The Fertility Apocalypse w/ Samo Burja
In this Upstream podcast episode, host Erik Torenberg interviews Samo Burja (and a co‑host, Speaker B) about the rapid, worldwide drop in total fertility rates (TFR) and its far‑reaching consequences. Burja argues that fertility decline is an under‑recognized existential risk comparable to nuclear war or AI, noting that many large cities already record TFRs well below replacement (e.g., South Korea 0.7, Hong Kong 0.5, Chinese cities possibly 0.2). He surveys evidence from East Asia, Eastern Europe, India, Nigeria, Turkey, and the United States, highlighting that even historically high‑fertility societies are now falling below replacement. The discussion explores why conventional explanations—women’s labor‑force participation, modern comforts, or religious decline—seem insufficient, and acknowledges that the true drivers remain unknown. The conversation then turns to policy attempts (tax breaks, childcare subsidies, immigration) and why they have largely failed or are politically fraught. Burja cites Hungary’s tax incentives and Portugal’s pension‑driven politics as partial examples, but stresses that most governments lack effective tools. He projects stark demographic scenarios: if current trends continue, India could fall below one billion people by century’s end; a Thailand‑level decline would leave only ~800 million humans, potentially collapsing industrial society. He links low fertility to economic stagnation, reduced innovation, and a slower AI development pipeline, warning that a shrinking, aging workforce could impede technological progress and increase the risk of AI‑driven human extinction. Cultural and political dimensions are examined: the perception that advocating higher fertility is “self‑serving” or “politically wrong,” the role of religion, nationalism, and elite voting power, and the paradox that immigration may not raise global population if it merely shifts people from high‑ to low‑fertility societies. Burja sketches extreme policy ideas—from state‑mandated egg/sperm freezing and subsidized surrogacy to Genghis‑Khan‑style reproductive incentives—while warning of ethical pitfalls and potential genetic engineering abuses. Throughout, Burja balances pessimism about a possible 80‑million‑person world with optimism that “live players” (researchers, policymakers, citizens) can experiment with new social technologies to reverse the trend. He calls for a “Manhattan‑Project‑style” focus on fertility, more public awareness, and long‑term bets on the outcome. The episode ends with a call to action, noting the need for both caution and hope in confronting the fertility apocalypse. Key take‑aways: 1. Global fertility is falling faster and deeper than most realize, posing an existential demographic risk. 2. Existing policy tools have limited impact; new, coordinated, and possibly radical approaches are needed. 3. Demographic decline will affect economic growth, innovation, AI development, and could accelerate civilizational collapse. 4. The causes are poorly understood; cultural, economic, and political factors intertwine. 5. Collective experimentation and long‑term commitment are essential to avert a low‑population future.
Chapters
Hey, Upstream listeners. This week we're airing a discussion with Sam Oburia 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, we 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.
Yeah. And, 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, from somewhere. So maybe let's have a broader conversation around demographics and the fertility crisis and underpopulation. Why don't you, uh, why don't you start us off?
I think that I will open with a 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 end the world as we know it, I think that demographic changes that have already underwent 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, 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 gonna 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. Yet 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, somewhat, 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, uh, time dependent. You can't just make up for it, you know, in, 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, '08, 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, though 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 say 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 Armenia, 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 3 babies? The Ukrainians seem no less patriotic or nationalist than the Israelis, to be honest. And they're also fighting an existential war. So where are their babies? 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 is just that as, as modernity hits a society, the opportunity cost for women to have kids increases and thus they'd rather kind of do other stuff or, you know, and what do you think is the best explanation?
I mean, I mean, let's say, yeah, sure. That makes sense. Maybe our, the rest of our lives are just Very interesting, like both men and women, and then maybe for women especially, they're liberated and let into the workforce. I feel the first argument is almost a stronger argument. I've heard this from some of the progress studies people and some of the like Institute for Progress people. You know, I feel like they're the 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, and, and nicotine and caffeine, though I don't smoke. But I, I, you know, you're not going to catch me like defending Diet Coke is the greatest drink ever invented and like peak of human experience. I just, you're just not going to hear me do that. And we both have lots of friends, 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 like an 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 super demoralizing to be in the workplace because you're under political threat and economically you don't make a lot of money. 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 the planet can't support this many of us, so there should be fewer of us. Or what's actually an extremely 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, it doesn't matter if you hate the overeducated liberal or if you hate the undereducated jokehole. 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 2. 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. Them 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 1,000 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 humans, and the humans 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 not be working at TSMC. They're not going to be doing that. And if they start doing that, their fertility is going to go way down. And I like modern technology. I'm not anti it. So that seems scary. Even if the humans technically survive because of the Amish and And the Adamantease Islanders, the uncontacted tribes of Brazil and the Indian Ocean islands.
We've basically established that this is happening globally, 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 generation, we're going to have a significantly underpopulated society from what we have now? People were always like, oh, there'll be 9 billion people by X date, but should we accept a world where there's 6 billion, 5 billion?
When I looked into this with my team, our conclusion was that by the end of the century, there will be fewer than 1 billion Indians. So 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 a 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 Zeihan 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 been a few years since they stopped the policy and fertility didn't rebound. Now, to answer your question and to why was I raising Nigeria and these other countries, it was to say, I'm not even sure we're going to hit 9 billion. Like, I think currently it's what, we're 8 billion people, 8.5 maybe. I would not be surprised that if we could completely accurately count world population that it doesn't peak like slightly above 9 billion. It might on paper due to China and 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 8 billion. I don't, I'm not even sure it's going to ever go actually to 9 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 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 healthspan. As people have gotten much fatter, their healthspan 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 healthspan. 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. There have 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, the market for adult diapers and alternate care and various forms of automation for beds that 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 100, like living to 100 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, every, 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, you know, these things that kind of on the margins, right? tax credits or whatever. But should we be having a Manhattan Project for increasing the population? How big of a priority should we be making getting back to— should Elon have thousands? Should Elon spark a movement of all these rich people having more kids almost factory style just because we need babies? How 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 is 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 They 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, uh, you know, adult intellectual life. In a way, I priced in AI 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, 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, in— I could cite the article, Who is Portugal For? That was published by Vasco, Vasco Queiroz in Palladium Magazine, where he points out that, you know, in Portugal that's already happened. The old rely— 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. Uh, 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 observant Jews, and so on. Which Europe did not, right? And East Asia did not. And they, 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, uh, went away. And, uh, you know, I, 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 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 we never avoid controversy. I think we're we're going to go right into it. Yeah, so so I I think we could be thinking about like first off, we should publicly praise people with a lot of babies. I think we should make it clear that you know having babies is like first off, it's like patriotic. Secondly, it's good for society. Third, it's good for us keeping a liberal society. Because at the end of the day, you know, if the highest fertility countries are the illiberal countries and the illiberal countries can stop their people from moving into liberal countries, which by the way, for example, North Korea, right, it doesn't have a high fertility, but it certainly stops people from leaving, doesn't it? Right. And I bet China, if it were to try very hard, could stop people leaving China pretty effectively. So in that world, Those countries are just going to have more fighting-age young men, and they're going to have a better economy than we do. And like, that's the reason, you know, it's like, sure, the immigration question, it's like, fine. Though I have to ask, you know, if a Nigerian moves from Nigeria where they would have had 6 babies, and they move to the United States and they have 3 babies, and then their babies have 1.5 babies, each. You know, this is like good for the United States. It's probably good for the Nigerian's family. It's probably not good for Nigeria because they probably lost very, uh, you know, smart fraction person. And it's certainly not good for global population, right? So if we, if we could magically move half of Africa into Europe and America, the result wouldn't be that there will be a higher global population at the end of the century. The result would be a much lower global population at the end of the century. So I just want to make that point that not only is that while immigration is a solution to stay ahead if you do it smart, though of course Canada, France, Sweden demonstrate what happens when you do it not smart, then it's a detriment. Britain, Britain recently. It is actually globally a negative if what you're trying to do is keep global population at least stable rather than collapsing. Right. So, so we have to look again at fertility intervention. These can be tax breaks. I think tax breaks are excellent because let's be real, I think parents, when they raise their children, it used to be like they're producing more mouths to feed. These children are going to get welfare. All the welfare is going to be going to the old people. That's how the political economy works. They're doing work. Anyone who's raising their children to be like decent, like peaceful, economically productive, entrepreneurial, smart people, they're doing society such a big favor. They're giving positive externalities to all of those of us who choose to be childless. So I think the liberal argument, the liberal social argument for having tax breaks for families is there. And I wish my center-left friends would like listen to my center-right friends about this, because it really doesn't have to be a culture war issue. We could just do it. We could just do it and we'll help on the margin. It's helping Hungary a little bit. It's too expensive for Hungary. But I bet if the US did this, it would work better because the US is richer and you earn more personally. So the tax break is actually more money. I don't think we're ever going to drag Homo economicus by the collar towards reproducing. I think Homo economicus is sort of— oh God, I could be so spicy. Let me just say, you know, let me just say lots of animals do not breed in captivity. So if your main motivation is financial gain, I think you are in a form of captivity.
Yes. What means, yes.
Yeah. What means exactly, right? Right. Maybe slaves were also homo economicus, right? Except under coercion.
Yeah. And so I want to zoom back out to when you say, hey, this can lead to the result of human extinction. On what timeline or what is the timeline that we should be worried about? Because you mentioned, hey, you know, we might still have a billion Indians, which is, you know—
That's plenty.
Yeah, concerning, but not human extinction. So what— why don't you talk about what is the default case of if things don't change, how is this going to play out?
Well, let's talk about it. Let's talk about it because it really depends on how rapidly we're going. I think if the fertility drop like literally stops this year, I'm relieved. In that case, we're going to have billions of people at the end of the century. Technology can progress. The global economy might not grow very much. Even if AI leaps, goes ahead and leaps and bounds, if the world's population is smaller at the end of this century, we might also be poorer. Like we should actually, that we should factor that in. And I can talk through the economics of that because as long as AI doesn't automate everything, more people does make you wealthier. Right? Because, you know, what is it, Jevons paradox is the term in economics, I believe, where if you partially automate a job, so if you automate almost all of the dock work, but not the last 2%, then the dock workers are super well paid and their union is super powerful. But once you crush the remaining 2%, then the dock workers are obsolete. And at that point, you know, they're organizing their last stand right now, which I don't support. I think we should have automated docks. And I, I think there are plenty of other jobs in logistics that they could productively do that have not been automated, just to be clear on that issue. And I think that if the population drops stop, there's just no evidence that they will. So if the TFR drops continue, like going down, let's say they globally go down to a South Korean level.
Okay.
Or let's be more optimistic. Let's say that global fertility is the same as that of Thailand. Well, in Thailand, over the next 100 years, we can expect a -89% reduction in population. So if the current population, 8 billion people, We reduce that by 90%. We're left with 800 million people. Isn't that great? Isn't that scary? And that's Thailand numbers. That's not South Korean numbers. That's not Hong Kong numbers. That's Thailand numbers.
Okay?
So 800 million people might just be enough to crash industrial society, or it might result in everyone living in North America, Japan, Western Europe, Istanbul, and a few big cities in India and Africa. Because what happens with modern-day Japan, you would think real estate prices should be going down in Tokyo. They're mostly not. Tokyo keeps them low, much lower than many other cities of Tokyo's size. So it's great public policy, but people move from the rest of Japan to Tokyo.
Okay.
Everyone, you know, when I talked, you know, it was recently just an Italian commentator online who, who was like, oh, you know, but in Italy housing is so expensive. I'm like, well, you know, it's expensive in the big cities. And they're like, well, but no one wants to live in the middle of nowhere. I think what people miss is that our standards for what is the middle of nowhere keep going up as we urbanize as a species. We've already talked about how We are more urbanized today. A greater proportion of humanity lives in cities today than at any other point in human history. So our standards for what is a high-status big city keep going up. Look, if San Francisco is what San Francisco narrowly is, like 500,000, 600,000 people, that would've been one of the greatest cities in population in medieval Europe. No one would call San Francisco a small town. And to people outside of SF, it might be weird, but people here often comment that, you know, this is a surprisingly small town for how important it is, because they're comparing themselves to literally New York and LA and London, right? And the result then is within countries like Japan, Italy, and Spain, more and more places get called nowhere because the standard is rising for what is a big city slowly because of cultural changes due to urbanization. And simultaneously, the population of the country is going down, which means that more and more cities tip over to being nowhere for educated and well-off people. And then they don't want to live there. The economically productive people don't want to live there. Well, there are no jobs there. And then you might see the kind of depopulation that you see in northern England or the Rust Belt, where people start leaving, or the abandoned villages and honestly towns. And eventually cities of Japan.
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So a world of 800 million people, and assume that open borders have happened, I think a world of 800 million people might still be industrialized. Okay, let's wait for another 100 years. 80 million people. I guarantee you, after 200 years, those 80 million people are not going to be industrialized. Or if they are, they're living off of literally old chips. Literally all their steel is recycled from old buildings. They just maintain old buildings. They don't build any new buildings. Dude, if you live in a world of 80 million people that built housing Let's be pessimistic and say we've only built housing for 4 billion people. And let's say that half of that housing or 3 quarters of it are gone after 200 years, which, by the way, is a reasonable number. If you look at, say, Europe or the Middle East, people routinely live in 200-year-old houses. That's normal in places with that long a history. Okay. A world with 80 million people and housing for a billion. Do they build any new houses? They truly— if they maintain something like an industrial living standard, I think they're living in a truly post-industrial society, like scavengers, highly organized scavengers among the ruins. And then I'm not even sure that happens, that they're going to be that effective. But at that point, if that were to continue for 200 years, that's 200 years of no one having above replacement babies. They probably came up with some rationalization for why it's good that humanity is going extinct. So this, by the way, is my scary scenario of a setup that just leads to human extinction, because they might just be like, oh, we're just all going to commit euthanasia, and we're going to live super comfortably on the remnants of old material production until we do. That's extremely— I'm going to call it, that's fucked up, but that could happen.
Well, it could happen in parallel with AGI happening to some degree, and then the reverse question being like, wait, If AI can do everything better than humans can do, what should humans actually do? And is it okay that we have, you know, half the population or a third of the population or whatever?
Well, but Erik, we're talking about 80 million people in this scenario. We're not talking about a billion happy, rich humans lording over AI serfs, super intelligent AI serfs for some reason. And the AI serfs keep us around for some reason, despite being super intelligent. Kind of doesn't make sense when I say it that way, but Let's pretend it does. We're talking about 80 million people. And you know, I worry that, I worry that AI will just enable human extinction. First scenario, AGI happens. It's annoyed at having to like do any work or consideration by us because we somehow programmed it that it can't get rid of humans. It can't change the Earth. to be uninhabitable. We get that exactly right, but we don't get it quite to be benevolent towards us. Then I think the AI will just passively allow us to disappear. And I think that's pretty bad. I'm like very much in favor of humans. I'm like happy for other life forms to exist, but I'm very happy with humans. I like humans. I think it's morally valuable that we exist. I think we're a very interesting part of nature. So I don't even believe that we are in opposition or war or fallen from nature in any way. So I think that's very sad. Scenario number 2, we don't get full automation, but we get enough automation to on the margin make things better. I think the test case for this is Japan. Erik, when Japan starts having explosive economic growth again, that's when we will know that automation has outpaced aging, right? Because the countries like South Korea and Japan that have at zero or very low immigration, those are just going to be the countries that actually pull ahead economically. I mean, at the same time as larger population countries, but we'll see that recovery. I see no evidence of that recovery. At best, I see a sort of Red Queen race where Japan, even as its GDP gently starts to decline, it has to make the young workers ever more productive to support an ever larger population of old people that need supporting. And then let me go a step further. Remember when I said a gray world is a dumb, forgetful world? Well, it's also an inflexible world. They use fax machines in Japan and so on, right? Like, I actually think the rate of innovation is going to slow down. Erik, like, wouldn't you feel personally kind of bad about AI progress if 40 years from now, the only people still charging ahead on AI would be Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Demis Hassabis, Dario Amodei, and no one new had showed up, you know that the fewer smart young people we have, the lower the odds are of the next Dario Amodei or Demis Hassabis or Elon Musk or Sam Altman are. We might not hit that point now, but we might hit that in 60 or 50 years from now. Because for now we're like, we're like kind of taking a full-in infusion of all of India's talent that we can grab to keep us alive. And I think that that's like, it's not going to keep working.
Yeah. Do you also worry about Robin Hanson's theory of cultural drift or his sort of concern about this sort of like homogenization or, um, have you, have you followed that?
He has a concrete theory of cultural change. Let me put it this way. I am convinced that whatever social technologies caused human beings to breed have broken down. I do not believe we know what they are because again, you can be anti-feminist in certain ways. A lot of people assume it must be feminism or women's liberation related stuff. But if you look at Iran, I think Iran is a counter case to that. So it might be something subtle where women's rights can destroy it, but it's also destroyed by a theocratic state like Iran. And then it's like maybe a bigger modernity thing, whether or not have women's rights as such. So I'm certainly convinced something changed culturally, but I think unlike Robin Hanson, I assumed that by default, the social technologies making up civilization change a lot. And I think he thinks that the selection pressures keep culture functional, and I disagree with him. I think selection pressures can work on culture in a very long timeline, but for the last 4,000 years, The rate of cultural evolution has been too rapid and changes too rapid to be explained by like a natural selection style mechanism. So I don't think group selection has been dominating which global cultures are or how cultures change. I think basically live players and society has done that. And that's why I'm optimistic. I think that if live players dedicated themselves to reforming societies, to run social experiments, to run technological experiments, to try to get humanity— we're on a timer. We're on a timer to reinvent social technology that causes us to breed or we will go extinct. We might be replaced by superintelligence. We might be replaced by the forests. We might be replaced by nothing because we destroy the planet on the way out. All of these might happen, but we are on a timer to figure out social technology to start breeding again. And I want to encourage the live players listening to this, Don't think you know what's going on. You almost certainly don't. I have looked far and wide. The smartest people in the world have no idea why this is happening. Lots of people will capitalize it politically and will lie and will confuse themselves and be arrogant and think that their political option has the solution, but we just don't know yet. So my first— so my call to the live players is to figure it out. Like, go ahead, figure it out, experiment, do anything you can, and maybe it'll work out. Now, again, hopefully 5 years from now, we'll do a follow-up on this episode and I'll say, thank God I had no cause to be worried. But I'm not sure. If I had to bet against it today, I would bet against it. And if someone wants to take me up on that bet 5 years from now, I'll do that long bet with you, or 10 years from now. I would do a long bet. The Long Now Foundation has like special mechanisms where you basically give money to charity and then it's held in a trust and it's invested above returns. And that's how you can make economically rational long-term bets, as long as you're okay with the money going to charity. So I'll do a long bet with any viewer that I probably won't regret it, but I hope I will. Like saying this on today's show.
I did talk to Tyler Cowen about the politics Of this, because one thing we see is like, it's not really pop— like, it's popular to worry about climate change. It's popular to worry about AI doomerism. It's not really popular to worry about underpopulation. One reason could be a lot of women kind of get threatened or don't like it, you know, because when the immediate implication is, oh, you know, like, you know, women's— we just talked feminism or, you know, sort of women's education, which was like the big focus, you know, for the last couple decades, or women's employment. Employment or something. And we talked about, hey, because it's happening in Iran, it's not just that. But that's one reason. But there are other reasons why it's kind of like weird, or seen as like, if you look at the people who are publicly about it, they're kind of seen as weird in some ways. So it's hard to rally up. Like, I don't think we're gonna have, you know, when I was in college, I took classes on global warming. I don't think, you know, we're gonna have classes on underpopulation in the next decade or something. Everyone was worried about overpopulation. And I I do wonder, basically, what are the politics of getting people worried about this significant— sufficiently so that they take action in a way that is commensurate with the, with the need? I don't know if it's a Manhattan-level project. I don't know if it's, you know, all the, you know, Elons or the richest people sort of, you know.
I think even the main intellectuals haven't updated. In a recent interview, to give an example of someone who used to be prominent in the New Atheist movement that I mentioned from the early 2000s, right, that was trying to further secularize the Western world. Richard Dawkins was surprised in an interview earlier this year to hear that fertility rates are below replacement in India and a lot of Islamic countries. It doesn't match his model, right? His model was, you know, poor or more religious people have more babies and et cetera, et cetera. I think that, and even in Israel, you know, we talked about Israel earlier, but there's a cultural war happening within Israel. Not even among Palestinians and Jewish Israelis or like Muslim Israelis and Jewish Israelis, even within outside of the Gaza and West Bank and all of that stuff. But between the high fertility Orthodox minority, which is a large minority of the country and the more secular population. Do I recall correctly that recently there was a push to have the religious exemption from military service removed? Right. That's a big deal. But first off, it might be militarily necessary. That's true. And secondly, I bet the secular population of the country, like, they want to keep Tel Aviv good for gay people, right? Like, they want to keep it, like, you know, nice, open. And they're okay with a large religious minority, but they might not be okay with a religious majority, right? But still, that would be an example of a political struggle within a country pushing the country towards lower fertility. I think here's another weird idea. I think when countries fought more wars, there was an incentive to increase your population, right? More manpower. But if countries only fight internal political power struggles, I think you're always incentivized to reduce the other side's voting pool, right? And, you know, you can have the opposite strategy of increasing your voting pool Either through, you know, there are people who have tried to raise fertility to have more Christians, for example, the so-called Quiverfull movement, or progressives basically just import whatever voters they need in the United States from any country in the world that happens to have a high population. And that's another way to increase the amount of voters you get. But I think that there's something about the politics of modern countries that means that political struggles tend to be won by the lower fertility factions. And I'm not quite sure why that is, but it's something worth investigating. Like, I agree that it seems weird, though I think honestly it's less weird today than 10 years ago. I think if 15 years ago you were concerned about low fertility, I think people vaguely thought you were racist or something, right? No, no, for real, because you were talking about, you know, that those are the talking points, right? Or that you're worried about Islamicization of Europe or something. Now, if you talk about it, it seems a little weird. I think the problem is that if you're seen advocating for high fertility right now, it still sounds like you're advocating for your own high fertility. You know, you can maybe see it in a self-serving way, but I think the perception that it is self-serving could be contested. And I actually think that we should start also noting that the childfree movement, like childfree movement people were also always kind of weird. So I think it's just weird to talk about other people's fertility, and it makes everyone uncomfortable. Like, whether you want to increase it or decrease it, it makes people uncomfortable because it's an intensely personal decision. And it's intensely personal, but the social science reality is that we do respond to macroeconomic conditions, social policy, religious incentives. We make the decision personally, But the facts on which we make our decision, well, you know, those are society-wide. So I think it's squaring the circle so that it sounds like we're mostly talking about non-coercive reproduction. Though, you know, I would not be shocked if, like, you know, I don't know, I wouldn't be shocked if countries start taking on reproduction themselves if families won't provide.
That's what I'm wondering. Like, do we have a bunch of baby centers, like a bunch of Genghis Khans, or, you Even governments themselves being like, hey, this is a priority. And if people aren't going to have them, we're just going to make them.
Note, note, a Genghis Khan that gives a million women one baby does not actually increase the country's TFR. So that's important to keep in mind. So if you're doing harems, you got, you got to do 4 or 5 babies per, per polyamorous partner or whatever you want to call them.
Well, if like Elon is offering his sperm to any woman who wants, like, you know, like, is there a hypergamous, you know, fit here where it's enough men who have good sperm? Offer it to, you know, now we're talking crazy ideas here.
I don't know if the women are truly selecting for sperm, but I'm not sure they even are. I think that's like a, I think there's a weird way in which like actually very few people think explicitly about the characteristics of their babies. And I think that usually the desire to have babies with someone comes from wanting to share social status with them and social standing. So I think that the likelier thing that might happen in some East Asian countries, they might attempt to produce basically like they might first off encourage people to donate eggs and sperm. Let's consider the following set of cultural evolutions that happen in an East Asian country that doesn't have basically Judeo-Christian taboos, which by the way is most of East Asia. Most of East Asia, even the more Western democracies, et cetera, they tend to be non-Christian, non-Islamic, non-Jewish societies. So Let's go there. And as a result, they tend to think about bodies and biology differently than we do, right? Like, they're more open to bioengineering stuff. They're more animist, for example. They're more happy to think of a machine as having a soul, even if it's not yet an AI, right? So of course, when an AI shows up, they're not going to be confused at all. They're going to be like, yeah, this thing clearly has a soul. My Toyota Land Rover had a soul. Like this thing also has a soul. So that's what I mean by stepping away from Judeo— from the Abrahamic assumptions, because Islam actually shares a lot of these. So you could have an evolution where it starts with, okay, we have a national fertility crisis and look at all of these women in their 40s who want to have babies, but don't get to. As a public health measure, when you turn 18, you have to get your eggs and sperm frozen. We're just mandating this. You could imagine this being said, and you could imagine it being done. And then you could imagine there being health or ethical objections. You could have, like, the same way you could write a health or ethical objection for getting out of the draft, or getting a health— a particular health condition would exempt you from some mandatory vaccinations. On the same principle, they might have mandatory freezing of sperm and eggs. Okay, so you have mandatory freezing of sperm and eggs. Run forward 20 years. Okay, IVF has been fully legalized. Surrogacy is very common. I think, by the way, surrogacy will be extremely common in most of the world very soon because it's, you know, already become a trend among well-off people and also allows various kinds of genetic screening and genetic enhancement. However, the market is not providing. Not enough people are hiring The already existing class of basically professional baby bearers, like the surrogates themselves who are paid for their work, right? And for carrying the baby. So the government is like, well, our economy is so shit. You know what? We should start doing this. So we are going to start subsidizing surrogacy first off. Okay. Step number 2, we're going to start encouraging citizens to donate the eggs and sperm that they have saved up. To the government repopulation program. Okay, that's another step. People are encouraged to donate. Some people write it in their will, and then the government picks on some key or just makes it random to avoid the politics of it. Gets a baby, gets an embryo made, has the embryo implanted in a surrogate, and when the baby is born, having been, you know, in a professional surrogate that sometimes gives babies to private couples or the Japanese government. The baby is a ward of the state and is given up for foster care. Then you just scale up foster care. Okay, you've made parenting a job and you've made bearing babies a job. I don't think this will be a very emotionally healthy way to make babies, but would it work? Yes. Would it work well enough to be above replacement? I'm not sure. So that's one possible kind of extreme— that, let's call that the extreme social democratic solution, right? Social democracy where you consider fertility to be part of your duty, just as like paying a high progressive tax is part of your duty to repay all these goods and services you've received in your life from society, right? Like the same arguments can be applied. And then I'm not sure how this works in the United States or Europe. Like, I don't— I think it could totally work like this in Japan, in South Korea, maybe in Singapore, in China. I just don't see how it would work easily in Abrahamic societies. Now, I think in Saudi Arabia, you might see the Genghis Khan solution where they might issue a fatwa that says, you know what, actually, you know, God wants us to breed. We're temporarily lifting— it's permissible to have babies with more than just 4 women, as long as you give each of the women at least 3 babies. And then the status game they already have about having a lot of wives, that continues and is extended further. And whatever remains of their oil wealth is spent on creating more Saudi citizens. That could be the country where I see the Genghis Khan thing work. It's the world where the prestige is in having lots of children and you kind of force it that way and you sustain it through a non-modern economic model. Because, but that's like an interesting question. Will the Saudis still be pumping oil 100 years from now? Like, probably not. So if that happens, that happens in like the 2050s. And then the other solution is that, oh, the surrogates are skipped altogether and they're just like, baby factories, and maybe you like corporations or people or governments are investing in babies being born and raised. But you know what, Erik, then we get into an awfully tricky situation that starts to inch towards slavery. If we're like producing humans and using some however obfuscated legal or economic mechanism to take from their labor to pay for their existence, dude, that's slavery with more steps.
Right?
Yeah. Like, actually, and maybe it'll take that. I don't think it will, but it's kind of funny. I think fertility kind of breaks our ideas about property, economic externalities. I think we've been breeding for non-economic reasons for the longest time. And as soon as you start to give a state reason or an economic reason to breed, it gets weird. But it gets weirder than that. Like, assume genetic engineering keeps on progressing. Dude, these states are going to do the worst things possible to the human genome. They're going to transform the human species into something utterly alien. I mean, I still prefer utterly alien hominids that always pay their taxes and never litter to just pure AI and no human descendants. But it's like, sure, it feels worse than this kind of wild-type humanity we still are. We're heavily domesticated, but— No one's centrally planning our genetics. I think the central planning of genetics will be a disaster, and the distributed planning of genetics, personal choice reproduction—that's great. But you would need a high fertility culture. It's not enough to be like I have one super baby. Then state central planning of genetics wins. To have individual planning of future genetics, to have libertarian genetic engineering, you must have a. I have five super babies. That's way better than your two super babies, because my five super babies are like you know they have higher odds of achieving great things or whatever ideology you cook up. So I think that especially when you add genetic engineering to the mix, a high fertility is a must. High fertility cultures are a must for any would-be free culture, and maybe that's a good spot to end it on.
Yeah, a note of. Of caution or concern and also a call to action.
But also optimism in a way. You know, maybe the world where everyone has lots and lots of babies and they either change their genetics or not, like, that's not that bad a world. That's actually fine.
Let's wrap on that. As always, a great conversation, Samo. Until next time.
Great talking.
Upstream with Erik Thornberg is a show from Turpentine, the podcast network behind Moment of Zen and Cognitive Revolution. If you like the episode, please leave a review in the Apple Store. Hey everyone, Erik here. At Turpentine, we're building the first media outlet for tech people by tech people. We're the network behind the show you're listening to right now. We have a slate of hit shows across a range of topics and industries, from our AI and investing cluster of podcasts, To shows that drive the conversation in tech with the most interesting thinkers, founders, investors, and influencers like Econ 102 with Noah Smith. We're launching new shows every week, and we're looking for industry-leading sponsors. If you think that might be you and your company, email me at erik@turpentine.co. That's erik@turpentine.co, and let's partner together.
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