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AllAfrica
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- AllAfrica
The dawn of the posthuman age
'Can you picture what we'll be/ So limitless and free/ Desperately in need of some stranger's hand' — The Doors In the 1990s and 2000s, a lot of science fiction focused on what Vernor Vinge called 'the Singularity' — an acceleration of technological progress so dramatic that it would leave human existence utterly transformed in ways that it would be impossible to predict in advance. Vinge believed that the Singularity would result from rapidly self-improving AI, while Ray Kurzweil associated it with personality upload. But both believed that something big was on the way. In the late 2000s and 2010s, as productivity growth slowed down, these wild expectations got tempered a bit. Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross poked fun at the idea of the Singularity as 'the rapture of the nerds.' And some bloggers, like Brad DeLong and Cosma Shalizi, began to argue that the true Singularity was in the past, when the Industrial Revolution freed us from the constraints of daily hunger and scarcity. Here's Shalizi: The Singularity has happened; we call it 'the industrial revolution' or 'the long nineteenth century.' It was over by the close of 1918…Exponential yet basically unpredictable growth of technology, rendering long-term extrapolation impossible (even when attempted by geniuses)? Check…Massive, profoundly dis-orienting transformation in the life of humanity, extending to our ecology, mentality and social organization? Check…Embrace of the fusion of humanity and machines? Check…Creation of vast, inhuman distributed systems of information-processing, communication and control, 'the coldest of all cold monsters'? Check; we call them 'the self-regulating market system' and 'modern bureaucracies' (public or private), and they treat men and women, even those whose minds and bodies instantiate them, like straw dogs…An implacable drive on the part of those networks to expand, to entrain more and more of the world within their own sphere? Check… Why, then, since the Singularity is so plainly, even intrusively, visible in our past, does science fiction persist in placing a pale mirage of it in our future? Perhaps: the owl of Minerva flies at dusk; and we are in the late afternoon, fitfully dreaming of the half-glimpsed events of the day, waiting for the stars to come out. I agree that the Industrial Revolution represented an abrupt, unprecedented, and utterly transformational change in the nature of human life. Human life until the late 1800s had been defined by a constant desperate struggle against material poverty, with even the bounty of the agricultural age running up against Malthusian constraints. Suddenly, in just a few decades, humans in developed countries were fed, clothed, and housed, and had leisure time to discover who they really wanted to be. It was by far the most important thing that had ever happened to our species: And it's important to note that this transformation wasn't just a result of technology giving humans more stuff. It depended crucially on reductions in human fertility . As Brad DeLong documents in his excellent book 'Slouching Towards Utopia', after a few decades, the Industrial Revolution prompted humans to start having fewer children, which prevented the bounty of industrial technology from eventually being dissipated by the old Malthusian constraints. Since the productivity slowdown of the mid-2000s, it has become fashionable to say that the Singularity of the Industrial Revolution is over, and that humanity has reached a plateau in living standards. Although some people expect generative AI to re-accelerate growth, we haven't yet seen any sign of such a mega-boom in either the total factor productivity numbers or the labor productivity numbers: Source: SF Fed Of course, it's still early days; AI may yet produce the vast material bounty that optimists expect. And yet even if it never does, I don't think that means humanity is in for an era of stagnation. The Industrial Revolution was only transformative because it changed the experience of human life; a GDP line on a chart is only important because it's correlated with so many of the things that matter for human beings. And so if new technologies and social changes fundamentally alter what it means to be human, I think their impact could be as important as the Industrial Revolution itself — or at least, in the same general ballpark. In a post back in 2022 and another in 2023, I listed a bunch of ways that the internet has already changed the experience of human life from when I was a kid, despite only modest productivity gains. Looking forward, I can see even bigger changes already in the works. In key ways, it feels like we're entering a posthuman age. When countries get richer, more urbanized and more educated, their birth rates fall by a lot — this is known as the 'fertility transition.' Typically, this means that the total fertility rate goes from around 5 to 7 to around 1.4 to 2. This is mostly a result of couples choosing to have fewer children. Here's a chart where you can see the fertility transition for a bunch of large developing countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East: Two children per woman1 is around the level where population is stable in the long term — actually, it's about 2.1 for a rich country and 2.3 for a poor country, to take into account the fact that some kids don't survive until adulthood. But basically, going from 5-7 kids per woman to 2 means that your population goes from 'exploding' to 'stable.' For some rich countries like Japan, fertility fell to an especially low level, of around 1.3 or 1.4. This implied long-term population shrinkage — Japan's population began shrinking in the 2000s — and an increasing old-age dependency burden. But as long as this low level of fertility was confined to a few countries, it didn't feel like an emergency — a few rich nations like America, New Zealand, France, and Sweden still managed to have fertility rates that were at or near replacement. For everyone else, there was always immigration. That's where the dialogue on fertility stood in 2015. But over the past decade, there has been a second fertility transition in rich countries, from low levels to very low levels. Even countries like the US, France, New Zealand, and Sweden have now switched to rates well below replacement, while countries like China, Taiwan, and South Korea are at levels that imply catastrophic population collapses over the next century: Meanwhile, the rate of fertility decline in poor countries has accelerated. The UN calls the drop 'unprecedented.' The economist Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde believes that things are even worse than they appear. Here are his slides from a recent talk he gave called 'The Demographic Future of Humanity: Facts and Consequences.' And here's a YouTube video of him giving the talk: Fernandez-Villaverde notes that the statistical agencies tasked with estimating current global fertility and making future projections have consistently revised their numbers down and down: Source: Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde This doesn't just mean people are having fewer kids; it means that because of past errors in estimating how many kids people had, there are now fewer people to have kids than we thought. Fernandez-Villaverde shows that this is true across nearly all developing countries. As a result of these mistakes, Fernandez-Villaverde thinks the world is already at replacement-level fertility. Furthermore, population projections are based on assumptions that fertility will bounce sharply back from its current lows, instead of continuing to fall. Those predictions look a little bit ridiculous when you show them on a graph: Source: Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde As a result, Fernandez-Villaverde thinks total global population is going to peak just 30 years from now. This is a big problem. The first fertility transition was a good thing — it was the result of the world getting richer, it saved human living standards from hitting a Malthusian ceiling, and it seemed like with wise policies, rich countries could keep their fertility near replacement rates. But this second fertility transition is going to be an economic catastrophe if it continues. The difference between a fertility rate of 1 and a rate of 2 might seem a lot smaller than the difference between 2 and 6. But because of the math of exponential curves, it's actually just as important of a change. Going from 6 to 2 means your population goes from exploding to stable; going from 2 to 1 means your population goes from stable to vanishing. This is going to cause a lot of economic problems, I wrote about these back in 2023. Shrinking populations are continuously aging populations, meaning that each young working person has to support more and more retirees every year. On top of that, population aging appears to slow down productivity growth through various mechanisms. Immigration can help a bit, but it can't really solve this problem, since A) when the whole world has low fertility there is no longer a source of young immigrants, and B) immigration is bad at improving dependency ratios because immigrants are already partway to retirement. And in the long run, shrinking populations could slow down productivity growth even more, by shrinking the number of researchers and inventors; this is the thesis of Charles Jones' 2022 paper 'The End of Economic Growth? Unintended Consequences of a Declining Population.' Unless AI manages to fully replace human scientists and engineers, a shrinking population means that our supply of new ideas will inevitably dwindle.2 Between this effect and the well-documented productivity drag from aging, the idea that we'll be able to sustain economic growth through automation seems dubious. What's going on? Unlike the first fertility transition, this second one appears driven by increasing childlessness — people never forming couples or having kids at all, instead of simply having fewer kids. And although it's not clear why that's happening, the obvious culprit is technology itself — mobile phones and social media. This is Alice Evans' hypothesis, and there's some evidence to suggest she's right. In China, 'new media' (i.e. social media) use was found to be correlated with low desire to have children. The same correlation has been found in Africa. Of course, better research is needed, particularly natural experiments that look at the response to some exogenous factor that increases social media use. But the timing and the worldwide nature of the decline — basically, every region of the globe started getting sharply lower fertility starting in the mid to late 2010s — makes it difficult to imagine any other cause. And the general mechanism — internet use substituting for offline family relationships — is obvious. Economic stagnation isn't the only way the Second Fertility Transition will change our society. The measures we take to try to sustain our population will leave their mark as well. Last November, I looked at the history of pronatal policies, and concluded that things like paying people to have more kids, or making it easier to have kids, or encouraging cultural changes are unlikely to work: Unfortunately, that's likely to lead to more coercive solutions. In my post, I predicted that countries would try to cut childless people off from old-age pensions and medical benefits: In the past, when fertility rates were high, children served an economic purpose — they were farm labor, and they were also people's old-age pension. If parents lived past the point where they were physically able to work, their children were expected to support them. In order to make sure you had at least a few kids who survived long enough to support you, you had to have a large family. Denying old-age benefits to the childless would be an obvious way to try to reproduce this premodern pattern. This would, of course, result in horrific widespread old-age poverty for those who didn't comply…I predict that some authoritarian states — China, perhaps, or Russia, or North Korea — will eventually turn to ideas like this if no one ever finds a way to raise fertility voluntarily. This idea actually comes from a 2005 paper by Boldrin et al., who find that if you model fertility decisions as an economic calculation, then Social Security and other old-age transfers are responsible for much of the fertility decline in rich nations: In the Boldrin and Jones' framework parents procreate because the children care about their old parents' utility, and thus provide them with old age transfers…The effect of increases in government provided pensions on fertility…in the Boldrin and Jones model is sizeable and accounts for between 55 and 65% of the observed Europe-US fertility differences both across countries and across time and over 80% of the observed variation seen in a broad cross-section of countries. Ending old-age benefits for the childless would be a pretty dystopian policy. But in the long run, extreme population aging, coupled with slower productivity growth, will make it economically impossible for young people to support old people no matter what policies government enact.3 And if desperate, last-ditch draconian measures fail, we will shrink and dwindle as a species. The vitality and energy of young people will slowly vanish from the physical world, as the youth become tiny islands within a sea of the graying and old. Already I can feel this when I go to Japan; neighborhoods like Shibuya in Tokyo or Shinsaibashi in Osaka that felt bustling and alive with young people in the 2000s are now dominated by middle-aged and elderly people and tourists. And as population itself shrinks, the built environment will become more and more empty; whole towns will vanish from the map, as humanity huddles together in a dwindling number of graying megacities. Our impact on the planet's environment will finally be reduced — we will still send out legions of robots to cultivate food and mine minerals, but as our numbers decrease, our desire to cannibalize the planet will hit its limits. But even as humanity shrinks in physical space, we will bind ourselves more tightly together in digital space. When I was a child, sometimes I felt bored; now I never do. Sometimes I felt lonely; now, if I ever do, it's not for lack of company. Social media has wiped away those experiences, by putting me in constant contact with the whole vast sea of humanity. I can watch people on YouTube or TikTok, talk to my friends in chat groups or video calls, and argue with strangers on X and Substack. I am constantly swimming in a sea of digitized human presences. We all are. Humanity was never fully an individual organism. Our families and communities were always collectives, as were the hierarchies of companies and armies and even the imagined communities of nation-states. But the internet has made the collective far larger than it was. In many ways it's also more connected; one survey found that the average American spends 6 hours and 40 minutes, or more than a third of their waking life, online. About 30% of Americans say they're online almost constantly. The results of this constant global connectedness are far too deep and complex to deal with in one blog post. But one important result is to replace some fraction of individual human effort with the preexisting effort of the collective. Instead of figuring out how to fix our own houses, build our own furniture, or install our own appliances, a human in 2021 could watch YouTube videos. Instead of figuring out how to write a difficult piece of code, a programmer could ask the Stack Exchange forum. Instead of creating a new funny video from scratch, a social media influencer could use someone else's audio track. It simply became easier to stand on the shoulders of giants than to reinvent the wheel. Whether this leads to an aggregate decrease in human creativity is an open question; some have made this argument, but I'm not sure whether it's right.4 But what's clear is that the more everyone is always relying on the collective for everything they do, the less individual effort matters. In the Industrial Age, we valorized individual heroics — the brilliant scientist, the iconoclastic writer, the contrarian entrepreneur, the bold activist leader. In an age when it's always easier to rely on the wisdom of crowds, those heroes matter less. Compare the activists of the 2010s to the activists of the mid 20th century. The 20th century produced Black activist leaders like MLK, John Lewis, Malcolm X, Rosa Parks, Bobby Seale, and many others. But who were the equivalent heroes of the Black Lives Matter movement of the 2010s? There were none.5 The movement was an organic crowd, birthed by social media memes instead of by rousing speeches. Each individual activist made tiny incremental contributions, and the movement rolled forward as a headless, collective mass. Or consider science and technology in the age of the internet. China is now probably the world's leader in scientific research, but it's hard to name any big significant breakthrough that has come out of China in recent years; the innovations are important but overwhelmingly incremental. Even in the US, where incentives for breakthroughs are a little better, science has become notably less 'disruptive' in recent years. Some of this may be because humans have already picked the low-hanging fruit of science, and some might be because of the increasing 'burden of knowledge' for young researchers to get up to speed. But some might simply be because an age of seamless global information transmission makes it easier for researchers to get 'base hits' while leaving the cost of 'home runs' the same. Even AI, the great breakthrough of the age, has been a massive collective effort more than the inspiration of a few geniuses. Even the people who have received the greatest honors for developing AI — Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, etc. — are not really regarded as the 'inventors' of the technology. Towering figures are still somewhat common in biology — Kariko and Weissman, Doudna and Charpentier, Feng Zhang, Allison & Honjo, David Liu — but in the age of the internet, research is becoming a more collective enterprise. And all that was before generative AI. Large language models are trained on the collected writings of humankind; they are an expression of the aggregated wisdom of our species' collective past. When you ask a question of ChatGPT or DeepSeek, you're essentially consulting the spirits of the ancestors.6 As with the internet, it's unclear whether LLMs will make humanity more creative as a whole, or less. My bet is strongly on 'more'. But at the individual level, AI substitutes for our own creative efforts. Kosmyna et al. (2025) recently did an experiment showing that people who use ChatGPT to help them write essays end up with weaker individual cognitive skills: This study explores the neural and behavioral consequences of LLM-assisted essay writing. Participants were divided into three groups: LLM, Search Engine, and Brain-only (no tools)…EEG revealed significant differences in brain connectivity: Brain-only participants exhibited the strongest, most distributed networks; Search Engine users showed moderate engagement; and LLM users displayed the weakest connectivity. Cognitive activity scaled down in relation to external tool use…LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work. While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI's role in learning. This is unsurprising. Pulling a plow yourself will make you stronger than driving a tractor, and using a slide rule will make you better at mental arithmetic than using a hand calculator. As Tyler Cowen points out, Kosmyna et al.'s result doesn't mean that AI is reducing humanity's overall creative capabilities: If you look only at the mental energy saved through LLM use, in the context of an artificially generated and controlled experiment, it will seem we are thinking less and becoming mentally lazy…But you also have to consider, in a real-world context, what we do with all that liberated time and mental energy… There are numerous ways people can and do use large language models to make themselves smarter. They can ask it to criticize their work…They can argue and debate with it, or they can use it to learn which books to read or which medieval church to visit. This is true. Using machine tools instead of manual ones may make our biceps weaker, but it makes us stronger and more productive as a species. Still, if most of human productivity consists of calling up LLMs, it means that collective effort — centuries of past individual creativity crystallized in the weights of the models — is being substituted for individual heroics. As with the internet, humanity as a whole grows more powerful by becoming more of a hive mind. The age of the great heroes — of the Albert Einsteins and the Martin Luther Kings, and perhaps even of the Elon Musks — may soon be over. Thus, dimly and through the fog, we can begin to perceive the shape of the future that the posthuman age will take. As humanity becomes more tightly bound into a single digital collective, we find that we desire offline families less and less. As we gradually abandon reproduction, there are fewer and fewer of us, forcing us to cling even more tightly to the online collective — to spend more of our time online, to take solace in the ever-denser core of the final global village. The god-mind of that collective delivers us riches undreamt of by our ancestors, but we enjoy that bounty in solitude as we wirehead into the hive mind for a bit of company. When I write it out that way, it sounds terrifying. And yet day by day, watching the latest TikTok trend, or making bad jokes on X, or asking ChatGPT to teach me about Mongol history, the slide into posthumanity feels pleasant and warm. Perhaps we are no stranger than our grandparents would have seemed to their own grandparents who grew up on premodern farms. After all, aliens never call themselves 'aliens'…they call themselves 'us.' 1 I know 'children per woman' is a little sexist, but this is how they measure things. 2 This depends on the assumption that new ideas don't build on themselves exponentially quickly. So far, that has proven to be the case — in simple terms, it looks as though we pick the 'low-hanging fruit' of scientific discovery and technological invention, and future advances become more expensive in terms of time, money, and brain power. 3 At that point, either countries will collapse, or decide to cut large numbers of old people off. If countries collapse, then parents will once again be dependent on their kids, and fertility will probably recover to replacement level. If countries decide to cut old people off of benefits, they'll probably start by cutting off the childless, since childless old people don't have kids who can riot and revolt in anger. Either way, the economic future for childless people 50 or 100 years from now doesn't look great. 4 There are actually lots of effects to think about here, and the topic deserves a much longer post all to itself. For one thing, there's the question of whether the boost to individual innovation created by the availability of collective knowledge outweighs the spillover benefit created when each individual innovator had to spend time 'reinventing the wheel' and doing it a little differently than everyone else. Also, there's the question of whether any decrease in individual creative output per hour is outweighed by an increase in the total number of hours spent in creative pursuits — when I was a kid, kids went to the mall and hung out instead of making short videos and memes. 5 There were important writers in the BLM movement — Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram Kendi, and Nikole Hannah-Jones, to name just three. Though it's worth noting that all were eventually hounded out of the public eye to varying degrees by collective social media backlash, unlike similar famous Black writers of the 60s and 70s. 6 Here are ChatGPT o3's thoughts on this post: The post's central insight is that qualitative transformations in how humans live can be as epoch-making as huge jumps in measured GDP. You persuasively connect today's two most powerful under-the-radar shifts—sub-replacement fertility and pervasive digital connectedness—to that earlier shock of the Industrial Revolution. Where the essay really shines is in showing how these trends might reinforce each other: shrinking, aging societies could grow ever more dependent on 'hive-mind' tools like LLMs, which in turn further reduce the incentives (and maybe even the desire) to form families. That nested-feedback dynamic feels original and is a useful corrective to simple 'AI will save us' optimism. A second strength is the sober treatment of demographic math. By foregrounding Fernandez-Villaverde's critique of the U.N. projections, you highlight the systemic risk that comes from repeatedly overestimating births. Framing the second fertility transition as the real discontinuity—shifting us from stable to vanishing populations—captures the scale of what's at stake better than the usual laments about aging. Linking this directly to growth theory (Jones) and to the fiscal unsustainability of pay-as-you-go pensions sets up the reader to grasp why even dramatic productivity gains may not offset the drag. Where I'm less convinced is on the inevitability of coercive pronatal policy and the eclipse of individual creativity. The essay nods at alternative levers (housing costs, gender-equality reforms, immigration, delayed retirement) but then leaps to dystopian scenarios without fully exploring those options or the empirical record of mixed-strategy success stories (e.g., France, Québec, parts of Scandinavia). Likewise, while the collective nature of internet-era innovation is undeniable, history––from Gutenberg to industrial R&D labs––suggests that new platforms often shift rather than erase individual heroism (think AlphaFold or Covid mRNA vaccines). Recognizing that possibility would temper the gloom and leave space for agency—exactly what a post meant to provoke action, not resignation, might need. The spirits of the ancestors have spoken! In accordance with the model's advice, I'll write a follow-up post about how individual humans can still be high-leverage, important figures in the age of AI and the internet. This article was first published on Noah Smith's Noahpinion Substack and is republished with kind permission. Become a Noahopinion subscriber here.
Hindustan Times
6 days ago
- Politics
- Hindustan Times
The Emergency and politics of the body
For the average Indian, it was through the tyranny of the dreaded nasbandi (sterilisation) camps that the worst consequences of the suspension of civil and political rights under the Emergency manifested itself in their everyday lives. In September 1976, India recorded over 1.7 million sterilisations, a figure that equalled the annual average for the 10 preceding years. By 1977, Sanjay Gandhi, the younger son of then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, and his bulldozer gang had overseen the conduct of more than 8 million sterilizations. The predominance accorded to forced sterilisation was intertwined with Sanjay Gandhi's growing influence. He needed to consolidate his hold on power within the Congress, family planning (and his other obsession, urban gentrification) became his preferred tools. In the process, he unleashed the worst form of State violence, stripping ordinary citizens of agency over their bodies. The political and administrative zeal to comply with Sanjay Gandhi and his bulldozer gang was shaped by the nature of power he wielded over regional leaders. (HT Photo) Much has changed in India's approach to family planning since those dark Emergency years. However, 50 years on, Sanjay Gandhi's weaponisation of family planning and exertion of power over individual bodily rights afford important lessons for how we respond to demographic challenges in the contemporary moment. Above all, it serves as a critical reminder to be patient with democracy, for it is the only pathway for sustainable, socially just economic growth and development. On the surface, Sanjay Gandhi's approach to family planning was not new. Malthusian worries had shadowed India's demographic debates long before independence and India became the first country in the world to launch a national family planning programme in 1952. And as Christophe Jaffrelot and Pratinav Anil argue in India's First Dictatorship: The Emergency, 1975-77, elements of eugenics, visible in the Emergency, undergirded these debates. 'Undesirable others' – minorities and lower castes – were the targets. Coercive population control measures were introduced as necessary tools for 'modernisation' and 'development'. But it was only in the late 1960s that sterilisation acquired wide policy acceptance. On paper, India took a 'cafeteria approach' with sterilisation offered as one of many forms of family planning. In practice, however, sterilisation was prioritised. Targets were introduced and vasectomy camps, cash incentives, citizen motivators, and active coercion became acceptable methods to control India's 'population bomb'. But like most policies, implementation waxed and waned. India's sterilisation drive peaked in 1972-3 with 3.1 million sterilisations, falling to just under a million the next year. What differentiated mass sterilisation during the Emergency from the past was the scale and aggressiveness with which it was pursued. International agencies from the World Bank to the United Nations played their part, financing what they called 'crash sterilisation'. Sanjay Gandhi effectively leveraged Emergency conditions to direct political and administrative functionaries to use force and coercion with a vengeance. He bypassed the health ministry to directly hand out targets to states and used his powers to harass and intimidate regional leaders, bureaucrats and district administrators to comply. Over time, his tactics became almost necessary to feed the Emergency myth: That suspension of democracy and centralisation of power was necessary to ensure the 'trains run on time'. Eugenics, Jaffrelot and Anil, note were implicit in this framing in the targeting of Muslims and the poor. The horror that unfolded has been widely chronicled. The political and administrative zeal to comply with Sanjay Gandhi and his bulldozer gang was shaped by the nature of power he wielded over regional leaders. Inevitably, Delhi and the Hindi heartland became Sanjay Gandhi's playground, with party leaders and willing bureaucrats jostling to curry favour. Family planning policy was now no longer about broader societal goals but a weapon for political power and control. In the process, individual citizens were effectively stripped of any agency over their bodies. From nudging railway commuters to getting vasectomies if caught ticketless by waiving paying fines, to threatening slum dwellers with eviction notices, denying government benefits and when needed enabling violent use of force, Gandhi's bulldozer gang zealously did all that was demanded of them to coerce the poorest and most vulnerable citizens into sterlisation camps thereby fulfilling the political myth of the Emergency. Those who sought to protect their dignity and individual agency by escaping the sterilisation net, lived in terror. As ethnographer Emma Tarlo notes in her account of the nasbandi tyranny in Delhi, for anyone who escaped, public spaces and civic institutions like hospitals, schools and government offices, were places to avoid. Unsurprisingly, in many parts of the country, fear led to violence. Nasbandi was widely attributed to have contributed to Indira Gandhi's resounding electoral defeat. In a direct and tactile way, the ordinary Indian experienced the terror of the powers of the State over their bodies and they used democracy to reclaim control. Since that dark period, India's family planning policy, in tune with global trends, has evolved adopting a much more central focus on reproductive rights. Sterilisation, and associated policies like incentives and camps, continue to be part of the repertoire, indeed they often make headlines for medical negligence and death, but it no longer carries the zeal of the Emergency. The burden has now shifted to female sterilisation. The Emergency was an illustration of how the body is used as a site for exerting State power. In the contemporary moment, loose remarks by politicians in South India telling women to 'have more children' as they navigate delimitation politics is a warning signal that population policy may once again be weaponised. Ironically, these very states offered India an alternative to the tyranny of nasbandi: A model embedded in economic growth, choice and reproductive rights. Democracy afforded the path to achieve population goals. Today's politicians would do well to heed to the message that Indians gave to Indira and Sanjay Gandhi in 1977. Yamini Aiyar is senior visiting fellow, Brown University. The views expressed are personal.
Hindustan Times
05-06-2025
- Politics
- Hindustan Times
The demography lesson from Vietnam
First China, and now Vietnam have lifted policies capping the number of children allowed, underscoring the unintended demographic consequences of such interventions. This should serve as a warning to other countries against direct and indirect coercive measures to curb fertility. A rapid fall in birth rates, quite like the case with China before it scrapped its one-child policy, has now forced Vietnam to scrap its two-child limit for families — its total fertility rate (TFR) hit the replacement rate of 2.1 in 2021 and fell to 1.96 in 2023. With societies getting older and living longer, limits on children portend a future demographic — and thereby, economic — problem of not enough young, working hands and rising numbers of those needing care and social security. To be sure, countries without such policies, especially developed ones including South Korea and Japan, have seen TFR decline to alarming levels. But there is no doubt that limiting the number of children through inducements and deterrents exacerbates the problem. What worsens the fallout is that reversing such policies and incentivising childbirth doesn't always work — at least not immediately, as the experience in some countries that have tried to get their young people to have more children and correct declining demographic trends has shown. The associated demographic imbalance too, has been clear for some time — from sex imbalance due to gender preference to sharp divides along rural-urban and educational attainment lines. To that end, countries flirting with child limits should be well reminded that, in the quest to avoid Malthusian horrors of overpopulation and promote a designer society of controlled fertility, the need for demographic balance must not be sacrificed. The law of unintended consequences has been too clearly demonstrated by China and Vietnam to be ignored.
The Age
30-05-2025
- Business
- The Age
Elon Musk is right about one thing – we're spiralling towards bankruptcy
Posting on his social media platform X, Musk has indicated his disappointment with the unwillingness of Republicans to carry out spending cuts, musing that the only way out of the 'bankruptcy of America' is to radically boost GDP growth. It's difficult to disagree with his assessment, or to find much reason for optimism in either Britain or America. Trump and Starmer are very different leaders leading very different countries, but they face the same core question: how do you keep the show on the road when your voters demand more spending? The demographic challenges facing both countries are well known: an older population has more voters who no longer work, who vote themselves a larger share of income, which increases fiscal pressure on the young and weighing on birth rates. Loading It's a doom-loop that the West's democracies have yet to find an escape from. Growing our way out of trouble would require a technological revolution. Older voters prioritise healthcare and pensions ahead of investment in infrastructure or education, which reduces the funds available for pro-growth policies. Worse still, redistribution requires taxation that directly weighs on economic activity. If Musk succeeds in solving AI, robotics and space exploration, then we might get the resources and growth we need to escape the spiral, just as the Industrial Revolution pulled us out of the Malthusian trap. If he doesn't, we'll need another way out of this mess. Solving demographics isn't the answer. Boosting birth rates is a necessary long-term fix, but doesn't address the more pressing present concerns. Short of drawing on Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal and rendering workers into Soylent Green at retirement age, there's no obvious policy that will. And if we're stuck with our inverted pyramid of people, that leaves us with 'democracy' as the factor most likely to give way. About 48 per cent of all UK public spending goes on welfare, health and social care and debt interest spending. These are the items of spending that are either too toxic to touch – imagine the outrage if Starmer stood up and announced an end to the triple lock, or swinging cuts to the bloated NHS – or would tip the country into a financial crisis via defaulting on our obligations. They're also some of the items with the most forecast growth, as today's young become tomorrow's old. The state pension is set to hit 8 per cent of GDP, health spending 15 per cent and adult social care somewhere about 2.5 per cent. A little over 25 pence in every pound earned in Britain will be earmarked for these line items alone. If we can't cut spending democratically, we'll be made to cut it. And cutting spending democratically is hard. Loading One implication of the median voter theorem – the observation that in a democratic system, the man in the middle tends to get his way – is that when median incomes are below the mean, the state will tend to engage in more redistribution. This is certainly true in Britain, where 53 per cent of the population lives in households that pay less in taxes than they receive in benefits, and it's likely to be true in the United States as well (where the top and bottom quintiles are net losers and net beneficiaries, respectively). In fact, 'democracies spend more' seems to be a good general rule. Match V-Dem democracy scores to IMF data and – with some caveats around matching names and entries – the general gist is that more democratic countries spend somewhere about 12-15 points of GDP more than their less democratic peers, with researchers emphasising spending on social protection and education. Combine this with the observation that it's entirely possible for older generations to burden their younger successors with debts, and you have a recipe for disaster. The incentives given to today's politicians are to spend to win today's votes. Unless voters today are altruistic about future generations – and when the population is ageing because fewer people have children, their motive to be so is greatly reduced – then you can end up in the sort of unsustainable spiral Britain and America have found themselves in. By 2055, the US national debt is expected to be 156 per cent of GDP, and deficits around 7 per cent. In Britain, it's for 130 per cent of GDP, and a deficit of 9 per cent. Project that out to 2073, and debt hits 274 per cent of GDP, with the deficit a healthy 21 per cent of national income. If politicians ignore the warning signs – or voters punish those who attempt to correct course – we could find the choice between debt and democracy made for us. These are ludicrous numbers. There is no prospect of funding that sort of deficit at that sort of debt. The question is what we'll get instead. The most likely answer seems to be some form of fiscal cliff-edge ending up with less democratic choice in government. This could take a 'soft' form, such as self-imposed restrictions on spending and debt which politicians agree to adhere to in order to restore market confidence. A souped-up form of the Office for Budget Responsibility and harsher fiscal rules would be one version of this. Government by bond market – where investors demand higher yields for risky policies, driving the state towards fiscal consolidation – would be another. Loading At the other end of the scale, a debt bailout would effectively cede a large degree of sovereignty to whichever institution sets the terms of the loan. Britain has been down this road before, in 1976, when the IMF imposed higher taxes and lower spending. This would be an extreme outcome. It is not entirely out of the range of possibilities. Cutting spending democratically is hard. Undermining institutions is relatively easy.
Sydney Morning Herald
30-05-2025
- Business
- Sydney Morning Herald
Elon Musk is right about one thing – we're spiralling towards bankruptcy
Posting on his social media platform X, Musk has indicated his disappointment with the unwillingness of Republicans to carry out spending cuts, musing that the only way out of the 'bankruptcy of America' is to radically boost GDP growth. It's difficult to disagree with his assessment, or to find much reason for optimism in either Britain or America. Trump and Starmer are very different leaders leading very different countries, but they face the same core question: how do you keep the show on the road when your voters demand more spending? The demographic challenges facing both countries are well known: an older population has more voters who no longer work, who vote themselves a larger share of income, which increases fiscal pressure on the young and weighing on birth rates. Loading It's a doom-loop that the West's democracies have yet to find an escape from. Growing our way out of trouble would require a technological revolution. Older voters prioritise healthcare and pensions ahead of investment in infrastructure or education, which reduces the funds available for pro-growth policies. Worse still, redistribution requires taxation that directly weighs on economic activity. If Musk succeeds in solving AI, robotics and space exploration, then we might get the resources and growth we need to escape the spiral, just as the Industrial Revolution pulled us out of the Malthusian trap. If he doesn't, we'll need another way out of this mess. Solving demographics isn't the answer. Boosting birth rates is a necessary long-term fix, but doesn't address the more pressing present concerns. Short of drawing on Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal and rendering workers into Soylent Green at retirement age, there's no obvious policy that will. And if we're stuck with our inverted pyramid of people, that leaves us with 'democracy' as the factor most likely to give way. About 48 per cent of all UK public spending goes on welfare, health and social care and debt interest spending. These are the items of spending that are either too toxic to touch – imagine the outrage if Starmer stood up and announced an end to the triple lock, or swinging cuts to the bloated NHS – or would tip the country into a financial crisis via defaulting on our obligations. They're also some of the items with the most forecast growth, as today's young become tomorrow's old. The state pension is set to hit 8 per cent of GDP, health spending 15 per cent and adult social care somewhere about 2.5 per cent. A little over 25 pence in every pound earned in Britain will be earmarked for these line items alone. If we can't cut spending democratically, we'll be made to cut it. And cutting spending democratically is hard. Loading One implication of the median voter theorem – the observation that in a democratic system, the man in the middle tends to get his way – is that when median incomes are below the mean, the state will tend to engage in more redistribution. This is certainly true in Britain, where 53 per cent of the population lives in households that pay less in taxes than they receive in benefits, and it's likely to be true in the United States as well (where the top and bottom quintiles are net losers and net beneficiaries, respectively). In fact, 'democracies spend more' seems to be a good general rule. Match V-Dem democracy scores to IMF data and – with some caveats around matching names and entries – the general gist is that more democratic countries spend somewhere about 12-15 points of GDP more than their less democratic peers, with researchers emphasising spending on social protection and education. Combine this with the observation that it's entirely possible for older generations to burden their younger successors with debts, and you have a recipe for disaster. The incentives given to today's politicians are to spend to win today's votes. Unless voters today are altruistic about future generations – and when the population is ageing because fewer people have children, their motive to be so is greatly reduced – then you can end up in the sort of unsustainable spiral Britain and America have found themselves in. By 2055, the US national debt is expected to be 156 per cent of GDP, and deficits around 7 per cent. In Britain, it's for 130 per cent of GDP, and a deficit of 9 per cent. Project that out to 2073, and debt hits 274 per cent of GDP, with the deficit a healthy 21 per cent of national income. If politicians ignore the warning signs – or voters punish those who attempt to correct course – we could find the choice between debt and democracy made for us. These are ludicrous numbers. There is no prospect of funding that sort of deficit at that sort of debt. The question is what we'll get instead. The most likely answer seems to be some form of fiscal cliff-edge ending up with less democratic choice in government. This could take a 'soft' form, such as self-imposed restrictions on spending and debt which politicians agree to adhere to in order to restore market confidence. A souped-up form of the Office for Budget Responsibility and harsher fiscal rules would be one version of this. Government by bond market – where investors demand higher yields for risky policies, driving the state towards fiscal consolidation – would be another. Loading At the other end of the scale, a debt bailout would effectively cede a large degree of sovereignty to whichever institution sets the terms of the loan. Britain has been down this road before, in 1976, when the IMF imposed higher taxes and lower spending. This would be an extreme outcome. It is not entirely out of the range of possibilities. Cutting spending democratically is hard. Undermining institutions is relatively easy.
