2023-12-01

Razib Khan

Just real quick. How many people here have 3 kids? 4 kids? 5? 6? 7? Nobody above 8. Alright. I am going to talk about the present for the first half and then I will talk about the future.

You guys all know what the world population is at some level. These maps are informative because they give you a gestalt view of what's going on. When you read the science, the big thing you focus on is what's surprising. To me what's surprising is how many people Europe has. It's a small continent but there's a lot of people there. It's extremely dense.

When it comes to the Americas, there really aren't as many people there as people think. There's a lot of people in Asia and Africa. Until recently, Africa was not populous. But since the 1900s it has taken off. Germany has 85 million. There are a lot of people in Europe.

I think this is a good way to orient us to understand what the current population distributions are and get distributions and see what the future might be like. China and India right now in 2023 depending on which numbers you believe, India might have more people right now. Probably that's true. My understanding is that China has been exagerating a bit and their demographic collapse is worse than they are reporting because it makes their economic numbers look better.

I wanted to show births in 2021 next. This is thanks to MoreBirths on twitter. He pointed this out to me. This shows the number of raw births in the year 2021. This is basically the year 2100 without too many modifications. As you can see... Europe had 4.1 million births in 2021. The nation of Ethiopia had 3.9 million births. Okay? This is the future that we're already in. Nigeria, Ehtiopia, DRC, Sub-Sarahan Africa, MENA... Pakistan, India, China.

India has 2.5x more people than China... middle east and africa.. The new world is kind of where it was in the first map, right? I'd like to think of myself as a data focused person but I was surprised to see this. We're treading water in the new world including South America.

South Korea abolishes itself

I tweeted this a few months ago at midnight. This went viral. I titled it South Korea Abolishes Itself. Look at this trajectory. In a few decades, nobody in South Korea will be having children. I tweet this out periodically because in Korea k-pop is pretty influential right now. I often put a gif of Kim Jong Un because he has higher fertility up there in North Korea.

In about 50 years, there will be more North Koreans than South Koreans. All North Korea has to do is wait. I am against communism but it does say something about consumerism dominant in South Korea that they are so anti-natal.

On the right diagram, we are at almost 1 child per woman in the Southwest of Korea. In seoul, it's 0.34. I don't know how many of you know the political cultural geography of Korea.. the southwest is the liberal part. It tends to be where Buddhism is weaker. There are more catholics there. It is the leftwing politics supporters. Seoul has more protestants. 25% of koreans are christians. Their fertility is crashing.

I talked with Malcolm and Simone and it shocked me how conservative countries with based views have low fertility. I'll get back to that.

Malthus didn't realize human nature changed

A friend pointed out years ago that Malthus wasn't totally wrong about malthusian predictions. We have pretty much abolished famine in the past 40 years. I remember Ethiopians and Somalia... that sort of stuff doesn't happen very often any more. A lot of it is better governance and better supply chains. A lot of it is that our agricultural production has kept up.

The Malthusian models... is that basically outputs increases geometrically but population increases exponentially. Wheat output will increase but it's not exponential. In a malthusian system, if the population declines it means famine or external shock. But that's not true. He was wrong about human nature.

There was an assumption of human nature in Malthus about the way humans behave: the more wealth you have the more children you have. It was that way for 1000s of years. In Britain, it changed in the late 19th century.

The wealth we have today is mostly because of the demographic transition where people had smaller and smaller families. Economic growth outran the average family size. Most Americans could have dozens and dozens of kids just on an economic basis if you wanted to live in subsistence.

We changed our nature. Malthus thought that human nature was was not what it was. It is a little more pliable apparently. I think there are hereditary aspects to human nature but it turns out that having as many children as possible based on your resources is not one of the aspects of human nature even though that's how it was in agriculture for the past 10,000 years.

Demographic destiny

In Israel, they break out fertility by religion. There are some Russian jews but set that aside. There are arabs, muslims, and jews. There is a collapse of muslim birth rate to converge to jewish birth rate. Once they cut off subsidies, the muslims stopped having children. The orthodox jews have children for ideological reasons and not just because they can.

The demographic problems were prevented by this massive fertility of this ultra orthodox group. Secular israelis have 2.3 children, they are above replacement rate. Cultural competition does drive fertility. Israel is an example of that.

The Russian-Jewish migration did avert some of the demographic transitions with the rise of non-jews in Israel. Their fertility was low actually so it was just a holding pattern. It is the fertility of the orthodox jews who are very aggressive about not being included in civil society who think they are doing a service to Israel by having so many children.

TFR is a population-level summary

A society with a 1.9 freproduction rate is going to be shrinking. A demographer wrote a book called something something inherit the earth about 15 years ago. He talked about religious minorities like the Amish and LDS. In Finland, there are radical lutherans... there are subcultures that have... in Europe, it is the brahama... bulgaria is projected to be half brohma... we call them gypsy in English.

These groups have really really high fertility rates. They eventually take over the fertility because everyone else disappears. A society where some have a rate of 3 and other people have 1. A society over time will self-correct.

"Shall the religious inherit the earth" (a book).

On the other hand, groups that you think are highly fertile can change their fertility very fast. The LDS fertility estimate is 2.4. They look at certain counties in Utah and Idaho where they know the LDS fraction. 2.4 is good and it's above replacement. I can tell you it was not 2.4 when I was a kid though. It has crashed. Their fertility is disappearing.

The USA right now is 1.67 on average. I think I skipped a slide.

What will be the shape of the future?

I see it as Bene Gesserit vs Bene Tiellax. It is a spectrum, you know. There is one group... the Bene Gesserit they are basically the trads using natural methods. They are not violating any of the cannons of the orange catholic bible or the Bulterian Jihad. That's how they do it. Old school. They do it like that for millions of years.

Bene Tiellax. If you haven't read all the books, cover your ears I guess. Bene Tiellax plays out in the later books. They are the genetic engineers. They are kind of depicted as Frank Herbert as villains but by the end they are not really villains they are just part of the master plan. They do cloning. They create synthetic creatures that can mutate and change their faces. They are masters of biological manipulation. The Bene Tiellax are a little bit different from some of the others in this room, but basically they violate the orange catholic bible.

They have something called axlotl tanks. These are Bene Tiellax women. They are braindead and they are used to grow humans. We will probably have artificial wombs. I didn't want to put pictures in here of the animal artificial wombs because it's gross. But this is coming.

The future present

This might seem really freaky. Some people are using surrogates and this pisses off people. But Paris Hilton used surrogates. Most surrogates are used by straight people. It's pretty normal now. I think it will get more normal. My kids were all made traditionally so to speak. I am just reporting that I am not a user of this technology.

They walk among us

There are 8 million test tube babies. 2.5 million IVF cycles. NY Time was freaked out by test tube babies a lot in the 70s. There are more than 2 million non-invasive prenatal screenings in the USA. "Overcoming infertility is pleasing to god" by Wayne Grudem, Baptist theologian.

IVF is happening all the time. Embryo screening started back in like 2015. It's happening all the time.

The future future?

Jonny Anomaly wrote a book called creating future people, genetic enhancement, I talked with him on a podcast. This stuff is happening. It's all around us. They walk amongst us. The technology. There are genetically modified children already born. It is here. How do you deal with it? We just have to face it.

Whither a natalism future?

Trads vs technologists? I am a genticist. You can imagine what kind of person I am. But I am trad in my behavior. I have friends on both sides. Right now as a movement, if you want to think of natalism as a movement, we have a near enemy and then we have.... I think we should just kind of chill out about what disagreements we have internally. Some of the pro-tech eugenicist weirdos think religion is weird and stupid right? And then the trads are like these people are going to hell and should be put in jail. That's fine, but it's not going to happen.

IVF is happening all over this country. Abortion is happening all over the country. A lot of stuff you disagree with. A lot of coalitions though are built from people who disagree about things. We have to agree to disagree. Conflicts will erupt. We just have to understand that.

But right now with the fertility rates we have and the culture we have here-- mostly based in this room- we have to understand we have a lot of cultural threats and shooting each other is not going to help right now.

I do think that separation might be one thing... Elon wants to go to the star. A post-human future? Maybe give the trads the earth. This is kind of science fiction but worth suggesting.

Peace

In terms of peace, we should use both strategies mostly because we will. You can argue that one group should marginalize the other but that won't happen here in the USA. Until the shampoo warlord takes over, .... the last thing I want to say is be the role model. I'm doing my part! The book selfish reason to have kids... I have a friend here in Austin who hsa a kid because I didn't bully her but I did nag her. Now she is going to have a third or fourth and she wasn't going to have any in the beginning. Live it in your own life if you can. If you have goals or aspirations, you can at least target what you want.