So...while I dont actively encourage at this time using my economic models in an explicitly degrowth sort of way, I'm well aware that they're compatible. And I wanna discuss how things should work in relation to the "fertility" discussion in the previous post.
First of all, in a post growth world where we enter a period where we hit or flirt with the hard limits of environmental sustainability, I'll say this, maximum supportable GDP will become fixed. If we can only sustain say, a $50 trillion GDP, well, we can only support a $50 trillion GDP.
From there, considering the population debate, lower is better. Like there used to be this weird monument in georgia that advocated for the human population to be set at 500 million or something. Why would that be a good thing? Well, more population with a fixed economic ceiling means lower GDP per capita. Lower population means higher GDP per capita. The less people we have, the better we can live, assuming we dont need massive populations to generate massive GDP. Our current economic model is built around more people = more workers = more growth. But again, if that proves to be environmentally disastrous, yeah, you will eventually want fewer people, so each person can live better.
Now, reducing population is tricky. The obvious answer is the bad answer. Ya know...people dying....let's avoid that one. So....how's the best way to reduce our population? Through a reduced birth rate. So is low fertility really bad here? 1.58 kids per woman might not be a bad thing.
If we have 500 million people in the US at a $50 trillion GDP economy, that's a $100k GDP. But if we only have a replacement rate at 75-80% of the population, well maybe we'll only reach 400 million, and if the economy becomes productive enough to hit $50 trillion GDP a year no matter what, as more automation means doing more with less labor, then we can have future generations at $125k GDP per capita instead. If we drop to 300 million with a $50 trillion GDP ceiling which our economy becomes increasingly easy to hit, that's a $166k GDP per capita. Ya know? Point is, with a fixed economic maximum, fewer people, means higher living standards.
And once again, perhaps it's better for us to have fewer kids than to run into environmental limits the hard way, as that could lead to more death, rather than more kids not being born. So I say, yeah, if we reproduce below our replacement rate, and if, later this century, we hit an economic crisis that forces us to cut back on our economy to be sustainable (as we very well might some time this century), again, it's better if we reduce our population in a slow and controlled way than to just keep growing until we run out of resources and then we face some disastrous economic collapse.
I also wanna talk about how UBI plays into this. Like....my own UBI is designed with neutrality toward childbearing. There's been the argument that if we give too much money for having children, that people will have too many kids as we're incentivizing it. I set my UBI at 1/3 of the poverty line for children, because that's around the amount adding a child to a family adds to the poverty line. THe first person is around $16k, but then additional people add around $5500 each, so yeah, my UBI is set around there. This, in theory, means that people won't have tons of kids just to get more money, but I'm not actively punishing people for having more kids.
If we want to raise or lower the population, we can adjust the financial incentives accordingly. People have talked about raising the fertility rate with "baby bonuses". Yeah that's a good left wing way to do that. More money means more kids. Less money means less kids. And I dont wanna be cruel toward people, hence why I dont wanna actively punish people financially for having kids by not giving children ANY UBI, but you could, theoretically, reduce the benefit to children to disincentivize children. I wouldnt advise going nuts with this mechanism, but it seems like a lot better alternative than either, malthusianism where we actively deprive people resources through NO safety net system at all to punish people for having kids, or taking away rights and freedoms to force people to have kids. Like, it's a much softer incentive structure if we decide to use it. I wont advise going down obviously, to discourage childbearing unless absolutely necessary. But you could make an argument for a higher childrens' UBI to incentivize people having more kids.
Again I kinda feel weird about this topic given some might think this goes into eugenics territory, but I'm actually trying to head that off here. I look at the trump administration acting like we have this massive "crisis" while pushing a handmaids tale style conservatism and I'm just trying to offer a better approach, I think a more subtle approach of carrots and sticks works better than just taking away womens' rights and turning them into breeding cows ya know? Because if we let the right do it, that's what they wanna do. We looked at their goals in the last article and that crap is DISMAL. I think my approach is better and more compatible with our freedoms and the culture we claim to have that is worth preserving.
The same is true going forward. It would be better if we had a more managed population decline via fewer births than something that is...cataclysmic like the next great leap forward or something. I mean, we're not there yet, but I suspect we WILL hit a point some time in the next 100 years where the environment FORCES cuts to living standards if we dont voluntarily make cutbacks ourselves. heck, I've seen computer models suggesting it might happen as soon as 2040. That's 14 years from now. We'll see, but yeah. What we're currently doing isn't gonna be sustainable forever, and I'd rather encourage voluntary changes ahead of the time than something that is resolved through authoritarianism or mass death when we hit a major point of no return.
Anyway that's my general approach to these topics. Sorry to get dark.
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