Robin Hanson's Novel Solution to Low Fertility Rates
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Summary
Robin Hanson, economics professor at George Mason University and author of The Elephant of the Brain and The Age of M, joins us to talk about his new book, The Fermi Paradox, and why we should all be trying to have more babies.
Transcript
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Hello, everyone. We are so excited today. A little bit fanboying and girling out because
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we are joined by the fantastic, brilliant, and super fun Robin Hanson. He, in addition to being
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a professor of economics at George Mason University, has written some of my favorite
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books, including The Elephant of the Brain, which is just mind-blowing, and The Age of M.
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He talks about prediction markets, grabby aliens, signaling...
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Well, Simone didn't know that he had invented the term grabby aliens. I didn't know he had
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invented the term great filter. This is in regards to the Fermi paradox. So genuinely,
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like a huge figure in terms of, and being at the, we go to these events where it's all
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like young, like up and coming, like supposed to be all the smartest hip young people. And he's
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always at these events because he is considered like the one person not in our generation who is
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seminal to these communities. He's so with it. He's so with it.
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So what we're going to talk about on this one is we were giving a lecture at one of these that
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have been called Manifest about pronatalism. And he just dropped this idea about how it could be
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solved that we had never heard before and was really interesting. And we want to go into it.
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All right. So let's first acknowledge that any solution requires some policy people to do some
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things. And if they don't do certain things, it doesn't happen. And I'm honestly not that optimistic
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the right people would do the right thing here. And we could talk a bit about that. So the fundamental
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problem is a lot of things in our culture are oriented toward low fertility. And a lot of people
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really like those things. That is, they're really deeply attached to intensive parenting,
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long years of schooling, delayed mating, gender equality, and there's a whole bunch more. And
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any solution that induces high fertility is going to cut into some of those things. And so even if we
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could get people to adopt a solution we're about to tell you, and they try it for a while, there's a
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risk that they'll see that in fact it cuts into those things. They'll go, oh no, oh no, we can't have
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that. And then they would turn it off because they'd rather have declining population and low
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fertility than to have some of those things. That I think is a fundamental risk. That is just a
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fundamental cultural conflict. And a lot of, maybe even the majority of elites really prefer the package
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that leads to declining population, even when they understand that they could do otherwise, but doing
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otherwise will change some of these key parts of their culture that they're really attached to. So
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that's my fundamental warning. But given that, if you're willing to prioritize
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fertility high enough, i.e. doing what it takes to raise fertility, I think there is in fact a simple
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solution. So first of all, there's a lot of studies on how incentives to increase fertility and their
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effects. And so there are definitely a lot of studies that show small incentives have pretty small
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effects. And then there's some studies that show modest incentives have modest effects. And as an
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economist, I feel really confident huge incentives should have big effects. There's just no question, right?
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If you gave people a million dollars per baby, there's going to be a lot of babies, okay? That's just going to
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And businesses would be started around that, you know?
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Exactly, right? Now, if I say that, then people will say, how could we possibly afford that,
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right? Because now you're imagining we're going to have to tax everybody else to pay for this,
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and that's going to be a huge tax, and we're not going to like it, right? So the key observation is
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that we don't have to pay for it. We can make investors pay for it. So here's the trick. So at
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the moment, in say the US, we have roughly $100 trillion in debt. That's not just the explicit bonds
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we've sold, but also the promises we made, like Medicare and Social Security, that we haven't set up
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a way to pay for it, which is debt. We owe it, okay? And if you divide that by 300 million people,
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that's $300,000 a person. And there are some other estimates of unfunded promises that are even
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higher, say $700,000 a person. Even the literal debt per person in terms of bonds is $100,000 a
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person. So we're talking somewhere between $100,000, $700,000 a person that's owed at the moment in
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the US in debt. Okay, so here's the key observation. The way we've decided to pay taxes, it may not be
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just or right, but how we do it. Every time a new baby is born, we saddle them with their fraction of
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that debt. They're just on the hook to pay one out of 300 million fraction of that debt. That's how we
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do it. We basically take all citizens alive and we say, you all owe this debt. So every new baby
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literally owes $100,000 to $700,000 of debt and is expected to pay it in terms of bondholders are
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buying these bonds because they expect them to actually get repaid. So if we go with sort of the
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bondholders perspective on debt, then they're expecting every new baby to pay another, say,
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$300,000 of the debt. And so that means it's worth it up to $300,000 to create a new baby
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because they're unhooked to pay that part of the debt. So if we paid a parent, say, $200,000
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to make a baby, and then they're going to pay us $300,000 in present value, this isn't just future
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pay, this is the present value of all that stuff, then we're making $100,000 profit.
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Yeah, so let's talk about this functionally because I think when we talk about it in terms
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of dividing up the debt, it can sort of confuse people because they're like, well, this is negative
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value, but it's not exactly negative value because you can buy and sell debt, and this debt might not
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be paid back as is. So we could almost think of this as, and tell me if I'm explaining this wrong,
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but I'm trying to explain it in simpler terms. When a person has a kid, companies can sort of buy
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parts of that kid's future earnings. So when that kid is paying taxes, a portion of those taxes might go
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directly to the government, but then a portion of those taxes would go to paying off this debt,
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Right, so you're jumping ahead. I didn't say how we would hand the money out.
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Now you're talking about how to hand it out, which I agree is an important thing. But I'm just trying
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to first say, on average, a random kid, we should be willing to pay not $300,000, but we should also
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be willing to issue more bonds to cover it. That is, we don't actually need to pay up the money
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among ourselves. We could just issue more debt, say $300,000 of new debt for every kid,
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pay their parents $300,000 to have that kid, and then we're all better off.
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But that's on average. You want to talk about, well, how exactly do we pay, and how maybe do we
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pay some people more than others? And that was the subtlety you were about to get to, I think.
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Yeah, so I mean, the really brilliant thing about this, and I've heard some other mechanisms
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that try to solve the problem the same way, is one of the big problems with pronatalism is you
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just say every human life is worth X same amount. Well, that money isn't worth the same amount to
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all citizens. And it is going to be disproportionately of highest utility to the lowest productivity
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cultural groups in our society, because they have less money. And so they will be motivated to have
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more kids, which leads to negative social effects. But this accounts for that and gives additional
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money to groups that regularly, and there's many ways these groups could be. It could be cultural
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groups. It could be some sort of factor of where you live. It could be where they go to school. It
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could be where the parents went to school. But there are going to be correlating factors with families
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that raise kids who earn lots of money and are productive citizens, and they will be rewarded for that.
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But what's really interesting is they're rewarded for it at a narcissistic level. So today, I, as a
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parent, do not get rewarded in any way by society for doing things for my kids, which are likely to
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make that kid an active and positive contributor to society. But to him, this would be an active way
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to earn more money. So suppose like we're Mormons, right? And our local Mormon church could be like,
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oh shit, like this is a good way to earn more money. Like it's a little scam or like Jehovah's
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Witnesses or something. Cause you know, Jehovah's Witnesses, they don't send their kids to college.
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So they would get almost no money from a system like this because they'd be considered very bad
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bets. But they could be like, oh shit, like I just found out how we scan the system. What if we make
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all our kids like really successful and like high contributors? And yeah, continue.
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So let's walk through the mechanism. So I'm afraid we might be losing our audience here.
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So first of all, we get you to agree on average, people are valuable. And in fact,
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the nation would just make a profit on average by paying parents to have more kids.
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And that money could come from investors. So it doesn't have to come out of taxes,
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at least current taxes. And I can convince you then that the first step, hey, we ought to be just
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paying a lot for kids. But you might say, if we pay the same amount for any kid, we've got this
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problem. They're going to dish up the less valuable kids and a lot more of those. And there's not an
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incentive to make the more valuable kids, right? So now under this scenario, the reason why we want to
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make kids is that they'll pay taxes in the future, right? So then a simple thing is, well,
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what we want to do is pay the parents in proportion to how much taxes these kids will pay.
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And you might think, well, how can we figure out that? How do we take a kid and figure out how
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much taxes they'll pay? And the answer is simple. You just make an asset, which is a fraction of
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their taxes paid. That is, every year, somebody pays taxes to the government. That's a stream of
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money that goes to the government. That stream of money can be turned into an asset. Somebody can own
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that stream of money and you can chop off fractions of it. So you could say, chop off 20% or 25% of
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the money this kid is going to pay to the government in taxes and turn that into an asset and basically
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give that asset to the parents. This is what you own as a result of making this kid. And you can either
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hold onto it for its future returns, or you can sell it off to investors at whatever price you pick.
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But now we've given you the parent an incentive to make that asset worth more. The more you can convince
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investors that this kid will pay more taxes in the future, the more they'll be willing to pay for that
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asset, and the more you will get compensated as a parent for having this kid.
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So this would happen only after your child becomes an adult then. So, right?
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Right. But you could sell the asset initially. That's the whole magic of investments. Like a company
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might have a product that isn't going to make money for 20 years, but you can sell the stock right now.
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So yeah, parents would have the ability to sell it right away. And if people believed the parents
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would raise a kid that would make a lot of money, then... Do you know, just from the numbers,
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do you know if there's a high correlation between the tax revenue across families, across generations?
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There's a substantial correlation, but it's not 1.0.
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So there's a few really important notes of this that I think wouldn't immediately be
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intuitive to people. One, I want to talk about two industries this would create. And two,
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I want to talk about something that people think would be common, but would actually be
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a pretty dumb move. I think a lot of people would immediately think that wealthy families
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would buy off their own kids' debt things, or keep them in the family, basically, so that
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the kid would never have to pay this portion of their taxes. This would actually be a pretty
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bad move. And the reason why it would be a bad move is whoever owns your debt or certificate or
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whatever you want to call it has a huge incentive to ensure you do well in life. And so you would
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disproportionately want to sell these to groups that are going to promote your kid. So suppose
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it's owned by a major financial firm. Now that financial firm has a reason to hire your kid.
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Suppose it's owned by Google. Now Google has a reason to ensure that your kid is created in
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coding and hire them and pay them. But what's really fascinating is it allows for middling
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cultural institutions to come into existence that don't exist now. So you could have something that's
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like a private school, right? That basically acts as a daycare for the kid, teaches the kid
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middle school, teaches the kid high school, maybe even gives them college. And these institutions
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would essentially buy at a discounted price, kids from families whose economic circumstances
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prevent that kid from reaching their potential full potential. And then those institutions could
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then make money on the arbitrage there. By low, so high.
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Through the way that they play a role in raising the kid, increase the kid's lifetime value.
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It's like human private equity. Right. Yeah. So let's distinguish two things here because they
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can get kind of mixed up. One is the idea of taking the stream of payments you send to the
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government and creating an asset out of that, that then whose value can be increased by moving that
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asset into the hands of people who can better act on it. I called this a tax career agent, but that's
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the idea you were talking about. So we can do that with anybody, even today. It's somewhat
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independent of giving part of it to parents. So my proposal here for fertility is once you have
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these assets that represent the ability to, you know, the future taxes, you should give a fraction
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of that asset to the parent as an incentive for them to be a parent, to create a kid. And that's a
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good solution to the fertility problem. Right. But we don't necessarily want to give the entire
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tax career agent asset to the parents, maybe a third of it or a quarter or something, but the
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rest of it is available there still to be sold to create these other valuable agents. Somebody who
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owns your future taxes or a fraction of them has an interest to advise and promote you. Yeah. And
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that's a valuable role in the world. At the moment, the thing is the government is already in this role
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and they're doing a terrible job. You already have a career agent in the form of the government who gets
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20% of your income and therefore should be trying to advise and promote you. They just don't do it.
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If we switch their role to somebody else, we transfer that asset to someone else. Somebody else
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holding that asset could do better to improve that asset. That would be valuable for everybody.
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The government gets more out of that. You get more out of it. They get more. It's a win for everyone.
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Well, and it also seems like it's uniquely a win for lower middle classes because like trust fund kids,
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from my understanding, are not very good at generating tax revenue. I mean, one, they have all these tax
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shelters for their financial instruments, but two, they're also typically not generating that much
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money themselves. So this looks, I mean, I feel like politically it's not so terrible, but you
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were sort of saying in the beginning of the podcast that you have your doubts that people would get
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their act together. Policymakers would get their act together, even like broach a subject like this.
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Right. So there's the two ideas here. So one is the general idea of a tax career agent. The idea of
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taking the stream of money that goes to the government and turning that into an asset that we sell to other
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people. That's one idea. And the other idea is just giving part of that to parents as an incentive
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for parents. So it's that second idea I was initially being worried about. That is, if we do
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that, if we give parents $300,000 a person on average or something, then they will change behavior.
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People will go to school less. They'll be less intensive parenting. They will mate earlier in life.
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They may have more gender inequality. Those things would happen. And then people looking at the
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consequences might blanch and say, I don't like this. That's the thing I was worried about.
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Here's the really interesting thing that would be a consequence of this, which is it could
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essentially end if it turns out that there are not persistent genetic differences between ethnic
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groups. And if it turns out that a person's social class isn't in any way genetically heritable,
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it would eradicate those barriers within just a few generations. It could essentially end racism
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because that would always be a smart arbitrage play in terms of investing money, ensuring that these
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people are contributing more to society. The problem is, and it would also do this with sexism to some
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extent. The problem is that if it turns out that any of those things are genetic and any of those
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differences are genetic, then it would compound them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I wouldn't want to focus
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people's attention on those promises because as you indicate, they probably won't be realized, but
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I might focus your attention on who today is making the worst choices of schooling and career.
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Right. And I think most people presume it's lower class people who are in fact making bad choices
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there. And these career agents would be very incentivized to help those people make better
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choices. So then they would get, if you might say, you know, children of the rich probably get,
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already get pretty good career advice, pretty good school advice. They aren't lacking for good
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contacts to tell them what jobs to take or what schools to go to. It's lower class people who don't
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really get the system and know what the best way to set up their career is. They would then be getting
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this expert advice from people who really care a lot and they would have the biggest benefits
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percentage-wise. Yeah. That's fascinating. Well, I mean, the, the, the biggest negative incentive of
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this would be if it turns out that there are like persistent genetic heretical differences between
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individuals within the easiest way to quote unquote scam this system, but in a way that ultimately would
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help society. I always love when systems end up is you just sort of get genetics that you would
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consider a high likelihood to end up in a high productivity individual. And you just sort of
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mass produce them. Like you as a company pay for surrogates and then you, you know, have lots of
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kids and then you handle their education and then you would have sort of corporate families, which I
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suspect we're going to see systems like this. Yeah. Let's not use the term corporate family. Cause
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that's like industrial family, industrial parenting, industrial parent. Yes. Yes. Basically
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scale economies of parenting, large organized systematic structures of parenting. Kind of a little,
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a little brave new worldy, a little brave new worldy. And I think that would happen and that would
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freak some people out that that's exactly the sort of thing that would might make some people back off
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and say, Oh, I don't like this. Yeah. I mean, I also, I also worry about people selecting
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disproportionately for males because men are higher earners and especially in a world in which women
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would be incentivized to probably take more time out of the workforce for reproduction.
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That is lower earning. But in this world, that's paid well. That's highly compensated.
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Yeah. But is that, is that, is that money taxed? I mean, a surrogate I'm sure would be paid well,
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but when a mother who chooses to, you know, take time off.
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Yes. If she was raising successful kids and keep in mind in this world, because one of the greatest
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signs that a kid is going to be a high productivity individual is going to be that the mother's a high
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productivity individual, that these women who want to be mothers are actually incentivized
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to work. Yeah. Because basically their, their, their kids will sell for a higher price or their
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kids tax tax revenue will sell for a higher price if they themselves are high earners. Correct.
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Yeah. Or at least look like they could do hiring. So they just have to show a promising young career
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and then abandon it for, for kids, but then show that they could have continued and they look very
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promising. Or not abandon it at all. But I mean, I feel like this could also,
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if it turns out the good way, it would, it would also encourage a lot of, we'll say,
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so a big problem, for example, like in, in, in Sweden, amazing childcare, like basically they've
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set up a pronatalist policy set, not dialed up enough, I guess for, to make a difference,
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but you know, their, their whole hypothesis is, okay, well let's let women have kids and work.
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So like great childcare, great education, you know, whatever you need so that women can continue
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to stay in the workforce. And if we had something like that, where it was like, okay, great support
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and you keep working, then that could even encourage women to be both higher career achievers
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But this system would create incentives for companies to provide that, Simone.
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As an economist, I have to point out that often people are looking at a problem that's trying to
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figure out intuitively through their own reasoning, what would be the most cost-effective solution
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to things? And the economist often says, well, we don't want to take your guess of a most
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effective solution and make policies that require that. What we want to do is just create the
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incentive to do the best job and let people figure out what does best. So if we just pay per kid,
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according to their future tax revenue, that lets the system be open for trying all these different
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things. Maybe the Sweden approach will work better. Maybe the Hungarian, maybe the Israeli.
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We shouldn't presume to know. We should just set up the incentive so they can compete. All those
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different approaches would try to get people to recruit into their thing and they would set up
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investors to try their approach and then they would try it. And 20 years later, they'd see what
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sort of kids they had. Yeah. Yeah. Makes sense.
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I think trying to predict phenomenon you're going to see in the system. Another one that I think would
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be pretty interesting is I suspect that many religious communities would sort of demand the
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tithing of a portion of a kid's debt to the religious institution, but then they would become more
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more motivated to ensure that the kids were successful, which would lead to some really
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interesting behavior patterns for these institutions, which I'd be interested to see.
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But I think it would only lead to a lot of net benefit stuff for society. If you consider a good
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society, a society where a lot of kids are raised productive and happy, but it could be a net negative
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if you consider a good society, one that is closer to a traditional society.
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Right. So plausibly say religious communities would gain more from these subsidies. Yeah. They
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would more eagerly take advantage of them. They'd be more set up to take advantage of them. And then
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the larger world would see, oh, this is subsidizing religion. And the people who don't like religion,
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they go, well, that's bad. We don't like that. And that's, again, the danger here. If it works,
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it'll work probably by changing some substantial things and leaning in some directions. And that'll just
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put people off who don't like those directions. Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. Well, and I
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think one thing to remember if you talk about the political viability of all this is how common
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antinatalism is as an ethical stance among the far left at this point. Yeah. It's really common,
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not just far left, middle left, even center left. And I've seen it and they consider you can get
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canceled. I remember when one professor at Harvard was like, well, I'm a fan of your guys, but I can't be
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known as a pro natalist because I've heard some people have even accused me of potentially being
00:22:31.280
a pro natalist. And I'm like, how is that, that negative a thing? But apparently it's like a
00:22:35.380
cancelable offense. I mean, I think people perceive and guess that in fact, stronger pro natalism
00:22:42.900
policies would change gender equality. That is, it'll induce differences in the gender's life patterns
00:22:49.900
and what they do. And they don't like that. And I think they think advocating for that makes you an
00:22:56.520
evil person. Gender equality depends on pro natalism because if you don't have feminist people having
00:23:01.580
kids and passing on that culture, there will be no feminist. But they are within their lifetime,
00:23:05.780
Simone. They don't care about future people. And they think of it as a percentage thing,
00:23:09.860
you know, just what percentage of the world is doing different things. The absolute size of the
00:23:13.640
world is not really part of feminism in most people's minds. Yeah. Well, this is fascinating.
00:23:20.860
Would you have any other thoughts about, so if you were going to implement this,
00:23:23.760
like realistically, well, I mean, we are looking at doing that charter city saying,
00:23:27.200
Timon, we could work this into the way the tax card works. Oh my gosh. Yeah. That's a good idea.
00:23:31.080
Yeah. Now notice that the reason that this tax, you know, thing works is because we have a lot
00:23:36.920
of debt, say in the United States. So it's an especially easy to make the argument for nations
00:23:42.220
that already have a lot of debt. If you're starting a new nation with very little debt, great for you.
00:23:46.900
Good job. But then I've got the problem while I don't actually have, you know, the same argument
00:23:53.400
to give about why you should be issuing more debt. Yeah. Well, what we would do is we would just do
00:23:59.780
it to say that a portion of a kid's taxes go to just get split off to go to a private corporation,
00:24:04.920
basically. And, and the, by default, parents can buy and can, can not sell these and keep these.
00:24:12.340
And then the kids don't have to worry about it. Now, a lot of people would be freaked out that
00:24:15.200
parents were trading a part of a kid's future to a company. And so you'd want some portion of the
00:24:19.580
kids, some parents, basically all you're doing. And I think you really clear. Essentially I could
00:24:27.560
go and make this agreement with someone in our society today, but because it's so hard for
00:24:32.800
corporations to collect on my income right now, it functionally wouldn't work. There's not good
00:24:38.260
mechanisms for doing this at scale. However, if you used existing tax systems to do it, you could do it
00:24:43.980
at scale, which would allow for these economic patterns to emerge. You don't actually need the
00:24:49.720
debt argument. You just say, okay, half of a person's taxes are basically paid. Right. So
00:24:53.720
actually a few years ago, I said the generic solution to the fertility problem is just to
00:24:59.040
allow parents to endow kids with debt or equity, because then the parents, you know, are investing
00:25:04.660
in this kid. Now, the problem there is most people see parents endowing kids with debt or equity
00:25:10.000
as some kind of slavery. And they go, oh, that's terrible. The parents are owning part of the kids,
00:25:14.800
but apparently they don't mind that when nations do that. Nations endowing kids with debt. That's
00:25:20.040
fine. That's not slavery. So it's only slavery when individuals do it, but not when nations do it. So
00:25:24.960
that's why, you know, there's an attractive option to having the nations pay for kids because
00:25:30.620
they're allowed to endow people with debt and equity.
00:25:34.160
Well, a really interesting thing you could do if you did this is make it sort of legally mandatory
00:25:39.980
that this is the only way that the university system can collect money through improving kids'
00:25:46.560
net value to society. And that way you wouldn't have them putting, you know, just, just charging
00:25:54.720
You could certainly try to make universities have a bigger stake in their students, which would be by
00:26:00.840
saying you can only, tuition can only be in the form of, of these sorts of tax shares.
00:26:06.300
But of course they would presumably just sell them as soon as they could. So now you have to require
00:26:10.800
that they hold them for a long time. And now you've got a lot of budgeting problems there.
00:26:17.160
Do you think that there's a particular nation, one that presumably has a lot of debt already,
00:26:20.900
aside from the United States that could possibly be convinced to consider this? Or do you think
00:26:25.780
the United States is the most likely, likely nation here?
00:26:29.280
So, so the nation, the developed nation that most has the highest fertility is Israel.
00:26:35.120
But there's a problem in the sense that if you think you have a cultural solution to the
00:26:39.880
fertility problem, then you're less eager for this financial solution.
00:26:44.500
But you might want to double down and do both. So then the problem is like, you go for some other,
00:26:48.700
like the United States is financially well set up because we have a big debt,
00:26:51.640
but then we're not culturally as inclined to do it.
00:26:54.680
So part of the problem here is if you are inclined to adopt this proposal, it's because
00:26:58.780
culture is in the direction of promoting fertility, in which case you less need the solution.
00:27:03.720
The solution is most needed by the ones least likely to adopt it. And that's true for a lot
00:27:10.600
Well, here is a potential answer to that. This could be implemented through a religious organization.
00:27:17.700
So, for example, the Church of Mormon could essentially do this for all of their members
00:27:21.920
and that the fractional shares would come from tithing revenue from these individuals where a
00:27:28.920
portion of the tithe would go to the company or whoever owns the shares. Now, this would be relevant
00:27:35.240
because the church then would be explicitly motivating people to raise people in a way where
00:27:40.700
they didn't deconvert from the church, which is also in their best interest.
00:27:44.840
Although they don't like to advertise such an explicit motivation. So, for example, the most
00:27:51.840
successful group like this in the US is the Amish. They are very successful at a 93% retention rate
00:27:58.580
and they are doubling every 20 years. And so they have maintaining a high fertility and a high
00:28:03.520
retention rate. But I think they go out of their way to kick teenagers out and say, go see the world
00:28:10.000
and to say, look, it really is your choice. We're not pressuring you to come back. And that's part of
00:28:15.780
the reason why kids might come back and be persuaded. They might look worse if they said, sure, you can go,
00:28:22.860
but look, we've got all this debt tied into you and we'll lose money to leave. That might not sell so
00:28:32.060
Yeah. This is still the, what bothers me most about financial incentives on the prenatalist front
00:28:37.700
is that there are a lot of people out there who are just like, no, no, no. We need more money. Give
00:28:42.100
parents more money. No one has an answer. And what I love about this is you're like, nope, here's exactly
00:28:47.560
how it can be done. This is why it would be done. This is why it's practical.
00:28:50.580
Well, it's worth repeating then. Yes. We're going to give a lot of assets to each parent. It's going
00:28:56.200
to be worth, say on average, $300,000 or more, but we're going to give it in the form of an asset
00:29:02.820
that represents future tax revenue first, so that it's not just giving everybody the same amount of
00:29:06.600
money. And secondly, we're going to pay for that by issuing more debt. Because in fact, the investors
00:29:11.600
will say, yeah, you can cover that. So say if you have a house, if you just are spending more than
00:29:16.900
you earn and want to take out a loan in your house, investors should go, oh, I need to make
00:29:21.320
sure you can cover that with the house because you might not be able to pay. If you build an
00:29:26.080
addition to the house and you want to take out a loan for that, investors will go, oh, yeah, sure.
00:29:30.940
I'm happy to back your bigger loan on the house if you have a bigger house because you're going to be
00:29:37.140
able to pay that back. So that's what we're talking about here. When you have another kid,
00:29:40.300
you're adding on to the house, you're making it a bigger, more valuable thing, and it's perfectly
00:29:45.160
reasonable to have a bigger debt on it. Yeah. So this talk has been fantastic. I've really enjoyed
00:29:52.280
it. We'd love to have you back on. And thank you so much for your time. I love this solution because
00:29:57.900
I do think it's one of the few financial solutions that I think is very realistic and viable, just
00:30:03.000
very difficult to get past at the level of a nation state until they begin to panic.
00:30:06.640
Keep in mind, one, they are going to panic, and two, all of the antinatalists are going to die
00:30:11.580
and not have kids. So maybe the future. Eventually. Yeah. You know, give it time.
00:30:15.640
Give it time. All right. Thank you so much. So this is, we're ending, we're ending, Simone.
00:30:22.100
Yes. Ending the episode. So we're going to do the next episode. I'm going to go use the restroom,
00:30:26.560
go get a beer. I'll be right back and get ready to introduce him for the next time. I would have
00:30:31.040
brought a beer. This is, this is our, this is our happy hour. This is our, yeah, we, we like basically
00:30:36.560
live on UK times. It's like eating for Malcolm gets up every day to start working at 2 30 AM.
00:30:43.000
So yeah, where do you physically live in California? We're on East coast. We're, we're like right by
00:30:47.580
New York, but yeah, Malcolm just likes working when no one else is conscious. So you don't get
00:30:51.920
interrupted that way. It's really nice. Not going to lie. Yeah. And then later on, when you have
00:30:56.500
meetings in the day, you can be kind of tired, but people don't care that much if you're tired in the
00:30:59.640
meeting. Yeah, no, they don't notice. They don't notice at all. So it's totally fine.
00:31:03.540
Yeah. I, I, I still really love this. I think that there's, there's a way in our lifetime to
00:31:09.360
get people seriously talking about this. There will be some serious panics about it. I guess
00:31:13.260
what I worry about is that politicians are never really incentivized to look at anything beyond
00:31:17.300
their term. So, you know, if you're interested in what projects could be done, it would be possible
00:31:21.940
to fund a trial of the tax career agent trial. What you just do is take a bunch of people and you'd
00:31:29.200
make tax agents for them by creating an asset that pays as much as they'll pay in taxes, but it
00:31:34.780
doesn't come from the government. So you don't have to get the government involved in a trial.
00:31:38.060
Right. You just create a trial where you say, basically when we give people these tax career
00:31:42.700
agents, does that help? We just do a trial of seeing whether those people with this agent who
00:31:47.620
gives them advice and promotion, whether they actually make more money. Yeah. You could do a trial
00:31:52.340
of that. And I've done some blog posts on roughly how much that would cost, but there's some clever
00:31:56.160
ways to make it cheaper, but still that would seem a kind of thing that would then launch the idea of
00:32:01.960
selling tax assets as a thing by showing that in fact, there's value there. That's somewhat separate
00:32:09.100
of the fertility part. Yeah. But it would still, I mean, that, you know, if we can make that small
00:32:13.540
case, then we can make a bigger case that can actually affect the numbers. So that would be huge.