- Hello everybody and this is my first,
Well, my first official attempt
at doing econ via Facebook Live.
And I know that you here are to learn
about economics, and I know
that you are very bright and eager students.
And how do I know that
is because you're watching on a Saturday morning.
That's how much you love econ.
For the first topic I chose,
it's not at all controversial.
It is pro-choice or pro-life,
which is on the right side of history.
So there you go.
Now, let me define here what we're talking about,
"right side of history."
Little back story, I had been teaching econ in China,
I came back, 2015 in the summer,
I found a temp job and I was calling
for a conservative political candidate.
And I got on the phone with somebody,
and somebody said to me, "I won't vote
"for that candidate because it's like the 1950s,"
and she was referring to I think abortion rights,
or something like that, but often we talk
about where's history going,
what should happen in history, things like that.
So what we're actually going to talk about today,
is pro-choice or pro-life, right side of history.
And I want to say, I forgot to say this,
right side of history,
we're going to define that today
as being pro-human because we write the history.
So you can say, "Well, history's very fluid,"
but history is something that man does.
So for purposes of today, we're going to say,
which is on the right side of history
as far as which is going to benefit man.
Alright, so.
First off, we have here is a spectrum.
I drew a little...
It starts at a point and goes out into the future.
Let's think about women, because women are
the most invested in having children
and raising children, and so they're kind of going
to be our determinants of whether
we have more children or less children in the future.
Now, if you're thinking about women,
they do all kinds of things, they don't just,
I'm about to compare women having more children,
or working more, I'm about to compare those two things.
However, women do other things too.
They care for elderly relatives,
they go to movies with their husbands,
all kinds of things.
They're not just either baby-making machines
or people who go to work.
But for purposes of what we're going to explore today,
we need to compare just two items,
so we're gonna  kind of narrow it down.
So, the first choice we have here,
is at this area, we're gonna call that
zero children,  and we're going
to say there's going to be,
let me get the sharp end of that.
This here is going to be more work,
and less children.
Alright?
So we have more work and less children
on this end of the spectrum.
Now, that's not true in every culture,
but most cultures when women have fewer children,
they work more, and when women work more,
they tend to have fewer children.
It's vice versa.
Also, when they have more children,
they tend to make different choices
about what their career should be,
they tend to choose more stable jobs
that are more family friendly,
they tend to pay lower, things like that.
They choose that when they are having more children.
So over here, maybe that should be fewer, I don't know.
Alright, so over here we have
more children, and we're gonna have less working.
Alright, so we have more children, less working.
Just wanted to give you a look of that real quick.
Now, it's a choice they make,
and a woman herself can choose here,
she can choose lots of children, Quiverfull,
she can choose somewhere in the middle.
Most probably choose in the middle.
what we're talking about here is not the individual,
We're talking about society as a whole.
Because you can have many women
choose to stay single and not have any children,
or you can have many children, you can choose yourself,
but as a society, what are we choosing
are we choosing more work and less children for women,
or are we choosing less working and more children.
So,  what actually is happening here.
We normally think of working as earning money.
And earning money often we associate with saving,
and with improving our lives, and stuff like that.
That's true for the individual, but as a society
what we're talking about is this,
as a society, when women are working more,
and having less children, they're producing
for the society today.
They're creating wealth in the society today.
So it's like spending.
When they're having more children,
they're creating wealth for future generations
because their children will grow up and then work later.
And it's a very long process.
If you have your first job,
I think I started working at 16 part time,
it takes 16 years to make a worker
but to be really into your full productivity years,
it takes longer than that, maybe early 20s,
for some of us like in their 30s.
So, when we're thinking about that,
we're thinking there's kind of a trade-off.
In fact, I'm gonna change this so that it says that.
So, we're gonna change it from being women,
to the society, but keep women in mind here
because it's still the same problem,
I'm just re-labeling it for purposes of the society.
So you have this here,
and I'll tell you what, I used to teach in China.
I taught economics in English,
and business English and all that,
and when I'm in front of a live classroom,
it's a lot easier.
I am looking at my rack of books, and CDs,
and I know some people,
I know my mom and dad are there 'cause I told them,
"Hey I'm gonna be online,"
but it's a lot warmer when you have live people there.
I'm feeling like, I don't feel like
I'm talking to anybody, but I'm trying
to get my mind engaged here
It's a different experience.
I've never quite done this this way before
but anyway, we are going to put on here,
we're going to change the spectrum.
So, when women are having fewer children,
that is like they're going to increase
today's societal spending.
Ok, remember working is saving for you,
but for the society you're producing goods
for the society that's going to be used today.
Savings too, you can save money,
build a building that will last for generations
but it's basically spending.
And then you're going to have lower saving.
And again, if you're having children
on the individual level, you are not saving money.
You are doing a great service for society as we'll see,
if you're having more children.
So actually when you're having more children,
you as the individual, you are probably broke.
But you as the society are saving for the future.
Ok, and then the opposite happens here.
When you have less spending,
you're gonna have more saving.
And again, an individual woman
can be anywhere on the spectrum.
Like one might be here, one might be here,
you have a Quiverfull, Evangelical woman here.
You have a Catholic nun here who never had children.
but on average we're gonna end up
somewhere in the middle.
Alright, so let me grab my notes here
to keep me on track.
And I'm glad I made notes because I'm just...
I don't wanna, you know.
So let's go to an extreme example.
Now, little bit of history, and of course
you know I lived in China.
China had a large population to begin with.
China then had a leader named Mao Zedong
And Chairman Mao said,
"We should have more children."
So he told people to have
as many kids as they had,
and on top of the huge population
they had anyway, the increase started even more
because they were like
"oh yeah, he said it's great, let's have a lot of children."
So they had an even worse problem
because he was encouraging the birth of children.
So then Chairman Mao died in 1976.
And they kind of reversed back
from some of his policies.
One of the things they did,
and I believe it was about 1980,
was the One Child Policy.
So when we have the One Child Policy in China
there were some caveats, but basically
for urban couples you could have one child.
And now, as of a couple years ago,
and maybe it's in practice now,
that is now a two child policy
because the population boom is essentially over.
So, Chinese have said,
Now this is not just abortion, this is also birth control,
Chinese have said they have had
400 million pregnancies that were
either prevented or aborted basically.
So they're saying 400 million.
Their population I think is about 1.3 billion.
So their population would have been,
assuming these 400 million had been children
and did not have any children themselves,
their population would have been a lot higher
maybe about 1.7 billion, something like that.
Now what happens when a society does that
We're gonna have to look here.
China actually, if you wanna talk
about the right side of history,
we have to talk about the good and the bad,
And obviously, I'm a very dedicated Christian,
I am pro-life, if you've seen
any of my stuff, you know that.
So you know where I'm going with this.
But to be honest, we have to be honest here,
so the science says this,
When you are a very poor nation,
what's happening is you are stuck,
there's other things.
Nations are poor for a number of reasons.
You can be poor because there's no infrastructure,
Like Zimbabwe.
Zimbabwe makes tobacco, it's one
of their major exports.
I asked my co-worker,  who's from Zimbabwe,
"is that tobacco raw,
"or is it like cigarettes?"
She's like "No, it's all raw."
So they're growing tobacco,
they're selling it to another nation
who's making it into cigarettes, highly profitable.
Tobacco, raw tobacco, not so much.
So there could be lack of infrastructure,
there could be a bad court system,
there could be lack of freedom
to be able to conduct trade and to work.
There's all kinds of reasons, a lot of things.
But one of the factors is this specturm.
Are we going to have more kids?
Are we going to have less kids?
Societies that are poor,
tend to be way too this spectrum.
So, just so we remember, I'm going to say
This more spending, less saving
is fewer children
And over here is more kids.
Just so we keep our head around it.
So, we have fewer kids, more kids.
Now,  of this spectrum, this tends to be richer nations.
And that happens naturally over time,
we'll talk about that.
But more kids, over here,
tends to be where your developing nations are stuck.
So you have places like Nigeria probably,
I'm guessing right now.
A lot of parts of Africa,
Philippines, they're stuck.
They have lots and lots of kids,
and that sounds good.
"Oh, they're investing for the future. "
Yes, problem is, they are saving for the future,
and there's not any spending today.
So when there's no spending today,
you're not investing in things like
the infrastructure, in order
to have a better today and tomorrow.
'cause when you're saving your money
outside of children,
you work, you save some money, it goes to the bank,
the bank is gonna loan the money,
they're gonna build a factory or something.
You're having so much of this,
that part of the problem is
if you can get women to have less children,
it's going to increase your economy.
Because when you have less kids,
again, women tend to work more
Work goes up, work goes down.
So when women are,
if you can get a developing nation
to reduce its number of children,
it actually is going to move them more to here
and that frees them up to work,
increases their workforce,
increases their savings rate.
And so you're actually gonna get a boost.
Now, China took this to the extreme.
They said, "Well, we're definitely
"off the charts over here
" 'cause Chairman Mao was like
" 'ah, we've gotta have kids,
" 'we're a glorious nation.' "
China was like "No, we're gonna put you at one.
"We're gonna put you at one"
What did that do?
That burned, I mean, where I'm going with this,
I don't wanna give away the farm,
but that kind of said, "The future savings
"of children is not nearly
"as important as today's growth."
China made a lot of reforms,
they did not just grow because they had fewer children
but it did help them.
It helped get everything going,
it put women into the workforce,
'cause in Chinese culture,
women work even with kids,
and so, at least currently.
I honestly don't know what they did
before the Communist revolution.
But women work even with kids
but they work more, obviously
if they have fewer kids.
So, push them all the way here,
China's like "Yeah, Ok."
So they did this for a while
and now, naturally, they're wanting
to have fewer kids.
So they're rolling that back,
and you're like "why would you roll it back?"
Well, again, you're going to have
to have some kind of balance
Because their spending,
you have to have some savings for the future,
in terms of kids.
Right now, it's look pretty bleak.
I tell people often,  I like to troll a little bit.
And people will be like, "Oh the population
"of the world's too big," and stuff,
and I'm always like, "Yeah, China
"has a huge, huge population problem."
and people are like, "Oh yeah, there's so many kids."
and I'm like "no, dude you don't understand."
Alright.
So what we have here, is,
I'm gonna switch colors because I went
to Wal-Mart, I got this board at Wal-Mart, 16 bucks.
I mean you gotta love Wal-Mart.
So, see what I can do.
Is this red?
Ok.
So, some important dates in China's history.
1980,  concerning their One Child Policy.
1980, One Child Policy was implemented.
Now, took a while to get into effect,
but starting in 2012,
this is five years ago now,
Their workforce started to shrink.
What that means is people
between the ages of 16 and 65.
So people at the traditional working age.
That is shrinking rapidly.
We're talking like starting here,
they said over the next 10 years
it was going to go down by the population of France.
That's like 70, 80 million people.
That's a lot of people.
The next important date
in Chinese demography, 2020.
China has a huge urban/rural divide.
So you've got a ton of people in the countryside,
and a ton of people in the city,
huge migration from the rural to the urban,
for jobs, for things like that.
So,  in 2020, what the economists
call the rural excess workers,
the workers that don't have enough work
'cause they're in the rural area, they're underemployed,
That excess is going to be soaked up by 2020.
Now, the next big date,
two things are happening.
One related to China, one that takes the place of China,
2026, Chinese population will decline for the first time.
Coincedentally, but also not, India's still growing.
So India will then become
the most populous nation in 2026.
That's nine years off.
China will go down to second place at that point,
and then will go into some kind
of a slow decline of population.
Here's what it looks like in the world.
Or actually, not the world, let's do China.
China had a, we're gonna do a chart.
Right down here is your time, ok?
Over time, and this is your population, your people.
So China's growing, growing, growing,
and then of course One Child Policy it moderates it,
and then it's gonna start going into a slow decline,
and as we saw that year is 2026,
that population will decline.
I think it will peak at like 1.35 billion people,
and then it will start going down, India will pass them.
So, this is unusual for China,
because it looks a lot like,
you could say, "well, this is China,
"they're doing what they're doing."
China's still a developing nation.
This, if you take out that this is about China,
this looks a lot like developing countries.
United States is not really, it's not the case here,
because of immigration and we do,
in some parts of our society,
we still have high birth rates.
But for the most part, it's immigration in the U.S.
Immigration in Germany.
But natural populations in Europe
are already doing this.
Naturally when people have more money,
they tend to have less kids.
So, what happens over time
is you get in this death spiral population.
In China, the culture has changed
to the point where people
don't necessarily want two kids.
Some do, but they're like "Oh, now we can have two kids
"and they're expensive,"
Chinese put a lot of money and time into their kids,
as everybody does but especially in China.
They have a lot of specialty baby shops and stuff.
They have rising incomes, and one child.
It's a big deal.
Like you open up a little shop with educational toys,
you're gonna be making bank over there.
But this looks like Japan.
And Japan's already rich.
This naturally happens to rich countries.
Japan is gonna lose like half their population
in a hundred years, it's really severe in Japan.
Japan does not allow immigration.
Very little, if any.
And they're in trouble because of it.
It looks like Korea.
South Korea.
North Korea also looks kind of bad,
but it's more, I don't know why,
they just, I don't think they're growing.
Their population, they're very oppressed.
But South Korea looks like this and they're rich.
Taiwan looks like this.
America would look like this
if we didn't have so much immigration
So immigration in the first world,
I shouldn't say that 'cause it's now
developing and developed.
In the developed world, immigration
kind of buoys the population.
So who's on the right side of history?
Well, basically I just gave you the answer.
In the short term, you can make a case,
morality aside, you can make a case
pro-choice is going to help us
in the short term increase the economy.
Long term, it has got to be
it has got to be pro-life.
And here's the reason,
is because populations that are growing are healthy.
And so if you have, it's kind of like
you don't want a bunch of old people
and not enough young people,
and that's exactly what nations like Japan
are starting to look like.
and China very quickly is going to look like that.
Developed nations look like that, etcetera.
So over time,  is pro-life.
If you think about this too,
most societies, not all, but almost all
of developed societies have
some kind of a program
to help people who are older, or infirm
or disabled, and those programs are pay as you go.
And I love that phrase
because it means different things in different contexts.
So I'm going to write it down.
If you remember, I remember when the Democrats
took over Congress in 2006
they started something called PayGo
which meant pay as you go
which means they had to pay for increases
with offsetting revenue or something like that.
But what it means as a society,
is today's people, today's workers,
today's society are paying for the retirement
and the care of the older people,
and the infirm people, and the disabled people.
So there's not like a bank account somewhere
where we're gonna pull out assets to pay for people,
pay as you go.
So, not only is pro-life on the right side of history,
in the long run, in the short run
you can get some benefits
by developing countries reducing your birthrate,
But not only are you pro-life if you want
humans to thrive in the long run,
but if you like popular programs
such as Medicare, such as Social Security,
you are also pro-life
because if you have a low birthrate,
and no immigration, or the world in general
has a low birthrate, it's going
to look bad for those programs.
You cannot sustain them
unless you have very, very high taxes,
without a growing population.
People call it a Ponzi scheme.
It is, yeah, but it's also kind of a social contract, right?
And we cannot make good
on that social contract if we are
choosing more abortions, choosing more birth control
because you're going to have
less ability to pay as you go.
You're like, "oh you keep mentioning
"immigration, Benjamin, you keep mentioning that.
"We'll just have immigration come in."
Here's the problem with that,
Let me put our little chart back up here.
This being population,
this being time,
What's happening to the world
is if you look at population,
it's exponential growth so it looks kind of fun,
it's just petering along,
and then you get to about 1800s, 1850s,
and it just starts shooting up
and it's just shooting up and it looks
like it's just going to explode.
Here's the deal though,
if you go out into the future,
it's going to do that same arc
we saw with China.
it's going to go up, it's going to moderate,
and then it's gonna decline.
And this is coming sooner than you think.
Some people think it won't even hit before 2100.
What's happening is people in the world
are getting wealthy and
they are having fewer children.
So as nations develop,
right now we have a lot of growth
in like Pakistan, and Indonesia
and Philippines, but as they get wealthier,
which everybody's figuring out how to do,
everybody's making reforms.
You can look at rich nations,
you can say, "oh, United States and Canada,
"England, France, they do really well.
"What can I do that's like them?
"Oh, reform the legal system, enforce property rights,
"give people infrastructure that's safe,
"and don't have taxes that are burdensome."
People are figuring this out
And when they do, they get wealthier
and then the population's gonna decline.
We are looking at, in the future,
a worker's paradise because people
will fight over workers, people will not
be trying to keep immigrants out,
they will be incentivising them to come to their country,
because they're gonna be all on the,
they may reform, and not do the pay as you go,
system for taking care of the older folk
and the disabled folk, but they may
not be on that in the future,
but in general they are 'cause politically
it's easier to pass the cost down
than it is to force people to pay today
for what they get tomorrow.
It's better to pay people today
for what they get today
rather than tell them "you're gonna
"pay me today, and I'm gonna pay you tomorrow."
It doesn't work as well.
That's gonna happen to the whole world.
So again, pro-life is on the right side of history.
Alright, here's my information
if you would like to follow me.
I'm at facebook.com/benjaminfaust
I do not post much, but I'm on Twitter and Gab
@benjaminfaust
When you are looking at life's problems,
don't look right or look left, look up.
And again, I didn't get into the morality
but again, think about what you're doing.
The Pro-Life March was either yesterday,
or it's this weekend, a lot of things going on,
so pro-life, rest assured, is on the right side of history.
With a few caveats, for developing nations
possibly reducing the birth rate, morality aside,
could definitely help them develop faster.
Thank you so much for watching,
and I plan on doing this again.
After I got going, I wasn't so dithering
and stuff, hopefully.
Alright,  goodbye.
