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MAYBE BABY: POPULATION POLITICS PART 1 – politicalbetting.com
MAYBE BABY: POPULATION POLITICS PART 1 – politicalbetting.com
The ONS reported in October 2021 that “the total fertility rate for England and Wales in 2020 fell to 1.58 children per woman, the lowest since records began in 1938.” Contrary to predictions of a baby boom, conceptions during the first COVID lockdown fell and didn’t begin to pick up until after restrictions were eased.
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Whatever happened to them?
1. Irrelevant. Even if the lab escape theory is true, there is no reason to imagine that the Chinese have allowed a new variant to evolve (or, indeed, have engineered one) in laboratory experiments and then let it loose on their own population
2. They probably haven't lied about prevalence in any meaningful way. I don't believe that because I'm taken in by the propaganda machine of a totalitarian state. I believe that because they're clearly desperate to pursue zero Covid and stories such as Xi'an get out and are, indeed, broadcast by Chinese state media. It's conceivable that small outbreaks in rural areas are being identified and successfully contained by local authorities without the outside world hearing of it, but large numbers of cases, no
3. Population size is irrelevant, it is number of cases that counts when one wishes to consider the likelihood of variant emergence. China has had about 100,000 cases since the start of the pandemic, and the nature of the Chinese surveillance state, scientific capability and ruthless suppression tactics means that cases are probably being identified and recorded reasonably accurately, especially post the original Wuhan outbreak. India has reported nearly 35 million cases and that's likely a gross underestimate. The two are not remotely comparable in this regard
4. If the Chinese had imported a devastating new form of Covid from somewhere as underdeveloped and populous as Pakistan then we would have expected to receive many alarming reports of Pakistani hospitals beginning to fill with Covid patients bleeding from all sorts of nasty places by now. We have not. Again, the likelihood of a variant of concern being simultaneously so transmissible that even the Chinese struggle to contain it, yet having originated and been imported from another jurisdiction where it has failed to cause an outbreak at all, is remote in the extreme
In summary, a miserable situation for people in Xi'an, but not something we ought to be getting innervated about. Frankly, the next nasty variant - even if there is something nastier than Omicron to come, which there may well not be - is vastly, vastly more likely to originate here than in China.
This is a very interesting idea...
That I was going to do a video on (back when I made YouTube videos).
What I was going to say was "People are economically rational, and when housing costs rise, people respond by - for example - having fewer children so they need less housing. As housing prices fall again, you would expect to see birth rates rise."
And then I looked at a bunch of places where house prices had fallen: the two biggest examples being Japan and Italy, where they have dropped 50% or so in real terms in the last quarter century.
Unfortunately, my thesis didn't play out. Birth rates remained super low in both places.
So... Hmmm...
To steal shamelessly from @rcs1000, something must be done, this is something, so we're doing it.
The Welsh started gagging secondary schoolchildren in the classroom at the beginning of the Omicronpanic, to quote just one of numerous examples. Scotland never stopped. Confronted with the new variant, it has made naff all difference to anything, along with all of the other mild-to-moderate restrictions.
Our leaders must realise, by now, that sticking a piece of blue paper to a child's face is no barrier to Omicron. Zahawi, who is not an idiot, has insisted on starting to do it again regardless. Useless interventions intended for show really ought to stop. But they won't, of course.
It all stacks up, although how much we actually want to be doing about it is another matter. There are strong arguments to be advanced for the idea that both this country and the world as a whole are overpopulated with humans. We're most likely to develop economically in an environmentally sustainable way through managed population decline, even though this means that we have to deal with the painful demographic problem, bluntly put, of too many dependent elderly along the way.
Anecdotally, when I look at my friends and acquaintances of my own age, there seems to be a correlation between proximity of family and the number of kids: the people who have family nearby have an extra child or two over those of us who do not. It'd be interesting to see if others agree with this.
So a question is: are people moving more (as in between areas/regions of the UK) than they did in (say) the 1980s and 1990s?
Maybe, of course, we'll see less of such posts as Facebook's demographic changes.
And good morning to one and all.
Japanese house price peaked in 1991. That's 30 years ago. If there was going to be an impact on birth rates from lower housing costs, we could reasonably expect it by now,
For the Italians it was a mere 16 years ago... and house prices are marooned.
Spanish house prices halved between 2007 and now. The birth rate has actually declined.
Of course, those local authorities you want to ignore are part of the country so I'm not sure why we would want to exclude them.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2019/08/30/elon-musk-jack-ma-biggest-problem-world-will-face-is-population-drop.html
Musk has been talking about this problem for years. “Civilisation ending with a whimper”. I’ve little doubt Tesla’s foray into humanoid robotics is motivated by his fear of this. How else to maintain humanity’s standard of living with an ever declining labour force?
I definitely dont think government should intervene of course although it is perfectly legitimate to improve the spend on child services and child benefit not to engineer the birth rate but because it is fair
Other parents seem much more into 'shared' parenting: it's yet another anecdote, but probably about a third of the people at pick-ups at our school in the afternoon are male. I'm sure when I was at school, it was almost all the mothers picking kids up.
Humankind will muddle on, as we've always done. It doesn't require lying mega-billionaires to 'invent' solutions to the problems they themselves define.
https://www.politico.eu/article/france-reduces-mask-wearing-age-to-six-year-old/
Children as young as six in France will have to wear masks outdoors and in most public spaces from Monday, according to details published by the French government Saturday.
Mr. Pigeon, I agree entirely. Masks in school are akin to banning gatherings in Trafalgar Square. A wide open space with as much ventilation as possible is verboten, so gatherings in tight, confined spaces go ahead instead.
It's doing 'something' but not something effective or sensible.
I'll be having to wear a piece of cloth when I get my booster next week. Tedious bloody thing.
The real question for the day, is whether there’s a similar viral research lab in Shanxi?
If the internet is a strong factor in declining fertility then you'd expect that to have a stronger effect on unintended conceptions. Whereas if it is a response to housing costs then you'd expect to see a decline in intended conceptions.
If there are environmental factors that are reducing fertility biologically then you'd see this evenly.
The other thought I have is that the decline in the over-20 fertility rate is I think coincidental with the change to welfare rules in 2017, and the introduction of a two-child limit.
Kids will get over this easily enough: unless adults don't let them.
I've got a lot more time for the argument that schools closing affects kids much more, especially those who most need the extra-curricula support schools can give. So if it's a choice between schooling in masks and no schooling, I'd prefer the former. Ideally neither, but I can see why masks may be required given the spread.
Alternatively, the human population could continue to decrease. Eventually civilisation would end, and finally the extinction of humanity could take place. My guess is that evolution will find a way and humanity will survive, but in a changed form. This will all take hundreds of years or longer.
IMO he is a charlatan. Look at the promises he's made that have not paid off as well. Or his constant ramping and deramping of cryptocurrencies. Also, that many of 'his' achievements are not actually his.
To be clear: there is much to admire about Musk. But like Steve Jobs, he has massive personality flaws that put him firmly into the 'bad' camp in my eyes - a shift that's occurred over the last few years. I love his vision; I just don't like or trust the man.
The theatre is those who think that they can continue their lives as normal in these abnormal times.
As for patronising: you did say I was 'closed off from humanity'. I'd argue you got off lightly...
In the early 90s, there was the looming "pensions gap" crisis - due to falling birthrates, all the pay-as-you-go social security systems were due to go bankrupt.
The mooted solution was defined pension pots, per tax payer.
The politicians really didn't like this, since it meant telling people to pay more and (at least initially) get less.
A major part of the advocacy for mass immigration was, that instead of such measures, we would just import enough young people to "re-inflate" the population pyramid.
IF, as seems quite likely, the world population stops growing and begins the shrink, that will become less and less of an option.
The pay-as-you-go schemes can't survive a shrinking population, during the phase when we have lots of old people living longer, and less employed people paying for them.
What I'm getting at is, everyone has there limits. I was just interested to see if French had crossed a boundary even for those who are generally pro-mask.
But I find it interesting that you want to exclude London. Why? Isn't it part of England?
And if this correlation is incidental, I'd be curious to know what you think the hidden factor is.
If that's the case then it is potentially a more fundamental change, and may prove a more difficult one to solve. A gently declining population sounds like a good idea when the global population is seven billion and rising, but if, at some point in the future, the global population is one billion and declining with increasing pace, it won't look so clever.
I think there's a risk that the economic consequences of a declining population (placing a greater economic burden on a shrinking workforce to support the elderly) will act to reduce fertility further, creating a spiral of decline. If the young are too busy caring for their grandparents to have children then the normal pattern of inter-generational family support has inverted and it becomes hard to shift back.
That's not to defend Musk as such. He may be concerned more about a shortage of colonists for Mars.
An interesting feature of Japanese society is how normal it is for men to pay for sexual services. No doubt this cuts down the unintended conceptions figure. Easy to see how internet porn is achieving similar everywhere else.
But look at all the things he goes into that are ridiculous: all his claims about autonomous driving, with its constantly retreating timelines. The cryptocurrency rubbish. The Boring Company. etc, etc.
I get it: you promise big and deliver less. But there comes a time when it just becomes out-and-out lying for your own benefit.
So tell me: what 'advances' has he made for human civilisation? I could just about buy the jump-starting electric vehicles, but SpaceX has little relevance to anyone day-to-day - not even with Starlink.
If you want an invention that has advanced civilisation, look at GPS...
I’m not convinced either of those conditions are met
If we run through a list of plausible scenarios:
1) a benign scenario where there’s a coincidental and fairly typical outbreak of Hanta virus, and all the dystopian activity by the state is to snaffle omicron before the Olympics, purely for internal Pr purposes. Right now almost no one on the planet is deviating from this view.
2) coincidental hanta virus outbreak but the measures are arguably a proportionate response to omicron for a population with no acquired immunity to sarscov2 and shithouse Chinese vaccines. This one isn’t as benign as it sounds for China and the world economy / markets, nor indirectly for democracy lovers in Taiwan, given how Xi might react to the collapse of his covid policy (and potentially property based economy / financial system).
3) a new covid variant that seems to cause a more severe and horrific form of inflammation in an unspecified percentage of patients. This one means Mr Horse Battery might win his argument against Max last week that a terrible new and worse variant might be coming. Could be meh, could be the stuff of nightmares. Watch this space.
4) it’s a new viral outbreak altogether. Whether zoonotic or lab borne ultimately makes little difference. Hide under the bed time.
Given omicron's infectiveness, I think the only options are let it go or lockdown, and even a full, hard lockdown might not be enough to slow it down.
Or Musky baby will make a deal with China that 'allows' them to capture all traffic from within China. And probably eslewhere...
Not exactly Logan's Run - but a very different society to that we have now.
If you were to exclude the single / unmarried from the data set what does the fertility rate look like - ie are we having the same level of breeding but only from a subset of the population
I admire the way Musk built Tesla up: it is an incredibly difficult business to be successful in, even with subsidies. If he was just building cars and not over-promising and over-hyping things - especially autonomous driving - I'd be much happier.
As ever with people, try to split the hype from the reality. And there's a heck of a lot of undeserved hype around Musk.
My gf and other women I know consider the last two years written off, wasted, so will delay any children until that year in Australia is done, or all the Munros climbed, or a Masters degree etc etc
I'm fully onboard with this cos I want to do all that too.
It’s telling though whether in theoretical physics, music, art, how many major breakthroughs are made by the young and how few even by the middle aged yet alone the old. While there are exceptions, it does seem to be that we need new souls growing up, challenging orthodoxy and authority and making their own mistakes to stimulate innovation.
Do we face a future of dementia and disease free centurions holding almost all the capital, while an ever declining human labour force works in tandem with robots and ai to keep their lifestyles going? That truly is civilisation ending with a whimper.
But in an era when young women earn more, on average, than young men (despite the innumerate and ideological propaganda of the 'gender pay gap') the reverse is true.
Hmm. If I have time/inclination I might try furkling through my old psych textbooks and see if there's anything on that.
Speaking for myself, the reason I will clock in 0.1 below the replacement ratio is I started too old and feel too tired now to do it again.
There’s an economics driver behind that of course, but I’d go further and say society has encouraged the extension of adolescence deep into adulthood. I know plenty of 30-somethings and a few 40-somethings who still live like adolescents.
The government doesn't seem to understand that at three jabs and the virus not going anywhere this is as good as it gets.
Introducing what must be a hugely damaging measure for children, most of whom AAUI have already had the virus is just corrosive gesture politics.
EXC: Liz Truss overruled officials to demand £1.4K lunch at Tory donor's gentleman's club in Mayfair
Officials warned 5 Hertford St was "incredibly expensive"
But per emails, she "refused to consider anywhere else" and "explicitly" rejected alternatives
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/liz-truss-wants-to-lunch-and-only-a-tory-donors-place-will-do-z0gq8pknc
Stepping back, I wonder whether we should accept the falling conception rates as a generally good thing - raising difficult challenges for society and civilisation but good for the planet.
There are nearly 8bn people on earth - if that fell by half, or even by 90%, it would not be a 'bad thing' overall.
I look forward to part 2 of this header but remain to be convinced that HMG should be incentivising people to have children.
To what extent, if at all, should politicians seek to influence the birth rate?
And then I realised the obvious response.