tuatoru3 hours ago
The tech connection on this is that phones expand the radius of the circle of peers - people that a given person can see and copy. But most of the problem is as Fernandez-Villaverde says: modernity itself, the expansion of money into more and more areas of life.
Acrobatic_Road3 hours ago
Everyone needs to read the section about demographic data.
Big claims:
- The United Nations is systematically over-estimating fertility. (Table A1)
- The United Nations is assuming inplausible fertility rebounds (B.2)
- The world is already below the replacement rate. (B.4)
- The world population will peak in 30 years.
He has been saying this in his lecture "Demographic Future of Humanity" which you can find on YouTube, but now we have finally have the paper.
We need to make this common knowledge.
- tuatoru3 hours ago
  Fernandez-Villaverde says he goes to each country's national statistical agency's website, and uses their numbers for births and deaths and population, and computes fertility and replacement rate, and the trajectory of population for each country from that.
  He says he has no idea where the UN gets its numbers, despite asking several times. He is a professor of economics and demography, so he's not going to just make stuff up.