The hottest Demography Substack posts right now

And their main takeaways
Category
Top World Politics Topics

Please Stop Talking about "Zoomers" and "Gen Alpha"

Richard Hanania's Newsletter ā€¢ 3218 implied HN points ā€¢ 23 Mar 26
šŸŽ­ļø Culture Demography
  1. Stop giving younger cohorts names like "Gen Z" or "Generation Alpha"; those labels are arbitrary and we could just use birth decades or say "young people" instead.
  2. Labeling kids early creates fixed identities and stereotypes that can prolong adolescence and lower expectations for growing up.
  3. Generation names used to be applied retrospectively after shared experiences; naming cohorts prospectively biases how we see them and hinders learning across ages.

Anglo Deaths of Despair, North Korean Intranet, Lauren Southern Memoir, and More

Richard Hanania's Newsletter ā€¢ 926 implied HN points ā€¢ 27 Feb 26
šŸŒ World Politics Demography
  1. The new book Kakistocracy is being promoted and PDF review copies are being offered to journalists, podcasters, and potential contest entrants.
  2. Public reflections include admitting that voting for Trump was a mistake and describing practical steps used to cut back on phone use, shared via a video interview and an article.
  3. Curated links and commentary cover debates over crime trends (no clear evidence that better medical care lowered murder deaths recently), complexities in Gulf Arab fertility data because of large foreign populations and theories about governance or religion, plus pieces on North Koreaā€™s intranet, Assadā€™s last days, Neanderthalā€“human mating, and a memoir review.

The case for a pronatalist dating site

Wood From Eden ā€¢ 2256 implied HN points ā€¢ 01 Jan 26
šŸŽ­ļø Culture Demography
  1. The modern dating market became more selfish after traditional norms eroded, and that selfishness is undermining stable marriages and family formation. Restoring cultural norms that value commitment and co-investment in a family is needed to repair this.
  2. A non-profit pronatalist dating site could create safer spaces that reward decency and commitment instead of flash and casual hookups. Such a platform should promote norms like valuing steadiness over constant excitement, discouraging ghosting, and treating sex as something that serves a long-term relationship.
  3. Money and policy should focus on supporting cultural infrastructure rather than cash payments, so NGOs and civic movements should build and fund pro-family platforms. A community-driven, non-commercial service can better match people who view family as a cornerstone and grow with a broader pronatalist movement.

Heritability of human life span is about 50% when heritability is redefined to be something different

DYNOMIGHT INTERNET NEWSLETTER ā€¢ 703 implied HN points ā€¢ 05 Feb 26
šŸ”¬ Science Demography
  1. If you measure lifespan heritability in a simulated world with no nonā€‘aging deaths (accidents, murder, overdoses, infectious disease), the apparent heritability rises to roughly 46ā€“57%, about 50%.
  2. Heritability is an observational ratio that depends on societal and environmental factors, so lowering extrinsic mortality naturally increases the fraction of lifespan variation attributed to genetics.
  3. The simulation is a useful exercise and matches historical twin estimates, but its strong assumptions and vague reporting mean the ~50% figure shouldnā€™t be taken as the true modern heritability; a more cautious read of the results suggests something closer to 35ā€“45% (around 40%).

The Other Type of Flynn Effect

Cremieux Recueil ā€¢ 235 implied HN points ā€¢ 23 Feb 26
šŸ”¬ Science Demography
  1. Many reported Flynn and anti-Flynn effects are driven by measurement biasā€”tests change meaning across cohorts and norms get obsoleteā€”so gains often reflect test-taking sophistication more than real changes in general ability.
  2. Some apparent cohort trends are actually sampling or compositional artifacts, for example later-born children tending to have more advantaged parents, and those apparent gains or losses often disappear in within-family (sibling) comparisons.
  3. Robust conclusions require checking measurement invariance, using within-family designs, and guarding against collinearity and low power; when those methods are applied, large population IQ shifts usually shrink or vanish.
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Top Links 991 How TSMC makes money. Japan's demography. Highways to Hitler. Debating Zbig.

Chartbook ā€¢ 586 implied HN points ā€¢ 23 Jan 26
šŸŒ International Demography
  1. The collection explains how Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) makes money and what that means for global chip supply chains.
  2. It examines Japan's demographic challenges, highlighting population decline and the economic and social consequences.
  3. It revisits contested historical and geopolitical topics, like the role of highways in Nazi Germany and debates around the Cold War figure known as 'Zbig', showing how infrastructure and personalities shape history.

Nobody knows how to stop humanity from shrinking

Noahpinion ā€¢ 26647 implied HN points ā€¢ 22 Nov 24
šŸ‡ŗšŸ‡ø U.S. Politics Demography
  1. Humanity faces a big problem with declining population and aging, which is not getting enough attention. As birth rates drop, we risk having fewer young people to support our growing older population.
  2. The U.S. now relies heavily on immigration to maintain its population. Many other parts of the world are experiencing the same low birth rate trends, making future immigration uncertain.
  3. Fertility rates are continuously declining globally, and no one knows how to stop this trend. A smaller, older population could threaten the quality of life and economic stability.

The changing (and perhaps surprising) geography of diabetes

Sustainability by numbers ā€¢ 427 implied HN points ā€¢ 02 Feb 26
šŸ„ Health & Wellness Demography
  1. Diabetes is rising much faster in South Asia, parts of Africa, the Middle East and some Pacific islands than in Europe or North America, with countries like Pakistan showing some of the highest ageā€‘standardised rates.
  2. Rising overweight and obesity ā€” even where undernutrition still exists ā€” is the main modifiable driver of type II diabetes, and these increases have been rapid in many lowā€‘ and middleā€‘income countries.
  3. Certain ethnic groups, especially South Asians, develop diabetes at lower BMIs because they tend to carry more visceral fat. That means modest weight gain leads to much higher risk, and many cases stay undiagnosed or untreated as health systems struggle to keep up.

How To Increase the Total Fertility Rate

David Friedmanā€™s Substack ā€¢ 287 implied HN points ā€¢ 03 Feb 26
šŸŒ World Politics Demography
  1. Fertility rates in developed countries are well below replacement largely because peopleā€”especially womenā€”are marrying and having children much later, which shortens the years when they can easily have kids.
  2. Three main explanations are mating-market dynamics, career priorities that delay childbearing, and rising pessimism about the future. Each explanation implies different fixes, from shifting social norms to policies that make parenting and careers compatible to efforts that improve how people view the future.
  3. If low fertility continues, populations may shrink unless offset by immigration, automation, or medical advances, and highā€‘fertility subgroups could come to dominate demographically, producing longā€‘term cultural or biological shifts.

Meaning, machines, and the void

antoniomelonio ā€¢ 95 implied HN points ā€¢ 25 Feb 26
šŸŽ­ļø Culture Demography
  1. Our civilization is great at making things but lousy at creating purpose, and AI doesnā€™t create that emptiness ā€” it simply exposes it.
  2. AI is a force multiplier: it boosts genuine skill and craft, and at the same time it reveals lives run by performed competence and an 'inner foreman' of self-exploitation.
  3. If pointless jobs dissolve, people could gain unowned time to rebuild family, neighborhood, and meaning, but purpose canā€™t be bought or policy-hacked ā€” it grows through attention, presence, and choosing what matters.

Fertility Goes Up When Men Win

Cremieux Recueil ā€¢ 694 implied HN points ā€¢ 21 Dec 25
šŸ„ Health Politics Demography
  1. When men gain income or individually controlled money, households tend to have more children, while when women get the same transfers, completed fertility often fallsā€”likely because shifts in who controls resources change household bargaining.
  2. This male-bias effect appears across many settingsā€”reparations, lottery wins, resource booms, and sex-ratio shiftsā€”and seems driven by higher male marriage rates and greater marital stability when menā€™s prospects improve.
  3. For fertility policy, that means who receives support matters: boosting menā€™s economic prospects or using child-contingent designs can raise births, but explicitly favoring men is politically unacceptable, so policies must instead shape incentives and bargaining in neutral, fair ways.

Censored by Britain

Wrong Side of History ā€¢ 512 implied HN points ā€¢ 15 Dec 25
šŸŽ­ļø Culture Demography
  1. The Online Safety Act and similar rules are making platforms restrict content and add age checks, which risks silencing writers and breaking the link between creators and readers.
  2. Rapid demographic change and mass immigration are reshaping Britain and Europe, changing politics and social cohesion. Current policies to expand legal migration risk fueling political backlash and security worries.
  3. Cultural institutions and habits are weakeningā€”fewer people study or read English literature and trust traditional media is falling. At the same time, citizen archivists are uncovering neglected histories and social problems that mainstream outlets often miss.

Econ 210a :: Why the Agrarian Age Stayed Poor: Just What Was the Long-Run Trap Anyway?

Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality ā€¢ 92 implied HN points ā€¢ 11 Feb 26
šŸ’¾ History Demography
  1. For most of the agrarian age, technological progress was extremely slow and often fragile, so living standards stayed low and forward steps could vanish during collapses.
  2. Measuring the stock of technology is hard, but one useful idea is that idea-value grows with output per person plus part of population growth, and true wealth should account for variety and longer lifespans.
  3. From about 1600 onward growth rates rose sharply in stages (commercial, industrial, modern), producing a massive, qualitative gulf between preindustrial poverty and todayā€™s high material abundance.

šŸ›‘šŸš¼ The end of (demographic) history

Faster, Please! ā€¢ 548 implied HN points ā€¢ 14 Dec 25
šŸ”¬ Science Demography
  1. The global fertility transition seems to have largely finished, so the classic story of steadily falling birth rates is no longer the clear master narrative.
  2. Even with that shift, the demographic future is uncertain ā€” demographers donā€™t know exactly how birth rates, aging, and migration will evolve next.
  3. That uncertainty has big policy and economic implications, because different population paths lead to very different outcomes for growth, labor markets, and public finances.

Pre-Class Assignment for Tuesday: 2026-01-27 :: Econ 196 :: Productivity & Technology

Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality ā€¢ 69 implied HN points ā€¢ 10 Feb 26
šŸšŒ Education Demography
  1. The demographic transition radically changed population trajectories: a small change in long-run growth rates produces huge differences in population over centuries, so modern population levels are far higher than they would have been under the old growth regime.
  2. Using capability-specific measuresā€”like photons or lumen-hours for lightingā€”shows that technological improvements have raised practical living standards far more than conventional real-output or real-wage measures imply.
  3. Measuring prosperity requires both these capability-based metrics and attention to distribution, environment, and nonmarket welfare, and hands-on quantitative exercises (e.g., Python arithmetic) are a powerful way to teach what technology and growth actually mean.

HOISTED FROM THE ARCHIVES: Yes: Pre-Modern Economies Were Meaningfully "Malthusian" (Which Does Not Mean Incomes Were Stable)

Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality ā€¢ 76 implied HN points ā€¢ 04 Feb 26
šŸ’¾ History Demography
  1. Pre-modern economies were essentially Malthusian: slow technological gains could raise living standards only temporarily because higher incomes typically led to faster population growth that eventually offset those gains.
  2. Random shocks and long-run eventsā€”like plagues, good harvests, trade booms, or imperial peaceā€”can produce centuries-long rises, falls, and plateaus in incomes and urbanization even inside a Malthusian system.
  3. Cultural and institutional factors (luxury tastes, marriage customs, infanticide, larger trade zones) can raise average incomes and create long "supercycles," but they do not by themselves produce sustained, compounding livingā€‘standard growth for the broad population.

"The Global Fertility Crisis is Worse than You Think"

The Honest Broker Newsletter ā€¢ 2159 implied HN points ā€¢ 13 Jun 25
šŸ‡ŗšŸ‡ø U.S. Politics Demography
  1. Fertility rates are dropping globally, and it's happening faster than expected. This decline is seen in both wealthy and poorer countries.
  2. Many countries' fertility rates have fallen below the replacement rate required to sustain their populations. This means that if it continues, the world's population will eventually shrink drastically.
  3. Experts are concerned that the global fertility crisis could lead to significant economic and social issues in the future, making it a serious issue that might need international attention.

A Problem of Prophesy

David Friedmanā€™s Substack ā€¢ 260 implied HN points ā€¢ 20 Dec 25
šŸ”¬ Science Demography
  1. Total fertility rate (TFR) is a snapshot-based prediction that can underestimate the number of children women will actually have if they postpone births, while completed fertility rate (CFR) is what determines population change.
  2. There is a biological limit to how late people can have children, so shifting births to older ages can only go so far, though advances in reproductive technology could change that limit.
  3. Life expectancy at birth (an estimated measure) is also a prophecy and can fall during temporary mortality shocks even though completed life expectancy will likely be higher if mortality rates continue to decline.

WEEK 2: Malthusian Economics :: Graduate Economic History :: Spring 2026 :: Econ 210a

Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality ā€¢ 76 implied HN points ā€¢ 22 Jan 26
šŸ’¾ History Demography
  1. It took tens of thousands of years for humanity to move from small bands of foragers to hundreds of millions of farmers and then to billions of postā€‘industrial people.
  2. During the long Malthusian agrarian era (roughly -5000 to 1500), technological gains mostly increased population rather than improving most peopleā€™s lives, leaving life nasty, brutish, and short for the majority.
  3. The shift from hunting and gathering to farming often produced worse biological living standardsā€”people tended to become shorter, sicker, and more unequal under early agriculture.

šŸ‘¶šŸ“‰ 3 long-shot ways to solve the global baby bust

Faster, Please! ā€¢ 1096 implied HN points ā€¢ 25 Jun 25
šŸ‡ŗšŸ‡ø U.S. Politics Demography
  1. Governments can't just pay people to have babies. Cultural views on family size have changed, making it hard to encourage larger families this way.
  2. A shrinking workforce doesn't mean a bad economy. In Japan, fewer workers have led to higher wages and better productivity, showing there can be benefits.
  3. For future generations, three ideas could spark more births: a revival of religious communities that encourage larger families, AI making family life easier, and the excitement of space exploration that needs more people.

We need to think about Africa

Wood From Eden ā€¢ 1728 implied HN points ā€¢ 24 Jan 25
šŸŒ World Politics Demography
  1. Africa's population is growing quickly and will represent a large part of the world in the future. It's important for the rest of the world to pay attention to this change.
  2. Ignoring Africa's potential problems could lead to bigger issues later on. We may need to think about ways to help cope with possible crises.
  3. Instead of only debating about challenges in Africa, we should start thinking of solutions now. Preparing early can help everyone in the future.

Tuesday Economic Growth Blogging: The Preā€‘Modern Treadmill Was Real on Necessities, Not on Technology, or Luxuries, or Culture, or Means of Domination

Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality ā€¢ 146 implied HN points ā€¢ 20 Nov 25
šŸ’¾ History Demography
  1. For necessities and conveniences that affect reproductive fitness, average living standards stayed near subsistence from about 3000 BCE until the 19th century, leaving people nutritionally stressed and population growth very low.
  2. The Malthusian treadmill applied to necessities and reproductive outcomes, but it didnā€™t necessarily constrain luxuries, culture, or the technologies and institutions of domination, which follow different dynamics and matter for overall welfare.
  3. Human technological capacity for producing necessities rose a lot long before living standards visibly improved, so technology expanded steadily even while material wellbeing stayed near subsistence until the Industrial Revolution.

On Marriage

Who is Robert Malone ā€¢ 19 implied HN points ā€¢ 07 Feb 26
šŸŽ­ļø Culture Demography
  1. Strong marriages, extended families, and close communities are the foundation of a stable society because they share childcare, financial help, and emotional support that reduce isolation and burnout for young parents.
  2. Falling fertility is driven by cultural choices, economic pressures, and the timing of childbearing; earlier marriages and births create population momentum that increases population even without larger family sizes, while societies can also adapt to low growth by boosting productivity and redesigning social systems.
  3. Teach character and commitment over fleeting chemistry, protect children from harmful influences, and normalize family involvement and mediation so marriages become more resilient and long-lasting.

Considerations on Cultural Drift

Nothing Human ā€¢ 20 implied HN points ā€¢ 21 Jan 26
šŸŽ­ļø Culture Demography
  1. Cultural evolution is malfunctioning: extreme monoculture, rapid elite-driven change, and weaker selection pressures are letting maladaptive norms spread. This undermines the adaptive processes that built modern civilization and risks long-term social decline.
  2. Itā€™s unclear that population decline will automatically stop innovation; the economic models that predict collapse are uncertain and contested. Institutions, digitized knowledge, AI, and reforms in how we do science could sustain or even boost innovation despite fewer people.
  3. Most obvious fixes are politically or morally blocked, so easy paths like subsidizing niche cultures, state cultural engineering, or privatizing long-term capital look impractical. Addressing cultural drift will likely require bold, unconventional governance or social experiments to restore deep cultural variety.