2023 US vs. China GDP

[ohio jones]

U.S. TFR is 1.64, China's is 1.25. America is facing the exact same problem - it's just not as far along yet. (China has over a billion people, America has ⅓ of a billion.)

Every developed country in the world goes through the same demographic transition. Even the Amish will do so once they run out of viable farmland and are forced to become more urbanized.

The Amish are not a country.

[Ken]

U.S. TFR is 1.64, China's is 1.25. America is facing the exact same problem - it's just not as far along yet. (China has over a billion people, America has ⅓ of a billion.)

Every developed country in the world goes through the same demographic transition. Even the Amish will do so once they run out of viable farmland and are forced to become more urbanized.

The Amish are not a country.

No but I predict that the size of Amish families will fall as well if they go through the same transition from a rural agrarian lifestyle to an urban/suburban one due to population pressure. It is all but inevitable. And that will, indeed, eventually happen when the Amish run out of viable farmland to colonize. Which is also all but inevitable.

[ohio jones]

Every developed country in the world goes through the same demographic transition. Even the Amish will do so once they run out of viable farmland and are forced to become more urbanized.

The Amish are not a country.

No but I predict that the size of Amish families will fall as well if they go through the same transition from a rural agrarian lifestyle to an urban/suburban one due to population pressure. It is all but inevitable. And that will, indeed, eventually happen when the Amish run out of viable farmland to colonize. Which is also all but inevitable.

Why would they run out of viable farmland to colonize? There should be plenty of opportunity globally for them to move into areas affected by depopulation and urbanization.

[Josh]

The most conservative Amish pattern requires about an acre per person (and yes, I realise saying this will cause Ken to start talking about deserts and dry places and stuff like that). America has 2.3 billion acres, but Canada has another 2.4 billion. (If there are concerns about water, Canada has plenty.)

The opportunity for Amish to expand is basically limitless, or at least it is until we get into the billions.

Interestingly, China also had a very large rural population that needed about an acre per person to sustain life with their traditional method of growing crops and raising animals, and they have about 2.3 billion acres (and 1.4 billion people before COVID). The main reason China has such a massive population is because Mao Tse Tung ran a campaign to encourage the largest families possible, so the population exploded in the 1960s.

Nonetheless, some people will continue to believe that (a) populations will shrink, (b) every rural person will want to pack themselves into a high-rise apartment complex in a giant megacity, and (c) the solution to all of this is "immigration", as if there is some limitless supply of people who will make good additions to the country somewhere else. (Where are these people going to come from? China? India?)

[Ken]

The Amish are not a country.

No but I predict that the size of Amish families will fall as well if they go through the same transition from a rural agrarian lifestyle to an urban/suburban one due to population pressure. It is all but inevitable. And that will, indeed, eventually happen when the Amish run out of viable farmland to colonize. Which is also all but inevitable.

Why would they run out of viable farmland to colonize? There should be plenty of opportunity globally for them to move into areas affected by depopulation and urbanization.

People aren't depopulating rural areas of the US or anywhere else in the world because farming is uneconomical. They are depopulating it because of advances in productivity. It is the same for every other industry based on extracting value from the land or sea. Fishing, logging, mining, and yes, farming.

So productive farmland in the US isn't lying fallow. It is being bought up and consolidated by large corporate interests who are using advances in productivity to farm vast acreages with a few employees and lots of technology. Same thing in mining, fishing, and logging. Bill Gates is buying vast acreages of farmland in the Midwest. As are enormously wealthy interests like sovereign wealth funds from oil rich Persian Gulf States. And the same thing is happening everywhere else in the world from Brazil to Ethiopia.

That is who the Amish will be increasingly competing with as they expand outwards from their traditional enclaves. Yes they will continue to find opportunities in marginally productive areas like upstate New York and Kentucky. But eventually those will run out like they did for previous generations and they will run into the reality that there are not many new places to go. Especially if their population continues to increase exponentially.

And then they will be forced like every previous generation of Americans to increasingly diversity and urbanize.

[Josh]

Ah yes, Ken's vision of the future: Bill Gates owns all the farmland and the rest of us have to live in high rise apartment complexes.

Nobody works the land (except underpaid immigrants, of course) because then we wouldn't be urban and sophisticated enough. One who is truly cultured and well-educated instead lives sort of like an insect, buzzing around their hive in their worker-drone colony before they buzz off to be "productive" in one of America's many productive industries, such as social-media platforms, pharmaceutical marketing, defence/aerospace (so we can design more overpriced missiles that fail to shoot down their targets), marketing firms, "disruptive industries", tech startups, trendy coffeeshops, "fintech" institutions that find ever more creative ways to get people into debt, and so on.

Some of us have a vision for the future that doesn't involve every one of us turning into a bug-person.

[ohio jones]

Why would they run out of viable farmland to colonize? There should be plenty of opportunity globally for them to move into areas affected by depopulation and urbanization.

... And then they will be forced like every previous generation of Americans to increasingly diversity and urbanize.

Even if they're not Americans any more?

[Ken]

Ah yes, Ken's vision of the future: Bill Gates owns all the farmland and the rest of us have to live in high rise apartment complexes.

It isn't my vision of the future. It is economic reality. Whether we like it or not.

Out here in the northwest we had massive logging camps like these 100 years ago and it took thousands of men working by by hand to to fell timber and keep sawmills in operation




Today a single guy can do in a day what it took 100 men to accomplish 100 years ago.



Same thing in fishing. A hundred years ago the Alaska groundfish industry was manned by fleets of hundreds of small schooners like these maybe catching a ton of fish per day on a good day to pack on ice and haul back to canneries on shore which employed hundreds more



Today the groundfish industry is dominated by factory processors like these which can catch 100 tons of fish per tow, 6 times per day



They process it all onboard ship and offload directly to Asian-bound container ships without even the need for a single cannery worker on land. This is Dutch Harbor Alaska. Those fish frozen at sea are going straight from that factory trawler in the foreground into refrigerated containers for shipping to Asia on Chinese container ship without a single person touching them



Mining is the same. What once took thousands of men to dig coal out of the ground by hand is now accomplished by massive machinery removing entire mountaintops.

And yes, farming is increasingly like that too.

That is what is meant by increases in productivity. Less men and more machines to accomplish the same job. Yes in some industries like fishing there are regulations designed to protect the little guy and so we still have fleets of small scale fishermen around the country. Not so in farming. The government doesn't carve out milk, wheat, or corn quotas for small scale operators and prohibit larger scale equipment like it does in some fisheries.

Will the Amish be able to continue? Sure. Those who have generational farms especially. But they will run up into very real obstacles to growth. Corporate farms and sovereign wealth funds aren't going to sell to the Amish just because they ask. And those wealthy interests have the infinitely deep pockets to out-bid them should they choose to. That is the reality. It isn't something I WANT to see. It is just what is happening. They are not immune from the forces that affect the rest of the world economy.

So yes. If the Amish continue to grow exponentially, they will be increasingly faced with the need to diversify into other lines of work. Which will mean an increasingly suburban or urban lifestyle. And then large families will go from being an economic advantage to an economic disadvantage just like everywhere else in the world.

I don't make the rules. But I can observe history and economic trends.

[barnhart]

Ken, there is likely some data to test the effect of industrialization on Amish families. My brother-in-law has been working for years in the RV industry in northern Indiana where the labor force is overwhelmingly Amish.

[Ken]

Ken, there is likely some data to test the effect of industrialization on Amish families. My brother-in-law has been working for years in the RV industry in northern Indiana where the labor force is overwhelmingly Amish.

I would expect there is data if anyone is interested enough to collect it.

But I also expect change is inevitable. If you live on an Amish family farm there is virtually no limit to family size. Each new child can be put to work on the farm to generate income and each new child imposes little additional cost since food is abundant on a farm and clothes are hand-me-down.

By contrast, an Amish family living in some sort of suburban/exurban setting with the father working outside the home at a factory for long hours of the day? Every kid brings only cost to the family. If you live in suburbia there isn't much productive income that your 10 year old son can generate in the back yard. And you'll now be buying a larger portion of your food, paying more for utilities and so forth. Plus housing is much more expensive than in rural areas and homes are going to be smaller. So a family of 15 is no big deal on a traditional Amish farm in rural PA or Ohio. But not so easy to pull off in someplace like suburban Philly.

That has been the case with every single rural society on the planet that has urbanized. Family sizes shrink. I'm not sure why the Amish would be any different. They may resist the trend for a while, but economic realities are hard to buck over long periods of time.

The other problem the Amish are going to face is that their version of small scale family farming isn't going to translate as well to distant stretches of the rural west that are becoming depopulated through consolidation. Same thing in places like Saskatchewan. The Amish are not wholly self-sufficient. They rely on goods and services like everyone else as well as markets. They use ordinary medical services in places like PA and OH, employ their children in ordinary businesses, and rely on local markets to sell their produce from farmers markets and roadside stands to local wholesalers. That is fine in densely populated rural OH, PA, NY, KY, and so forth. But go out to northwestern Nebraska or northern Saskatchewan where rural towns are drying up and vanishing as farming consolidates and it isn't going to be so easy. The nearest hospital might be 100 miles away which is a long ways on a buggy. There aren't going to be people driving by to visit your roadside stand or farmers market. And there won't be any local markets at all for anything but the most basic commodity crops like wheat, corn, and soybeans which are the least conducive crops to grow using horse-powered agriculture.

So I think Josh's notion that the Amish can just endlessly populate the vast empty spaces in North America is wrong. Previous generations of farmers tried that and they are all gone. What is left are corporate operators farming thousands upon thousands of acres using large scale equipment and things like Mexican immigrant labor.

Maybe they can change and become mechanized corporate farmers themselves. Like the Hutterites. That is certainly a possibility. Maybe they will find that converting from horses to John Deere is a preferable compromise to working in RV factories. I don't know. But it will be interesting to watch.