Thread by @shrikanth_krish

It's interesting how the southern states brag about how they have "met economic progress goals" by lowering fertility rates!

Even Europe's per-capita income shot up greatly after the Black Plague of 14th cen. That's no big deal

https://twitter.com/SwarajyaMag/status/1013020825488896000

If you are not going to invest in future by having kids, why should the nation invest in you?

It behooves the government to invest in younger, more fecund states. They are the ones who inherit the future.

While economists obsess over "per-capita income", they gloss over the primacy of life over death

If we lose sight of that, then we start worshipping lucre at the expense of life.

I can enjoy a far better standard of living by not marrying at all. But if even a single node in my ancestral tree had reasoned the same way, I wouldn't be here!

My grandfather was the 16th kid of my Great grand mother. Had she stopped at 15, I wouldn't be tweeting today! The 16th kid (born to poverty) ended his career as the head of a major PSU, and was the most successful of all the 16 children (only 6 of whom survived beyond 5 years)

It's interesting to note that he belonged to the brahmin community of Tamil nadu (settled in Karnataka) - a community notorious for its extremely low fertility rates today - rates that are well below replacement levels!

Per-capita income is a statistical measure that does not capture the value of "life" per se.

Even a kid born to a subsistence living with an adult income of say Rs 100,000 per year, is better than the kid being unborn! Life is valuable, precious and wonderful in itself.

Europe's population declined by anywhere between 33% to 50% between 1347 and 1351 on account of the Great Plague.

This naturally increased the wages of peasants as well as urban workers massively. It meant improved Per-capita income!

So should we have more plagues?

Here's an estimate on the impact of the Plague on wages in England -

"Wages in England rose from twelve to twenty—eight percent from the 1340s to the 1350s and twenty to forty percent from the 1340s to the 1360s"

This was the greatest per-capita economic growth experienced in the history of the world prior to the Industrial Revolution!

More information here -

eh.net/encyclopedia/t…

The Malthusian thesis of economies not graduating beyond near-subsistence living due to population eating up any productivity growth explained much of the global economy from antiquity till about 1800 (when Malthus wrote his work)

Yet, in the 19th century, Malthus was proven wrong, with the Industrial Revolution kicking in and an unprecedented growth in standard of living particularly in Western Europe.

But this increase in standard of living was caused by an intellectual revolution, that figured out more productive ways of getting things done! Not by having fewer kids necessarily.

The Population of Europe grew from 203MM to 408MM between 1800 and 1900 - the century of IR!

Even as late as 1910, the United Kingdom (the richest country on earth) had a fertility rate per woman of 3.

To put things into perspective, Europe's population grew barely from 168MM to 203MM between 1500 and 1800

Yet the PCI growth during these three very long centuries was barely a fraction of the growth achieved in PCI between 1800 and 1900 despite a doubling of population

THe other argument positioned against population growth is one of "lack of resources". The argument goes that the past is irrelevant. The absolute levels today are so high that the world simply cannot withstand as many people

That's a lot of bull given that the mean density per.sq km on earth is still as low as 50 per sq km.

While Europe and Asia have extremely high population densities, much of the New world as well as Africa is still virgin territory, waiting to be civilized and inhabited!

The "resource" argument bothered thinkers even 300 years ago when the world had less than 1/10th of today's population.

Jonathan Swift, the great English intellectual of the 18th cen bemoaned the high Irish birth rates and their abject poverty in his book "A Modest Proposal"

He even sarcastically suggested that the Irish kill their kids for food!

But the Irish did not pay heed to Swift and kept on having kids.

Today the Irish rank among the most prosperous ethnic groups on earth.
There are ~80MM Irish worldwide!

And <7MM of them actually live in Ireland! 40MM of them are in the United States, the richest country on earth, and enjoy a standard of living among the highest on earth

A community numbering a few hundred thousands, constrained in a small island, living in subsistence conditions, has now increased its number by a multiple of 100, and enjoying living standards about 100 times better than their ancestors in Swift's day!

Constraints on immigration and technological stagnation remain the more fundamental problems that we need to grapple with, rather than placing the blame on fertility rates, which are already at all time lows in human history

This thread is not a plea for heedless reproduction, nor an argument against planning families

The idea is merely to put "PCI" in proper perspective, and also not get into the ridiculous thought process of thinking of "lower fertility rates" as an "economic achievement"!

The southern states must focus on generating more wealth, ideas (and kids!) for the nation than pat themselves on the back for producing fewer kids!