Covering Delta retweeted
Why then do immigrant families with lower median incomes have higher fertility rates than native ones? Why do Amish or Hasidic families have significantly higher fertility rates?
Yes, the costs of having a family matter, but values, priorities, and community are more important.
Today, Foreign Affairs publishes a long essay I wrote summarizing some of my work on the global fertility collapse:
foreignaffairs.com/united-st…
It was a fantastic experience (with great editorial support) because the essay pushed me beyond pure economics to discuss issues such as geopolitics and polarization. Unlike some commentators, I don’t think the first-round economic consequences of fertility decline matter most; the second-round political and social ones do.
Yes, social security systems worldwide are in danger, but reality will impose itself sooner or later. The same politicians who swear over their ancestors’ tombs that retirement benefits will remain untouched will cut them (even if they are French). It will not be pretty, and most likely the cuts will come only after a major crisis and after politicians have tried everything else and failed.
Similarly, businesses will adapt to shrinking markets and valuations. Those who claim that capitalism somehow needs constantly expanding markets will be proven wrong. After all, this is the same misguided understanding of markets that has been proven wrong again and again since September 14, 1867, and that nobody really believes unless they have had the misfortune of earning a Ph.D. in a humanities department at an Ivy League school.
The real consequences will come when collapsing populations poison political systems. Look at the recent elections in eastern Germany. That is the future for all of us.
Also, the relative standing of great powers will shift drastically. Given current demographic trends, the U.S. will have a larger population than China by around 2100. The exact date depends on assumptions about net immigration into the U.S., but even with zero net immigration, the U.S. will overtake China by 2128. And Russia’s demographic future is only slightly more optimistic than China’s.
Those who dismiss these changes forget how antiquity ended in Western Europe. The western part of the Roman Empire entered acute demographic decline around 200 CE. By 476 CE, the western empire no longer existed. Despite some revisionist views that have cast a more positive light on late antiquity (and rightly corrected what was sometimes an overly negative assessment of the period), the fact is that England or France in 600 CE had lost most of their classical heritage, and material life had lost at least an order of magnitude in sophistication. The eastern part of the empire, however, weathered its demographic collapse much better and lasted another millennium.
No, I don’t believe we will go extinct (the Amish and Haredi will be enough for the survival of humankind), but the world will be very different in 2200 regardless of how you feel about it. The rational is the real and the real is the rational.
Covering Delta retweeted
The conventional thinking is that a nuclear armed Iran is destabilizing to regional security. This may have been true before Operation Epic Fury, but the status quo is no longer one of fragile equilibrium.
What political objectives will the Iranians achieve with nuclear weapons that asymmetric warfare has not already delivered? Iran is not a suicide bomber. It’s a country with conventional security needs and regional power ambitions. It has become clear that economic and military pressure will not lead to a change in behavior that accords with Washington’s idyllic fantasies. Deterrence has been established. If anything, committing to obtaining a nuclear strike capability would lead to a regional nuclear arms race, which is not in Iran’s interests. I just don’t buy the argument that the quest for nuclear deterrence is the operational logic at work here anymore.
The only path forward that will bring peace and prosperity to the Greater Middle East is one that treats Iran and its current leadership as powerful regional actors that need to (and can) be negotiated with. The US simply cannot sustain this level of military engagement in the region indefinitely, and the longer it commits resources to it, the more it undermines its broader commitments to maintaining security in other theaters and to investing in and growing its own economy. It also perpetuates a dynamic in which voters feel that the government in Washington is unaccountable, tyrannical, illegitimate, and therefore deserving of being overthrown by any means necessary.
The entropy we’ve exported to the rest of the world has already started to come home, and we can no longer take the stability of our own societies and political systems for granted.
Covering Delta retweeted
I'm joined by @VincentDeluard to discuss how the latest US elections fit into a global shift toward economic populism, the abandonment of the two percent target, and what an unwinding of foreign capital flows could mean for the USD, rates, and US assets.
hiddenforces.io/podcasts/the…
Covering Delta retweeted
The logic of an authoritarian like Trump is very different from that of the institutionalists who preceded him. He is unconstrained by democratic norms and, given his experience following his defeat in 2020, may well view the end of his term as an existential threat to his personal freedom and legacy as he approaches the twilight of his life.
What we have learned from the last five years, whether from Russia’s massive military buildup ahead of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine or Trump’s consistent willingness to escalate rather than seek off-ramps to end this war, is that where constraints on the executive are reduced, individuals with power are capable of making extraordinarily destructive decisions that seem illogical when viewed from the outside.
Trump has very little to lose by escalating, including by authorizing the use of nuclear weapons in Iran. Many of those working for him may be operating with similar logic, as investigations and hearings will likely reach deep into his administration should Democrats reclaim the White House in 2028.
Let us all pray that there are still people within Trump’s circle with the power, influence, and courage to stop this, because we are teetering at the edge of a very dark precipice, and I do not believe there will be any easy return.
Covering Delta retweeted
There's a lot of evidence coming out in the press and via public statements by elected officials like Chris Murphy and the President himself that should make all of us very worried about what this administration is planning and how far it is willing to go to prolong this war.
Covering Delta retweeted
Pape is really milking this for all it's worth.
Covering Delta retweeted
I can promise you that no presidential candidate is going to pause AI unless we get a 9/11 type event. It's just not gonna happen.
Covering Delta retweeted
America would be seen as a rogue superpower, unaccountable to international institutions, unconstrained by their norms, and a threat to modern civilization.
If a nuclear weapon were used on Pick Axe mountain in Iran by the US or Israel or an empty field in Ukraine by Russia etc, it doesn’t matter, it would open up Pandora’s box and would make the U.S. and the world dramatically less safe. This isn’t even a question of how big of a disaster the use, in any manner, of a nuclear weapon would be. It would represent the largest foreign policy error ever by the United States if we were involved. We can only hope this claim isn’t accurate in any way.
Covering Delta retweeted
I’m joined by @rbrtrmstrng to discuss the growing backlash against AI, the fiscal reckoning facing highly indebted economies, and how investors should hedge against a bursting of the AI bubble if bonds are no longer a reliable offset to equity risk.
hiddenforces.io/podcasts/how…
Covering Delta retweeted
In fairness, @edzitron is not a finance or tech analyst. He has a degree in media and communications. He's a guy who built an audience by yelling at Big Tech and by tapping into the populist crosscurrents of the 2020s.
When this cycle is over, no one will remember his name.
I mean look, AI is hard. I’ve been wrong about many aspects of it and most of the smartest people I follow have been wrong about *something.*
But Ed has been claiming peak AI for more than two years. This is almost literally like covering the Intel IPO in 1971 by bringing on somebody who claimed that Moore’s Law (written in 1965) had peaked in 1966, 1967, 1968, 1969, and 1970. It’s not illegal to do this, but your source is confidently commenting on a phenomenon his previous commentary considered impossible.
Covering Delta retweeted
Even accounting for the fact that this is a commercial and not a live demonstration, I still don’t find it convincing.
That said, I now often confuse human phone operators with agents because of how scripted they’ve become.
introducing prism, the world’s first speech-to-speech model you can’t tell from a human in conversation
prism has:
> 300ms response time, 4x faster than OpenAI GPT-Live
> outperforms every other s2s model on intelligence (with NO reasoning)
> the first s2s model customizable through reinforcement learning
we’re a team of 35 with $35M in funding, and we’re unlocking s2s model adoption faster than openai, google, and x.
the first 100 people to sign up here get 1 month free: rime.ai/prism?utm_campaign=p…
Covering Delta retweeted
“The temptation to look down at the French as an unruly and undisciplined people should be resisted, because what you are seeing in France could well be visited upon us in America and the rest of the developed world.” — @rbrtrmstrng
Covering Delta retweeted
I'm joined by @pkedrosky to discuss why the AI boom is unlike any previous Capex cycle and why competing narratives and a US-China technological arms race converge to make this moment more consequential and dangerous than any that came before it.
hiddenforces.io/podcasts/the…
RT @kofinas: Most people don't understand how to think about risk, let alone how to price it efficiently. Tom does.
The only thing I'd dis…
This quoted post is unavailable.
Covering Delta retweeted
The Hundred Year Pivot is back!
@ttmygh and I speak with @BCG's Philipp Carlsson, co-author of "The Kids Are Alright," about why young people are so pessimistic and why the dominant narrative that they falling behind doesn't hold up against the data.
hiddenforces.io/podcasts/why…
Covering Delta retweeted
"Three-kid families have turned into what feels like a 'luxury good', amid rising childcare and housing costs. The data also highlights stay-at-home moms at 37% in the top 1%, far above lower groups."
I find this to be anecdotally true, and a great use of financial resources.
