[badloginagain]

Peter Zeihan's take is that urbanization leads to less children because there's less space, you don't need the free labor kids provides on the farm, and children are very expensive in the city.

This is coupled with the speed of urbanization for countries that industrialized after the second world war- the later you industrialize, the faster that industrialization happens, the more stark the transition to a childless economy.

As mentioned in the article, there is a demographic boon for that industrialized generation. Less money needed for schools, etc, more time your prime working age adults can contribute to the economy.

Except all those countries industrialized around the same generation. That generation is aging out of the workforce and there's nothing to replace them.

Zeihan posits this leads to demographic collapse, and that these countries just simply "go away" because there isn't enough children to keep the country functioning. I'm not sure how much I believe that, but I do know that nobody has a clue how to fix it. Japan has been front and center for this problem and still haven't found a way to reverse the trend.

[wing-_-nuts]

Zeihan is a smart guy, but he tends to take his limited expertise and expand it into areas where he doesn't have a strong foundation. I think his ideas on demographics are a bit too deterministic. Demographics don't enter a state where they 'can't' recover. Behavior responds to incentives. The reason why birth rates are plummeting in the developed world is that costs to have kids are soaring. If there was real investment in child care (think, what france and sweden have done, but on steroids), and if higher ed and other costs were mostly covered, people would feel able to have more kids.

Now how do we pay for all that? Dunno. That question is above my pay grade, but I think we'd undoubtedly have to cut spending on other priorities and raise taxes. I think that'd probably be worth it to claw out of a demographic decline.

[unethical_ban]

>there isn't enough children to keep the country functioning

I wonder if some kind of mandatory civil service will become necessary. I feel in the US that many people are disengaged from the rest of their communities for numerous reasons, and it would be both a direct public service and a benefit to societal cohesion for all people to experience being a servant to their cities via public works.

[marssaxman]

How do you get from the resurrection of corveé labor to an increased birth rate? I don't see the connection. If anything, I would imagine that taxing people's time as well as their money would only make the burden of parenthood feel heavier.

[unethical_ban]

It wasn't directly about increasing birthrate, it was about dealing with decreasing birthrate.

If we have fewer people to operate society, we may need to conscript ourselves into being useful to the rest of our community.