Two points I wonder about, hopefully not too naïvely:
Why are the French (and Italians who are already at the numbers feared) not having children? Are they overworked like the Japanese who can't focus on family-making, or does having children put a strain on their private economy or freedom that they can't handle? Do they worry their children won't have good lives? Or do people don't like children as much these days (this seems very unlikely to me)? It seems weird to me to focus on choosing the symptoms, instead of eliminating the causes.
Nobody really knows for sure and the answer is disputed, but I will tell you one thing: it's certainly far beyond just the French and Italians. If I'm not mistaken, the French have the
highest fertility rate in Europe, although it seems a demographic breakdown shows that the "native" French are also below 2, and the national rate is pulled up by immigrants. Just about every other country in, essentially, the entire "first world" is under 2 (which is the replacement rate - two children to replace two parents so the population is stable).
As for why? No two people agree. But it seems to me like a rational prediction of the logistic curve. There are an
awful lot of people already and they're not making any more space, at least not counting tiny land reclamation projects here and there that are, sorry, a drop in the ocean. Given that,
should you expect that people would just reproduce infinitely to a Malthusian maximum? Would you want to?
What happened to the economic growth, which ought to be a constant (as in, always there) in capitalist economies? I remember it being big news when corona caused the GDP to decrease in places, since normally it only goes up by varying amounts. Is it made null by an equal population growth? Or does it only happen when a population is predominantly young people?
The economic growth should also coincide with the development of technology. If people's worries about being replaced by computerized systems (e.g. automized checkouts) and AI are in any way real, shouldn't we be expecting a higher productivity? Or is the economic growth funneled somewhere else, instead of the welfare of the population? I.e. is capitalism working its wheels - has French wealth inequality increased over the last decennia?
Now this part I could write a book about. Maybe I should. Let me start here.
What happened to the economic growth, which ought to be a constant (as in, always there) in capitalist economies?
Why ought it to be? How
could it be?
In order to understand where economic growth comes from and where it goes, first we have to answer the question... what do we actually mean by "economic growth" anyway? It's not a number on a chart. I can write any number on a chart and it won't make anyone feel any better. The number has to mean something for real people. But when we speak of "economic growth", it's too easy to, and too many people do, get distracted by the abstraction and/or abstracted by the distraction and treat it like a number with no consequences and no rules besides math operations.
For me, the definition is simple, but it may require a little background. You see, we can talk about "embodied energy", which is simply the amount of energy that went into doing something. So, as a simple example, the embodied energy of a nugget of iron ore in your hand is greater than that same nugget in the ground, because it took effort to mine it out; smelt it into iron, refine it into steel, shape it into a knife, and the embodied energy goes up at every step.
Embodied energy in and of itself is not a great metric for economic growth, though, because energy can just be wasted in lots of ways. So to me, economic growth is best understood as
the increase in embodied energy of resources in ways that improve someone's standard of living. In other words, loosely speaking,
the production of more and better goods that someone out there wants.
The problem here should be obvious: no economists, governments, or really anyone use that definition of economic growth in any formal context. The standard is just to talk about GDP, or GDP per capita if you're lucky. But these are both meaningless numbers - if you and I each have a delicious carrot, the economy is unchanged; but if I pay you $50 for your carrot and you pay me $50 for mine, GDP goes up $100. I hope it's clear, then, that the definition I gave above is the kind of economic growth that people really want and work for. I hope it's also clear that that kind of growth
cannot just keep going up. There are only so many resources and there is only so much energy that can be used to extract and refine them; and on top of that, there is only so much degree to which you can really improve someone's living standard and expect him to notice. Now you may reasonably say that there is still a lot of "want" left in the world, a lot of room to improve standards of living for a lot of people, and that's true, but there's less now than likely ever before in history, especially in the developed world, and there are real diminishing returns, and the world is looking with increasing diffidence at those absolute resource limits... and as standards of living do rise, miners and smelters want those new and better goods too, which means you have to give them more things to convince them to be miners and smelters or else they will try to find some other way to get them, and so costs rise everywhere in the system just to stay in the same place.
So, even in an ideal resource allocation scenario, growth in real meaningful terms
must get harder and slow down over time. The only thing that's even kept it afloat as far as it has is technology, as people learn ways to use less energy to get the same goods — and this has clear theoretical limits. There's no such thing as a post-scarcity future, ever; and if there was, people would breed up to the point where things start becoming scarce again. Which, of course, has happened many times in the history of the settlement of new lands.
You'll note that I did
not define growth so as to exclude wealth inequality - making life better for one guy counts just as much as making life better for everyone - and that's because growth in real terms inevitably slows down for
everyone. In fact, because of the diminishing returns on standard of living, it slows down even faster "at the top". Even when wealth inequality increases, this doesn't
on its own "funnel away economic growth" in the sense I'm using - most wealth exists on paper, and the rich are not actually taking more than a trivial excess of real physical goods over anyone else. This hasn't always been true; certainly in feudal Europe, the wealthy got that way by actively lowering everyone else's standard of living in the form of literally taking their stuff. But for now, wealth inequality cannot explain much of the growth problem. Even when some rich guy buys up a company and fires a bunch of people, it's just not really making a dent overall.
Okay, so why is GDP also stumbling, given that it has been decoupled from real human-meaningful productivity for decades? Well, I could write a lot more about this but I feel like I might be running into some post length limits any time soon, so I'll just say this: GDP can be inflated by purely paper transactions that don't affect anyone's real life, but real standard of living improvements are still what people want and work for. That parasitic paper economy still needs a working foundation to live off, or else people stop taking your Papiermarks anymore. When that foundation shrinks, and the paper gets more self-incestuously leveraged, the numbers get swingier and you start to see busts that can make whole filing cabinets full of paper worthless in minutes. GDP no longer tracks production, but it's still sensitive to it because production is still the motivation people have for wanting money in the first place.
So to really put the fine point to your question, if you had a million dollars (if you had a million dollars), where would you invest it and expect a return? Would you build a factory, producing what, staffed by whom, where? If you expect growth, where would it come from?
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