Pablo Perez

@JesusFerna7026 I don’t think it can change at all unless we start having children sooner

Let me lay out the unpleasant arithmetic of the replacement rate, and why a modern society finds it so hard to reach. A population of 100 women in an advanced economy needs 210 children to replace itself. Why? Absent sex-selective practices, roughly 105 boys are born for every 100 girls. Evolution overshoots male births because boys are more prone to early death from accidents and disease. Therefore, of 210 children, about 108 are boys and 102 are girls. Not all girls reach the midpoint of their fertile age: accidents, suicide, homicide, and illness take some. In an advanced economy, about 98% of them survive, leaving 100 women to replace the original 100. Now consider the distribution of children per woman. Imagine 15 women have no children. Five do so by choice, for various reasons (professional, affective, religious). Ten face unfixable fertility problems, theirs or their partner’s. The 10% figure is conservative: the medical literature points to around 13%, and that does not even count male fertility problems. Of the remaining 85, 10 have one child, 60 have two, 10 have three, and 5 have four. I am stopping at four to keep the post concise; very few women in younger cohorts have five or more children, but I could adapt the example to account for them. Hence, the 100 women in this population have 180 children, for a completed fertility rate of 1.8. Interestingly, this is roughly the rate we saw in many advanced economies until the early 1990s, and in the U.S. until around 2008. But we are still 30 children short of replacement! Voluntary childlessness is only 5%. Three-quarters of women have two or more children. Look around: most of your friends will have two, plenty will have three or four. And yet, we are well below replacement. You would not look at this population and call it selfish (is having two kids hedonistic?) or accuse it of losing family values (only 5% of women are choosing voluntarily not to have children). The point is simpler. To reach 210 births, you need a substantial share of women to have three or more children. Two as the “normal” pattern will not get you there. And modern society makes three or more a costly proposition for most families. Of course, current fertility rates in most advanced economies are well below 1.8. But my point is that, under present social arrangements, we should not expect 2.1, even if (to humor last weekend’s debate) we banned smartphones and TikTok. We need many, many more families with three or four children. More pointedly, there is no self-regulating mechanism that pushes a society back to 2.1. The market-clearing analogy many economists use is flawed; scarcity feedback does not work the same way. (Another post on this another day.) And, as I often read, the claim that “nature” somehow regulates current overpopulation is just childish mumbo jumbo. So yes, the arithmetic of replacement rate is unpleasant.

@MrtnzAlvrz Le van a fastidiar la predicción a JFV 😅

Vox al 14% en este contexto europeo es de alucinar, complicado hacerlo tan mal

@cesarastudillo Funciona en muchos aspectos de la vida. Una buena amiga decía que hay que haber contado muchos ladrillos antes de aprender a rezar

Esto me resultó evidente como espectador de la cultura skater. Un truco ejecutado con soltura es el fruto de cientos o miles de fallos repetidos sin drama ni lamentación. El progreso se produce, pero en estructuras inaccesibles. Sin ahá intelectual. Solo afinación sensoriomotora.

@LosGandules ¡Les habéis hecho el guion!

@zerepolbap Impacientes por que llegue mañana. 🤪

Los ponen mucho en Radio3, @LosGandules

Hay un concepto precioso, que es el del principio de indeterminación: de hecho, no se puede determinar con precisión absoluta el tono y la duración de una nota musical simultáneamente.

El de la paciencia era Jon

@JesusFerna7026 @lugaricano Maybe this is a silly question but, how much of it is about demographics? It is probably quite different from the example you put from Japan, but I am still a bit surprised that the GDP-per-working-age-person idea is not shown by default x.com/jesusferna7026…

I rarely post on Europe because @lugaricano always has better takes than mine. It is hard to be the second act! His post this morning: siliconcontinent.com/p/the-two-euro… on the two Europes is particularly striking. Figure 1, which I reproduce here, is something European policymakers should keep in mind every day. Beyond the raw, somewhat abstract figures for GDP per capita, there is a reality I see every time I travel to Western Europe. I moved to the U.S. in 1996, six weeks after graduating from college. Every time I visit, I can tell that Spain (especially outside Madrid) is further behind the U.S. today than it was the day I left. The malaise in countries such as France, Germany, Italy, and Spain is not just economic. The public conversation is also more insular and focused on distributional fights over a pie that grows much less than in the past, with many more claimants. While I can listen to dozens of incredibly exciting podcasts in the U.S. about deep learning and technology, most of what one hears in Europe (Luis excepted!) is second-rate. Of course, this is not to say that everything is perfect in the U.S. Far from it. One only needs to ride the subway in Seoul a couple of times to realize that New York City is, on many dimensions, a major underperformer. When I visit New York City, I am not amazed by its prosperity but wonder how much richer it could be with a half-decent government. And California’s policies are a textbook example of how to waste the immense resources of one of the luckiest places on Earth. And Europe still has centuries of beautiful architecture and culinary traditions going for it But, Western Europe, thou art weighed in the balances, and art found wanting.

@FPJ_Loretta @JesusFerna7026 Sip, más o menos es lo que yo veo también. Mi intuición es que la subida de la edad del primer hijo está relacionada con la bajada de mortalidad en edades intermedias (“efecto tapón”), pero nunca he tenido tiempo de mirar los números con detalle para ver si hay algo ahí o no.

@zerepolbap @JesusFerna7026 Yo he escuchado ya a varios expertos hablar del tema y la única conclusión que saco es que nadie sabe la solución. O sea, la solución es bajar la edad en que se tiene el primer hijo, pero nadie sabe cómo conseguirlo.

No sé si es en abierto pero no me deja regalar linkito. Tremendo 👇 elconfidencial.com/espana/tribuna…

@FPJ_Loretta De leer a @JesusFerna7026 sobre el tema en los últimos dos años solo llego a la conclusión de que… es complicado. Y que las explicaciones culturales hay que tomarlas con pinzas, por bien que nos suenen.

@FPJ_Loretta Guatemala ha bajado de 3.8 a 1.8 en 20 años. x.com/jesusferna7026…

Report to the police. A criminal organization is using your bank account to launder money for unlawful purposes and you don’t get caught as accomplice!

@cesarastudillo @root_rat @Recuenco En realidad, NEDTAPADEH, porque los listos que estáis de vuelta tenéis más costes hundidos (más que perder) por soltar amarras. Un poco como lo del rico, el camello y la aguja.

@root_rat @Recuenco …por exactamente los mismos medios extracognitivos que están al alcance de alguien con un IQ de 60. Dios se esconde de puta madre y las pocas veces que se deja ver lo hace de forma muy muy cognitivamente democrática.

Qué opinas @Recuenco ? Es un tema interesante este.

@cesarastudillo @apuntista @root_rat @Recuenco Oh, cielos. (El asunto es lo que pasa cuando uno mira atrás de reojo)

@apuntista @root_rat @Recuenco Es una hipótesis funcional a mi experiencia espiritual. Tras haber sido católico, llevo cuarenta años dándole la espalda a Dios y a estas alturas ya tenía que haber dejado de sentirle… eppur si muove.

@RuralxData Ni se va construir una autovía que una Guadalajara con nada (mucho menos dos), ni se va a hacer y a autovía en pantanolandia. Ninguna da ni media docena de votos.

Si me das a elegir entre la M-70 y una conexión Lisboa-Valencia pasando por Extremadura y Ciudad Real, me quedo con la opción en color rojo. ¿Y tú?

@juanrvelasco @duolingo ¡Pero si la L mayúscula ya te daba la pista! 🤣

Cosas de @duolingo y el español.

Parafraseando al gran @cesarastudillo, esto no sale en la ISO 9000

Como no hay nada que me guste más que cruzar las ideas de unos con las de otros, aquí dejo un balón a puerta vacía por si don @Recuenco lo quisiera rematar.