The Economics of Falling Populations
economist.com
economist.com
The "too few ideas" claim is also weird. For you to contribute some ideas to the global economy, at the very least you need some access to capital, that currently most of the world doesn't have. Having good education and some freedom from spending all time and all your energy just to survive on subsistence level also helps. In production of ideas, lifting people everywhere to the Western middle class standard of living and mindset is far more important than raw population count. This would probably require bringing industrial labor wages to a more realistic level everywhere, also in poorer countries.
The whole system of relying on cheap labor in developing countries would have to change somewhat with decelerating population. The stuff in the West would be more expensive, although maybe with fewer workers wages couldn't be so stagnant. The model of buying materials and labor cheap somewhere and selling stuff highish to Western population would be harder to sustain, making many businesses less viable. Maybe this is especially scary for people that are heavily into capital.
This is my personal take and it's somewhat related to the post-Black Death phenomena in Europe that the article mentions. There's also "The Great Demographic Reversal" book where the authors apparently also predict rising inflation and take into account aging of the population (I've only watched an interview with one of the authors).
I don't think so. Lots of stuff we consume in the west is made in China. Chinese wages have gone up like crazy in the last few decades. (Not that they are particularly high now, they just used to be sooo low.) Yet, stuff hasn't gotten more expensive for us.
The causality runs the other way:
Wages go up when productivity goes up. Productivity going up in China means they can make more with less work.
So if anything, the proportion of the price in our cheap imported stuff that goes towards labour costs tends to fall as Chinese labour gets more productive.
That's because of several factors -
1. China has a massive massive population and the majority is still relatively poor. This is still lots of untapped labour available at low cost.
2. The skilled workers that have been trained in the past 3 decades is allowing China to move up in the value chain. They are capturing more of the profits because of this. Look at how many Chinese tech brands establishing significant presence in western markets. They are able to offer lower prices as they are mostly vertically integrated and labour costs of even the skilled positions are generally lower in China (where they centralise a lot of their functions) compared to the west.
3. And at the same time, countries with even cheaper labour are competing with Chinese producers on the low end. You see this particularly with things like clothes and shoes which are labour intensive but relatively low tech.
Of course, there has been some government intervention on all sides, but companies are also willing to pay a bit of a premium to secure a second supplier.
Well, at low cost compared to western labour, but at high cost compared to recent Chinese past.
(We would need to introduce some actual numbers in the discussion to say anything more precise.)
> They are capturing more of the profits because of this.
Just to clarify: things are still becoming cheaper for consumers around the world.
Overall the pie has grown. China might be getting relatively more of the pie, but the rest of the world also got more in absolute terms.
> 3. And at the same time, countries with even cheaper labour are competing with Chinese producers on the low end. You see this particularly with things like clothes and shoes which are labour intensive but relatively low tech.
Yes. But yet, Chinese wages are going up.
1. Prices of goods and price of labour do not correlate. As in decrease/increase in wages do not lead to a change in price of goods. That feels counterintuitive, yet if examined closely you see that price of something is always at the point of maximum profit. So increase in price will lead to less sales and less profit regardless of labour cost.
To give you an example - you run a SaaS business with annual $100 price for your most popular plan. You have profits enough to pay you and a couple of developers a salary. Your competitor has similar offering with the same price. Your developers demand a pay increase of 15% - which will put you at a loss. What options are for you without magically getting more market share, getting outside investment etc:
A. Cave-in to the wage increase and operate at a loss. B. Increase price of your most popular plan which would lead to less profit and you will have to operate at even greater loss. C. Somehow fire developers and find new ones.
This leads to the conclusion that wages and profit margins have inverse causal relationship. Price of goods is determined by supply/demand and non-market forces (regulation etc).
2. Price of labour has no causal relationship with productivity. Price of labour does not have any specific market differences from any other commodity. If the demand for labour is high and supply is low (think software developers) and no monopsony (one buyer market) then the price will go up. I live in Eastern Europe which became a major outsourcing hub in last 15 years or so. Salaries for devs have gone up at least 1000% (number of zeroes is correct) compared to time before outsourcing boom.
If there is a monopsony - there is no competition for labour only one company hires people - then the wage would be as low as it can get regardless of productivity. Big employers like Amazon and Walmart can perform crazy fits of neo-taylorism without any kind of wage increase - because they can.
If supply of labour increases - then wages will fall, regardless of productivity. The whole reason behind offshoring, outsourcing.
3. Why wages can rise in China:
A. A lot of what they do right now demands a higher-skilled workforce which is not in abundance. Low in supply != high productivity.
B. China is not only a big factory that supplies goods for the West. As profits are invested into institutions - new opportunities appear. Chinese goods were seen as cheap copies 30 years ago, now it is often price/quality competitive products such Oneplus phones, some of the Chinese cars or even market leaders such as DJI drones and gimbals. All of that requires skilled engineers, designers, marketing people.
C. Non-market forces. CCP can pressure business owners to pay better wages or to better comply to labour standards. I'm not sure if that's happening to be honest but that's possible.
As a sidenote: If you want to know more about the disconnect between wages and productivity you can read David Ricardo's magnum opus On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation from 1817, it is not an easy read yet I think in many ways it yet be refuted (in good faith).
People are always up for more money. The question is, I guess, what they would be doing different if they got that raise or not. (Ie stay on or quit, or join one vs another company etc.)
The real question is how the business can mitigate rising salary (and lowering of margins) and whether there is relation between labour cost and price of goods.
All businesses in the market raise their prices, except one, which keeps operating at a lower margin. It is easy to see what would happen next - the company that didn't raise prices makes much more than before and all competitors suffer losses.
What if businesses collaborate to raise prices all at once? That would be price fixing which is illegal.
So margins tend to become lower and lower over time. That leads to a very important problem - Tendency of the rate of profit to fall [0]
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_profit...
Even just taking your example, Walmart is competition for Amazon for unskilled labour.
But you are right that in order to get a tight connection between productivity and labour, there needs to be competition in the labour market. (Actual competition is best, but even the threat of potential competition is better than nothing.)
Regarding Amazon and Walmart Even though it might be not a real monopsony in literal sense, it could be an effective monopsony where Amazon and Walmart pay what they want essentially (due to the big difference in bargaining power between employees and employers). I'm not in US so it is not so easy for me to get context fully - but is there a scarcity in low-skilled labour? I thought that precisely that there is a lot of people who decide between shitty job and homelessness there is no real competition there.
My whole point is that looking at labour as a commodity which is being sold and bought on the market gives a much clearer view on issues like unions, anti-trust, monopoly.
The link between wages and productivity goes via competition:
Eg assume your labour can make one employer x $/h (after taxes and equipment, cost of capital etc), and some other employer y $/h. Assume x > y, then the first employer better bid at least y $/h for your services, otherwise the other guy can make a profit by poaching you.
> Also there is political implication of looking at people who are poorly paid and saying something like "They should increase their skill-level to get out of poverty" which I think misses the mark totally.
Well, if anything, the truth is often politically inconvenient.
Alas, the problem is that many people can't _just_ increase their productivity like that.
(But as a society, we could try to help them. In general, on the level of a society, no matter how you arrange economics, even in a socialist paradise: productivity is king. Society as a whole can not consume more in the long run than they produce as a whole.)
> Regarding Amazon and Walmart Even though it might be not a real monopsony in literal sense, it could be an effective monopsony where Amazon and Walmart pay what they want essentially (due to the big difference in bargaining power between employees and employers).
I have no clue what this bargaining power is supposed to be?
Amazon is competing with Walmart is competing with McDonalds is competing with Uber etc for low skilled labour. No need to bring any nebulous 'bargaining power' into the discussion?
> I thought that precisely that there is a lot of people who decide between shitty job and homelessness there is no real competition there.
The decision is between multiple shitty jobs.
(Compared to what our descendants in a 100 years will expect, all our jobs are shitty. Compared to what was available a 100 years ago for our ancestors, almost all our jobs and perks are crazy awesome: people working at Walmart can afford smart phones.)
> My whole point is that looking at labour as a commodity which is being sold and bought on the market gives a much clearer view on issues like unions, anti-trust, monopoly.
Well, you are sort-of right. This perspective is enlightening.
Unions trying to monopolize labour is a bit of a problem, yes.
Anti-trust legislation is mostly used by entities who can afford expensive lawyers to keep the pesky competition at bay.
Monopsony ain't much of a problem in the market for low skilled labour in the US, especially for people willing to move. (And for monopsony not to be a problem we only need enough people being willing to move, not everyone. The margin matters.)
And yet, raw population count is crucial in "lifting people" to higher standards of living. It's about how dynamic an economy is, which is about momentum. An aging population is just not as dynamic...
The decline in population in the west wont see the same wealth shared by fewer people, but less wealth produced, a shrinking economy, and more and fiercer fights for the smaller pie.
To make this happen we will also need, obviously, technology advances and organizational innovation. But to get more people for doing that, I would rely more on taking knowledge people out from industries becoming less profitable (a normal economic thing; many people would agree that currently smart people are attracted economically to many questionable enterprises) and lifting the developing world (as its population growth is slowing) than, as I said, growing raw population count.
I'm assuming you don't mean that we absolutely need a pool of people willing to work for any wage due to fear of extreme poverty. I have a sneaking suspicion that this point might hide under the "we need more people for more ideas" argument in the article. But the reality shows that we don't need such a poverty pool for agriculture for a long time now (looking at the Western agricultural productivity) and we probably don't really need it for industrial production either. This is due to technological advances letting us produce more with less people.
I don't think that's necessarily an obvious outcome. Right now cheap labor is taking away incentives to automate. Some things can't be automated economically, but given broad incentives across industry there will be a reorienting towards automation. For instance mobile phones components would be designed to be assembled without human intervention.
Of course creating the automation requires labor but much less and it is more one-off.
We already know - with total certainty - the maximum number of 80-year-olds who will be alive in the year 2100. They’ve all already been born.
No surprise women forced to have children by religious and/or societal pressure have more children. Therefore in the long run societies with less freedom out compete more free societies.
What we really need is an ability to decouple having children from the physical cost it can have on female body. It would be a great achievement if technology could resolve this issue.
How do you solve that when society is built around "getting a degree, get a job" first and then think about the children.
Speaking for my country, the State always has money for everything that is redundant but there's never money for the basics such affordable housing programs for young couples or kindergardens and all similar institutions to help parents.
In Soviet sphere of influence in Europe there was sudden drop in fertility rate after fall of communism. The fall of communism meant that we went from empty shops and lack of opportunities to full shops and plenty of opportunities. So exact opposite happened to what you predict.
Additionally, recently e.g. Polish government introduced very generous child support in a program known as 500+. There is no noticeable change in fertility rate.
IMO the biggest reason why women decide to not have children is the perceived opportunity cost. Loosing on studies, career and freedom of being young. Communist countries did not provide young women with opportunities and did not demand high competitiveness, so perceived opportunity cost of having children was a lot lower.
1. Actually the fertility rate was falling quietly but steadily alongside the rise of urbanization.
2. In many countries such as Ukraine the production of consumer goods has fallen in the 90's yet there were no deficit (empty shops) due to even greater loss of purchasing power. Basically in Soviet times they had more cash but goods production was lacking and after that situation reversed. Shock doctrine - liberalization of markets - pushed most of the people into poverty.
From what I've read about Poland - shock doctrine also contributed negatively to socioeconomic factors (at least initially). There was a decrease in GDP in 1990 of 7 percent and the same decrease -7% in 1991. So drop in fertility wouldn't be that sudden after all.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...
Economic crash in Poland, Czechia or Hungry was nowhere near to what was happening in Ukraine and Russia [0].
Also, after crash in 1990 Polish GDP was growing each year until 2020, but fertility rates keep on dropping until 2004. Then they stabilized below replacement rate.
GDP can not explain changes in fertility rate. There were cultural changes happening that had bigger impact.
[0] https://n-22-3.dcs.redcdn.pl/file/o2/tvn/web-content/m/orig/...
In fact the expectation was the both parents would be working and the child would be in childcare or kindergarten. Which of course put a lot of pressure on women due to reality of being a housewife and a full-time working woman at the same time.
There was also a lot of collective pressure - if you do not have a child by certain age you would be considered a failure, which is hard to attribute to communism per se but to certain backwardness and lack of education.
But I still think that big difference in fertility is the change from peasant family with 5-8 children to the urban family of 1-2.
No, it actually proves me right. The increase in job opportunities, which women definitely took advantage of, and adoption of modern western lifestyle is what made the birth rates plummet.
Since you mentioned former Soviet Union countries, Hungary implemented [1] new measures to give the people the necessary conditions to have kids. All the news articles I can find are from 2019, so it will take a while until we can decide if they had success or not:
Agree. And not women only, males too. While a woman can decide to have a child completely on her own, it's most of the times a decision shared between parents. You need to take a multi-decades commitment that changes completely your life, permanently ties it with that at least two other people, and enormously reduces your space of freedom. It just doesn't make much sense.
Before having kids people want a family structure and to be able to provide for a child's needs. Those two things are intertwined. At the same time if you have those things by the time your fifty you don't have kids because you're fifty - and honestly you're either thinking about retirement or death, not kids.
So for most people who aren't prodigies of one sort or another there's a windows from 30 to 40'ish where if they set things up straight kid or kids seem realistic. If you had to tack on the price of an artificial womb I think the window would get marginally smaller not larger.
>Before having kids people want a family structure and to be able to provide for a child's needs. Those two things are intertwined. At the same time if you have those things by the time your fifty you don't have kids because you're fifty - and honestly you're either thinking about retirement or death, not kids.
I completely disagree. People in their 50s thinking about their retirement or death? In my country retirement age (for men) is 65. Being fifty is very far from retirement for many people.
>So for most people who aren't prodigies of one sort or another there's a windows from 30 to 40'ish where if they set things up straight kid or kids seem realistic.
This 30 to 40 age bracket you chose is also where many women experience physical issues due to having children. My sister had her first kid at 32. Now years later she is still dealing with health issues as a result.
I think the best age when most people are not just economically, but mentally prepared for having children is 30-50. For women in their late 30s and 40s the health risks start to outweigh the benefits of having a child.
>If you had to tack on the price of an artificial womb I think the window would get marginally smaller not larger.
Who says you wouldn't have people choosing to have children the traditional way? I bet an artificial womb would mean large number of people in their 40s and 50s would decide to have children. If the cost was for example comparable to a cost of a new mid range car many people in that age group could afford it.
A lot of problems would be solved 'automatically' if the world population would be reduced.
The idea that the worlds population is a problem is in my world an antihuman stance which keeps popping up even tough it keeps being proven wrong. Wether Maltahus, Erlich or the UN.
Ok, I will stay in my pragmatically driven (being in favor of endless population growth is just another ideology, being in favor of neither is pragmatism), non population exploding enclave and become rich in the process. I'll be looking forward to seeing Africa mass produce poor people.
Your ideology requires technological progress to always be faster than human population growth, sure you can keep this up another 300 years but at some point you are going to trip.
Humans create resources we don't just find them. 300 years from now we are either harvesting the universe or we are just sitting ducks waiting for some giant cataclysmic event. At least my "ideology" gives us a chance where as yours just wait for us to join natures 99.9% extinction rate.
That's for different historical reasons than their booming populations. They are still very dynamic economic wise, but have to start from a very low bar.
But any country that was ever important had tons of people. Franch and UK and Germany were hugely important globally when they were among the top-5 most populous countries in the world (that was the case back in 19th century). Then the US took that role, and had a good run.
I think we'll cope pretty well with a small drop-off, especially if that's coupled with much of the world getting better prospects at the same time.
You are correct that what matters is mostly the population living in soceities organized well enough for their inhabitants to have better prospects. But sadly becoming a country with "better prospects" is not a simple thing.
In fact, population decreasing in rich western countries, has a rather deleterious effect on the poor countries. I being from a third world country see everyday how people who could help to fix my country end up emigrating because rich countries need more people.
So it's not at all clear whether much of the world getting better prospects will compensate for population decreasing, or much of the world will get worse prospects because of population decreasing.
I hear this a lot, in the context of, we must keep growing the global population on the off chance that someone may be born who comes up with a way to live on an over-populated, polluted, resource-depleted planet. It's nonsense.
As for resource depletion, 3.5 vs 7 billion people doesn't make that much difference, both are more than earth can support naturally without us constantly finding new ways to obtain resources.
After all the largest extinctions we have caused so far were megafauna extinctions 10k years ago and we managed to do that with just a few millions of people.
Standards of living globally are better than at any time in the past, yet in spite of the continued failed predictions of disaster people have been making for the past couple hundred years, people still persist in making such predictions. Willfully ignoring humanity's ability to adapt and overcome, that's the real nonsense.
You have to free people from drudgery and spend tons on their education, and provide them with a stable environment in which to work, and cultural encouragement for the parents to nourish children's curiosity.
Only then can you hope to generate ideas that surpass our already quite formidable body of knowledge, and it's still not guaranteed.
> yet in spite of the continued failed predictions of disaster people have been making for the past couple hundred years, people still persist in making such predictions.
They only have to be right once. On a geological time scale, a disaster is certainly inevitable. Not that I necessarily agree with doomsaying all the time. Population growth isn't the biggest issue we're facing.
We are the one species that might just have a chance if we don't succumb to the dystopian pessimist view that is a much bigger risk than anything else.
Resources is something we invent and use not something we deplete. We use these resources to make the world even safer, richers, to pull more people out of poverty all based on producing things of value that humans appreciate.
You are more than welcome to not use the computer you are likely to be using for writing your comments.
But you won't because it's valuable to you, more valuable than the "depletion" of the resources that was used to make it.
So now take you and multiply by 7 billion people and you will see why we are choosing to keep creating and coming up with new resources.
Rainforests are marine biomass and ozone and ice caps are things we invent and not deplete?
How do you think we were able feed the amount of people we are doing today if it wasn't for our ability to transform things like dead animal goo into energy to power our machines which then again provide wealth which gives us time to do other things.
If you are big and successful, new ideas are the poison.The only vector for new idea implementations to make it big, is other behemoths want to eat old behemoths. Apple/Android eating Kodak.
The individual does rarely factor into that. Unless s/he knows how to move giants into funny game constellations. Which becomes ever less likely, as most giants today are owned by pension funds, who prefer stability over change.
Contrary what the propaganda tells us, nobody wants ideas, nobody wants change, not even those trying to emulate market capitalism to prevent political backlash. Which makes ideas worse then worthless. Its something the "No-Future"-coporate-cartel will come down upon you for.
The individuals DO factor into that but it require a framework the individuals best suited for solving these problems can work within which allow them to spend the time needed to create the knowledge to solve the problems which requires wealth which require growth i.e. requires society (i.e. us)
Progress takes many people working together to shape ideas and build things.
And an aging society would be less inclined to change and adopt it, run by more older people resistant to some new idea, and have less young people with the dynamism to put such idea in action even if it was adopted.
Theoritically. In practice they're more concerned with their own mortality, and weighing the merits of some new diet or therapy for hemmorhoids or some such...
Deflation: if there is less demand for a product, then the price will fall. Expecting prices to fall, people hold off buying anything as long as possible.
Investment risk: With population rising at 1% per year, it doubles in 70 years. This inevitable increase in demand for products reduces the risk of investment: if a town has 1 shoe shop now, it will need 2 shoe shops in 70 years. This underlying increase in demand reduces the risk of investment in new productive assets, and also makes debt repayment easier (future income will be greater than today's).
Following the same logic, with falling population financiers will demand higher interest rates on new investment to compensate for the increased risk, and debt will have to be repaid from shrinking income.
Contrary to the article, falling investment, rather than lack of ideas, will be the major mechanism by which productivity growth stalls with falling population.
There will still be lots of ideas, but they will each have to jump a much higher investment hurdle to be realised. So we'll limp along with minimally maintained, decrepit old capital equipment and systems.
Eventually, as firms go out of business. The trend arises from the difference between "break even" and "shut down" prices, and consequent delays in the feedback: it takes some years for producer firms to be removed from the market.
If prices fall for long enough, the idea of falling prices becomes entrenched in households' planning, making everything worse still.
I personally waited 6 years before I upgraded to a Ryzen CPU.
>Who is going to keep producing if you can’t make a profit?
Those who have to repay their debts.
What the Fed is doing right now isn't fighting deflation though, it's fighting something with the symptoms of deflation. A savings glut is very similar to deflation.
Deflation means your money is gaining purchasing power and therefore people start saving money instead of spending.
Retirement forces you to save money, no matter what, instead of spending it. Low yields/interest rates actually create pressure to save even more, which chokes the economy. If you don't spend money and keep investing then you will reach a point where you did every investment possible, because the lack of spending also eliminates further investments to be made. The excess capital is poured into existing investments like stocks and housing which causes a bubble to form. If there is a lack of due diligence (think of 2008 or over leveraged borrowers in general) and someone discovers that, then the bubble will pop.
The dumb part is that there are a lot of investments to be done in real estate but nobody is building to satisfy investor demand.
That's not to discount policies that make it easier for families to have children. Those are clearly valuable.
They come at it from different angles, but agree that (large) social networks are crucial for the generation and execution of ideas.
It will be a rather different population, likely more religious and more conservative, considering that many of the subcultures with higher birth rates are conservative religious subcultures – and, the more conservative and religious a group is, the higher their birth rate tends to be. A society dominated by religious conservatives may produce a slower rate of technological innovation as much as one with a more secular but declining population does. On the other hand, there will always be defections – even highly insular groups such as Old Order Amish and ultra-Orthodox Jews can still have a 5-20% defection rate, and with less insular groups the defection rate tends to be higher – and those defections will help replenish the secular component of the population.
Another factor to note, is that many wealthy countries are avoiding population decline through immigration. That won't change the global population trends, but may redistribute the downsides of population decline towards poorer countries. Given most innovation happens in wealthy countries and relatively little in poorer countries even at present, that may delay for longer any negative impact on technological innovation from declining population.
I find it to be pretty convincing. People tend to create projections of the future based on the current world, which is of course quite limited. Very rarely do we consider the actual cultural background of the “people of the future.”
I don't have a good argument to defend this, because there's no way I could predict how civilization, technology, etc. could advance if we had 8 million people instead of 8 billion. But intuitively I just don't see it being much different.
> a recent paper inspired by their book, by Charles Jones, an economist at Stanford University, argues that over the long run any positive economic effects that come from a shrinking population may be cancelled out by the reduction in humankind’s creative capacity. If ideas drive growth and people are the source of ideas, he writes, then the fate of our species depends crucially on long-run population trends
We have more creatives than we can already handle, more talented PhD scientists, researchers and engineers than a dozen Earths can afford to fund. In the face of relentless environmental degradation, greenhouse pollution and a scientific consensus that our planets sixth great extinction event occurring right now is solely caused by humans, how can anyone make statements like this with a straight face?
Energy and resource exploitation is rising rapidly in the developing world, were they to consume as much per person as the West overnight the planet would be ruined very quickly.
We will deplete all resource and cause irreparable damage in all possible scenarios. I think that much is clear. I hope we are technologically mature enough to be able to artificially evolve until that happens. That’s our best bet.
There are only certain things like oil that are not renewable but even the plastics and petroleum based products have plant based alternative versions, they are simply more expensive to produce at this time.
I worry about conservation of natural habitats. But that is a bigger problem in developing countries than currently in the West.
That'a because the west destroyed all the big animal habitats centuries ago. Did you know there used to be lions in europe?
Food relies on soil, a resource that we are depleting between 10x to 40x the replacement rate. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-...
From the device you are typing on, to the palm oil in most of your food, to the clothes you wear, I find it hard to believe that deep down people aren't even slightly aware of what that makes their lives "quite liveable in 2021" is built entirely on back of rampant environmental destruction elsewhere.
Would you really argue a bunch of kids dying of cancer from rare earth mining in someone else's backyard to make an iPhone is not the Western end-consumers fault when they know it is happening?
This externalisation and blame-shifting is not something to boast out loud, it's cringeworthy and embarrassing to read, I hope you revisit it in a few decades.
> Conservation is properly funded.
The extinction rate across the developed world is accelerating[1]. In some US states it's doubled in a few decades. A Harvard biologist estimates around 3 species an hour go extinct.[2]
Humans annually absorb 42 percent of the Earth’s terrestrial net primary productivity, 30 percent of its marine net primary productivity and 50 percent of its fresh water[3]
[1] https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/blog/2019/05/natur...
> The Report finds that around 1 million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades, more than ever before in human history.
[2] https://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/population_and_...
> One constant, however, is human population pressure. A study of 114 nations found that human population density predicted with 88-percent accuracy the number of endangered birds and mammals
[3] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/277/5325/494.full
[3] https://sci-hub.se/https://science.sciencemag.org/content/27...
In a few decades China is going "externalise" its environmental destruction elsewhere. Repeat this until there are no places left to destroy and by "to destroy" I don't mean they were destroyed, I mean that people decided that destroying them should be illegal.
From a brutal evolutionary standpoint it doesn't matter how many we fund, what matters is whether the competitive environment produces enough winners to solve the mess we're in.
Totally valid to question whether the current environment is optimal even on those limited terms, though, before we even get started on the ethics of inequality.
That ended when they got into politics.
Alternatively, try and articulate how your own opinion differs, and why your opinion is preferable. That seems as close as we can get to a balanced discussion.