Hey Upstream listeners, this week we're airing a discussion with Sam Buha on why fertility rates are plummeting everywhere from South Korea to Nigeria, what this means for humanity's future, and whether we can do anything about it. Let's dive in.
Yeah, let's get into it. I mean, we've talked about demographic issues in specific countries like India or China or some others, even Japan, and I mentioned it in Poland and Eastern Europe. And typically, of course, people are like, you know, immigration, but if we have it on a global scale, like, you know, we need people from somewhere. So maybe let's have a broader conversation around demographics and the fertility crisis and underpopulation. Why don't you start us off?
I think that I will open with the provocation: we have no known demographic or cultural force that kicks in and stops us from reaching the TFR zero society. Now, would I bet that there will be a TFR zero society in the next century? I tend to be an optimist. I tend to say that we will figure this out and we will push in the other direction and something else will happen. However, I think that if those activists who warn us of the reality of global warming can indulge in hyperbole of how this might, you know, end the world as we know it, I think the demographic changes that have already undergone are certain to end the world as we know it. The only question is, will they end the world, the human world, full stop?
I have not heard anyone refer to, basically, at least not in public, to the ongoing demographic contraction and drop in fertility rates happening globally as a source of existential risk, just as much as nuclear war or AI. It should be considered in the same category. Let me make the case. Until very recently, people assumed that fertility would plateau at a very low 1.1 total fertility rate. This is what we used to see in places like South Korea, places like Japan that are famous for their old population and low fertility. At 1.3, Japan's actually now a middle fertility country. Japan's no longer an outlier. If anything, it's slowed down relatively to other countries accelerating their fertility decline. So in a way, for East Asia, Japan is now a high fertility country, and globally it's a middling fertility country.
But once you break this barrier of TFR of 1.0, as they have in South Korea and gone as low as 0.7, or if you take Hong Kong on its own, its TFR right now is like 0.5. And if we looked at the other major Chinese cities, if the Chinese Communist Party released accurate data, I bet we would see numbers worse than Hong Kong. We would see numbers like 0.3 or 0.2 if they weren't adulterated or messed with. Let's be real. If we have cities in the world that have tens of millions of people, so nation-sized, already seeing fertility of 0.3, 0.2, Erik, how long is it before we see a 0.1 city? And how long before we see a city that it's not going to be literally 0.0, but could it be like 0.02 or 0.04? I think it's just insane that no one's thinking that. Everyone's assuming this must bounce back. Everyone's assuming it must stop.
And now we're seeing it truly everywhere, right? We talked about it in India, which is a very poor country, a very young country. We talked about it in Eastern Europe, that's like middle income, sometimes very poor depending on the country, also low fertility. We talked about it in Japan, in America, in Britain. It's truly happening everywhere. And is there any country that has gotten below replacement rate in a serious way and then has bounced back to the degree that they've kind of made up for it? And that might be the wrong way of thinking about that even, because it's, you know, it's time dependent. You can't just make up for it, you know, in time maybe. But have we seen significant bounce backs or not really?
Well, we have seen significant bounce backs in a few places. I think that if you look at Eastern Europe, you will see that their fertility started crashing with the end of communism, reached very, very low rates even after the economy started improving, and then around 2007-2008 they achieved, you know, the lowest fertility on record happened for those countries, or second lowest. After that, they recovered, not above replacement, but they recovered from 0.2 or 0.3 up to 1.6, 1.7, 1.8. Even some of them have seen a second decline after the COVID years and now the post-COVID years. The decline, by the way, is continuing. It wasn't just during the social isolation, but if anything, it seems to be accelerating. There are a number of countries who, to everyone's surprise, have now crashed below replacement, such as Turkey. People were not expecting Turkey to be so below replacement so quickly, because again, Turkey is middle income by global standards, low income, low wealth by European standards still.
So I think that historically we did have a few cases. For example, the baby boom after World War II remains largely unexplained. There are numerous countries that did not have a baby boom, however the United States and France did. France returned above replacement due to the baby boom. I also believe Germany was below replacement at some time and rose above replacement briefly in the same period. So most stories, by the way, for the baby boom is it's good to win a war. And then, you know, you can argue, you know, the US clearly won a war. You can argue that France won the war. That's already a sort of weird argument. You can't really argue West Germany won the war. So, and then if you say, oh, but it's economic expansion that causes an increase in fertility, well, that sounds on paper like it makes sense, but it's the opposite of what we see about countries in the 1990s and 2000s. I think we just have to accept the truth that we don't understand fertility.
And look, there are just so few outliers. We're literally talking about, okay, among countries we could class as high income or middle income, I think we have like, I think it's either Armenia or Georgia, and then there's Israel. And Israel's fertility has also gone down, by the way, to be clear, but Israel has like a healthy fertility despite being a modern country. Maybe we can learn something from it, but what are you going to do, just cargo cult and just copy everything Israel does? It's unlikely to work. I don't think we actually know why Israel is for now still an outlier. Note an outlier might just mean that in the sort of distribution of fertility, it's going to take a bit longer, right? Like maybe people are temporarily super motivated by what's basically an existential fight. I could tell that story, by the way, but if I'm telling that story, then why are the Ukrainians not having like three babies? Ukrainians seem no less patriotic or nationalist than the Israelis, to be honest, right? And they're also fighting an existential war. So where are their babies? You know, it's really hard to tell a coherent theory even for these few outliers or cases where we have bounce back that we see.
And is the best explanation for why this happens just that as modernity hits a society, the opportunity cost for women to have kids increases, and thus they rather kind of do other stuff? Or, you know, and what do you think is the best explanation? I mean, let's say, yeah, sure, that makes sense. Maybe the rest of our lives are just very interesting, like both men and women, and then maybe for women especially, they're liberated and led into the workforce.
I feel the first argument is almost the stronger argument. I've heard this from some of the progress studies people and some of the Institute for Progress people. You know, I feel like they're the professional Panglossians of our era, right? All is well, the Big Mac is good for you, you like it, you enjoy it, you want to eat it. I feel like that's their job to say that. And like, you know, maybe I'll put in a good word for cigarettes and nicotine and caffeine, though I don't smoke, but I, you know, you're not going to catch me like defending Diet Coke as the greatest drink ever invented and like peak of human experience. You're just not going to hear me do that. And we both have lots of friends. It's like, you know, nothing wrong if you like it, but people were memeing about it, if you remember. So I feel like when they make some of their guys, I forget who, on Twitter make this argument, oh, modern life has just gotten so good that we're enjoying it so much that raising babies just doesn't seem as fun. I'm like, well, what is your opinion on North Korea? Has North Korean life gotten so much better over the last 30 years that all the North Korean women are like so happy with their career and earning opportunities and opportunities to contribute to North Korean society that that has tanked their TFR? It seems super unlikely, right? At least if that's like the main thing driving it, it just seems extremely unlikely.
Explanation. I don't know anything about North Korea. Did they have feminism? Well, well, okay, let me propose. While I'm sure Western propaganda exaggerates it, it's like one of the few truly totalitarian societies in the world, and their economy sucks. It's like super demoralizing to be in the workplace because you're under political threat and economically you don't make a lot of money. Sorry, sorry, Erik. I don't want to be too neurodiverse here, but I thought I would say that explicitly for the audience. If that's the case, why has their TFR collapsed? Have they had just a... Yeah, I mean, not even to interrupt, but because I think we just don't know, and that's the scariest. Can you imagine if the planet was warming every year and we didn't know there was CO2 emissions? I bet people would be way more worried about it. I don't even think we'd be partisan about it. I think we'd all be panicking and we'd be funding climate science to figure it out and starting to like seriously look at geoengineering to cool it. It's only because we have tied the warming of the planet to carbon specifically has it become like a proxy referendum for the car-centric, AC-centric, suburban lifestyle and, to a much lesser extent, the oil industry and the Middle East and all of these things. But for some reason on fertility, I don't know. I think we pretend to know why it's declining, and we have good stories, which is that human life is getting so much better, and maybe a story where, you know, the planet can't support this many of us, so there should be fewer of us, or what's actually an extremely, you know, eugenicist argument, but that everyone loves to make, both left and right, sort of like, well, it's good that the population is shrinking because the wrong people were reproducing anyway, right? Like that's an argument you hear in comment sections. I see it all the time. I just don't think it's true. I think by most metrics, you know, it doesn't matter if you hate the overeducated liberal or if you hate the undereducated yokel and you think it's good for humanity that either of these groups kind of stops reproducing. It doesn't matter because like both of them are failing to reproduce, and especially even the people in the middle.
Okay, the only community that currently in the United States has really good TFR, there are like two. One is the literal billionaires. So if you are a literal billionaire, you will have above-replacement fertility, and that's not even due to Elon like juicing the numbers. That's just normal. Very wealthy Americans tend to have above-replacement, and it's such a tiny proportion of the population. And it's like the Amish, not even the Amish, and the Mormons, by the way. Mormon fertility has collapsed, and for now, Amish fertility is like, it's not clear if it's noise in the data or if it's declining slowly. But let's play out this world where everyone goes below replacement except the Amish, and then a thousand years from now, the result isn't that the Amish control the United States of America. The result is that North America and South America and small parts of Europe, the Amish also have been resettling and buying some parts of Europe, are settled by Amish, and the Amish do 18th-century farming, and maybe they've kept tractors. That's at the very least a complete collapse of the industrial base, Erik. I guarantee you the Amish will like not be working at TSMC. Like there's just not, they're not going to be doing that, and if they start doing that, their fertility is going to go way down. And I don't, I like, I like modern technology. I'm not anti-it, so that seems scary, even if the Amish technically survive because of the Amish and the Hutterites, the uncontacted tribes of, you know, Brazil and the Indian Ocean islands.
We've already established that this is happening globally, yeah, nearly everywhere, for reasons we can't exactly understand. And people have tried, countries have tried different interventions, and nothing has really worked in a durable or repeatable way. So should we be hopeless, basically? Should we just accept that in the next, you know, generation we're going to have, you know, a significantly underpopulated society from what we have now? Like people were always like, oh, there'll be nine billion people by, you know, by X date, but should we accept a world where there's six billion, five billion?
You know, when I looked into this with my team, our conclusion was that by the end of the century there will be fewer than one billion Indians from South Asia. And I bet if we looked at some of these other places, we would arrive at similar results. In some places, even the population explosion was exaggerated. Like in the case of Nigeria, there's like strong evidence that the individual states are juicing their population numbers because there's no nationwide census. However, federal oil money is distributed within Nigeria on a key based on the population of a state. So there was a decade-long incentive to exaggerate population and population growth, and a blocking of the federal government just counting the people in the country. So it was kind of the states got to self-report how many people lived there, and the more people that lived there, the more oil revenue the elites got in that state. So that's pretty straightforward. And then in China, I think the Communist Party, this is one of the few things that Xi gets right, they have been incentivized to paper over just how disastrous the one-child policy is. So I bet they're currently exaggerating their fertility numbers significantly, even though, by the way, it's a few years since they stopped the policy and fertility didn't rebound.
Now, to answer your question, and why was I raising Nigeria and these other countries, it was to say I'm not even sure we're going to hit nine billion. Like I think currently it's what, we're eight billion people, eight and a half maybe. I would not be surprised that if we could completely accurately count world population, that it doesn't peak like slightly above nine billion. It might on paper due to China, Nigeria, and other places. Let me check. Yeah, current world population is apparently as of 2022, it was 7.95 billion. So we currently believe it to be over eight billion. I'm not even sure it's going to ever go actually to nine billion. And if it does, very soon after, I think it's going to fall. And this is much more pessimistic than the UN projections. You could look at these graphs year after year. The official population estimates look like, you know, fertility goes up and then it goes down and then it stabilizes. And this latter part is always fiction. It's just always fiction. But even after every year, the peak gets lower and the fall gets faster. They just keep drawing a line that surely this will stabilize. It might, but I don't think it's going to happen automatically. I actually think it's not going to happen automatically.
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What is your sort of assumption as it relates to life expectancy? And as you think about your projection, are you expecting that to stay the same? Are you expecting it to increase? Does that, you know, is that meaningful?
I think that on the margin we are going to live longer than ever before, with, I think, health spans, especially if we continue developing anti-obesity drugs. That's the important part because the world has gotten very fat. Like, for example, India and Mexico have greater obesity problems now than the United States, which is crazy to consider, right? Like more, you know, more trouble with diabetes and so on. But because of that, that is the great shortening of health span. As people have gotten much fatter, their health span has contracted. Note in the United States, do you know what's been happening to life expectancy for the last few years? It's been dropping. It's been decreasing. It's been dropping. Why is that? Health-related issues. It's basically, if you, you know, again, if you don't have diabetes, if you're not a drug addict, if you don't kill yourself, and suicides have been high, by the way, suicides have been increasing, and if you're not overweight, well, you know, that's why I said that I think that the anti-obesity drugs will, once introduced into the United States, Europe, which has also been getting fatter, though slower, and East Asia, where, by the way, in China people are for the first time having an obesity problem, but also India and Mexico and Turkey and Saudi Arabia, I think these drugs will extend health span.
So I think that by the end of this century, I predict that the focus on health and well-being will mean that people in their 50s and 60s will look closer to the way people in their 40s look today. So, and they'll feel more energetic and they'll be younger. I don't think we will make very much progress on slow aging-related cognitive decline. So while 60-year-olds might look like 40-year-olds today, they will be slightly dimmer than 40-year-olds today. Now, of course, in many professions, actually crystallized intelligence outdoes fluid intelligence. However, the intelligence of the population, the average intelligence, surely matters. Let us remember, a global graying implies also the world becoming stupider, or at least more forgetful. And I'm not even talking about Alzheimer's. I'm just talking about non-Alzheimer's-related age decline and ability to adapt, right? So yeah, I mean, maybe that missed your question, but there's so many, like, you can, there's so many threads we can pull on this where the prognosis is super negative.
I do think it's worth talking about healthcare. Like, if I were to find a silver lining to this, you know, to the silver-haired global population, I think for the first time ever we're going to have a database that's going to have the health statistics of 400 million 90-year-olds. They're just not, I'm not even sure there have been 400 million 90-year-olds in like all of human history. I don't know what the current global number is. It probably is like a few million. We could look, we could ask, you know, one of these, one of the AIs how many there are. But I think even if there are a few million, we've not collected data on them as a demographic because they're not consumers. Now in Japan, we saw this shift where as Japan grayed, you know, the market for adult diapers and alternate care and like various forms of automation for like beds that like move you out of the bed automatically and stuff like that, there was a market for that. So I think the pharmaceutical industry will have hundreds of millions of customers who want solutions to these terrible old-age diseases.
Now because of this, I could see global, you know, assuming the suicide thing doesn't get even worse, which is a big if, and assuming we solve obesity through basically pharmaceutical means globally, I think that we might see people reaching a, like, living to a hun- and being healthy and active and working until they're like late 60s, right? Maybe up to 70 for people with good genetics, with lucky genetics, I should say. All genetics, you know, almost every phenotype you see in the population has advantages and disadvantages, right? The same gene that might make you an Olympic powerlifter might actually mean that, you know, at 70 you're going to have bone issues or something like that.
Yeah, so circling back a little bit, are there any interventions that we're excited about? You know, people, you know, think about tax benefits, you know, childcare, like these things that kind of on the margins, right? Tax credits or whatever. But like, should we be having a Manhattan Project for increasing the population? Like, how big of a priority should we be making getting back to, you know, should Elon have a thousand or thousands? Like, should Elon start a, you know, sort of a movement of all these rich people having, you know, more kids, almost like factory style, just like because we need babies? Like, how severe is this potential crisis and what should be done about it?
I think I'm raising the alarm right now somewhat provocatively because I think it possible that this might lead to human extinction or civilizational collapse. I was already worried about civilizational collapse for a variety of reasons in our civilization 10 years ago, but I have to admit I personally assumed that low fertility would stay a Western problem. I didn't actually assume that would affect the Third World, at least not until it became rich. But that's not what happened, and that's been one of the biggest surprises of my, you know, adult intellectual life. In a way, I priced in progress because I was reading, you know, it was better back then, but I was reading LessWrong back in like 2009, 10, 11, Overcoming Bias, all of that stuff. No one was predicting a global fertility decline. Lots of people were saying, oh, maybe, you know, maybe feminism is the problem and like maybe Islam will overtake us all. But, you know, no one was saying, oh, actually, you know, Turkey and eventually places like Egypt are going to be low fertility too. No one was saying that.
So I would say that we should be very concerned and we should try many different things. I commend Hungary for having tried significant tax breaks for people with children. I think now is the right time to push for tax breaks for families. The reason is the old people haven't yet realized that they're socialists, okay? Baby boomers in America still think that they basically benefit from the free market. They don't realize that society is structurally more and more in the future going to be built towards transferring to the old from the young because the young work and the old vote. So if you have that setup, that surely goes towards massive wealth transfers some way or another. So right now, I think, you know, I could cite the article 'Who is Portugal for?' that was published by Vasco Vasquez in Pajamas Media, where he points out that, you know, in Portugal that's already happened. The old reliably, who are now such a big part of the population, reliably vote for pensions and various other benefits for the old, right? So that is definitely the case there already.
Portugal is a bit ahead of the US, partially because of immigration, partially because until 2010, America was a religious country. I don't think it is very much today, but back in the early 2000s, the US was an exception. It had a large population of Christians, also observing Jews and so on, which Europe did not, right? And East Asia did not, and they had higher fertility. Now, you know, the culture warriors of, you know, the center-left can congratulate themselves. You know, the New Atheist fight has been won. Young Americans are about as secular as young Europeans. However, as a side effect, that little fertility bump went away. And, you know, I don't think, by the way, staying religious is a solution. It's just staying religious helps. It's like your decline is slower and you still have more babies than the people who are not religious. And, you know, this effect can be pretty extreme together with a radically different lifestyle, as seen in the case of the Amish. But I don't think it's just that the Amish are that much more pious than Iranian Muslims. I think it's just the case that the lifestyle is very different, right? The Iranian Muslims, they might have bearded policemen harassing underdressed women in the street, but they live a modern lifestyle, including the women, right? The women go to university, have PhDs, the men work office jobs, and, you know, the bearded men policing the women, you know, they're not members of your clan or something. They're just literally the national religious police. So it's kind of like, it's a weirdly modern state and perhaps one worth an episode to discuss, like how does Iran work, right? Recently Iran was in the news with the missile barrage of Israel.
Yeah, perhaps we should have an Israel and Iran two episodes. Yeah, we never avoid controversy. I think we're going to go right into it. Yeah.
