Welcome to the 'Accelerated Globalists' podcast. We focus on the effects of globalization and the weakening of cross-national boundaries on technological progress, economic development, and human flourishing. I'm your host, Al Bashko. My guest today is Robin Hanson, a professor of Economics at George Mason University and one of the most contrarian and interdisciplinary public intellectuals around. In this episode we discuss topics of his recent interest: global fertility decline, cultural evolution, disappearing cultural diversity, and what we can do about it.
Transcript
[00:00:00] Intro. Robin Hanson: Once population peaks and starts to decline, there's no obvious force that will make that reverse. Declining worldwide population implies that innovation will slow down and come to a halt. A substantial fraction chance of civilization collapsing and being replaced is enough to make us worry. It’s like, you know, we're on a ship approaching an iceberg. Either you move the whole ship or you get off on the lifeboats.
This has been one of the best conversations I’ve had...
[00:00:32] Al Bashko: Hello, Robin.
[00:00:34] Robin Hanson: Hello.
[00:00:35] Al Bashko: And today we would like to discuss various issues regarding cultural evolution, regarding declining birth rates and what we can do about it and how it affects human civilization. And let's start immediately just to explain to our audience your position on all these issues. Why do you think declining fertility is one of the biggest challenges that human civilization faces at this particular moment?
[00:01:03] Robin: It's on track to produce below replacement fertility worldwide. We've already seen peak births in 2016. It's a pretty long term, relatively steady overall trend. So it looks the sort of thing you can project forward into the future. I think we understand many of the causes, approximate causes, and that they are long term things that look like they will continue. So once population peaks and starts to decline, there's no obvious force that will make that reverse.
For a long time, say, the United Nations, when it was projecting future populations, it would assume that fertility would fall until it hit replacement level, at which point it would stop falling. That was just a working assumption they used for many decades. And it's just not true. It didn't stop there, and there's no particular other place where it will stop. And if it just stays below replacement for a long time, the population will just decline worldwide, and a declining worldwide population implies that innovation will slow down and come to a halt.
Innovation is one of the main things that makes our world liberal and civil. It was much less so before innovation came to dominate and people made adjustments in order to promote innovation in their places. So we will see a several centuries long decline. Innovation will drive to a halt. We will sort of abandon many cities. We won't be able to support as much software as we had before. Our politics and society will get less civil and plausibly nothing will stop it. So the most likely scenario is that we just get replaced by the small, exceptional, insular, fertile cultures like the Amish or Haredim, just like the Christians took over the Roman Empire by doubling every 20 years for three centuries. That's enough for these others to do as well.
[00:03:06] Al: And why do you think it's so hard to reverse this trend?
[00:03:11] Robin: These aren't sort of, you know, based on where buildings or roads are or something that we could just choose to change. They are based on culture. That is, our deep values or the values that we most cherish and that we feel strongest about are the values driving these changes. And they are not very responsive to attempts to control them. I mean, in some sense, huge parts of our society fight the battles to push these in one direction or another. And it's hard to add much to that fight to get people. People love their culture, really.
So one of the things that people most love and trust is what they were taught about what's good and bad, who's good and evil? What are the virtues that they should most celebrate? And the other opposite cultural features they should most despise? There's anything that people feel the most confident and attached to. It's that that's what we're talking about. That's the structure out of which these trends are built.
[00:04:12] Al: And why do you think this trend towards more homogeneous global culture, which is relatively hostile towards high fertility, is going to continue in that direction without any reversals? Because, theoretically, some new cultures can arise and they might become more prevalent over time, especially if this anti-natalist culture is so weak in terms of fitness, in terms of ability to grow, etc. Why do you think we are not going to see new cultures arise or even existing cultures going in the opposite direction?
[00:05:02] Robin: So if you look around the world, you travel around the world, you read about in the world, it looks like it has a lot of diversity in many ways. There are different kinds of clothing and songs and food and, you know, house decoration styles and all sorts of holidays. Right? The world looks like it has a lot of variety of that sort. But when you get to core values, there's much less variety than it might seem. So if you looked at, say, regulation around the world, say in COVID policies in the early days, or look at nuclear regulation or airline regulation, you see enormous, very strong convergence worldwide. Also on fertility, you see worldwide pretty consistently worldwide falling in fertility. These are things that suggest that we have much less variety in our deep values.
So, we have what some have called a boutique multiculturalism, where we just like lots of these surface things to vary, but we don't really want deep values to vary. So I did some polls on Twitter where I asked about 12 different kinds of variety. Do people want more or less of it? And fundamental values was the kind where people least wanted more variety. They most wanted less variety of fundamental values. And I think that's right. People kind of hate it when other people have very different attitudes toward gender equality or slavery or, you know, death or children or, you know, work, respect, ethnicity. Right. People really, really hate when they find other people who have different values to them on some of these key deep values. And that's why the world doesn't have so much variety on that.
So, so for example, when I meet elites from around the world, they tell me two things. One is the people from where they come from have some unique, different features that the world should value. And they also tell me that they themselves are not different at all. They will fit in just fine in any elite organization anywhere in the world. And so I think elites really are quite homogeneous, especially, they went to the same schools, work in the same places, socialize in the same places, and have the same values.
[00:07:06] Al: Yes, that's in many ways true. We have seen this trend toward convergence on various values, not just among elites, but among the global population in general. And this is what the World Values Survey shows in many ways. But don't you think if we have these dire situations in terms of fertility in many, many countries and we're still not... we don't have like a global government or something like that, don't you think that at least, at least in some of those countries, when they see that the situation is quite dire, they will try some desperate measures to increase fertility, and as a result of it create some kind of cultural variation or at least policy variation in this regard?
Like, for example, South Korea now considers almost $100,000 bonuses per child born. It was not approved yet, but the government of theirs considers... Of course, I agree that maybe even this amount is not sufficient, but at least it is considerably more than was proposed so far. And if you have 200 countries or more than 200 countries and jurisdictions, and most of them are moving in this very low fertility direction... At least some of them are going to try something relatively successful and, elites in some of those countries might try it and it may succeed, and maybe then it is going to spread to other places.
[00:08:21] Robin: So there's two features about each culture to think about. Or each part of the world. One is how much does it promote or not. Fertility. And you know, what are the cultural weights that reduce fertility and maybe what are the incentives to increase it. But the other key thing is its degree of insularity. That is, how tied is it to the rest of the world? How much does it mix with the rest of the world? And therefore, how likely is it to be influenced by the rest of the world, as well as influencing the rest of the world?
The exceptions we've seen, which have managed to maintain high fertility, are also very high insularity. They very much limit contact of insiders with outsiders in order to keep people inside and keep people having a different set of values, norms and status markers from the outside. That's apparently what it takes to maintain a high difference in fertility. So if some particular nation like South Korea happens to have a different policy for a limited time, that may well have a different local effect, but if it maintains its high degree of integration and contact with the rest of the world, it's unlikely to maintain that difference for long.
That's the problem. is that now, you know, if they could show a success that lots of other people were inspired to copy, and then it spread to many other places, then you have a hope of changing the entire world culture. That would be the hope, but the hope of just being different and maintaining that difference for a long time in the face of other people not copying it. That seems much less likely to me. That is, the fact the whole world today has such a correlation in fertility as especially as a function of wealth and time suggests there really are large effects of sharing a world culture, and the fact that the few exceptions of these highly insular cultures suggest that's really what it takes.
So either it's like, you know, we're on a ship approaching an iceberg. Either you move the whole ship or you get off on the lifeboats. Those are the two key options there. The thing I want to emphasize is that even if we manage to fix fertility soon, that doesn't fix the more underlying problem of cultural drift. It might give us more time to fix it, but it doesn't fix.
[00:10:52] Al: Yes, that's true. But, if you think about the high fertility insular cultures, you might also notice that, for example, if you talk about Haredi Jews, they have extremely high fertility. But you are also going to notice that just religious Jews in Israel, not necessarily Haredi, not necessarily ultra-Orthodox Jews, also have quite high fertility. Not as high, but it could be the total fertility rate of like 4, 3.5, etc., just for religious Jews. And they might not be as isolated; they participate in the Israeli economy, etc., but they still have high fertility rates. So it means there could be some kind of integration in the global economy to some degree. And, of course, they're going to be influenced culturally, but not to the extent that their fertility converges, like with South Korea or even Western Europe. So... or your position is that as long as it continues over time, they're going to converge like Mormons, etc.?
[00:11:48] Robin: So there's the two key parameters is the fertility and the retention. so the Amish have like a 93% retention rate, which is very impressive. The Haredi I think it's only like two thirds retention rate. I would expect that's even worse for the less Orthodox Jews. So, you have to multiply the retention rate times their fertility rate to really ask how fast they're growing.
[00:12:14] Al: Yeah, but, according to official statistics, they have growth, like 4.4% a year. Well, official statistics from Israel. So it means, even if they lose some members, it's not... the loss is not high enough, and attrition is not high enough for them to grow slower than the Amish, so they grow even faster than the Amish. At this point in Israel, according to official statistics, they do a survey each year in Israel and they keep these statistics. And so, so far, it's still growing at more than 4% a year.
[00:12:46] Robin: So thankfully, I think human extinction isn't the main issue here. there are these exceptional cultures and if nothing else, we can count on these exceptional cultures replacing us. I mean, maybe some of them will fail to maintain their difference, but probably not all of them. So at least one exceptionally fertile, insular culture will be around to replace and replenish the Earth. so I think, I mean, there's two problems. One is the delay, we might have hoped where humanity would get to would get to sooner and this long, you know, fall of our mainline civilization, to be replaced by another is a delay, substantial delay.
And the other issue is that we might have liked some features of our dominant culture that these other cultures may not pick up and take on. So just like the Christians rejected many aspects of the Roman Empire, they didn't like, and we've lost those, a lot of technology, and we've lost those, a lot of technology, a lot of social practices, etc. were rejected and maybe had to rediscover, rediscovered if they're good. So that's another thing that's at issue here, but thankfully not human extinction. And then probably whatever these cultures are, they will eventually rediscover technology and re ignite growth.
But then if they haven't solved the underlying problem of cultural drift, they may themselves suffer from it and then rise and fall again and have to have a sequence of rising and falling, which then makes a lot longer path toward whichever future we hoped for, and also means we have much less influence now over what they will become. Each of these replacements makes large changes to culture.
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[00:14:42] Al: Okay, yeah, I have many questions regarding cultural drift and cultural evolution, but before we move towards that, let's also discuss a couple of issues specifically fertility-related. For example, you are always talking about how we have this low fertility because of prestige-biased copying because elites are promoting a low fertility lifestyle. And that's why it is gradually spreading across all countries, developed countries, and then also developing countries.
But recent statistics, recent studies, for example, from Sweden, show that actually, higher-earning people may have more children, especially true for men, but for women it's more or less stable. Higher-earning men have higher fertility across their lifetime, and for women it's more or less stable. So, the only negative correlation is with labor income for women, but for men, there is a positive correlation across lifetime earnings, not earnings in that particular year, but lifetime earnings versus lifetime fertility. And Lyman Stone wrote an article about the United States, and he demonstrated that if you subdivide by race, there is a positive correlation between household income and fertility among white Americans, and for minorities, it's more complicated.
But basically, the idea is there is no clear negative correlation between income and fertility. It's always an interaction of culture and income. And maybe we are moving in a direction where higher income is going to correlate with higher fertility. So are you so sure that there will be a continuous trend towards elites preferring low fertility and promoting a low fertility lifestyle, because if elites are going to shift to higher fertility, eventually it may also spread across the entire population.
[00:16:27] Robin:I don't want to be presenting myself as very sure of anything here. I think just a substantial fraction chance of civilization collapsing and being replaced is enough to make us worried. but I certainly do think that the history of falling fertility as income has risen should make us very concerned that there's an underlying effect of that sort. I think that many people have hoped that sort of very basic biological selection would ensure a fertility rise. And I think that doesn't really account for how cultural our species is.
Our species is very designed to copy behavior from local elites and not really just from some individual genetic propensity to have more kids or not. We don't encode much behavior in our genes. We encode most of in our culture. And that's what makes cultural change important. So obviously, if some local cultures could promote fertility, then that could be sustained. But the problem is just they mix so much with world culture that it's going to be hard to sustain the difference. I, you know, I wouldn't be very reassured. These correlations are weak. And they, they come and they go. And again, this is a static correlation at a time. But over time we've seen an enormous reduction in fertility, as income has grown. I mean, you just can't miss that as the large overall trend. And, you know, even in the last decade, we've seen enormous falls in fertility. So something is making that fall. And it's not plausibly I think, going to be reversed by just rich people having more kids and then having their kids inherit their rich kid tendency because I don't think there is much of an inheritance of rich kid tendency.
There's a large shared culture and there's whatever culture promotes. I mean, obviously all else equal. It is easier to have more kids when you are richer. And if that were the only effect, of course the world would have even higher fertility than we had centuries ago. So clearly it's not. It's not the main factor, but it's going to be there.
[00:18:38] Al: Yeah, of course, over time, we've seen a simultaneous decline in fertility and rising prosperity. So that's certainly true. And, on the other hand, now in many countries, the picture is more complicated. But of course, I understand your point. So maybe this correlation is just a temporary situation, or maybe it's just people who are richer than average have more children, but the overall trend is going down. And it's not about absolute income; it's about relative income. And people who have relatively high income have higher fertility. But of course, my point was that if we focus on prestige-biased copying and rich people are having higher prestige and higher status, maybe it's going to eventually affect culture.
But of course, there are also many, many other effects that we have to keep in mind. And now, returning back to measures to stimulate fertility, you were proposing to give... as one of the most effective measures... you were proposing to give large one-time payments for having kids and finance it through government debt, because obviously, over the lifetime of the person, the lifetime earnings and lifetime tax revenue can be quite huge, quite large. Even if you give people like five times GDP per capita or something like that, still over the lifetime, this money is going to be paid back.
And what do you think about alternative measures which are similar to that but do not require significant immediate expenditures? For example, there is an idea of producing GDP shares. So basically, everybody, every newborn, receives a GDP share. And then, for example, each year, this person receives some share of the country's GDP, but also you can sell it immediately. So, for example, if you want to sell it, it is like shares of the company. Similarly, you can trade GDP shares of a country. So you issue... instead of issuing debt, you issue equity and give it directly to the parents of the newborns. As a result of that, there are no immediate government expenditures. But on the other hand, people can still receive significant amounts of money. And it also basically aligns incentives so that people who receive these GDP shares later on are interested in the growth of GDP and potential growth of the population, etc., etc. What do you think about it?
[00:20:51] Robin:So my proposal is of the form you just mentioned, a way that you don't have to spend the money. Now, my proposal was that you give parents a share of their future children's tax payments. That is when those children pay taxes. Later, part of that money goes to whoever owns the transferable right to those payments. So if you give the parents that transferable right, they can sell that right initially for money to help pay for their parenting. So those rights are things that only have to get paid in the future. They aren't things you have to pay now and then they give. you know, a stake in the future. But more importantly, they give incentives for raising higher quality kids. i.e. kids will pay more taxes.
So the problem with giving all kids the same amount of anything is that you aren't creating incentive for higher quality kids, and then you're going to get a lot more of cheap kids who are easy to generate. but worth less. I mean, that still might be good. Better than having no kids. But, the point of the tax share is to give a higher incentive. Now, honestly, a pure free market approach would be to just let parents endow their kids with debt. but people seem very unwilling to allow that. And so governments but we seem to be very willing to let governments endow newborns with debt. And so, I guess, you know, you can just go with that and say, well, if you're willing to endow children with debt, let's endow children with this obligation that some of the tax payments go to somebody else. so that's a compromise in the sense of what we're allowing.
[00:22:30] Al: Okay. Yeah, I understand. Yeah. I just was referring to another article of yours where you were just proposing one-time payment, but then, yes, there was a more developed argument where you are proposing a tax share of children's income or taxes. But the idea with tax shares is that, is it... do you think it's easy to sell future tax streams from these potential children immediately? Like, it's probably not going to be as socially acceptable to do it… For example, when a child is just three years old, to sell future tax revenue streams that parents are going to receive immediately… But on the other hand, if you give GDP shares to everybody, it would not be a problem to sell them immediately and get money immediately. And as a result…
[00:23:14] Robin: I don’t see the immediate problem. there is no immediate problem with selling tax shares for children, is there?
[00:23:20] Al: In practice..., I mean, theoretically, no, but I think it's going to be less socially acceptable. So…
[00:23:25] Robin: What would be unacceptable?
[00:23:27] Al: Because people, society, would view the parents who are selling shares of future tax streams from their children who are like 2 or 3 years old. Probably they're going to view them negatively. At least…
[00:23:40] Robin:Why? I don't see the difference between that and selling a GDP share. What what's the difference?
[00:23:44] Al: Because a GDP share is just a GDP share. So it's not directly related to a person, but future tax streams from a particular person who is just two or three years old. It's directly related to a person.
[00:23:53] Robin: But it doesn’t give you any control over that person.
[00:23:55] Al: Yeah, of course, of course. But you see, we now even have problems with income sharing agreements. So income sharing agreements receive so much blowback. But if you basically do it for a child who is 2 or 3 years old, potentially it can receive even more social blowback then, because it's not the average of the national economy; now it's the income of a particular person, and you're trying to sell income streams. And I'm in favor of it, but I'm just saying that society might view it negatively.
[00:24:27] Robin:Well, what if you sold a house? Would that be a problem? Is that it? I mean.
[00:24:32] Al: No, no, that's not a problem.
[00:24:34] Robin: But, why not? Why isn't selling a house the problem? If you say if you can only sell aggregates of the economy, but not small individual things like I can sell my car, is that a problem? It's a small thing. It's just the one thing.
[00:24:46] Al: Okay
[00:24:47] Robin: I sell pictures of my children. I could sell course clothes of my children.
[00:24:52] Al: I mean, I agree, I agree, but, for example, when we are talking about income sharing agreements, which is similar to that in many ways, people are immediately, thinking about, slavery or indentured servitude, etcetera, etcetera, that you have to pay a certain person but.
[00:25:04] Robin:They’re assuming that you're buying some powers. That is, if you are selling control over your children, that would be slavery, but merely selling some stream of money that you can't control or related to them. It's not at all slavery.
[00:25:17] Al: Yeah.
[00:25:18] Robin: Slavery is about control.
[00:25:19] Al: Yes, of course I agree, I agree, but I'm just saying that many, many people will view it like slavery.
[00:25:25] Robin:So obviously, I mean, the more general point is just you want to make whatever compromises you have to make to get something happening. I would hope you wouldn't have to make a compromise on that, because otherwise, as I said, if you don't differentially pay higher quality children, then you're going to get the same payment for all children. You're going to get a lot more lower quality children.
[00:25:44] Al: Yeah, that's true, that's true. But, the issue is that, if the situation is becoming too desperate, maybe we will have to make some compromise of that nature because, many, many, solutions which would be potentially more optimal. They would be also…
[00:25:58] Robin: Here's what I think is going to be the bigger problem. Yeah. There are all these trends that have been causing low fertility. And if you offer large payments to have higher fertility, the way that's going to happen is through somehow reversing some of those trends. So what you would find is in some place that offered large enough payments that they caused not just more kids, but they caused a reversal of some of the cherished cultural trends, which might include gender equality. It might include, you know, paying more attention to children. It might include capstone versus cornerstone marriage.
They will see that in whatever place it is that has adopted this policy, some of those cherished trends are reversing, and they might object directly to that. Let's say I don't like to see the lower gender equality that's appearing in this region where you've offered these stronger incentives, and therefore they would want to not adopt that. And even, you know, pressure the places that had adopted to reverse because of disliking those social trends. I think that's the more likely problem is that people are so attached to these social trends that have been causing low fertility, is that they won't tolerate the reversal of those trends.
[00:27:10] Al: Yeah, but the reversal is also going to be gradual. So if something is happening gradually. So it might, might still be, possible to do that, because very often cultural change in the opposite direction or in one direction or another, it faces a lot of resistance when it's too quick. But in this case, reversal or some kind of reversal of trends is going to be gradual in many ways. And so there is a chance that it's going to succeed, especially if policy is designed in such a way that it's not immediately obvious how large a payoff people are going to receive.
[00:27:41] Robin: I mean. If the change is very slow and gradual and small, then we aren't actually getting a big effect. That is, it's when we have a substantial effect that you will see these, you know, these substantial side effects. So, I'd want to have the effects as soon and fast as possible. So I guess I want to see the side effects as soon and fast as possible. So I'm not very encouraged by saying, oh, it'll be really slow and nothing will happen for a long time. I'll go. But that's not good. I wanted something to happen.
[00:28:10] Al: Yeah, but if you design a policy, something like, "This payoff is going to increase 1% per year until fertility reaches a certain level as a result of it," Initially, it might not be as large, and the result is going to be easier to pass such a law. But if it's increasing 1% each year until fertility rates…
[00:28:25] Robin: But what will happen is that these policies will be adopted in some places but not others, and then whatever places adopt them will in fact have differential cultural change. and then the question is, will those places, you know, be shamed by the rest of the world to like, reverse their changes? Like, I mean, clearly at the moment we can tolerate some substantial variation in culture around the world. So, you know, France is the country in Europe at least in Western Europe with the highest fertility. And one of the ways they manage to have high fertility is they just have the lowest attention per child.
French parents pay less attention to their children than other European parents do. That's a way in which they are achieving higher fertility by reversing one of the key trends. Now the question is how long will French be able to withstand the disdain and disapproval of other Europeans for their low parental attention habits? Right. That's just just an example of the kind of problem you have here. The way you achieve higher fertility is by reversing some of these trends and it'll take a while to see the effects, but then it can take a while for the disapproval to accumulate into, you know, hatred even or strong repression.
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