Bye, bye, baby? Birthrates are declining globally – here's why it matters

 

• Birthrates are falling globally.
• In many countries, COVID-19 has suppressed population growth by causing a decline in births, migration and life expectancy.
• Even before the pandemic, urbanization was driving population decline.

At the end of May, the Chinese Government announced that parents in China would now be permitted to have up to three children. This announcement came only five years after the stunning reversal of the 1980 one-child policy.

Something is clearly going on.

That something is that China has experienced a fertility collapse. According to the latest census released in May, China is losing roughly 400,000 people every year. China still claims its population is growing, but even if these projections are taken at face value, the population decline previously projected to start by midcentury may now begin as early as 2030. This means China could lose between 600 and 700 million people from its population by 2100.

That’s right: 600 and 700 million people, or about half of its total population today.

China’s population changes are not unique among the superpowers. According to the United States’ most recent census, the US birthrate has declined for six straight years and 19% since 2007 in total. Like China, the US birthrate is now well below replacement rate at 1.6. (China is now at 1.3.) For a country to naturally replace its population, its birthrate needs to be at least 2.1.

You can also add the world’s second-most populous country, India, to the list of low-fertility countries, with a birthrate at replacement rate (2.1). Also include Japan (1.3), Russia (1.6), Brazil (1.8), Bangladesh (1.7) and Indonesia (2.0).

There are still big countries with high birthrates, such as Pakistan (3.4) and Nigeria (5.1). But even these numbers are lower than they were in 1960 – when Pakistan was at 6.6 and Nigeria at 6.4 – and declining every year.

The role of COVID-19 in declining birthrates

The COVID-19 pandemic is serving as a modifier – but not in the way commentators and comedians suggested when lockdowns began.

Remember all the jokes about people being stuck at home leading to a baby boom? As the data rolls in, its clear that in many countries, the opposite has occurred. Most children these days are wanted or planned children, especially in the developed world. Deciding to have a baby is contingent on being optimistic about the future – and optimism is difficult to muster during a global pandemic. In fact, the Brookings Institute estimates that 300,000 babies were not born in the US as a result of economic insecurity related to the pandemic.

Could this be a short-term phenomenon ready for correction? Possibly. Some analysts are anticipating a mini baby boom once vaccines are widely available and restrictions are lifted. But even a mini baby boom is unlikely to fully compensate for the decline. Experience shows that when a couple defers having a child, for whatever reason, they typically don’t make it up later. The unborn baby remains unborn.

A decline in fertility is just one way the pandemic is suppressing population growth in many developed nations. The other: closed borders. In 2020, Australia recorded its first population decline since World War I, due to stricter COVID-related border controls. Canada granted permanent-resident status to 180,000 applicants in 2020, far short of the target of 381,000 – and most of the new permanent residents were already in the country on student or work visas.

A third, grim factor is also at work: the death toll of the disease itself. Researchers predict that life expectancy in the United States has declined by a full year as a result of COVID deaths. Racial minorities were particularly hard hit, with African American life expectancy suppressed by two years and Latino life expectancy by three years. Officially, the pandemic is responsible for more than 3 million deaths – but that figure could be far higher, since some countries may be under-reporting deaths. This is probable, for example, in India, where the pandemic is claiming 4,000 lives a day; many authorities believe the real count is far higher.

But it's not only the pandemic...

As John Ibbitson and I wrote in Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline, the forces driving population decline have been in place since at least the turn of the century.

The biggest force is urbanization. The largest migration in human history has happened over the last century and it continues today as people move from the country to the city. In 1960, one-third of humanity lived in a city. Today, it’s almost 60%. Moving from the country to the city changes the economic rewards and penalties for having large families. Many children on the farm means lots of free hands to do the work. Many children in the city means lots of mouths to feed. That’s why we do the economically rational thing when we move to the city: we have fewer kids.

Moving to the city also changes the lives of women, exposing them to a different version of life than their mothers and grandmothers lived in the country. Urban women are much more likely to have an education and a career, as well as easier access to contraception. Lower birthrates are the inevitable result. That’s why first-time mothers today are older and have fewer children, and teenage pregnancies have dramatically declined. In most developed countries, the birthrate of women over 40 has surpassed the rate of women age 20 and younger.

We can expect that a great defining moment of the 21st century will occur in three decades or so when the global population starts to decline. COVID might have even pushed the start of this decline forward – but it certainly didn’t cause it.

Why population decline matters

Why should you care about population decline? Fewer people are good for the climate, but the economic consequences are severe. In the 1960s, there were six people of working age for every retired person. Today, the ratio is three-to-one. By 2035, it will be two-to-one.

Some say we must learn to curb our obsession with growth, to become less consumer-obsessed, to learn to manage with a smaller population. That sounds very attractive. But who will buy the stuff you sell? Who will pay for your healthcare and pension when you get old?

Because soon, humanity will be a lot smaller and older than it is today.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/06/birthrates-declining-global-fertility-decline-empty-planet-covid-19-urbanization-migration-population/

Democracy failure update: GOP voter suppression laws are still in progress

In states where the Republican Party is in control, the New York Times reports about a slew of new voter suppression laws are aiming at suppressing disabled voters from voting. This is a big deal because there are about 38 million voters who are disabled. That is a big voting block. The GOP aims to make voting for as many of the disabled as hard as they can. Some of the proposed laws are rather creative in the barriers that are being put in place. 

For example, in Texas the legislature is planning a special session to pass laws that would disproportionately affect people with disabilities. One Texas bill bans drive-through voting, further limits absentee voting, and it would allow poll watchers video record voters as possible evidence of wrongdoing. The intent is to give Republican poll watchers a chance to allege that legal accommodations such as a poll worker helping a disabled voter complete a ballot, or a blind voter using a screen reader, is fraud. The law makes it a felony to commit this kind of “vote fraud.” The NYT writes on this tactic:

Breaking these rules would be a felony — a characteristic of bills in several states that advocates said could discourage people from helping friends or neighbors.

“It’s made organizations like ours start questioning, ‘Should we do that?’ because a simple mistake on our end could put them in jeopardy and our organization in jeopardy,” said Chase Bearden, deputy executive director of the Coalition of Texans With Disabilities. “That’s a pretty chilling effect.”

Indeed, being accused of committing felony vote fraud just for helping someone to vote would be chilling. That is the Republican intent. In recent elections, demands from the disabled community have increasingly exerted pressure on politicians to respond. But after the 2020 election where mail-in voting helped the disabled turn out in large numbers, new GOP voter suppression laws are threatening their rights in an attempt to limit their political influence. Similar measures are being advanced in the Georgia and Wisconsin legislatures.

In Florida, new absentee ballot applications rules required that people must apply every election cycle instead of every two elections. That imposes a significant obstacle because many counties’ websites are inaccessible to people with disabilities. In addition, people who have a hard time controlling their hand writing, e.g., people with visual impairment or brain injury, can be subject to signature verification challenges at the polls.

The Republican Party is clearly not yet finished with its intense nationwide campaign of voter suppression and vote subversion. It is probably the best tactic the GOP has to keep a minority of Republicans in power against the will of all Americans who want to vote.

The big question is how effective will Republican efforts to subvert democracy work? The elections in 2022 and 2024 should shed some light.

Environment update: Maine tries to shift recycling costs from taxpayers to plastics producers

Plastic waste - mostly not recyclable 

A Washington Post article discusses an attempt by the state of Maine to shift disposal and recycling costs to waste producers. Not surprisingly, producers staunchly oppose this move. This was prompted by the refusal of China to accept plastic waste for recycling. Recycling is more mirage than reality. Only about 9% of plastic waste is recyclable. The concept of recycling plastic has always been an oil and chemical industry lie. The concept was heavily sold propaganda to get Americans to be deceived into psychological comfort with single-use plastics. WaPo writes:

“It’s good that the bottom fell out,” said Rep. Nicole Grohoski (D-Ellsworth), the bill’s Democratic sponsor, whose district includes Trenton. She doesn’t believe the old system of shipping products halfway around the world to China made sense as countries try to reduce their carbon footprints.

“We have to face this problem and use our own ingenuity to solve it,” Grohoski said.

The proposed legislation, which is vehemently opposed by representatives for Maine’s retail and food producing industries, would charge large packaging producers for collecting and recycling materials as well as for disposing of non-recyclable packaging. The income generated would be reimbursed to communities like Trenton to support their recycling efforts. EPR [extended producer responsibility] programs already exist in many states for a variety of toxic and bulky products including pharmaceuticals, batteries, paint, carpet and mattresses. At least a dozen states, from New York to California and Hawaii, have been working on similar bills for packaging.

“Ten years ago, this would have been unthinkable,” said Dylan de Thomas, vice president of external affairs at the Recycling Partnership, who said he is seeing far more openness to EPR bills from such corporate giants as Coca-Cola and Unilever than in the past.

“It’s a reflection of the pressure they are seeing from corporate investors,” said de Thomas, who anticipates there may be similar shifts in national policies.

The plastic waste problem is worsening, if what one sees in grocery stores is an indicator. Smaller amounts of product means more waste per unit or ounce of product. A vast array, dozens or hundreds, of snacks and prepared foods are now available, mostly in single use, mostly non-recyclable packaging. Thousands and thousands of plastic water and beverage bottles. Just look at all the plastics in grocery stores and snack shops. Little of it is recyclable. So, off to the landfill or onto the streets the plastic goes.

Questions: Should the cost of recycling be pushed onto producers because they are the ones who generate the waste and tricked us into getting used to it? Or are us consumers responsible for dealing with plastic waste because we buy it? 

At present, people toss glass and plastic liquid bottles out and there's not enough deposit fee incentive to recycle. Would getting rid of plastic containers for water and beverages and replacing that with glass bottles, maybe with a non-trivial deposit fee for each bottle, be too inconvenient for most Americans to accept? 

Producers argue that costs to consumers would increase as producers pass the costs through. Opponents deny that. Is it better to do nothing or try to reduce plastic waste?

How to persuade others

Robert Cialdini

Introduction and some context

The NPR program Freakonomics Radio Book Club broadcast an interview with social psychologist Robert Cialdini, professor emeritus of Psychology and Marketing at Arizona State University. Cialdini is a leading expert on persuasion science, i.e., what sensory inputs leads people to be susceptible to persuasion by others. He just published an updated and expanded 2021 edition of his 1984 classic book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. The 50 minute Book Club interview is here. 

The influence of Cialdini's original 1984 book is evidenced by the fact that marketers and manipulators the world over have used his book as a source of manipulation inspiration. Cialdini got interested in persuasion science after he became self-aware that he was being manipulated and controlled by all sorts of influence peddlers. He was baffled about why he was such a sucker. In the new edition of his book, Cialdini acknowledges what he unleashed as weapons for bad guys, e.g., dictators. demagogues, liars, deceivers, emotional manipulators, etc. To acknowledge what his book unleashed on all of us, he tries to deal with innate human badness and evil by adding a new chapter to the old book that focuses on the ethics of improper or immoral persuasion. 

Obviously, pointing to ethics is not going to faze demagogues, dictators, deceivers, etc. in the slightest. American commerce and politics is far past the point of meaningful ethics in this regard. The only meaningful ethics left are the rule of law and caveat emptor. Unfortunately those lines of defense are crumbling in real time before our eyes. But, at least Cialdini gives ethics (morality) the good 'ole college try. He correctly points out that all or nearly all information can be used for good, bad, frivolous, crime, altruism, truth telling, oppression, bigotry, deceit and whatever else specific information can be used for. 

Note that specific information includes social behavior. Humans are social creatures and most of us act accordingly but unconsciously on social cues most of the time. 

Based on the interview, my read on Caialdini’s current mindset and new book is that he is an astute intellectual successor who builds on a combination of (i) the 1910s-1970s master propagandist Edward Bernays (Crystallizing Public Opinion, 1923) and his contemporary and successor propagandists, and (ii) sociologist Peter Berger (Invitation to Sociology, 1963) and his social science predecessors, cohort and successors, including prominent cognitive and social science researchers of the human mind and/or politics such as Daniel Khaneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow, 2011), Philip Tetlock, (Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, 2015) Johnathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, 2012), Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels (Democracy for Realists: Why Elections do not Produce Responsive Governments, 2016) and others.

Some examples

To try to keep this fairly short (readable) but still meaningful, a couple of examples are probably best to use. According to Cialdini, the art of invoking a mostly mindless state of compliance and belief boils down to appeal to a few innate human biases, or “principles.” Marketers and political, religious, and economic propagandists routinely resort to these biases. Some readers here may recall the human bias list or codex I used to use to try to point out the messiness of how the unconscious human mind thinks.

 

For purposes of understanding influence or persuasion, ignore that list. Cialdini finds there are just seven unconscious biases or “levers of influence” that professional marketers, recruiters, propagandists and the like need to appeal to in their quest for money, power, recruits, deceit, sex and other fun goals. Without some explanation, these won't make much or any sense, but here's the list anyway: reciprocation, liking (~ the halo effect), social proof, authority, scarcity, commitment and consistency, and unity. Proper invocation of any of those seven tends to lead to a distinct, unconscious (automatic) “mindless compliance” in some or most people. People tend to just say “yes” without first thinking when any one of the seven levers of influence (psychological principles) are applied to them.

Reciprocity

Cialdini did three years of research by posing as a trainee in training programs in different industries. Within 6 months, he perceived all the levers of influence that professionals use in their training programs. He got these people to willingly tell him their secret techniques by applying the reciprocity lever. As one might imagine, professional politicians, trainers and recruiters usually don't want people to know how they get people to say yes. Marketers don’t want customers to know how they have been played into buying something they might not have bough if they weren’t manipulated. Demagogues, dictators and autocrats absolutely do not want people to know that they are being played and manipulated.

Reciprocity boils down to this: people instinctively want to give back what has been given to them in terms of behavior. Reciprocity is universal across cultures. What did Cialdini give the experts that, with 100% effectiveness, got the professional persuaders to spill their guts and knowingly tell their secrets of persuasion? He told them he was just a university professor doing research and not a real trainee. He said he came to the real experts to learn from them. Cialdini gave the professionals something, flattery in this case, and in return Cialdini freely got the information he wanted. 

Gifts from pharmaceutical company salespeople to prescribing doctors effectively induces the doctors to prescribe more of the company’s drugs. The gift can be a a free lunch to the doctor or their office staff. Research has also documented the same phenomenon with legislators. Gifts or donations to legislators induces them to give something back. A key point about reciprocity and the other six levers is that a small thing used as the lever tends to net a significantly larger return. 

Social proof

Here, social behavior is at play. If we perceive, correctly or not, that lots of other people more or less like us are doing something or believe something, the tendency is to do or believe the same. One study found the only thing that affected whether people would wear a mask in public during the COVID pandemic was whether most other people around them were wearing masks. Whether people believed the virus was a serious or not, or spread by air and masks reduce infection rate, did not matter. The only thing that mattered (made a statistically significant difference) was what other people were doing.

Research has now shown that in general, people who watch a presidential debate on TV are significantly swayed by audience applause. Whether a candidate the audience applauds is informed or not or is a crackpot or not doesn't matter. What matters is audience reaction. The human mind evolved to be responsive to the behavior of others and to fall in line with that behavior. 

Social proof is reflected in the presence of hired responders or “clacks” in theater, opera and other audiences. The responders enthusiastically act (laugh, cry, applaud, shout for an encore, etc.) to get the whole audience to respond similarly. Professional clacks are hired for their specific abilities, crying on cue or infectious laughing on cue, etc.

Social proof was a significant part of what got the German people to go along with the Nazis. We all know how that worked out. Social proof in places where people tend to refuse to get vaccinated, e.g., states that voted for T****, lead others in the state to not get vaccinated. 

Cialdini calls the social proof that the internet easily generates a “big, big problem.” Society has not caught up to the reality that they are being played in real life and in online life, in politics and most everything else. For example, the most persuasive number of stars in 5 star online produce or service reviews, e.g., Yelp, is 4.2 to 4.7. Five stars is too good for credibility. Smart businesses know how to get the average rating to the sweet spot.

Social proof for the public good sometimes backfires. Too many public service ads or news items that emphasize suicides or mass shootings tends to increase suicides and mass shootings. A notices at a national park entrance that people should not take artifacts because too many people are taking artifacts, leads some to want to take some artifacts before they are all gone. 

Question: Since social proof in pro-T**** states is a significant part of what leads people in those states to not wear a mask and not get vaccinated, is that mostly the fault of T**** and his anti-COVID propagandists, or mostly the fault of affected people because they are responsible for their own arguably stupid or bad behavior?

As monkeys see, I find that monkeys will do…

 

Strong personalities rule the world. What do I mean by “strong personalities”?  I mean “leader types” versus “follower types.”  Without follower types, leader types would be up the infamous creek without a paddle, and with no one to follow them. Leaders need willing followers to, for better or worse, get their positive/negative agendas passed. 

This phenomenon can be seen in all walks of life. From office politics to world stage politics, strong personalities set the tone for the rest of us. In every office I’ve ever worked in, and I’ve worked in many, I’ve seen it in action. If our office had a positive influential (strong personality) leader, things ran smoothly. If we had a negative influential (strong personality) leader, hardly anyone got along, and everyone pretty much hated their job. Just as the media can, I believe strong personalities can “make or break” any system, in that way.

Let’s look at the world stage now. Take the last five-ish (I’d call them hellish) years. What’s happened to the U.S. society with the strong negative influential leadership in Trump?  (When I say "negative," I believe I speak for the bulk of the world here, according to international polls.)  What’s happened is that we’ve devolved; taken those “two steps back” versus any single steps we’ve managed to take forward up until now. And why?  Because of a negative influential strong personality leader in one Donald J. Trump.  

Like the dysfunctional office, we are not happy campers.  Everyone is suspicious of everyone else.  No one wants to work together toward common goals. We all “want out” from the “opposing thumb” of the other.  But we can’t get out (of the world). It’s our permanent “office.”  

So where am I going with all this?  Well, I want to know what YOU think is the fix to our status quo:

First, do you think the status quo even needs fixing?  If yes, where do we find positive strong personalities to lead us out of the dysfunction?  

Do you see Biden, now, as the strong Yin to counter Trump's ongoing nasty Yang?  Or, has Biden no hope of undoing the influence of a heretofore strong negative personality leader?  

Has the cement now hardened and any “positive influence ship” has sailed, never to return back to port?  Where is our Roy Cohn Hundredth Monkey to save us?  If s/he exists, who is that influential positive leader?

Thanks for posting and recommending.