The Antiplanner on crowding and fertility; me on The Blank Slate; Ben Thompson on the Internet environment; Howard Husock on marijuana regulation; Scott Alexander on "abolish the FDA"
The empirical evidence is that overcrowding per se does not lead to rock bottom TFRs. E.g. the classic description of poor immigrant New York City "How the other half lives" by Riis (1890) contains many fascinating passages like this one:
---
The sanitary policeman whose beat this is will tell you that [this seven stories high building] contains thirty-six families, but the term has a widely different meaning here and on the avenues. In this house, where a case of small-pox was reported, there were fifty-eight babies and thirty-eight children that were over five years of age. In Essex street two small rooms in a six-story tenement were made to hold a "family" of father and mother, twelve children, and six boarders.
Exactly. Richer people have been having fewer kids than poor people for a long time, and they publicly aired their anxieties about that fact and its consequences - and supported vigorous efforts to reduce the fertility rate of the poor - for nearly as long. For various reasons it became both impolite (at best) and perceived as much less urgent to express such ideas in public in the last several decades.
It's one of those weird internet-era paradoxes how all this IT was supposed to make the whole of history available to everyone practically instantaneously for free. And yet, if something happened pre-internet, despite it being right there in the open for anyone to read it if they want - or have computers read it to them if literacy is too much of strain - it still might as well have never existed for 99% of people. No memory-holing was required for people to do this to themselves. Take THAT, Orwell!
I wonder about the poverty/fertility connection. My maternal great grandparents had, on the one side, 10 children, nine surviving to adulthood; and on the other, I think just three of four surviving to adulthood. True, I wouldn’t necessarily know all births.
The former, the more fertile, were the much more prosperous, though, owning their land as well as a cannery whose label is still vintage “collectible”. The latter were tenant farmers, and my grandfather never spoke of his youth; it seems to have been hard.
These maternal grandparents thus both grew up on farms but like many people in the 20s, left the farm and didn’t look back.
They then had two children only.
I am not sure why people in cities had so many children. A Catholic thing, presumably.
But out in the American heartland, it had a more practical character - although it seems like five or six would have sufficed even on a farm. But it’s always nine or ten or eleven …
I’m certain my grandparents had no reason to have ten kids in the city, and that’s why they had two. They were simple Baptist people, though their crowning achievement in life was a Cadillac as big as a parade float.
In general, there's no connection. What connection there is*, the arrow points away from wealth, for which the evidence is so strong that it's simultaneously frustrating and amusing how people keep repeating the opposite.
We really, really don't want to admit how much more Sybaritically self-indulgent and lifestyle-sensitive we all are than our recent ancestors, because, let's face it, that's just another way of saying 'decadent' and 'soft' and we all know that it's kind of embarrassing.
*NB: It's important to try to distinguish two contributors to the final numbers for fertility and population changes over time. There is the factor coming from chosen attempts (or continuations), and this is the part that is relevant to us, what influences people with options to choose to have more or fewer children. Then there is unchosen factor when people aren't just pretending to be budget constrained like we do, but actually facing real, hard, life-and-death Malthusian limits, in circumstances where many people would have had more kids if only they weren't already on the edge of starvation. That part did indeed to contribute to wealth-correlated differential fertility patterns, which in certain circumstances produced eugenic selection pressures. But this latter factor is completely irrelevant to our present case.
We don't actually do much restriction of potency on Alcohol - and in fact, many types of alcohol have *minimum* restrictions on potency, such as whisky, bourbon, etc - where the name requires a minimum potency, but quality versions are commonly found at significantly higher potency, while a potency of exactly the regulated minimum is usually associated with a cheaper, mass-market liquor. Some regions impose restrictions on upper potencies of beer and wine, but those are usually as much about shifting higher potency alcohols to higher tax categories, not about restricting their availability.
I understand why someone who doesn't approve of marijuana might be repulsed by the current state of the market, but "remember when otherwise innocent people could reliably be imprisoned for years because an officer claimed to have found a bag of dried leaves in their vehicle during a traffic stop" is not a particularly compelling vision of a better state either.
This feels much like the education apologists complaint to Bryan Caplan - "You keep saying you want to stop wasting all this money, but you haven't given us new educational interventions that work better" The burden, it seems to me, should have been on those who want to employ the full might of criminal sanctions to show that the harm that they propose to resolve through the war on drugs is a) sufficient to justify such a regime, and b) impossible to solve or mitigate sufficiently through less restrictive means. Such justifications have generally not been forthcoming, or at best have been underwhelming, so the obvious response is to just stop the criminalization and let the market work. Yes it will fail, yes there will be externalities, and in time problems may become acute enough to require a more consistent regulatory response, but what is wrong with "Markets fail, use markets" in this case?
Came for the "potency", too. In Germany, I get 38% in little bottles at the supermarket check-out, right above the last-second-sweets. And in the shelves you find 54% Rum (cuz it burns on sugar: Feuerzangenbowle ) or even 80% Stroh-Rum from Austria (not allowed to take on planes). Sweden has higher prices (thus more moonshine-hobbyists). I agree with AK that "Legalize it" should be better seen as "Regulate and - over time increasingly - tax it" instead of just "Liberate it".
In one sense, in our era, it's obvious that in our particular context, *pious observance* of religion definitely correlates with having a lot more kids.
But here's where people go wrong with that.
See, a contemporary western intellectual type looks at something like this, and even though he repeats "correlation is not causation" a dozen times a day, he just can't resist the urge to place far too much emphasis on written texts and ideas and thus can't help to attribute exaggerated causal significance to the 'legible content' of the theology, ideology, cosmology, metaphysics, philosophy, etc., that is, what other literate intellectuals wrote down.
So, they think that since "Ideas Matter!!!" the obvious reason that these piously observant religion people have more kids is mostly due to the simple reason that the theology clearly and explicitly tells them in written words to have more kids. And thus, there's no "actionable intelligence" lesson to draw from those groups that could possibly apply to non-religious majorities of people who don't believe in that theology enough to feel duty-bound to observe that commandment. Since that's the kind of thing they're usually looking for, they conclude that analysis of the fecundity of these religious groups is an intellectual dead end.
But they are just completely wrong about that. Those people don't have more kids just or even mostly because they believe God wants them to have more kids.
They have more kids because they arrange things in a lot of different ways such that the whole experience of a woman's life within her fertile window provides her with nothing but constant and consistent reinforcement that her decision space is such that she genuinely perceives that of the things she things it is plausible for her to do, the best choice she can make even from the selfish perspective of maximizing her own welfare, is to have as many children as possible.
You can see that there is a kind of separable, pragmatic, secular, non-religious basis for the decision here. The idea that God commands you to make what are the right and wise choices is not so much as order you wouldn't obey if God didn't command you to, but more like being commanded to "wash your hands before meals".
Sure, God wrote it down and told you to do it, and sure, when you were a stupid kid you didn't, but when you grew up you got smarter and better, and now it's something you would always choose to do anyway. So, the fact that it's written down in a commandment is almost beside the point on a practical basis, and for people who would do it anyway, the writing down of it mostly serves to once again provide another demonstration of the inherent truth, wisdom, and goodness contained in God's Laws.
So, the fact that there is this separable secular basis here should clue the typical modern western intellectual type that analyzing the situation looking for secular solutions isn't actually a dead end.
But, even the few that make it this far still just make another "Ideas Matter!!!" error, and declare it's all brainwashing or indoctrination, or false consciousness or something. As if the non-religious weren't marinating 24/7 in the most terrifying brainwashing complex the world has ever known, that causes Orwell to spin in his grave at least twice a month from seeing yet another new subtle mechanism emerge and out of embarrassment for not having been clever enough to put it in the book. "They are so brainwashed, unlike me, getting my beliefs as I do from the New York Times and Harvard's Department of Sociology. No indoctrination or false consciousness for me, no sir!"
But however you want to define 'brainwashing' it's not that. People are pretty good at picking up on when they are being lied to about the existence of opportunities to personally gain by breaking norms and their chances at succeeding in getting away with it. It wouldn't be so sustainably successful if the perception wasn't also completely accurate in many important ways. There *really isn't* anything these women can do that is a better alternative to having as many children as they can. They come to know the truth of that in countless observations and experiences and in a thousand big and little ways. Their social environment constrains their choices such that there simply aren't any better, more attractive options, or to the extent there may be such options outside the community, they are prevented in the critical years from acquiring the human capital required to take advantage of them. We say "You go girl!" They say, "Girl go ... and milk the cows." (Not coincidentally, the etymology of 'daughter' is proto-indo-european, meaning 'milker' hence, 'milkmaid'.)
That's how it works.
And, abstractly, there's nothing theologically-dependent or secularly-incompatible about that, that's the basic theory of how all policy works to change behavior. Before women's lib, this is what most secular societies did, and many of them believed they did so for secularly-justifiable reasons.
But there is one major catch, Catch 23.
The catch is the whole Dual Strategies Theory of social advancement by either dominance or prestige. Secular societies can change behavior by changing incentives, but when the exercise of power to create such an incentive structure is perceived as unwanted dominance and a coercive imposition, the government is creating and fighting an uphill battle fragile to any relaxation in the state's willpower to ensure obedience by whatever mean necessary. Even if people don't want to, secular societies with sufficient will and state capacity would still have little trouble squeezing extra kids out of their populations, but widespread resentments at the involuntarily compelled sacrifices could prove destabilizing as they just give rise to the political opportunism of some competitor who can exploit it and get support by promising to free people from the imposition.
So the trick is to have people come to believe that they are choosing and making the right choices and the policy is, like God's Law, just a reflection of what is obviously the right and wise and necessary thing to do.
Now, that's certainly possible to do without any appeal to the supernatural Divine or theology or whatever, so, in that sense, totally 'secular'. But the reason I call it a 'catch' is because I don't think it's really accurate to say that any kind of set of commonly held beliefs about the 'rightness' of these 'choices' and the legitimacy of the law which reflects that, is not in principle distinguishable from 'religion', even though most intellectuals have really wanted to believe otherwise for a long time.
Fortunately the answer to that debate doesn't make any difference, and when done right (and to some extent in secret), there are ways that a policy for change creates its own new normalcy, and when a normalcy is perceived to be aligned with and a strong, credible signal of social status and prestige, people naturally come to feel enough 'religion-equivalent' sentiment about it to keep it all going and to give cold-shoulders to any who attempt to undermine it.
If it was possible for you to pass for and live among the Amish or Hasidic - like some completely hilarious, ultra-orthodox version of 'undercover boss' - it would all become clear in no time.
Mexico allows people to buy what we would consider "prescription" medicine without a prescription. Going over the border to get things like Ozempic is quite common. You can bring back up to a 90 day supply for personal use, and the price is often cheaper.
Perhaps that is something to investigate if you were going to get rid of/change the FDA.
A commenter on SSC noted that one possible solution is to allow anything to be taken as a "supplement". Supplements are not given an FDA stamp of approval and insurance is not required to cover them. You couldn't sue if using a supplement goes wrong, at least not as easily.
How people would respond to that I don't know, but it would mean that it would be legal to get whatever drug you want.
It's pretty easy to get all kinds of prescription pharmeceuticals (that aren't also common abused recreational drugs) delivered from India to your mailbox, cheaply, and without a doctor's approval. I know lots of people who do this, for generic erection pills, for antibiotics, for sleeping pills, for all kinds of stuff, and they are all happy, satisfied, repeat customers.
It's hard to make arguments in favor of the necessity of America's extreme physician-pharmacist-gatekeeping-and-protecting regime when noticing that lots of people do this all the time and ... it's fine. Sure, there are always some anecdotal horror stories like there always are for literally anything, and it's hard to estimate the total amount of traffic in this stuff, but the overall rate of big harms seems negligibly tiny.
I confess that even I was surprised to learn this, which I didn't expect to be one of the "net benefit is zero" parts of Hansonian Medicine. Given how much time and money and hassle is involved in using the system the legal way, it's at least plausible that it's worse than zero and the bottom line is negative to a non-negligible degree.
In its own reports, if you know how to read between the lines, CBP has basically admitted that it has neither the capacity nor any real interest in policing this kind of thing. Maybe 0.1% of your orders will get randomly scanned and confiscated, perhaps you'll get a 'love letter' notifying you about it.
And as every sane person would expect, CBP constantly tries to advocate for larger budgets for more people and more equipment because, "Getting that extra capacity is essential to stop the epidemic of ... uh ... um ... "
People, don't bother responding with "But Fentanyl!", just like CBP does, because it can't make a case for anything else. Of course crazy strong and intensely euphoric synthetic opioids are highly addictive and really dangerous and it's utterly tragic how many junkies there are and how large numbers of people every year are unintentionally killing themselves using them.
But those people are getting their fix from drug dealers, not from clearnet online pharmacies packaged alongside their rash treatment. If you take out the harms associated with all the typical drugs of abuse for which it is coincidentally (and in practice, often only theoretically) possible to get a prescription, the accumulated harms from all the other un-authorized purchases of medicines are hard to distinguish from zero, and this was from people who were highly motivated to discover and exaggerate any of those harms if they could find them - but they couldn't.
Wasn't there once some kind of snow-clone of a popular headline for a libertarian article that went like, "What if (insert government agency here), which we are told is the only thing standing in the way of immediate and catastrophic threats to our welfare, stopped functioning entirely for a month and ... nothing happened?" The point is to cast doubt not just on the necessity of the agency as to costs being lower than the benefit of avoiding catastrophe, but to go further and ask whether it produces any benefit whatsoever.
Likewise, what if there were multiple large alternative free (though gray / black) markets in prescription medications where people could buy them without a physician's approval, and lots of people did so all the time and ... nothing happened?
"Once population falls, overcrowding will ease, family-friendly housing will be more available, and people will start having more kids."
I have a different model. The older and more child free an area gets, the less friendly to families it gets. We have lots of adults only and 55+ communities these days. In my experience things are either oriented towards families or oriented towards some other group. In a scenario where olds outnumber children I would expect that to get worse even if there are fewer overall people (when I've been in areas full of olds that is what it's like). Then of course there are old people entitlements, which will allow them to outbid the young for existing housing.
Children should be concentrated just as the elderly should not be.
But we do the opposite, and suffer for it, but not enough to mend our ways. Of course, it's harder when there are more elderly than children, which is why it's a vicious cycle. Everybody wants to be around young people, even really old people. Nobody wants to hang around a bunch of really old farts, even - sometimes especially - those same really old farts. They do so because they don't have a choice and can't avoid it anymore, and they try to cope with it the best they can.
Japan's population has been aging and shrinking for a long time. During their 80's boom they overbuilt and in the 90's long crash Tokyo rents fell by over half and IIRC only recently bounced back to where they were 30 years ago. But such bounce-back didn't happen almost anywhere else, where rents are still cheaper and there is on average more square meters of living space per person than there used to be. Still, they are all having even fewer kids.
There are now places in the Japanese countryside which are eerily uncrowded and low-populated (for them), and despite being cheap and spacious they are so practically devoid of children they are trying to pay people to move there and have kids, but it doesn't work. Not just "Judenfrei" but "Jugendfrei". Maybe the Hasidics should expand their real-estate speculation efforts to include those new cheap opportunities in Chiba Prefecture, which would really send history on a path nobody ever expected.
I have extended family in what I guess would be called "extreme suburban" orbit radius from a big city, in a US county with about 100K population. I don't know what the consensus usage of "small town" or "medium city" means in terms of population anymore, but the urban area is lower-medium-ish, I think. Like a lot of similar places, it had on average a thriving era from WWII through the early 80's when things peaked and started to go downhill. Every year is gets older, gloomier, trashier. All the best kids left for college and stayed gone for more exciting and more lucrative opportunities elsewhere, and the "iterative creaming" process never stops.
Not just "human capital" creaming, but youth-creaming too. If you were a kid, you wouldn't want to grow up there, will few other kids, and nothing but gloomy old people, and you'd be looking for your first opportunity to get out. Which just makes it older and gloomier, rinse and repeat. A huge portion of America outside the orbit of the Big Winner Cities looks just like this, and looks more like it with every passing day.
There is this naturally repulsive feeling when one visits a nursing home of the weight and tension from being around disability, decline, degeneration, decrepitude, weakness, illness, helplessness, dependency, indignity. You can't help but feel you are fighting the urge to leave and run away from place-curse life-sapping forces as quickly as possible, and indeed, there is a sense of relief almost as if from suffocation when one departs.
That's what it feels like to visit those places, or really any "Their Time Is Up" / "Just waiting for the inevitable end" place. One can note that cemeteries are not nearly so discomforting, and sometimes even pleasant in relative comparison, perhaps as they were made and meant to be.
I don't remember if any of the famous authors have pointed this out yet, but I think it's a widespread experience for those of more spiritually-inclined perspective to feel that a graveyard full of the long-deceased you don't have to see, feels much more spiritually alive than a nursing home full of the soon-to-die you can't avoid seeing.
In general it's supposed to be "location, location, location" common sense that the utility of housing has very little to do with square footage and acreage. Anything that goes against common sense is by definition absurd, so the wat that social groups practice collective cognitive dissonance like this is a good example of how the "Socially Accepted Excuse" mechanism in social psychology works. Literally everybody knows they can get all the space and land they want in safe uncool rural areas (or unsafe semi-cool urban areas) for peanuts. They don't want to live there, and they don't want to live among the people who do live there.
People aren't looking for "square feet I can afford", they are looking for "neighborhood quality I can afford", and at the margin of having more kids, they are still not thinking about space but about raising-kids-relevant neighborhood quality.
Here we get into a subtle point about "glass half full / half empty" alternative perspectives on what exactly prices actually communicate in such circumstances. No, I'm not getting into Giffen Goods territory, the point is that the trade-offs are starker in a way that square-footage-based analysis misses. On the one hand, when we see two apparently similar things, and one is cheaper, our intuition is that those lower prices are attractive and desirable and will pull people in to "restore equilibrium".
On the other hand, we can accept that we are in equilibrium already, look at the price difference, and infer that the prices reflect desirability, and that the lower priced option is lower-priced *because* it has some very highly undesirable features associated with it. That is to say, not so much an opportunity to reduce one's cost of living, but compensation for the fact that it poses a threat of major hits to ones quality of living, as if the house was built over a radioactive minerals outcropping and one wouldn't really be saving anything with having to pay to fill the basement with lead or those oncologist bills coming down the line.
The trouble is that when neighborhood desirability = neighborhood quality = neighbors quality. "Amenities" is either distinct or a euphemism for the quality of neighbors. And quality neighbors are scarce, then neighbors quality = neighbors wherewithal to bid up prices to the edge of affordability. So high prices are a strong, credible signal of desirability and low prices are likewise for undesirability. Much stronger and much more credible than is typical for normal goods and services for which there is always a lot of ante-facto uncertainty and post-facto disappointment as regards true value.
Art, fashion, and sporty-car dealers take care to police and occasionally manipulate markets to keep prices high for exactly this reason, not so much to assure people that their 'investment' will retain value, but to make it clear that there are never any real deals or discounts available and only cool, elite, rich people could possibly afford to own this stuff, and if you want want to signal you are one of those kinds of people, you can buy this item secure in the knowledge that you will be able to show off and impress the kind of people who are impressed by that kind of thing.
But with housing, nobody has to police or manipulate anything: the market participants are making the signals ultra-high fidelity automatically and all by themselves. The higher the price, the more you know the people who live there are the kind of neighbors who can afford to live there, and the more you want it. The lower the price, the more you know that even people on the margin to whom those low prices should be attractive are still willing to go broke avoiding the problems that happen there, that is, the people who live there.
The thing to notice is that none of the acceptably-discussable policy reform proposals have any chance of helping out with this situation to any meaningful degree because they are trying to make desirable but unaffordable square feet more affordable, when what is necessary is the exact opposite, to make the locations of affordable but undesirable square feet more desirable.
Which any wise and capable government can do, as indeed, they used to do very well without all our era's extra wealth and other advantages, not needing any new modern technology because their use of ancient social technology was perfectly sufficient. Unfortunately the progressives have outlawed these social technologies, and have been deploying their anti-social technologies for a long time.
But since we live in "Discourse in the Shadow of the Guillotine", we can't talk about what people really want, what they're really worried about, what might be done to actually improve those factors, etc.
So instead we talk about square feet, which, being impersonal, doesn't risk offending anybody. We don't want to seem radical, so we can't be serious.
It seems to me that the best argument for regime change is that we are headed for disaster if we can't fix our big problems, but that we are no longer capable of solving any of our big problems, because we can't solve what we can't talk about without offending people, and the current regime found it politically useful to make offense matter too much and to get everybody easily offended by everything all the time. Talk about anti-social technology!
Back when all right-thinking progressives were in a panic about overpopulation, they were very explicit and matter-of-fact in the documents they wrote as part of their global campaign to do something about it, as to how they planned to accomplish these objectives. And what they wrote was that in addition to subsidizing and encouraging the use of things that directly targeted the biological basis of procreation (e.g., condoms, hormones, sterilizations, etc.), they would lower birth rates in undeveloped countries by doing the things that all smart people already knew reliably lowered birth rates everywhere else, by increasing female education, especially higher education, and thus female participation in the workforce.
So, when they wanted to slow things down, they knew they had a good brake pedal, and they resolved to step on it. But then, when people started to worry that now we are going too slow, instead of concluding as any trucker would that "maybe we need to take our foot off the brake", they just *completely forget* about everything: not just the existence of the brake, but the fact that they once knew about the brake, intentionally stepped on it, watched it work, and then patted themselves on the back out of pride in their accomplishment.
It's amusing to observe this kind of collective politically-selective Alzheimer's when it comes to certain beliefs which were once common knowledge but which everyone auto-memory-holed when those facts later become inconvenient because they had implications which had become politically incorrect. More female education is always good, so when doing more of something good also steps on a needed brake, then it was perfectly fine to acknowledge the relationship and step on the brake. Two generations later, since less female education is always bad, it's "What brake?"
I don't remember if it was Cowen or Sumner but IIRC one of them started using the term "The Great Forgetting" to describe how all the progressive economists somehow got the same memo and then suddenly and simultaneously started discussing certain matters as if many lessons learned since WWII had never been learned at all, and that many once-popular (cough, politically-useful) theories had already been tested long ago and had failed those tests as they crumbled under the accumulating weight of contrary evidence.
But see, with the power of collective fake amnesia where we all just pretend that none of us can remember any of that stuff ever happening, we can all go on to pretend that these dreams never died and that those whole spaces of once-established intellectual territory are up for grabs again. "What do you mean the Phillips Curve doesn't work? Since when? I don't remember anyone proving that, and frankly, I don't believe that evidence exists. So, sorry, no idea what your talking about. La la la la, I can't hear you!". This is especially ironic for those who are eager to yell, "The Science Is Settled!" in other contexts, but that's how they roll.
I'll say it again that once social enforcement systems like this become strong enough such that literally any established fact can disintegrate in an instant in a flaring-up of yet another Great Forgetting, then epistemic progress, i.e., "progress" eventually becomes impossible, because you cannot keep building higher if you cannot accumulate knowledge beneath you faster than it gets forgotten.
On overcrowding, your simple model would require decades to play out. It also implicitly assumes a society without immigration. The model only requires the population to fall if you assume housing stock is fixed. If housing stock is growing, then you could have population just fail to keep up with growth in housing.
“Girls just want to have fun”. Especially those in college.
“You say, I used to be crazy. I say, I used to be young”, recent song.
It used to be that “Youth is wasted on the young” but not any more in a society of abundance, especially those going to or done with college. They are able and very willing to enjoy life, and especially life’s pleasures, especially those that don’t come with commitments to work, or to other people like a spouse or a child.
The opportunity cost of marriage and having babies has hugely increased. That’s far more important than crowding.
Cost of a nice house is mostly huge cost of a nice area. Most cities, like LA or NY, have much lower cost areas that have high crime-but few folks want to start their families in those affordable areas.
The cost of housing has gone up too much because of asset inflation, with the US deficit & money printing, yet without many product shortages, means more financial inflation. The owned houses are both a place to live as well most folk’s single largest investment.
Too little discussion among Y/N IMBY is how to increase the quality of life in those low quality existing areas. Because most know immediately it means reducing crime, which requires getting rid of, jailing, criminals or changing their behavior. Ain’t gonna happen.
I don't know about the relationship to fertility, but as a small town American I do find the crowding in Korea very noticable. Even in the rural areas the landscape is dotted by high rise apartments, often standing alone in fairly empty surroundings like a termite mound on the Savannah. There's little in the way of single family homes dotting the landscape like one might see in various parts of the US. Hills are generally left empty -- except for a cluster of buildings in the hills of Heundae Beach that a Korean friend found unsual enough to point out and explain as a holdover from when the area was a refugee settlement during the war.
As someone who likes to think I have some independently, rationally-justified sympathy for the more emotionally-motivated stance of those who mood-affiliate with "burn it down!" I am not so instantly allergic in my reaction to calls to "abolish the FDA" or even "abolish ICE" as I am to, say, "defund the police."
The problem is that while there is a ton of good points to be made in favor of having an FDA, there are also a ton of good points that we cannot tolerate the crap FDA we have, and we can't fix it by tweaking it either.
I propose a middle ground that is only a 9/10 on the radicalism scale as opposed to the 10/10 of outright abolition. "Complete Uninstall Reinstall Emendation" or CURE the FDA (Billy Crystal voice, "See what I did there?"). We're going to have the FDA, it's going to have the same missions, but everyone who works there now, can no longer work there, and we get new people with a temporary chance to max big changes to how their particular job or office works, to get the job done better.
Augeas had intolerably dirty stables, but he still needed stables. Sometimes they just need to get cleaned out. The hard way.
'If the causality runs from overcrowded housing to difficulty raising children to low birth rates, then doesn’t it seem as though population decline will be self-correcting? Once population falls, overcrowding will ease, family-friendly housing will be more available, and people will start having more kids.'
Only if these things are fungible. Is having 2 apartments in a high-rise family friendly? What is more likely to happen is that you need occupancy of >x% to make a high rise work for the maintenance that comes with it, and so rather than everyone getting 2 apartments worth of space half of the high rises are abandoned and the other half occupied resulting in the same issue only with less total wealth for the country.
I wonder if a majority of the relevant academic community believes blank slate. Maybe most of those who don't have switched their topics of interest to avoid that question or simply remain silent.
Jordan Peterson is a big proponent of differences in men and women. Unfortunately, as much as I want to believe much of what he says, I never seem to be able to confirm "facts" he builds his positions on. Another is the minimum IQ of 80 for US military.
Regarding Scott's point, I don't think the "you have to get it exactly right" part holds. I don't see why there is a higher bar for "basically functions" on changing all these things than there is for their current state, for which "basically functions" is perhaps a bit charitable. I agree that one wants to be careful, but it isn't as though the US system is amazing, and most other western systems are decidedly worse. Getting things mostly right seems like it would be an improvement.
Regarding marijuana, I think cigarettes are a worse comparison than alcohol, for the reasons you note. That said, alcohol regulation varies quite a bit by state, so we have lots of examples of what works. I suspect that regarding potency, there will be measures of potency demanded from users, regardless of government requirements, as soon as those measures become easy and reliable. I note (as a non-drinker) that most people don't go straight for the Everclear, but prefer much less potent potables. I expect that similar behavior will develop for marijuana as the culture moves into the mainstream, above board area.
I entirely disagree with your starting premise. Clearly the US gets the most important parts of prescription drugs right. While there is a balance between safety and availability, US does about as well as anyone on this even if the balance is different. The other factor no other country comes close is that most new drugs are developed primarily for the US market. That is very good, even if it could be better. Our current system is WAY better than "basically functions." You are not appreciating what we have.
Is it clear that the US gets the most important parts of prescription drugs right? I think a lot of very reasonable people would disagree with you. Just because other places largely do it worse doesn't mean that we do it well. There is a long list of issues with the FDA and US system, right down to whether or not the FDA even does less harm than good. So no, I don't think it is so clear.
The empirical evidence is that overcrowding per se does not lead to rock bottom TFRs. E.g. the classic description of poor immigrant New York City "How the other half lives" by Riis (1890) contains many fascinating passages like this one:
---
The sanitary policeman whose beat this is will tell you that [this seven stories high building] contains thirty-six families, but the term has a widely different meaning here and on the avenues. In this house, where a case of small-pox was reported, there were fifty-eight babies and thirty-eight children that were over five years of age. In Essex street two small rooms in a six-story tenement were made to hold a "family" of father and mother, twelve children, and six boarders.
Exactly. Richer people have been having fewer kids than poor people for a long time, and they publicly aired their anxieties about that fact and its consequences - and supported vigorous efforts to reduce the fertility rate of the poor - for nearly as long. For various reasons it became both impolite (at best) and perceived as much less urgent to express such ideas in public in the last several decades.
It's one of those weird internet-era paradoxes how all this IT was supposed to make the whole of history available to everyone practically instantaneously for free. And yet, if something happened pre-internet, despite it being right there in the open for anyone to read it if they want - or have computers read it to them if literacy is too much of strain - it still might as well have never existed for 99% of people. No memory-holing was required for people to do this to themselves. Take THAT, Orwell!
I wonder about the poverty/fertility connection. My maternal great grandparents had, on the one side, 10 children, nine surviving to adulthood; and on the other, I think just three of four surviving to adulthood. True, I wouldn’t necessarily know all births.
The former, the more fertile, were the much more prosperous, though, owning their land as well as a cannery whose label is still vintage “collectible”. The latter were tenant farmers, and my grandfather never spoke of his youth; it seems to have been hard.
These maternal grandparents thus both grew up on farms but like many people in the 20s, left the farm and didn’t look back.
They then had two children only.
I am not sure why people in cities had so many children. A Catholic thing, presumably.
But out in the American heartland, it had a more practical character - although it seems like five or six would have sufficed even on a farm. But it’s always nine or ten or eleven …
I’m certain my grandparents had no reason to have ten kids in the city, and that’s why they had two. They were simple Baptist people, though their crowning achievement in life was a Cadillac as big as a parade float.
In general, there's no connection. What connection there is*, the arrow points away from wealth, for which the evidence is so strong that it's simultaneously frustrating and amusing how people keep repeating the opposite.
We really, really don't want to admit how much more Sybaritically self-indulgent and lifestyle-sensitive we all are than our recent ancestors, because, let's face it, that's just another way of saying 'decadent' and 'soft' and we all know that it's kind of embarrassing.
*NB: It's important to try to distinguish two contributors to the final numbers for fertility and population changes over time. There is the factor coming from chosen attempts (or continuations), and this is the part that is relevant to us, what influences people with options to choose to have more or fewer children. Then there is unchosen factor when people aren't just pretending to be budget constrained like we do, but actually facing real, hard, life-and-death Malthusian limits, in circumstances where many people would have had more kids if only they weren't already on the edge of starvation. That part did indeed to contribute to wealth-correlated differential fertility patterns, which in certain circumstances produced eugenic selection pressures. But this latter factor is completely irrelevant to our present case.
Sure, this is true at present. But there’s nothing really “natural” about it.
We don't actually do much restriction of potency on Alcohol - and in fact, many types of alcohol have *minimum* restrictions on potency, such as whisky, bourbon, etc - where the name requires a minimum potency, but quality versions are commonly found at significantly higher potency, while a potency of exactly the regulated minimum is usually associated with a cheaper, mass-market liquor. Some regions impose restrictions on upper potencies of beer and wine, but those are usually as much about shifting higher potency alcohols to higher tax categories, not about restricting their availability.
I understand why someone who doesn't approve of marijuana might be repulsed by the current state of the market, but "remember when otherwise innocent people could reliably be imprisoned for years because an officer claimed to have found a bag of dried leaves in their vehicle during a traffic stop" is not a particularly compelling vision of a better state either.
This feels much like the education apologists complaint to Bryan Caplan - "You keep saying you want to stop wasting all this money, but you haven't given us new educational interventions that work better" The burden, it seems to me, should have been on those who want to employ the full might of criminal sanctions to show that the harm that they propose to resolve through the war on drugs is a) sufficient to justify such a regime, and b) impossible to solve or mitigate sufficiently through less restrictive means. Such justifications have generally not been forthcoming, or at best have been underwhelming, so the obvious response is to just stop the criminalization and let the market work. Yes it will fail, yes there will be externalities, and in time problems may become acute enough to require a more consistent regulatory response, but what is wrong with "Markets fail, use markets" in this case?
Came for the "potency", too. In Germany, I get 38% in little bottles at the supermarket check-out, right above the last-second-sweets. And in the shelves you find 54% Rum (cuz it burns on sugar: Feuerzangenbowle ) or even 80% Stroh-Rum from Austria (not allowed to take on planes). Sweden has higher prices (thus more moonshine-hobbyists). I agree with AK that "Legalize it" should be better seen as "Regulate and - over time increasingly - tax it" instead of just "Liberate it".
A few different birthrates in the USA and Israel:
Israeli Jewish - 3 children per woman
Israeli Muslim - 3 children per woman
American Jewish - 2 children per women
American Mormon - 3.4 per woman
American Atheist/Agnostic - 1.45
Religion is probably a more important factor than housing density.
https://www.jewishpress.com/news/israel/the-tide-turns-more-jewish-than-arab-births-in-israel/2022/02/22/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/05/12/charted-the-religions-that-make-the-most
It is and it isn't.
In one sense, in our era, it's obvious that in our particular context, *pious observance* of religion definitely correlates with having a lot more kids.
But here's where people go wrong with that.
See, a contemporary western intellectual type looks at something like this, and even though he repeats "correlation is not causation" a dozen times a day, he just can't resist the urge to place far too much emphasis on written texts and ideas and thus can't help to attribute exaggerated causal significance to the 'legible content' of the theology, ideology, cosmology, metaphysics, philosophy, etc., that is, what other literate intellectuals wrote down.
So, they think that since "Ideas Matter!!!" the obvious reason that these piously observant religion people have more kids is mostly due to the simple reason that the theology clearly and explicitly tells them in written words to have more kids. And thus, there's no "actionable intelligence" lesson to draw from those groups that could possibly apply to non-religious majorities of people who don't believe in that theology enough to feel duty-bound to observe that commandment. Since that's the kind of thing they're usually looking for, they conclude that analysis of the fecundity of these religious groups is an intellectual dead end.
But they are just completely wrong about that. Those people don't have more kids just or even mostly because they believe God wants them to have more kids.
They have more kids because they arrange things in a lot of different ways such that the whole experience of a woman's life within her fertile window provides her with nothing but constant and consistent reinforcement that her decision space is such that she genuinely perceives that of the things she things it is plausible for her to do, the best choice she can make even from the selfish perspective of maximizing her own welfare, is to have as many children as possible.
You can see that there is a kind of separable, pragmatic, secular, non-religious basis for the decision here. The idea that God commands you to make what are the right and wise choices is not so much as order you wouldn't obey if God didn't command you to, but more like being commanded to "wash your hands before meals".
Sure, God wrote it down and told you to do it, and sure, when you were a stupid kid you didn't, but when you grew up you got smarter and better, and now it's something you would always choose to do anyway. So, the fact that it's written down in a commandment is almost beside the point on a practical basis, and for people who would do it anyway, the writing down of it mostly serves to once again provide another demonstration of the inherent truth, wisdom, and goodness contained in God's Laws.
So, the fact that there is this separable secular basis here should clue the typical modern western intellectual type that analyzing the situation looking for secular solutions isn't actually a dead end.
But, even the few that make it this far still just make another "Ideas Matter!!!" error, and declare it's all brainwashing or indoctrination, or false consciousness or something. As if the non-religious weren't marinating 24/7 in the most terrifying brainwashing complex the world has ever known, that causes Orwell to spin in his grave at least twice a month from seeing yet another new subtle mechanism emerge and out of embarrassment for not having been clever enough to put it in the book. "They are so brainwashed, unlike me, getting my beliefs as I do from the New York Times and Harvard's Department of Sociology. No indoctrination or false consciousness for me, no sir!"
But however you want to define 'brainwashing' it's not that. People are pretty good at picking up on when they are being lied to about the existence of opportunities to personally gain by breaking norms and their chances at succeeding in getting away with it. It wouldn't be so sustainably successful if the perception wasn't also completely accurate in many important ways. There *really isn't* anything these women can do that is a better alternative to having as many children as they can. They come to know the truth of that in countless observations and experiences and in a thousand big and little ways. Their social environment constrains their choices such that there simply aren't any better, more attractive options, or to the extent there may be such options outside the community, they are prevented in the critical years from acquiring the human capital required to take advantage of them. We say "You go girl!" They say, "Girl go ... and milk the cows." (Not coincidentally, the etymology of 'daughter' is proto-indo-european, meaning 'milker' hence, 'milkmaid'.)
That's how it works.
And, abstractly, there's nothing theologically-dependent or secularly-incompatible about that, that's the basic theory of how all policy works to change behavior. Before women's lib, this is what most secular societies did, and many of them believed they did so for secularly-justifiable reasons.
But there is one major catch, Catch 23.
The catch is the whole Dual Strategies Theory of social advancement by either dominance or prestige. Secular societies can change behavior by changing incentives, but when the exercise of power to create such an incentive structure is perceived as unwanted dominance and a coercive imposition, the government is creating and fighting an uphill battle fragile to any relaxation in the state's willpower to ensure obedience by whatever mean necessary. Even if people don't want to, secular societies with sufficient will and state capacity would still have little trouble squeezing extra kids out of their populations, but widespread resentments at the involuntarily compelled sacrifices could prove destabilizing as they just give rise to the political opportunism of some competitor who can exploit it and get support by promising to free people from the imposition.
So the trick is to have people come to believe that they are choosing and making the right choices and the policy is, like God's Law, just a reflection of what is obviously the right and wise and necessary thing to do.
Now, that's certainly possible to do without any appeal to the supernatural Divine or theology or whatever, so, in that sense, totally 'secular'. But the reason I call it a 'catch' is because I don't think it's really accurate to say that any kind of set of commonly held beliefs about the 'rightness' of these 'choices' and the legitimacy of the law which reflects that, is not in principle distinguishable from 'religion', even though most intellectuals have really wanted to believe otherwise for a long time.
Fortunately the answer to that debate doesn't make any difference, and when done right (and to some extent in secret), there are ways that a policy for change creates its own new normalcy, and when a normalcy is perceived to be aligned with and a strong, credible signal of social status and prestige, people naturally come to feel enough 'religion-equivalent' sentiment about it to keep it all going and to give cold-shoulders to any who attempt to undermine it.
This is pretty heavy stuff. It’s going to take me a few passes to digest it.
If it was possible for you to pass for and live among the Amish or Hasidic - like some completely hilarious, ultra-orthodox version of 'undercover boss' - it would all become clear in no time.
Mexico allows people to buy what we would consider "prescription" medicine without a prescription. Going over the border to get things like Ozempic is quite common. You can bring back up to a 90 day supply for personal use, and the price is often cheaper.
Perhaps that is something to investigate if you were going to get rid of/change the FDA.
A commenter on SSC noted that one possible solution is to allow anything to be taken as a "supplement". Supplements are not given an FDA stamp of approval and insurance is not required to cover them. You couldn't sue if using a supplement goes wrong, at least not as easily.
How people would respond to that I don't know, but it would mean that it would be legal to get whatever drug you want.
It's pretty easy to get all kinds of prescription pharmeceuticals (that aren't also common abused recreational drugs) delivered from India to your mailbox, cheaply, and without a doctor's approval. I know lots of people who do this, for generic erection pills, for antibiotics, for sleeping pills, for all kinds of stuff, and they are all happy, satisfied, repeat customers.
It's hard to make arguments in favor of the necessity of America's extreme physician-pharmacist-gatekeeping-and-protecting regime when noticing that lots of people do this all the time and ... it's fine. Sure, there are always some anecdotal horror stories like there always are for literally anything, and it's hard to estimate the total amount of traffic in this stuff, but the overall rate of big harms seems negligibly tiny.
I confess that even I was surprised to learn this, which I didn't expect to be one of the "net benefit is zero" parts of Hansonian Medicine. Given how much time and money and hassle is involved in using the system the legal way, it's at least plausible that it's worse than zero and the bottom line is negative to a non-negligible degree.
In its own reports, if you know how to read between the lines, CBP has basically admitted that it has neither the capacity nor any real interest in policing this kind of thing. Maybe 0.1% of your orders will get randomly scanned and confiscated, perhaps you'll get a 'love letter' notifying you about it.
And as every sane person would expect, CBP constantly tries to advocate for larger budgets for more people and more equipment because, "Getting that extra capacity is essential to stop the epidemic of ... uh ... um ... "
People, don't bother responding with "But Fentanyl!", just like CBP does, because it can't make a case for anything else. Of course crazy strong and intensely euphoric synthetic opioids are highly addictive and really dangerous and it's utterly tragic how many junkies there are and how large numbers of people every year are unintentionally killing themselves using them.
But those people are getting their fix from drug dealers, not from clearnet online pharmacies packaged alongside their rash treatment. If you take out the harms associated with all the typical drugs of abuse for which it is coincidentally (and in practice, often only theoretically) possible to get a prescription, the accumulated harms from all the other un-authorized purchases of medicines are hard to distinguish from zero, and this was from people who were highly motivated to discover and exaggerate any of those harms if they could find them - but they couldn't.
Wasn't there once some kind of snow-clone of a popular headline for a libertarian article that went like, "What if (insert government agency here), which we are told is the only thing standing in the way of immediate and catastrophic threats to our welfare, stopped functioning entirely for a month and ... nothing happened?" The point is to cast doubt not just on the necessity of the agency as to costs being lower than the benefit of avoiding catastrophe, but to go further and ask whether it produces any benefit whatsoever.
Likewise, what if there were multiple large alternative free (though gray / black) markets in prescription medications where people could buy them without a physician's approval, and lots of people did so all the time and ... nothing happened?
"Once population falls, overcrowding will ease, family-friendly housing will be more available, and people will start having more kids."
I have a different model. The older and more child free an area gets, the less friendly to families it gets. We have lots of adults only and 55+ communities these days. In my experience things are either oriented towards families or oriented towards some other group. In a scenario where olds outnumber children I would expect that to get worse even if there are fewer overall people (when I've been in areas full of olds that is what it's like). Then of course there are old people entitlements, which will allow them to outbid the young for existing housing.
Children should be concentrated just as the elderly should not be.
But we do the opposite, and suffer for it, but not enough to mend our ways. Of course, it's harder when there are more elderly than children, which is why it's a vicious cycle. Everybody wants to be around young people, even really old people. Nobody wants to hang around a bunch of really old farts, even - sometimes especially - those same really old farts. They do so because they don't have a choice and can't avoid it anymore, and they try to cope with it the best they can.
Japan's population has been aging and shrinking for a long time. During their 80's boom they overbuilt and in the 90's long crash Tokyo rents fell by over half and IIRC only recently bounced back to where they were 30 years ago. But such bounce-back didn't happen almost anywhere else, where rents are still cheaper and there is on average more square meters of living space per person than there used to be. Still, they are all having even fewer kids.
There are now places in the Japanese countryside which are eerily uncrowded and low-populated (for them), and despite being cheap and spacious they are so practically devoid of children they are trying to pay people to move there and have kids, but it doesn't work. Not just "Judenfrei" but "Jugendfrei". Maybe the Hasidics should expand their real-estate speculation efforts to include those new cheap opportunities in Chiba Prefecture, which would really send history on a path nobody ever expected.
I have extended family in what I guess would be called "extreme suburban" orbit radius from a big city, in a US county with about 100K population. I don't know what the consensus usage of "small town" or "medium city" means in terms of population anymore, but the urban area is lower-medium-ish, I think. Like a lot of similar places, it had on average a thriving era from WWII through the early 80's when things peaked and started to go downhill. Every year is gets older, gloomier, trashier. All the best kids left for college and stayed gone for more exciting and more lucrative opportunities elsewhere, and the "iterative creaming" process never stops.
Not just "human capital" creaming, but youth-creaming too. If you were a kid, you wouldn't want to grow up there, will few other kids, and nothing but gloomy old people, and you'd be looking for your first opportunity to get out. Which just makes it older and gloomier, rinse and repeat. A huge portion of America outside the orbit of the Big Winner Cities looks just like this, and looks more like it with every passing day.
There is this naturally repulsive feeling when one visits a nursing home of the weight and tension from being around disability, decline, degeneration, decrepitude, weakness, illness, helplessness, dependency, indignity. You can't help but feel you are fighting the urge to leave and run away from place-curse life-sapping forces as quickly as possible, and indeed, there is a sense of relief almost as if from suffocation when one departs.
That's what it feels like to visit those places, or really any "Their Time Is Up" / "Just waiting for the inevitable end" place. One can note that cemeteries are not nearly so discomforting, and sometimes even pleasant in relative comparison, perhaps as they were made and meant to be.
I don't remember if any of the famous authors have pointed this out yet, but I think it's a widespread experience for those of more spiritually-inclined perspective to feel that a graveyard full of the long-deceased you don't have to see, feels much more spiritually alive than a nursing home full of the soon-to-die you can't avoid seeing.
In general it's supposed to be "location, location, location" common sense that the utility of housing has very little to do with square footage and acreage. Anything that goes against common sense is by definition absurd, so the wat that social groups practice collective cognitive dissonance like this is a good example of how the "Socially Accepted Excuse" mechanism in social psychology works. Literally everybody knows they can get all the space and land they want in safe uncool rural areas (or unsafe semi-cool urban areas) for peanuts. They don't want to live there, and they don't want to live among the people who do live there.
People aren't looking for "square feet I can afford", they are looking for "neighborhood quality I can afford", and at the margin of having more kids, they are still not thinking about space but about raising-kids-relevant neighborhood quality.
Here we get into a subtle point about "glass half full / half empty" alternative perspectives on what exactly prices actually communicate in such circumstances. No, I'm not getting into Giffen Goods territory, the point is that the trade-offs are starker in a way that square-footage-based analysis misses. On the one hand, when we see two apparently similar things, and one is cheaper, our intuition is that those lower prices are attractive and desirable and will pull people in to "restore equilibrium".
On the other hand, we can accept that we are in equilibrium already, look at the price difference, and infer that the prices reflect desirability, and that the lower priced option is lower-priced *because* it has some very highly undesirable features associated with it. That is to say, not so much an opportunity to reduce one's cost of living, but compensation for the fact that it poses a threat of major hits to ones quality of living, as if the house was built over a radioactive minerals outcropping and one wouldn't really be saving anything with having to pay to fill the basement with lead or those oncologist bills coming down the line.
The trouble is that when neighborhood desirability = neighborhood quality = neighbors quality. "Amenities" is either distinct or a euphemism for the quality of neighbors. And quality neighbors are scarce, then neighbors quality = neighbors wherewithal to bid up prices to the edge of affordability. So high prices are a strong, credible signal of desirability and low prices are likewise for undesirability. Much stronger and much more credible than is typical for normal goods and services for which there is always a lot of ante-facto uncertainty and post-facto disappointment as regards true value.
Art, fashion, and sporty-car dealers take care to police and occasionally manipulate markets to keep prices high for exactly this reason, not so much to assure people that their 'investment' will retain value, but to make it clear that there are never any real deals or discounts available and only cool, elite, rich people could possibly afford to own this stuff, and if you want want to signal you are one of those kinds of people, you can buy this item secure in the knowledge that you will be able to show off and impress the kind of people who are impressed by that kind of thing.
But with housing, nobody has to police or manipulate anything: the market participants are making the signals ultra-high fidelity automatically and all by themselves. The higher the price, the more you know the people who live there are the kind of neighbors who can afford to live there, and the more you want it. The lower the price, the more you know that even people on the margin to whom those low prices should be attractive are still willing to go broke avoiding the problems that happen there, that is, the people who live there.
The thing to notice is that none of the acceptably-discussable policy reform proposals have any chance of helping out with this situation to any meaningful degree because they are trying to make desirable but unaffordable square feet more affordable, when what is necessary is the exact opposite, to make the locations of affordable but undesirable square feet more desirable.
Which any wise and capable government can do, as indeed, they used to do very well without all our era's extra wealth and other advantages, not needing any new modern technology because their use of ancient social technology was perfectly sufficient. Unfortunately the progressives have outlawed these social technologies, and have been deploying their anti-social technologies for a long time.
But since we live in "Discourse in the Shadow of the Guillotine", we can't talk about what people really want, what they're really worried about, what might be done to actually improve those factors, etc.
So instead we talk about square feet, which, being impersonal, doesn't risk offending anybody. We don't want to seem radical, so we can't be serious.
It seems to me that the best argument for regime change is that we are headed for disaster if we can't fix our big problems, but that we are no longer capable of solving any of our big problems, because we can't solve what we can't talk about without offending people, and the current regime found it politically useful to make offense matter too much and to get everybody easily offended by everything all the time. Talk about anti-social technology!
I'm skeptical about overcrowding. Most of the largest families live in overcrowded situations with other large families.
People have kids in refugee camps. Probably more kids than in South Korea.
And as for family friendly, you can't make society family friendly and unstable at the same time.
Back when all right-thinking progressives were in a panic about overpopulation, they were very explicit and matter-of-fact in the documents they wrote as part of their global campaign to do something about it, as to how they planned to accomplish these objectives. And what they wrote was that in addition to subsidizing and encouraging the use of things that directly targeted the biological basis of procreation (e.g., condoms, hormones, sterilizations, etc.), they would lower birth rates in undeveloped countries by doing the things that all smart people already knew reliably lowered birth rates everywhere else, by increasing female education, especially higher education, and thus female participation in the workforce.
So, when they wanted to slow things down, they knew they had a good brake pedal, and they resolved to step on it. But then, when people started to worry that now we are going too slow, instead of concluding as any trucker would that "maybe we need to take our foot off the brake", they just *completely forget* about everything: not just the existence of the brake, but the fact that they once knew about the brake, intentionally stepped on it, watched it work, and then patted themselves on the back out of pride in their accomplishment.
It's amusing to observe this kind of collective politically-selective Alzheimer's when it comes to certain beliefs which were once common knowledge but which everyone auto-memory-holed when those facts later become inconvenient because they had implications which had become politically incorrect. More female education is always good, so when doing more of something good also steps on a needed brake, then it was perfectly fine to acknowledge the relationship and step on the brake. Two generations later, since less female education is always bad, it's "What brake?"
I don't remember if it was Cowen or Sumner but IIRC one of them started using the term "The Great Forgetting" to describe how all the progressive economists somehow got the same memo and then suddenly and simultaneously started discussing certain matters as if many lessons learned since WWII had never been learned at all, and that many once-popular (cough, politically-useful) theories had already been tested long ago and had failed those tests as they crumbled under the accumulating weight of contrary evidence.
But see, with the power of collective fake amnesia where we all just pretend that none of us can remember any of that stuff ever happening, we can all go on to pretend that these dreams never died and that those whole spaces of once-established intellectual territory are up for grabs again. "What do you mean the Phillips Curve doesn't work? Since when? I don't remember anyone proving that, and frankly, I don't believe that evidence exists. So, sorry, no idea what your talking about. La la la la, I can't hear you!". This is especially ironic for those who are eager to yell, "The Science Is Settled!" in other contexts, but that's how they roll.
I'll say it again that once social enforcement systems like this become strong enough such that literally any established fact can disintegrate in an instant in a flaring-up of yet another Great Forgetting, then epistemic progress, i.e., "progress" eventually becomes impossible, because you cannot keep building higher if you cannot accumulate knowledge beneath you faster than it gets forgotten.
On overcrowding, your simple model would require decades to play out. It also implicitly assumes a society without immigration. The model only requires the population to fall if you assume housing stock is fixed. If housing stock is growing, then you could have population just fail to keep up with growth in housing.
“Girls just want to have fun”. Especially those in college.
“You say, I used to be crazy. I say, I used to be young”, recent song.
It used to be that “Youth is wasted on the young” but not any more in a society of abundance, especially those going to or done with college. They are able and very willing to enjoy life, and especially life’s pleasures, especially those that don’t come with commitments to work, or to other people like a spouse or a child.
The opportunity cost of marriage and having babies has hugely increased. That’s far more important than crowding.
Cost of a nice house is mostly huge cost of a nice area. Most cities, like LA or NY, have much lower cost areas that have high crime-but few folks want to start their families in those affordable areas.
The cost of housing has gone up too much because of asset inflation, with the US deficit & money printing, yet without many product shortages, means more financial inflation. The owned houses are both a place to live as well most folk’s single largest investment.
Too little discussion among Y/N IMBY is how to increase the quality of life in those low quality existing areas. Because most know immediately it means reducing crime, which requires getting rid of, jailing, criminals or changing their behavior. Ain’t gonna happen.
I don't know about the relationship to fertility, but as a small town American I do find the crowding in Korea very noticable. Even in the rural areas the landscape is dotted by high rise apartments, often standing alone in fairly empty surroundings like a termite mound on the Savannah. There's little in the way of single family homes dotting the landscape like one might see in various parts of the US. Hills are generally left empty -- except for a cluster of buildings in the hills of Heundae Beach that a Korean friend found unsual enough to point out and explain as a holdover from when the area was a refugee settlement during the war.
As someone who likes to think I have some independently, rationally-justified sympathy for the more emotionally-motivated stance of those who mood-affiliate with "burn it down!" I am not so instantly allergic in my reaction to calls to "abolish the FDA" or even "abolish ICE" as I am to, say, "defund the police."
The problem is that while there is a ton of good points to be made in favor of having an FDA, there are also a ton of good points that we cannot tolerate the crap FDA we have, and we can't fix it by tweaking it either.
I propose a middle ground that is only a 9/10 on the radicalism scale as opposed to the 10/10 of outright abolition. "Complete Uninstall Reinstall Emendation" or CURE the FDA (Billy Crystal voice, "See what I did there?"). We're going to have the FDA, it's going to have the same missions, but everyone who works there now, can no longer work there, and we get new people with a temporary chance to max big changes to how their particular job or office works, to get the job done better.
Augeas had intolerably dirty stables, but he still needed stables. Sometimes they just need to get cleaned out. The hard way.
Does Antiplanner think there is some systematic policy error that has led to small apartments, "too high" density?
'If the causality runs from overcrowded housing to difficulty raising children to low birth rates, then doesn’t it seem as though population decline will be self-correcting? Once population falls, overcrowding will ease, family-friendly housing will be more available, and people will start having more kids.'
Only if these things are fungible. Is having 2 apartments in a high-rise family friendly? What is more likely to happen is that you need occupancy of >x% to make a high rise work for the maintenance that comes with it, and so rather than everyone getting 2 apartments worth of space half of the high rises are abandoned and the other half occupied resulting in the same issue only with less total wealth for the country.
I wonder if a majority of the relevant academic community believes blank slate. Maybe most of those who don't have switched their topics of interest to avoid that question or simply remain silent.
Jordan Peterson is a big proponent of differences in men and women. Unfortunately, as much as I want to believe much of what he says, I never seem to be able to confirm "facts" he builds his positions on. Another is the minimum IQ of 80 for US military.
Regarding Scott's point, I don't think the "you have to get it exactly right" part holds. I don't see why there is a higher bar for "basically functions" on changing all these things than there is for their current state, for which "basically functions" is perhaps a bit charitable. I agree that one wants to be careful, but it isn't as though the US system is amazing, and most other western systems are decidedly worse. Getting things mostly right seems like it would be an improvement.
Regarding marijuana, I think cigarettes are a worse comparison than alcohol, for the reasons you note. That said, alcohol regulation varies quite a bit by state, so we have lots of examples of what works. I suspect that regarding potency, there will be measures of potency demanded from users, regardless of government requirements, as soon as those measures become easy and reliable. I note (as a non-drinker) that most people don't go straight for the Everclear, but prefer much less potent potables. I expect that similar behavior will develop for marijuana as the culture moves into the mainstream, above board area.
I entirely disagree with your starting premise. Clearly the US gets the most important parts of prescription drugs right. While there is a balance between safety and availability, US does about as well as anyone on this even if the balance is different. The other factor no other country comes close is that most new drugs are developed primarily for the US market. That is very good, even if it could be better. Our current system is WAY better than "basically functions." You are not appreciating what we have.
Is it clear that the US gets the most important parts of prescription drugs right? I think a lot of very reasonable people would disagree with you. Just because other places largely do it worse doesn't mean that we do it well. There is a long list of issues with the FDA and US system, right down to whether or not the FDA even does less harm than good. So no, I don't think it is so clear.