On this episode of Unsupervised Learning Razib has a wide-ranging conversation, again, with Dan Hess, the man behind the More Births account on social media. An engineer with a large family in the DC area, Hess’ essays on topics like Israelis’ high birth rate have gained the attention of X. He has an account that has come from a few hundred followers to more than 45,000 in less than 4 years. His tweets have been boosted by Elon.
Today Razib and Hess start the conversation talking about East Asia, and its massive fertility crisis. Hess makes the case against urban density, observing how low fertility is in some of these Asian cities in particular. Razib also brings up economic and cultural creativity, as he and Hess ruminate on the consequences of reduced dynamism due to an aging population. Hess also argues that we cannot rely on evolution to fix our demographic imbalances; the source nations of immigrants are experiencing demographic collapse as well.
