Category Archives: Growth Causes and Consequences

A surplus of affluent females?

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1. Vincent Harinam writes,

There is an average yearly surplus of 2.2 million female undergrad enrolees between 2020 and 2029. Between 2030 and 2039, this number increases Morgan Stanley forecasts that 45 percent of working women between the ages of 25 and 44 will be single and childless by 2030, the largest share in history. to 2.3 million. Cumulatively, there will be a whopping 45.1 million women without an equally educated male partner between 2020 and 2039.

. . . Morgan Stanley forecasts that 45 percent of working women between the ages of 25 and 44 will be single and childless by 2030, the largest share in history.

This has many consequences. But one of them is that it bolsters the Democratic Party. The Democrats may not reap the demographic dividend long predicted based on rising numbers of minorities, but they can more reliably count on college-educated single women.

2. Or is it a surplus of bicycles relative to fish? (possibly obscure reference) From Aella, in an interview with Bari Weiss

When it comes to gender roles, the thing that men provide is typically protection, and the thing that women provide is typically reproduction. We no longer need protection, but we still need reproduction, so it’s like, ‘What do men do? Why are they valuable? Why are they even here?’ It’s kind of the ambient question in the background. . . .I feel like this is the thing that we’re going to have to figure out how to grapple with as a culture, because with any sort of advancement in a culture, we’re going to run into this problem where the role of one gender becomes unnecessary faster than the role of the other. This creates an imbalance in value. I think the imbalance in value ultimately is the thing that’s contributing to this sort of thing where women are able to rake in huge amounts of cash online while men are like sitting alone in their basements watching.

The future of cities

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1. Joel Kotkin writes (American Affairs, only one free article for non-subscribers),

To survive after the pandemic, great cities need to become healthier, less centralized, and less dependent on mass transit. Urban areas must find ways to facilitate walking, biking, and driving, ultimately in sterile autonomous vehicles. Cities will have to become more dis­persed, cleaner, better ventilated, and less transit dependent.

2. Richard Florida and Adam Ozimek write (WSJ),

The most lavish office towers in superstar cities like New York could survive and even thrive as brand statements for major companies and amenity-filled experiences for their tenants. Even in the midst of the pandemic, the premier office districts of New York and San Francisco remain the priciest in the country. But older buildings in less exclusive commercial areas in those cities are sure to suffer. And office and commercial rents are likely to decline even further in those second- and third-tier cities that have been losing business and professional services to larger cities for some time.

I don’t think that a lavish office tower holds much appeal. Certainly not for me. About the future of New York, I probably err too much on the side of pessimism.

Depopulation and EGOs

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In my post on depopulation, many commenters pointed out that the time horizon for significant depopulation is so long that it makes little sense to be concerned about it. Compared to the doubling time of population fifty years ago, the halving time of population going forward is trivial. Those critiques are valid.

But in the near term, we have what Eric Weinstein calls Embedded Growth Obligations. University faculties, law firms, public schools, and other institutions require an ever-expanding consumer base or else they will have to stop hiring new employees and even lay off existing employees. Our pay-as-you-go entitlement programs threaten to collapse as the ratio of beneficiaries to contributors falls. How does Social Security work if we extend life and have fewer workers? Many state and local government pension systems are in at least as much trouble.

Also in the short term, we may see a dramatic shift in the composition of world population. Fewer East Asians and Europeans. More sub-Saharan Africans. That also will pose some adjustment challenges.

Techno-optimism

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Peter Diamandis provides it.

Global gigabit connectivity will connect everyone and everything, everywhere, at ultra-low cost: The deployment of both licensed and unlicensed 5G, plus the launch of a multitude of global satellite networks (OneWeb, Starlink, etc.), allow for ubiquitous, low-cost communications for everyone, everywhere–– not to mention the connection of trillions of devices. And today’s skyrocketing connectivity is bringing online an additional 3 billion individuals, driving tens of trillions of dollars into the global economy. This Metatrend is driven by the convergence of: low-cost space launches, hardware advancements, 5G networks, artificial intelligence, materials science, and surging computing power.

This is one of twenty examples. One of them, number 7 on his list, restates Ray Kurzweil’s prediction of the singularity by the end of this decade. We’ll see.

Wonk, not woke

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Glenn Hubbard writes,

Two areas of emphasis should guide the policy discussion over preparation: skill development and redevelopment using community colleges, and enhanced training and skill development within firms. Public-policy changes can advance both.

Hubbard believes that a central policy challenge is to permit the creative part of creative destruction while mitigating the effects of destruction. His essay includes a reasonable set of proposals aimed at these goals.

The formal sector and the informal sector

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Timothy Taylor writes,

Here’s are some columns from a table from the World Employmentand Social Outlook: Trends 2020 published by the International Labour Organization in January 2020. As the report points out, around the world about 60% of workers have informal jobs; in low-income countries, it’s more like 90%

Read the whole post. The ability to cooperate in groups above the Dunbar number is extremely important for economic development. You might hate big corporations, but they are actually a miracle of civilization, as Tim and others have pointed out.

Did you two visit the same future?

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Ross Douthat writes,

the supposed cutting edge of capitalism is increasingly defined by technologies that have almost arrived, business models that are on their way to profitability, by runways that go on and on without the plane achieving takeoff.

Today is the publication date for Douthat’s The Decadent Society. So by the time you read this, I should have read some the book.

Also sharing Douthat’s viewpoint is the blogger It’s Only Chemo. Pointer from Tyler Cowen, who we know is of a similar persuasion.

Earlier in the month, there appeared The Future is Faster than you Think by Peter S. Diamandis and Steven Kotler, which takes the opposite position. They talk about what has almost arrived with excitement, not with irony. They sound to me like venture capitalists who believe every pitch they’ve ever heard.

I fall somewhere in between, but I lean more toward Diamandis and Kotler.

Essay backup: Reid Hoffman and Patrick Collison, annotated

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Below is the last of the essays from Medium that I need to back up. I have found Medium to be a major disappointment in every respect. My own essays there got zero promotion, as far as I can tell–they would have been as widely read if I had written them as blog posts.

The essays that are promoted to me by Medium (I am not clear on how they mix human curation with an algorithm) in their daily letter are almost invariably insipid. My impression is that 95 percent of the writers on the site cater only to the dogmatic and extreme left.

In the days when the blogosphere was the main form of self-published writing on the Internet, I think that the decentralized editorial curation process worked pretty well. With the demise of the blogosphere, and what are we left with? Twitter? Ugh.

A few months ago, a commenter on this site predicted that the intellectual failure of Medium would be followed by financial failure. That possibility alarmed me because, unlike all of my other essays, my Medium essays were not originally written on my computer. So I have no backups should Medium suddenly shut down. Hence, these backups.

I hope that Medium continues and that my essays stay there, where they are properly formatted. But going forward, I will place my essays elsewhere, primarily on this blog.

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