Charles C. Mann: belief

Transcript context

…My colleague, Robin Hanson, wonders if it isn’t one of the world’s biggest problems, that we’ll have too few children and too low a population. Countries such as Italy, I think, now have TFR of about 1.3. For Singaporean Chinese it’s, I think, 1.1. If you have enough countries — not all of them wealthy, by the way; Iran, Algeria have rapidly falling rates of childbirth — and you just have a shrinking population all the time, you have fiscal imbalances, you may have lower creativity, you may have a problem with aggregate demand. So you’ll have bad macroeconomic outcomes. Do you worry too much that the global population will be too low and will be shrinking too rapidly? I think your colleague is completely right that the population crashes that he’s talking about are going to face society as challenges they never faced before. Always there’s been what they call the population pyramid, which is a small number of older people and lots of younger people, in theory to support them, certainly by their taxes. And what happens is the birth rate declines, is that the pyramid turns into a cylinder or something like that, and you have an age structure that’s never really existed in human history before. Not only that, but there’s all these old people like me who are hanging around endlessly, [laughs] and what we seem to really want to do is push down that retirement age, so that the ever-shrinking number of younger people will have to do more and more to support us, if you go by the European example. So I do think this is going to be a big problem, and the only upside I can see of this is that if all these people retire, maybe it will postpone the problems with the shrinking amount of work that’s available [laughs] if we all do this. Or maybe robots will be our savior.…

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