The end of economic growth? Unintended consequences of a declining population
Charles I. Jones (Stanford University)
GPI Working Paper No. 13-2020 and published in the National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper series
In many models, economic growth is driven by people discovering new ideas. These models typically assume either a constant or growing population. However, in high income countries today, fertility is already below its replacement rate: women are having fewer than two children on average. It is a distinct possibility — highlighted in the recent book, Empty Planet — that global population will decline rather than stabilize in the long run. In standard models, this turns out to have profound implications: rather than continued exponential growth, living standards stagnate for a population that vanishes.
Other working papers
Should longtermists recommend hastening extinction rather than delaying it? – Richard Pettigrew (University of Bristol)
Longtermism is the view that the most urgent global priorities, and those to which we should devote the largest portion of our current resources, are those that focus on ensuring a long future for humanity, and perhaps sentient or intelligent life more generally, and improving the quality of those lives in that long future. The central argument for this conclusion is that, given a fixed amount of are source that we are able to devote to global priorities, the longtermist’s favoured interventions have…
Maximal cluelessness – Andreas Mogensen (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
I argue that many of the priority rankings that have been proposed by effective altruists seem to be in tension with apparently reasonable assumptions about the rational pursuit of our aims in the face of uncertainty. The particular issue on which I focus arises from recognition of the overwhelming importance…
Choosing the future: Markets, ethics and rapprochement in social discounting – Antony Millner (University of California, Santa Barbara) and Geoffrey Heal (Columbia University)
This paper provides a critical review of the literature on choosing social discount rates (SDRs) for public cost-benefit analysis. We discuss two dominant approaches, the first based on market prices, and the second based on intertemporal ethics. While both methods have attractive features, neither is immune to criticism. …