PPCC: Pisitófilos Creditófagos. Invierno 2025

[Cadavre Exquis]

https://x.com/KobeissiLetter/status/2014516651039871362

Saludos.

[Derby]

https://www.ft.com/content/d59c8d44-36e5-4c82-a3af-b4b81970a965

How Trump turned international relations into a real-estate game

With his Greenland obsession, the US president is reviving a national tradition: expansion via land grabs


© Harry Haysom

Perhaps Donald Trump really has suddenly given up on Greenland, but his obsession with the place has been long-term and telling. Sanewashers — the people who try to rationalise everything he does — spent last week explaining he needed it for security. Yet that contradicts Trump’s own early account of his interest. In 2021, he told the authors of The Divider, a book about his first presidential term: “I’m a real estate developer. I look at a corner, I say, ‘I’ve got to get that store for the building that I’m building,’ etc. It’s not that different . . . I love maps. And I always said: ‘Look at the size of this [Greenland]. It’s massive. That should be part of the United States.’” Trump embodies the new geopolitical trend: international relations is increasingly about real estate.

Land is the great prize of our time. Even as our economy becomes dematerialised, and our lives virtual, our obsessions just get more earthly. The McKinsey Global Institute has estimated that land, plus the housing and commercial property on top of it account for about two-thirds of the world’s $520tn of real wealth.

Real estate has long been a driver of domestic politics. The fact that only some people have housing wealth and can afford to live in strong job markets fuels inequality, the rural-urban and generational divides. House prices also feed anxiety over immigration (which raises competition for homes) and reduce fertility (because young people can’t afford enough space to have children). Much of this argument is outlined in the essay “The Housing Theory of Everything” by John Myers, Sam Bowman and Ben Southwood. But real estate’s merging with international relations is more recent.

The no-holds-barred fight for land that encompasses most of history paused with decolonisation in the 1960s, but restarted in 2014 when Vladimir Putin invaded Crimea. Trump has often suggested that the US, like Russia, should revive its national tradition: expansion through land grabs. This lust for land is driven by various trends, argues Michael Albertus of the University of Chicago, author of the new book Land Power. I spoke to him at last month’s Grand Continent conference in Aosta, Italy.

First, ever more people are competing for land. Just in my lifetime, since 1969, the global population has jumped from about 3.6 billion to 8.2 billion. The UN projects it will peak at 10.3 billion in the 2080s. One cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for instance, is the 10-fold increase in Israel’s population since 1948 to 10.2 million.

Trend two: climate change is reshuffling the value of the world’s land. The US real estate website Zillow used to track this issue by publishing climate-risk scores for homes but, perhaps coincidentally, ditched the scores after estate agents complained they hurt sales. Only the brave or misinformed are still buying in south Florida, whereas the warming Arctic looks like a freshly delivered new neighbourhood, ready for habitation. In real estate jargon, Greenland now “has potential”, as do northern Russia and Canada. Centuries hence, when Trump’s personal idiosyncrasies begin to fade from memory, historians might say that what we lived through in January 2026 heralded the start of the scramble for the Arctic. Bits of Antarctica could be next.

The third factor driving land grabs, says Albertus, is that the taboo on them is fading — or perhaps, in the cases of Trump and Putin, has vanished. Trump’s plan for the “Gaza Riviera” recasts 19th-century imperialism in the language of 21st-century real estate. And here is how he describes his “peace proposal” to give Russia chunks of Ukraine: “You’re cutting up land in a certain way, it’s not the easiest thing, it’s like a complex real estate deal times a thousand.” European policymakers, who started 2026 still imagining the taboo existed, are hastily updating their worldview.

Putting all these trends together, Albertus sees a “Great Reshuffle” of the world’s land. That happens periodically in history: think of the 19th-century “Scramble for Africa”, or the “Barbarian migrations” by Germanic tribes that destroyed the late Roman empire. This time, the likely chief grabbers are the US, China and Russia, plus possibly Iran as “water bankrupt” Tehran ceases to be habitable.

Land grabs could lose intensity after 2100, when falling birth rates shrink the world’s population. But even then, climate change should keep people moving. A century from now, giant Nigeria might be bullying the US for the Alaskan Riviera.

[el malo]

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/trump-sues-jpmorgan-and-ceo-jamie-dimon-5-billion-over-alleged-political-debanking

Trump Sues JPMorgan And CEO Jamie Dimon For $5 Billion Over Alleged 'Political' Debanking, by Tyler Durden

President Donald Trump has filed a lawsuit against JPMorgan Chase and its CEO Jamie Dimon, claiming the banking giant debanked him for political reasons.



The lawsuit was filed Thursday morning in a Miami state court by his attorney, Alejandro Brito, on behalf of Trump and several of his hospitality companies.

The complaint cites JPMorgan's code of conduct, which reads: "We set high expectations and hold ourselves accountable. We do the right thing—not necessarily the easy or expedient thing. We abide by the letter and spirit of the laws and regulations everywhere we do business and have zero tolerance for unethical behavior."

According to Brito, "Despite claiming to hold these principles dear, JPMC violated them by unilaterally—and without warning or remedy—terminating several of Plaintiff’s bank accounts."

Trump and his companies have "transacted hundreds of millions of dollars" through the bank, the lawsuit reads, adding that Feb. 19, 2021 was the day that "forever altered the dynamic of the parties’ relationship," when the bank allegedly "without warning or provocation," notified Trump and his companies that several of their bank accounts or were beneficiaries of, "would be closed just two months later, on April 19, 2021."

"JPMC did not provide plaintiffs with any recourse, remedy, or alternative—its decision was final and unequivocal," reads the suit.

JPMorgan Responds

In a statement following the filing of the suit, the bank blamed "rules and regulatory expectations."

"We do close accounts because they create legal or regulatory risk for the company," adding "We regret having to do so but often rules and regulatory expectations lead us to do so. We have been asking both this Administration and prior administrations to change the rules and regulations that put us in this position, and we support the Administration’s efforts to prevent the weaponization of the banking sector."

According to Trump's attorney, his team is "confident that JPMC’s unilateral decision came about as a result of political and social motivations, and JPMC’s unsubstantiated, ‘woke’ beliefs that it needed to distance itself from President Trump and his conservative political views."

"In essence, JPMC debunked plaintiff’s accounts because it believed that the political tide at the moment favored doing so," reads the complaint. "In addition to the considerable financial and reputational harm that Plaintiffs and their affiliated entities suffered, JPMC’s reckless decision is leading a growing trend by financial institutions in the United States of America to cut off a consumer’s access to banking services if their political views contradict with those of the financial institution."

Trump’s attorney alleged that, "JPMC’s conduct, in violation of its code of conduct and Dimon’s lofty assertions, is a key indicator of a systemic, subversive industry practice that aims to coerce the public to shift and re-align their political views."

The lawsuit goes on to allege that JPMorgan Chase and Dimon have "unlawfully and unjustifiably published some or all of their names, including the names of President Trump, the Trump Organization with its affiliated entities, and the Trump family, on a blacklist." -Fox News

According to the lawsuit, the JPMorgan blacklist is accessible by federally regulated banks and is comprised of individuals and entities that are not to be served.



"Given that Plaintiffs have always complied with all applicable banking rules and regulations and their wealth management accounts were in good standing, JPMC’s publication of President Trump, the other Plaintiffs, the Trump Organization and its affiliated entities, and/or the Trump family’s names on this blacklist, is an intentional and malicious falsehood," reads the lawsuit, which claims that the bank engaged in "an unfair and deceptive trade practice" by directing the publication of the names to the list, noting that the bank "had no legitimate basis to do so and knew that doing so would induce, and did in fact induce, other banking institutions not to deal with them."

Trump Announcement

Over the weekend, Trump quashed a WSJ article claiming that he offered JPM's Jamie Dimon the job of Fed Chairman, which he said was "totally untrue, there was never such an offer and, in fact, I'll be suing JPMorgan Chase over the next two weeks for incorrectly and inappropriately DEBANKING me after the January 6th Protest..."

In response, a JPMorgan spokeswoman, Trish Wexler, told media outlets that the bank does not "close accounts because of political beliefs."

As the Epoch Times noted over the weekend, in August 2025, Trump issued an executive order to ensure that banks cannot refuse services to individuals based on their political or religious beliefs, a practice known as “debanking.” A watchdog in December found that nine large U.S. banks actively engaged in the practice between 2020 and 2025.

“To date, the [Office of the Comptroller of the Currency] has observed that between 2020 and 2023, the banks maintained public and nonpublic policies restricting certain industry sectors’ access to banking services,” the report reads. “Many industry sectors were restricted based primarily on how it might appear to the public if the bank provided access to financial services to these sectors.”

Advocates against debanking have cited cases of Christians and conservatives who have stated that they have been victims of the practice by major financial institutions, including claims from the Indigenous Advance Ministries, former Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.), and Trump himself, among many others. First Lady Melania Trump, in her memoir “Melania,” wrote that she, too, was denied banking services.

“I was shocked and dismayed to learn that my long-time bank decided to terminate my account and deny my son the opportunity to open a new one,” she wrote in her book.

When issuing the order over the summer, the White House said banks could face fines, consent decrees, or other punitive actions if they continue to remove financial access for certain individuals.

Qué cara más dura, que hay que evitar la "weaponization of the banking system". Lo dice el representante del mismo país que bloqueó a bancos rusos en el SWIFT y pone sanciones económicas, bloqueos y aranceles según se levante esa mañana.

A todo esto, qué interesante está la geopolítica internacional desde que llegó este señor a la Casa Blanca:

https://www.elespanol.com/ciencia/salud/20260123/eeuu-anuncia-salida-efectiva-organizacion-mundial-salud-oms-insiste-no-pagara-cuotas-pendientes/1003744100610_0.html

EEUU anuncia su salida efectiva de la Organización Mundial de la Salud (OMS) e insiste en que no pagará las cuotas pendientes

La bandera de barras y estrellas ha dejado de ondear en la sede de la OMS de Ginebra. Estados Unidos ha hecho oficial este jueves su salida de la Organización Mundial de la Salud, una decisión que parte de una orden ejecutiva firmada por el presidente, Donald Trump, el día que llegó por segunda vez al poder.

La decisión preocupa por las grandes consecuencias que tendrá para la salud a nivel global. La Administración Trump argumenta su decisión en que, a su juicio, la agencia de la salud de la ONU tuvo fallos en la gestión de la pandemia de COVID-19.

Además, según ha informado el Departamento de Salud del país, EEUU no pagará las cuotas que tiene pendientes, cuotas millonarias que Washington debe a la organización, siendo una de las potencias que más fondos aporta al organismo (un 18% de la financiación total).

Según informa Reuters, el Gobierno de Trump tiene pendiente un pago que asciende hasta los 260 millones de dólares, cuotas correspondientes al periodo 2024-2025.

Sin embargo, para no efectuar estos honorarios, el Gobierno estadounidense se escuda en que los estatutos de la OMS no contienen ninguna condición que establezca que los pagos deben realizarse antes del retiro: "El pueblo estadounidense ha pagado más que suficiente", ha dicho un portavoz del Departamento de Estado en un correo electrónico al que se remite la citada agencia.

Milei sigue los pasos de Trump y abandona la OMS: equipara las cuarentenas de la covid con delitos de lesa humanidad
Según el comunicado de prensa del Departamento de Salud, el país sólo trabajará con la OMS de manera limitada para hacer efectiva la retirada definitiva. "No tenemos previsto participar como observadores ni reincorporarnos", ha declarado un alto funcionario de salud del gobierno.

Además del argumento esgrimido de una "mala gestión" de la pandemia, Trump también critica el rol de la OMS en "otras crisis sanitarias mundiales", su incapacidad para adoptar reformas y "su falta de independencia frente a la influencia política indebida" de otros estados miembros.

El magnate que países con poblaciones mayores que EEUU (como es el caso de China) no pagan el mismo volumen de cuotas.

Qué significa la salida de EEUU
Cuando se fundó la OMS en 1948, Estados Unidos se unió al organismo mediante una resolución conjunta del Congreso en la que se estipuló que al país norteamericano se le reservaba, a diferencia de los demás países miembros, el derecho a retirarse de la agencia.

El día que el inquilino de la Casa Blanca volvió al poder, el 20 de enero de 2025, firmó una orden ejecutiva con la que emitía un aviso formal para retirarse de esta agencia de la ONU. Según la legislación estadounidense, debía avisar con un año de antelación para poder hacer efectiva la salida.

La principal consecuencia será los grandes riesgos para todo el mundo a nivel sanitario, consecuencia de una debilitación de los sistemas los que depende el mundo para detectar, prevenir y responder a las amenazas a la salud.

Más allá, esta decisión ha desencadenado una crisis financiera que ha obligado a la OMS a reducir su equipo directivo a la mitad y a reducir su trabajo, recortando así los presupuestos de toda la agencia.

Será el próximo febrero cuando los estados miembros de la OMS discutan la salida del país norteamericano con el fin de organizar una nueva junta ejecutiva, además de tomar una decisión a la que se ven obligados por la falta de financiación: despedir aproximadamente a una cuarta parte de su personal para mediados de año.

Que conste que tengo sentimientos encontrados con esta decisión, y más después de ver cómo funciona la OMS y la "Ley de Pandemias" que pretendió instaurar.

[asustadísimos]

EL ANGLO HA ROTO LA BARAJA PARA INTENTAR RESUCITAR EL EFECTO RIQUEZA POR EL LADRILLO.—

Hay dos convulsiones:
1.º En el pospinchazo, el 'brexit'.
2.º En la postransición, el 'usexit'.

Es 'sensu contrario' el «o jugamos todos o rompemos la baraja»: «rompemos la baraja y que no juegue nadie».

Con el «ya no te junto», se intentan llevar por delante parte del entramado internacional generado en el siglo XX.

A cambio, proponen un salón de bodas y banquetes para obesos horteras, lleno de purpurina, donde escenificar los besamanos del Gran Cerdo del Ladrillo.

Porque se declaran REPATH ('real estate persons at heart') al tiempo que se comprometen a «no hacer nada que dañe el patrimonio de los propietarios de vivienda que, por primera vez en sus vidas, pueden pasear orgullosos por sus ciudades sabiendo que sus casas valen [valor, ¡ja!] 500mil, 600mil, 700mil dólares», ya que «la vivienda ha subido mucho, pero eso es riqueza para los propietarios».

https://www.transicionestructural.net/index.php?topic=2638.msg255034#msg255034

https://www.transicionestructural.net/index.php?topic=2638.msg254985#msg254985

Adicionalmente, crucifican a sus bancos centrales porque mantienen rigideces monetarias para controlar la inflación aproductiva generada por el timojuego de dinero sin trabajar del Ladrillo.

¿Pero por qué impiden que los grandes inversores institucionales formen patrimonios de viviendas unifamiliares?

https://www.transicionestructural.net/index.php?topic=2638.msg255022#msg255022

La respuesta es sencilla, dentro de su complejidad. Además de que gozan siendo hipócritas, cuando no cínicos, es que están quemando las naves para obligar a apostar todo a la misma carta.

Hay paralelismo entre esta prohibición, la de grandes patrimonios institucionales de viviendas-para-vivir, con la de la CBDC-dólar ('central bank digital coin'). En ambos casos se trata de eliminar cualquier posibilidad de volver atrás, obligándose a seguir adelante cueste lo que cueste.

El anglo está suicidándose. Y no hay que entender por anglo uno o varios países o Estados, sino el estatus cívico de ciertos integrantes del imperio, unos por interés, otros por cobardía.

¿Qué hacer?

Nada.

Ojalá que las elecciones 'midterm' del 3 de noviembre no signifiquen el hundimiento del REPATH-en-jefe; que este se salga con la suya humillando —debilitando— al banco central del imperio y al primer banco del mundo (querellas contra la Fed y el J. P. Morgan Chase); y que, en Madrid, lleguemos a las elecciones autonómicas y generales con el novio sin condenar.

[tomasjos]

https://elpais.com/economia/vivienda/2026-01-23/el-destierro-de-jose-en-ibiza-de-ser-el-primero-en-la-oposicion-a-renunciar-a-la-plaza-por-no-encontrar-vivienda.html

[tomasjos]

EL ANGLO HA ROTO LA BARAJA PARA INTENTAR RESUCITAR EL EFECTO RIQUEZA POR EL LADRILLO.—

Hay dos convulsiones:
1.º En el pospinchazo, el 'brexit'.
2.º En la postransición, el 'usexit'.

Es 'sensu contrario' el «o jugamos todos o rompemos la baraja»: «rompemos la baraja y que no juegue nadie».

Con el «ya no te junto», se intentan llevar por delante parte del entramado internacional generado en el siglo XX.

A cambio, proponen un salón de bodas y banquetes para obesos horteras, lleno de purpurina, donde escenificar los besamanos del Gran Cerdo del Ladrillo.

Porque se declaran REPATH ('real estate persons at heart') al tiempo que se comprometen a «no hacer nada que dañe el patrimonio de los propietarios de vivienda que, por primera vez en sus vidas, pueden pasear orgullosos por sus ciudades sabiendo que sus casas valen [valor, ¡ja!] 500mil, 600mil, 700mil dólares», ya que «la vivienda ha subido mucho, pero eso es riqueza para los propietarios».

https://www.transicionestructural.net/index.php?topic=2638.msg255034#msg255034

https://www.transicionestructural.net/index.php?topic=2638.msg254985#msg254985

Adicionalmente, crucifican a sus bancos centrales porque mantienen rigideces monetarias para controlar la inflación aproductiva generada por el timojuego de dinero sin trabajar del Ladrillo.

¿Pero por qué impiden que los grandes inversores institucionales formen patrimonios de viviendas unifamiliares?

https://www.transicionestructural.net/index.php?topic=2638.msg255022#msg255022

La respuesta es sencilla, dentro de su complejidad. Además de que gozan siendo hipócritas, cuando no cínicos, es que están quemando las naves para obligar a apostar todo a la misma carta.

Hay paralelismo entre esta prohibición, la de grandes patrimonios institucionales de viviendas-para-vivir, con la de la CBDC-dólar ('central bank digital coin'). En ambos casos se trata de eliminar cualquier posibilidad de volver atrás, obligándose a seguir adelante cueste lo que cueste.

El anglo está suicidándose. Y no hay que entender por anglo uno o varios países o Estados, sino el estatus cívico de ciertos integrantes del imperio, unos por interés, otros por cobardía.

¿Qué hacer?

Nada.

Ojalá que las elecciones 'midterm' del 3 de noviembre no signifiquen el hundimiento del REPATH-en-jefe; que este se salga con la suya humillando —debilitando— al banco central del imperio y al primer banco del mundo (querellas contra la Fed y el J. P. Morgan Chase); y que, en Madrid, lleguemos a las elecciones autonómicas y generales con el novio sin condenar.

En ese caso, que las generales sean ya mismo. Para que seguir aguantando esperando que se deshinchen los "liberales"  si interesa que lleguen al poder sin escandalos.

Lo comenté el otro día, es mejor que se acelere todo si con eso colapsa el modelo PopCap.

[senslev]

"A piece of cake"

[Derby]

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/lets-save-the-human-species

Let's save the human species!, Noah Smith

There's probably a solution out there to fertility decline. Let's find it!



Take a look at the marvel that is modern China. The endless gleaming lines of bullet trains. The air taxis and the drone delivery services and the driverless cars. The bubble tea franchises and the cavernous malls and the fast fashion and the pay-with-your-face apps and the robot waiters and the automated factories. The Shanghai clubs and the side streets of Chongqing and the manicured parks of Shenzhen.

You are looking at the peak. China will continue to be a spectacular, world-leading civilization for a couple more decades, but sometime around the century’s halfway point, demographic decline will begin to sap its vitality. Sometime around the mid-2010s, China’s birth rate fell off a cliff, and has not stopped falling since:


Source: Bloomberg

It’s difficult to state just how stark and catastrophic of a collapse this is. The number of births in China fell by 17% in just the last year. In fact, as economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde recently pointed out, China had fewer births in 2025 than in 1776, when its population was less than a fifth of what it is now.

China’s total fertility rate now stands at around 0.93, less than half the replacement level. At that rate, every four grandparents will have fewer than one grandchild. Fernández-Villaverde explains what this means for the future of China’s population:

f China could somehow sustain 7.92 million births per year from now on, its population would eventually stabilize at roughly 625 million, far below today’s 1.405 billion. In reality, as smaller cohorts reach childbearing age, births will fall well below 7.92 million. Hence, 625 million is a very generous upper bound[.]

But this isn’t a post about China; it’s about the whole world. Those who expect China’s low fertility to end its bid to dominate the globe are in for a severe disappointment, since fertility is falling in the rest of the world as well. It’s true that China is an especially severe case — a TFR of less than 1.0 puts it in a special category with Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Thailand (Japan, interestingly, is still slightly higher). But over the past decade, fertility has begun collapsing all over the world, much faster than it had been declining before.

Fernández-Villaverde has a good set of slides from 2023 explaining why the new fertility crisis is different and more urgent than traditional concerns. In earlier times, fertility tended to gently decline in each country until it was just under the replacement rate — the kind of baby deficit that seemed like it could be fixed with reasonable policies. But since the mid-2010s, the fertility decline has accelerated, and there seems to be no bottom to the new collapse; every year, statistical agencies revise their already negative projections downward even more.


Source: Jesús Fernández-Villaverde

When they confront these stark numbers, there are several things that people tell themselves (or shout on social media) to try to cope with the notion of a shrinking humanity. I’ll go through the most common of these coping statements, and explain why each of them is wrong.

1. “The only thing that matters is per capita living standards, so a shrinking population is fine”

People who say this forget that a shrinking population is also an aging population. Old people can work longer, but eventually their bodies and minds break down and they need to be supported by younger workers. Here’s what I wrote in 2024:

[With an aging population] every working-age adult has to toil harder and consume less in order to support a growing number of people who are too old to work…In the 1990s and 2000s, there were more than 5 working-age Americans (age 15-64) for every elderly American (64+). By 2021, there were fewer than 4. That means that the economic burden of supporting each elderly American is now shared among only 4 people instead of 5…And in other rich countries, it’s even worse. In France, there are only 3 working-age people for every elderly person. In Japan, there are only two[.]

And here’s what I wrote in 2023:

[A] shrinking population means that profitable investments will be a lot harder to come by…f there are more old people and fewer younger people, then demand for the assets of the old is going to have to be split among more sellers. And that will mean a lower price. In other words…people will have to save more and more during their working years in order to make it to a comfortable retirement.

And here’s the upshot:

So in general, the shrinking world will be a world of toil. Working people will have to bear the burdens of higher taxes, more eldercare, and longer working lives. And despite working more, they will have to be thrifty and ascetic, saving more money for their own retirements.

On top of all this, a shrinking population creates a problem for physical infrastructure. Road systems, sewer systems, electrical grids, and so on were built to support a certain size of population; cut the population in half, and there won’t be enough people to support all that infrastructure in any given area. We tend to forget just how quickly human structures depreciate and fall into ruin, and how much human maintenance they require to remain usable.

You can try to consolidate people into fewer towns and smaller areas, but human mobility is not infinite; some people will be stuck in decaying towns, rotting away in despair.

2. “Productivity improvements will compensate for shrinking populations”

It’s true that if you raise total factor productivity, it will compensate for a shrinking work force. But there are three big problems here. The first is that with a few exceptions, every country is already trying as hard as it can to raise productivity, so there’s no button you can press that says “raise productivity even more” when your labor force starts to shrink.

The second problem is that shrinking workforces also shrink the number of people who are available to work on improving productivity. Chad Jones models this out in a 2022 paper, which shows some potentially dire consequences from a shrinking pool of researchers.

The third problem is that aging populations tend to have lower productivity growth:


Source: Maestas et al. (2022)

And this is from Ozimek et al. (2018):

The aggregate data show a clear relationship between an older workforce and lower productivity at the state-industry level, in both cross-section and panel models. The results are confirmed using employer-employee linked data…that show having older coworkers reduces an individual’s wages.

So low fertility will actually make it harder to raise productivity to compensate for low fertility.

3. “Robots will make human workers unnecessary anyway”

I encounter this one a lot these days. But this is also a coping statement rather than a solution. For one thing, we have no idea if it’s true or not. So far, AI systems are able to do some things very well and other things not very well, meaning there’s still a lot of need for human labor.1 That might change — we might develop AI systems that do everything well, allowing technology to replace labor instead of complementing it. But we don’t know if we’ll be able to do that, and it’s foolish of us to place all our hopes in that one possibility.

On top of that, total replacement of the human labor force with AI would just be a different kind of posthuman future. It would be an incredibly disruptive event for societies as they are currently set up. At the very least it would require massive labor reallocation of the type that we haven’t proven very good at in the past, creating a vast dispossessed underclass almost overnight. It could also drive up prices for electricity, land, and water to the point where humans are essentially driven to starvation, requiring large-scale redistribution of capital income in order to keep the human population alive. That would disrupt every political system on Earth, possibly causing disruptions more severe than occurred during the Industrial Revolution.

In other words, this is not a scenario to comfort ourselves with.

4. “Concerns about low fertility are racist and sexist”

When I warn about low fertility on social media, I inevitably encounter a few progressives telling me not to worry, because:

1.- Concerns about low fertility are actually just concerns about low white fertility, and

2.- Concerns about low fertility are excuses to enslave women and turn them into baby-making machines.

The first of these is just flat-out false. Asian fertility is lower than white fertility, for one thing. But fertility rates are also collapsing at an accelerating rate throughout the entire world, including Africa, Latin America, India, and poor countries in general:



As for sexism, I haven’t seen anyone contemplate turning society into The Handmaid’s Tale, and even deeply religious Muslim countries have seen stark fertility decline. So enslaving women doesn’t seem to be on the list of policy responses to the population crisis.

5. “We can just pay people to have more kids”

Paying people to have more kids does “work”, in the sense that people do have more kids when you pay them to do so. The problem is that they don’t have very many more kids; the effect sizes are so small that the amount of money required to boost fertility to near replacement levels would be prohibitive.

China has been trying to boost fertility with economic support for years, with no apparent result. Hungary tried to pay people to have more kids, with no lasting results at all. South Korea implemented a very substantial “baby bonus”, equivalent to about $700 per month, and it had the effect of reducing the fertility decline by 4.7% — not nearly enough to offset the catastrophic declines of recent years.

Even under optimistic assumptions, the sums of money required to restore non-collapsing fertility through baby bonuses are astronomical. This is from Lyman Stone, who studies this issue:

In 2020, the total fertility rate is probably around 1.71 children per woman. Thus, to reach 2.07, we would need a 21% increase in birth rates. To accomplish this, we would need the present value of child benefits to increase by somewhere between 52% and 400% of household income. For the median woman, this would mean providing a child benefit for the first 18 years of a child’s life worth approximately $5,300 per year in addition to currently-provided benefits, with the range running from $2,800 more per year to $23,000 more per year.

$23,000 per year, or even $10,000 per year, is an incredibly large sum of money — much more than any current welfare proposals, and enough to require gargantuan tax hikes that would no doubt prove politically toxic. But even this would not be enough — not even close.

Since Stone wrote that post, the U.S. TFR has fallen again, to 1.62. There is no reason to think it won’t fall more. This means that even under extremely optimistic assumptions about the power of baby bonuses, the amount we’d have to pay to get fertility back up to near replacement is just a complete political non-starter. For countries like China and Korea, the gap is far greater still, and baby bonuses are looking like they have only a very small effect.

Back in 2012, there were policies available that might have raised fertility to sustainable levels in many rich countries. As of 2026, in the face of the catastrophic and ongoing acceleration in the fertility decline, we have no known policy capable of addressing the problem.

6. “Immigration will solve the population problem”

Immigration is good, but sadly it won’t solve the population problem. First, fertility is falling across the entire world, even in the poorest countries of Africa. In the world as a whole, fertility rates are approaching replacement level and may already be there.


Source: World Bank

There is no other planet to get immigrants from. 

Rich countries, of course, can continue to dull the pains of population aging and shrinkage by taking people from poor countries. But as Fernández-Villaverde notes, it’s not that simple, because those rich countries have strong welfare states. Poor immigrants are going to use lots of welfare benefits, ultimately canceling out much of their economic contribution to the nation. And because immigrants themselves age, they’re eventually going to contribute to population aging, especially because many of them come when they’re already middle-aged.

So anyway, there is a massive amount of coping on this issue, because people see a grave and possibly even existential threat coming inexorably in their direction, and they don’t think there’s anything they can do to stop it, so they need something to tell themselves in order to stop worrying. But this sort of self-reassurance won’t solve the actual problem or avert the actual threat.

In fact, we mustn’t bury our heads in the sand on this issue, or tell ourselves that it’s all going to work out. Instead, we have to face up to the problem, so that we can start looking for ways to solve it.

What we need right now is research, research, and more research

Humanity has always relied on technical solutions to get us out of our worst problems. It was research into green energy that has given us hope of stopping climate change. Vaccine research has given us hope of stopping pandemics. The Green Revolution staved off mass starvation from population growth, and so on.

Collapsing fertility is a bit different from those other problems, because it’s fundamentally a social problem rather than a physical threat like climate change, disease, or starvation. Social science research is typically much more expensive and much less conclusive than research in the physical sciences.

But despite that big hurdle, it stands to reason that the human race should be doing lots and lots of research on how to avert this imminent and nearly existential threat. I propose a Fertility Policy Research Center, gathering together top researchers in experimental economics and development economics, epidemiologists, quantitative sociologists, and so on. The goal would be to find a solution to the problem of long-term stabilization of the fertility at or near the replacement rate of 2.0.

The center’s activities could include:

*Epidemiological and observational research on the causes of fertility drops

*Randomized controlled trials of policy interventions to raise fertility

*Trials of technological interventions for increasing fertility

The first and third of these won’t be that expensive. It’s the second of these — RCTs for policy interventions to raise fertility — that will cost a lot of money and take a lot of time. A single study can cost millions of dollars.

The funding for fertility policy research will thus have to be in the billions of dollars. That’s outside of the range of modern philanthropic research, but not by much — the ARC Institute has pledged grants of $650 million, and CERN’s Future Circular Collider has $1 billion, all from private sources. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that a group of billionaires might be willing to pool their resources and endow a Fertility Policy Research Institute with $5 billion or even $10 billion.

Take Elon Musk, for instance. The world’s richest man has clearly identified ultra-low birth rates as an existential threat:



Musk’s net worth is now over $750 billion. Just one percent of his wealth could fully endow a Fertility Policy Research Center with all of the money it would likely need for at least two decades. Five percent of his wealth could endow the center with all the money it would ever need. Isn’t solving an existential threat worth five percent of one man’s wealth?

Anyway, there is no dearth of hypotheses to consider here. Big questions for the research center might include:

1.- Is social media causing the recent acceleration in the decline of fertility rates? Would restrictions on social media use be sufficient to raise TFR by a significant amount?

2.- Does geographically concentrating people with high fertility rates tend to increase or decrease society-wide birth rates?

3.- Does living space per person affect fertility rates?

4.- How does economic security affect fertility rates?

5.- Which is more cost-effective for raising fertility: cash payments or in-kind benefits like free child care?

6.- Would AI nannies or tutors relieve some of the burden of child care, thus increasing people’s desire to have children?

7.- How do maternal and paternal leave affect fertility rates?

8.- Does gender equality in household chores affect fertility?

9.- How do norms of higher and lower fertility get transmitted? Can these norms be influenced by deliberate media campaigns or other informational interventions?

10.- Are there interventions that encourage couple formation earlier in life?

11.- Are there any public health factors affecting fertility rates to a significant degree?

These are just a few hypotheses off of the top of my head. Putting $50 million toward investigating each of these would use up only 0.065% of Elon Musk’s wealth, while the payoff from even one important, usable finding could be absolutely huge.

It would be even better, of course, if governments could get involved with the funding effort. This could be tricky, since government grants usually go through laborious and slow processes. In the U.S., a special research project — similar to the Human Genome Project — might be able to circumvent some of those procedural hurdles. And since fertility decline is such a worldwide problem, there are probably plenty of governments who would contribute some funding to the center — many without onerous red tape. China, in particular, seems like it would want to fund a crash program for solving the birth rate problem.

Government support will be especially crucial when scaling up policy interventions from RCTs to actual government policy. This can be very tricky and very expensive, since many interventions don’t scale up. Government support, both logistical and in terms of funding, would often be essential — but it would also probably be forthcoming.

It’s kind of insane that nobody has done this yet, and it speaks to the power of the six coping statements that I listed above. A lot of people have managed to convince themselves that the problem of low fertility is no big deal, or that it’s easily solved, or that even viewing it as a problem is illegitimate. They are all wrong. It’s a huge problem, and we need to be attacking it with the same tool — scientific research — that we’ve used to defeat so many adversaries in the past.

1 This is a stochastic version of Moravec’s Paradox.

PS https://www.youtube.com/shorts/JV6bFIQOF3Q Dimon preguntado sobre si hay un clima de miedo en los USA...

[Cadavre Exquis]

US Formally Withdraws From WHO
Posted by msmash on Friday January 23, 2026 @09:00AM from the brave-new-world dept.

The United States formally withdrew from the World Health Organization on Thursday, making good on an executive order that President Trump issued on his first day in office pledging to leave the international organization that coordinates global responses to public health threats. The New York Times:

While the United States is walking away from the organization, a senior official with the Department of Health and Human Services told reporters on Thursday that the Trump administration was considering some type of narrow, limited engagement with W.H.O. global networks that track infectious diseases, including influenza.

As a W.H.O. member, the United States long sent scientists from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to participate in international decision-making about which strains to include in the flu vaccine. A W.H.O. meeting on next year's vaccine is scheduled for February. The official said the Trump administration would soon disclose how or whether it will participate.

On Thursday, the administration said that all U.S. government funding to the organization had been terminated, and that all assigned federal employees and contractors had been recalled from its Geneva headquarters and its offices worldwide.

Saludos.