| ▲ | reissbaker 2 days ago | |
This entire paper is baloney. Here's the critical excerpt they're basing their statements on: The log10 per-capita domestic comprehensive wealth index is related positively to the logit of the dependency ratio (Fig. 4a), but with countries in the Middle East departing from the expected relationship (Appendix II, Fig. S3). The boosted regression tree analyses showed that the dependency ratio had the highest relative influence on wealth (43.5–82.5%) compared to rmean and population size (Appendix II, Fig. S4), and a clear threshold effect where wealth increased rapidly from a dependency ratio of ~ 0.09 (-2.3 on the logit scale) to ~ 0.16 (-1.65 on the logit scale) (Fig. 4a). In other words, most countries with relatively older populations are those with the highest national per-capita wealth on average. All they did was... show that countries with lower birth rates correlate to countries that are richer. No kidding! Everyone knows that wealthy countries have had declining birth rates for decades. Presenting this correlation as causation — that is, implying that the declining birth rates have a positive impact on wealth (!!!) (rather than wealth having a negative impact on birth rates) — is basically nonsensical. This paper is just degrowth propaganda designed to trick numeracy-poor journalists into writing articles about how declining birth rates are fine, actually. (And huh... Middle Eastern countries are an exception? Wow! Almost like it's not low birth rates that cause wealth... And there's something different about Middle Eastern countries. I wonder what that could be?) | ||
| ▲ | imtringued 2 days ago | parent [-] | |
Actually, declining birth rates have a positive effect on national per capital wealth, but not in the way the paper talks about it. By not having children, parents save costs and can instead accumulate more wealth per capita. This doesn't actually increase aggregate wealth though. It's the same wealth distributed over fewer people, making it look like you can population crash your way to wealth. It is a somewhat perverse way to look at society, but par for the course for economists. | ||