“Why are people moving to San Francisco? In some sense, it’s a matter of popular cities continuing to be popular. That means people still find value and jobs there. The Bay Area is culturally rich, with people — and culture and food — from around the world. While tech companies have been cutting back on hiring lately, the area is still the home base to their giant and lucrative businesses, meaning there’s still plenty of opportunity for workers.
There’s reason to believe that people aren’t just moving back to San Francisco because they want to. The move back also represents a solidification of remote work policies, in which many companies have come down on the side of hybrid work, where people are still expected in the office some of the time. In other words, people who may have wanted to move elsewhere permanently have been forced back to the Bay Area, though perhaps in different locations than they had been.
The decision to return to the Bay Area could also come from employees who are hoping to put in face time with their bosses ahead of a potential recession. Studies have shown that bosses view people who work in the offices more favorably and are more likely to consider them for promotion.”
“China’s population drop isn’t the result of a single, acute crisis, but years of policy decisions and cultural and economic shifts that have led this nation of 1.4 billion people to where it is today: facing an aging and shrinking population for the foreseeable future.”
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“As much as China’s aging and eventual shrinking was a demographic inevitability as it became richer and more modern, the particular speed at which that transition is occurring, and the particular challenges that pace will present, are Beijing’s own doing.”
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“In 2015, the Chinese government did something it almost never does: It admitted it made a mistake, at least implicitly.
The ruling Communist Party announced that it was ending its historic and coercive one-child policy, allowing all married couples to have up to two children.
The one-child policy had helped lead to the mother of all demographic dividends, the term for the economist boost created when a country’s birth and death rates both decline. Between 1980 and 2015, China’s working-age population grew from 594 million to a little over 1 billion. China’s dependency ratio — the total young and elderly population relative to the working-age population — fell from over 68 percent in 1980 to less than 38 percent in 2015, which meant more workers for every non-working person.”
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“But no fuel burns forever, and over the past decade, hundreds of millions of Chinese have hit retirement age, with a plummeting number of young people to replace them. So the slogans went from “Having only one child is good” to “One is too few, while two are just right.”
How did the Chinese people react? Not by having more children. By 2021, China’s total fertility rate (that is, the number of expected births per woman over the course of their reproductive lifetime) had fallen to just 1.15, nearly a full child below the replacement rate of 2.1. (That’s two to replace each parent, plus a slight extra to make up for children who might die before they reach adulthood”
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“For all its power and aggregate wealth — it is by most accounts the world’s second-largest economy — on a per capita basis, it’s still a middle-income country at best. To reach anything like a per capita parity with a country like the UK, let alone the US, would require years more of high-powered economic growth that will be increasingly difficult to pull off in an aging nation. In the end, China could get old before it gets rich.
And if China can’t grow faster, the elderly will bear the brunt of the cost. A 2013 study estimated that nearly a quarter of China’s seniors live below the poverty line, and the country — like many others in East Asia, including richer nations like Japan and South Korea — has little in the way of old-age support. That was less of a problem when older adults could count on being taken care of by their children, but decades of the one-child policy has left an inverted pyramid known as “4-2-1,” with four grandparents and two parents depending on one child.
As more and more young Chinese choose to go without children altogether — pursuing the “double income, no kids” lifestyle — more and more elderly Chinese will have no familial support whatsoever, with one survey projecting 79 million childless older adults in China by 2050. And those trends will reinforce each other — younger Chinese are already citing the burden of caring for elderly parents as one reason to have fewer or no children.”
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“Beyond ending the one-child policy, the Chinese government has begun offering financial inducements to couples to have more children, following in the footsteps of other countries that have faced demographic deficits.
Shanghai will give mothers 60 days of additional parental leave, while Shenzhen has joined other Chinese cities in giving subsidies — $1,476 in its case — to couples who have a third child. But don’t expect these moves to make a major difference in birth rates. While such financial incentives might prompt couples to have a child earlier than they had planned, there’s little evidence the programs can convince a childless couple to have a kid, or lastingly increase birthrates.”
“Warp Speed deserves substantial credit for saving lives in the early pandemic. Companies making crucial parts for the vaccine have credited Warp Speed’s special authorizations with getting their power turned back on in minutes after an outage and convincing vendors to cut their production times from 75 days to 7. Negotiated partnerships for every part of the supply chain — from glass vials to syringes to packaging for shipping — enabled a rapid rollout. Even the Defense Department got involved in logistics, flying equipment and vaccines from place to place.”
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“Immunologist Moncef Slaoui, who headed Warp Speed under the Trump administration, spent years before the pandemic advocating for a simple, cheap measure that would have made it possible to develop vaccines even faster: maintaining idle capacity so the country can respond to emergencies.
As he told Science in a 2021 interview:
“The whole concept—after we went through the flu pandemic, the Ebola outbreak, the Zika outbreak—was to say, “Listen, the problem is always the same, which is there are no manufacturing facilities sitting there idle, waiting to be used. Even if we had one, we would have trouble because we would have to stop manufacturing other vaccines, which are essential for saving people’s life. So we thought, “Why don’t we take a dedicated facility and have them work on discovering vaccines against known potential outbreak agents, one after the other?” They would become incredibly skilled and trained at going fast, discovering vaccines. The company was prepared to make available the facility and ask just for the cost of running it. Unfortunately, it didn’t fly.””
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“That investment? Didn’t happen. Before the pandemic, some of this country’s smartest experts spent years telling us that a pandemic was coming and would be catastrophic, but that we could prepare and substantially mitigate the harms. We didn’t.
During the pandemic, we developed significant expertise in vaccine development and distribution, which we easily could have leveraged into maintaining capacity for rapid vaccine development to prevent the next pandemic. We didn’t.”
“Meta laying off 11,000 people and Goldman Sachs 3,200 sounds like a lot. But when you put it in context, it’s quite tiny — there are some 165 million people in the workforce. It’s also important to keep in mind when looking at websites like layoffs.fyi, which tracks tech sector layoffs, that in the grand scheme of things, some of these totals are not that much.”
“Total births and the general fertility rate in the US have fallen significantly over the past 15 years. While 2021 saw a 1 percent increase in births from the year before — the likely result of planned pregnancies postponed during the first difficult year of the pandemic, plus the reproductive benefits of remote work — that number was still more than half a million fewer than the US peak in 2007. The total fertility rate — the number of children women are projected to give birth to over the course of their lifetimes — stood at 1.67, well below the point needed to replace the population through reproduction alone. Nearly one in six Americans 55 and over is childless, a percentage that is only expected to grow. Without the boost of immigration, the US population growth rate would have essentially flatlined in recent years, and even with it, it grew by just 0.4 percent in 2022, among the lowest rates in the nation’s history.”
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“America has room for more children; it needs them to thrive; and most of all, people do want the freedom to choose the family sizes they desire, including larger ones. It’s a future that progressives can — and should — help create.”
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” while it’s true that a child born today will be responsible for adding more carbon into the atmosphere, that 60-metric-ton figure was derived from work by researchers in 2009 who added up not just the lifetime emissions of the child, but dwindling portions of the lifetime emissions of that child’s descendants, all the way until 2400 — and making all of that the responsibility of the parents. And that number assumes that the world will make no additional progress in decarbonizing the global economy, which already isn’t true. In a rich country like the US, a baby born today will emit less CO2 on average over the course of their lifetime than their parents did; according to the International Energy Agency, if the world achieves carbon neutrality by 2050, the carbon footprint of those New Year’s babies could be 10 times smaller than that of their grandparents.”
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“As for those fears that having a child would doom them to life in a hot hellscape, the world now appears to be on a path to dodge the worst-case climate scenarios. This isn’t to minimize the very real suffering that will be unavoidable thanks to warming, especially in poorer countries, but a child born today almost anywhere around the world has a better chance of living a good, long life than at almost any other time in the whole of human history.”
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“an aging country is one that will have a dwindling number of young workers to support a growing number of elderly. Today there are around three and a half working-age adults to support every American eligible for Social Security. By 2060, that is projected to fall to two and a half workers for every retiree. Social Security isn’t a Ponzi scheme, but without enough young workers putting in payroll taxes, it can’t continue in its current form.”
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“A study of 33 OECD nations between 1960 and 2012 found that while countries can remain inventive even as they age, rates of innovation eventually begin to stagnate and decline. As a 44-year-old it pains me to say this, but creativity is a quality most concentrated in the young.”
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“The average cost of child care in the US now exceeds $10,000 a year. That’s an enormous burden for working- and middle-class families, but it also discourages people who would have more children from doing so. Reducing the cost of care is one of the few proven ways of boosting fertility over the long term”
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“while the most effective way to grow population over the long term is the old-fashioned one — have more children — liberalizing immigration to add more Americans would pay off immediately.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/sen-schumer-says-2-downed-150259573.html
“If there is a Russian ideology, it’s ethnic nationalism. China’s case is also largely nationalism. In China, nationalism began to displace communism as an ideology in the 1970s, after the Cultural Revolution. It comes from the disappointment of the population with ideological dogma and with the great promise of a communist revolution that never happened. The Chinese Communist Party was facing a legitimacy deficit, and they were looking for things to fill it — so nationalism replaced communist revolution. The same thing happened with the Soviet Union falling apart; the Russian Federation had to reinvent itself on the basis of Russian nationalism.”
https://www.vox.com/the-goods/23569504/ticketmaster-monopoly-live-nation-taylor-swift-antitrust-clyde-lawrence