> Fertility rates in higher and middle-income countries have reached record lows. Today, over 2 billion people – more than a quarter of the global population – live in countries with a total fertility rate below 1.3. This level would lead to rapidly shrinking populations in these countries in the absence of significant immigration. This article maps the global landscape of low fertility and the key drivers behind its recent declines. The current fertility ‘freefall’ is more widespread, deeper and more permanent than previously anticipated. It is driven by multiple factors, including structural conditions, unstable labour markets and anxiety about the future, but also changing intimate relations, better access to efficient contraception and changing views about parenthood and reproductive preferences. These conditions contribute to delayed parenthood, which increases the risk of infertility. Young adults express lower and more fluid fertility intentions than the previous generations, eroding the two-child family norm. The multifaceted nature of fertility decline implies that very low fertility is likely to persist and spread to many more countries. Due to lower fertility preferences and a limited scope to address the root causes of low fertility, policies aiming to increase fertility will probably fail in their aim to reverse fertility decline.
Degrowth is about reversing growth, not slowing it. A decrease is a reduction, not a slowing. It’s about reversing the sign, not changing the first derivative.
1000s of data points are evidence, even if they aren’t logged in a lab notebook. No one except ideologues needs a study to say men are stronger than women; the broad outline of the autistic manner of speaking is equally obvious. The details are worth study, but you have to have no exposure to the relevant populations to argue with the existence of the difference.
Oh, you mean like, I dunno, actually measuring them!?
You seem to have misheard "this is excessive extrapolation and theorized details from too little hard data" as "the most-general version of the phenomenon doesn't exist."
> 1000s of data points are evidence
Except they're the same kind my neighbor uses when he says that kids these days are different and don't respect their elders like they used-to.
> Whether or not the Brits need our advice, we need to have our own internal discussion about what’s going on over in the UK and how we can use it to inform our own choices. And although there are still a few things to admire across the pond, the UK mostly now functions as a cautionary tale for the U.S. — yes, despite Trump, and guns, and high health care costs.
> Whether you think the UK has been falling behind America economically for a decade or for two decades depends on which set of prices you use to measure living standards. If you use the two countries’ national price indices, the UK has been growing slower than the U.S. since the financial crisis of 2008; if you use PPP prices, as Paul Krugman prefers, the UK’s relative stagnation has come only since Brexit in 2016:
it was still on the uptrend until 2020 when switching off the economy squashed all growth and not just in Britain but other major continental economies too, Germany has actually been in and out of recession multiple times since.
2016 added some turbulence to domestic politics and econ but until then our recovery from the GFC had been fast, occasionally faster than the rest of the G7.
> 2020 when switching off the economy squashed all growth
The exception here is the US, again. And what did they do differently? Massive QE and "helicopter money". Anti-austerity worked extremely well for growth, even if the debt went up.
Counter-cyclic fiscal policy and QE does work, absolutely, but it's likely dependent on size of economy because in most cases austerity works better...but in most cases the economies are much smaller than America's; Ireland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Italy, Greece (since austerity was forced upon it), HK, Britain could likely've been more austere during the GFC and seen more growth.
Then again although not comparable to America's it's possible that the British economy was/is large enough to sustain even more liberal fiscal policy but given the dependence on import and that it's primarily a service economy I doubt it.
The examples I gave, primarily post GFC, except in the case of Greece the caveat is that although initially caused by the GFC the sovereign debt crisis marks it as distinct from the other economies listed.
HK under JJ Cowperthwaite (1961 to 1971), but more generally since then and especially pre '97.
Singapore, I'm told, from someone who lives there. I don't really follow their politics so take this with a pinch of salt appropriate for hearing things on the grapevine.
As someone who moved from the UK, to the US and back to the UK, my money goes a lot further in the UK.
I can afford to not work at all here. With health insurance, property taxes, and general outgoings per month being so much higher in the US (California, at least), there was no way I could retire early over there.
And whereas it's easy to hand-wave away "Trump, the healthcare, guns, ... " in a dismissive sentence, those things have real impact on a society and on the individuals living in that society. There's a reason [1] I moved away from the US, and will never return. Money-über-alles has its downside.
It's also worth noting (since the author brings it up) that the Mississippi comparison is pretty bogus. According to data from the Office for National Statistics and the US Census Bureau, median household wealth in Great Britain is substantially higher (around £300,000, or $403,000)[2] compared to the US ($175,000) [3] and Mississippi ($59,000). GDP and personal wealth are not the same thing.
You have not made any attempt as an argument. That’s a pure assertion without even an attempt at a causal chain. Being resilient to non-problems is a cost with no benefit.
> The war in Ethiopia is often cited as the immediate cause, but people have always managed to farm through wars, usually at least enough to avoid the Ethiopian situation.
This isn’t true. See the Thirty Years War. There have been many wars in the past that have led to mass starvation by making the work of agriculture impossible. See also the depopulation of Sichuan during the Ming- Qing transition.
Separately the Ethiopian war was subsidised by western food aid and other aid to the Dengists.
> And it doesn't work there, so why would it work for impaired driving?
It does actually. See how thieves resident in Florida travel to New York to work because of the different enforcement regimes for one of the clearest possible examples[1].
Even if deterrence didn’t work at all putting people in prison is good because of incapacitation. Committing crimes is stupidly right tailed[2]. Every career criminal in jail for a year is a year society doesn’t suffer their crimes.
Note that New York seems to have much lower property crime rates than Florida. It's usually difficult to compare this between jurisdictions but it seems pretty clear cut in this case.
It also seems like the percentage of goods lost to retail theft is slightly lower in New York than Florida.
c.f. you have a thirdhand cherry-picked quote from someone on a political site that implies differently.
People who think their opponents are Evil with a capital E generally think that way, yes. See the prevalence of “Punch a Nazi. Lots of Republicans don’t see Democrats as legitimate political opponents and the opposite is very very much true.
Violence against those who are advocating for violence against innocent people seems completely justified. Calling them political opponents sounds like an attempt to white wash what's actually going on.
Ok, but me and my buddies think you use tenuous judgement to characterize words as violence, and enable people to use physical violence in “retaliation”.
That’s a bright line violence against innocents, so we’re closing all your checking accounts and preventing you from paying for anything without cash. And if people try to help you, we’ll say loudly in polite society that they traffic in blood money.
