Morgan Housel

But the decline has been going on.

But even after they lifted that and after they went out, it's a cultural preference for fewer children.

And that decline has been going on for a long time.

And it's not, it has not sped up.

It has gone supernova in the last 10 years.

if you look at the domestic birth rate in the United States, it's higher than almost everywhere else in the developed world.

It's not high and it's much lower than it used to be in the United States.

The wild card for the United States and almost no other country has, and certainly China doesn't have, is immigration, which goes through ebbs and flows.

Unbelievably high three years ago, marching towards zero now.

And so that's very difficult to predict what that will be over the next 25 years.

You brought up a point earlier that is, I guess, inarguable, that any empire,

that has this level of debt that has been extended to the extent the United States has collapsed.

I would bring up another analogy and I would say, and I know the answer to this is a rhetorical question, what country in history has succeeded for more than five or 10 years with a shrinking population?

None, none, never, none.

And China's population is by 1.4 billion right now.

The new forecast, I think it was by 2070, maybe, so this is a long-term forecast, will be down to 600 million.

And what country, what creates GDP growth?

There's two ways to grow your economy.

You increase the number of people or you make those people more productive.

That's what economic growth is.