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by pjc50 260 days ago
> like everywhere else in the world India’s fertility rate has dropped off a cliff

It's amazing when people flag this as a bad thing when it's undoubtedly a key component of getting places to prosperity in the first place. Got to get people away from being starvation-limited.

> I think India really only has capacity to send a sizable amount of its citizens overseas only for the next 5 years or so at which point migration out of India will largely subside.

That's how you can tell a country is ""winning"" in the international rankings, when more people want to move in than move out.
3 comments
mike_hearn 260 days ago
No society today got to prosperity on the back of falling birth rates. And nor did any of the western countries that went through population booms have food-production created famines.
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bluGill 260 days ago
> it's undoubtedly a key component of getting places to prosperity in the first place

The baby boom and a couple previous generations in the US is also associated with getting to high prosperity and high fertility. This part of your thesis is debunked and thus your whole argument falls apart.

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dav_Oz 260 days ago
> It's amazing when people flag this as a bad thing when it's undoubtedly a key component of getting places to prosperity in the first place. Got to get people away from being starvation-limited.

Exponentially falling fertility rates can create dynamics which can be destructive in its own right. As with other complex phenomena it would be for example foolish to rapidly cool the earth's climate. Stability is the key, here. Right now India is just below replacement which short to mid-term looks very promising but will it stabilize? Looking at worldwide trends I very much doubt that. A growing economy needs some demographical stability so coming from a long-term view fertility dropping off a cliff, now, could be bad news later (in one, two generations).

Turning some knobs one way or the other does not produce linear results, quite the opposite, there are thresholds, there is criticality. To draw on another more time compressed analogy here: I guess some operators thought back then: What could go possibly wrong by running a nuclear reactor (RBMK) at safer lower powers?

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