11 ms·

Why the demographic transition is speeding up

xchip 5y ago
TL;DR: "The fashion for fewer births was probably rooted both in changes in outlook associated with secularism and the Enlightenment and in the spread of information about family planning"
- thriftwy 5y ago
  This is the vehicle of demographic decline. The reason for driving it is relative poverty[1], and insecurity in one's future, both of which are prevalent in many modern societies. 1. this one is hard to define in a comment.
wallacoloo 5y ago
> On November 24th India’s government declared that the country’s fertility rate had dropped to 2.0 children per woman. the writer (who appears to be anonymous?) shamelessly omits citing or linking to any source for this, and i can't find it. there's a WaPo article [1] claiming a similar thing, where their assertion is backed up by a broken link. when i search "India fertility rate" the most relevant thing i can find suggests this to be 2.18 as of this year [2]. this source's numbers match the St Louis Fed's numbers [3] up to the point that the fed lacks data (2019). help me out here. the claim that fertility rates are falling faster than predicted -- and that replacement rate has already been reached -- is central to this article. so on the surface, this article seems entirely untrustworthy. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/11/25/india-birth-rate-replacement-population/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/11/25/india-birth-... [2] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/fertility-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/fertility-ra... [3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNTFRTININD https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNTFRTININD
guerby 5y ago
https://archive.md/qwYYD https://archive.md/qwYYD
- rubyfan 5y ago
  ‘I am not a robot’ puts me into a loop instead of getting to the content. Anyone else run into this? I use ad blockers and vpn so I understand why I am asked to prove I’m not a robot but unsure why I can’t get through the test.
  - gumby 5y ago
    I find that "test" is sometimes broken by ad block. Which makes me worry what else is going on with that captcha.
guerby 5y ago
Nice video about the subject of world population, in french: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxHwUt87izg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxHwUt87izg
foxhop 5y ago
Division reducing chance of Multiplication. https://pad.yohdah.com/827/why-the-blacksmith-needs-the-druid/raw https://pad.yohdah.com/827/why-the-blacksmith-needs-the-drui...
Ambolia 5y ago
Populations that stop reproducing is a problem that solves itself. Probably cultures and individuals that are more likely to desire babies will push forward.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  unlikely. historically the most important cultures were a small minority of human population
  - medstrom 5y ago
    That's a bold claim, can you unpack? Also, important for who?
    - cblconfederate 5y ago
      the whole constellation of western cultures that dominated the world came from small populations. Important for , let's say, technology, since technology gave them military advantage
      - gremloni 5y ago
        Dominated the world for the tiniest sliver of human civilization. Asia is coming back strong again.
  - gremloni 5y ago
    Nonsense. For 95% of recorded human history the Chinese and Indians were the richest and most productive civilizations and you can’t call those populations small. It’s like you’re living in your own narrative.
cblconfederate 5y ago
Pity there isnt one such country in sub-saharan africa to help reverse overpopulation, the only low fertility rate seems to be Mauritius.
eric4smith 5y ago
At one time I thought, along with the orthodoxy, that falling population rates would be a big problem in the future. But now, it's just a way for humanity to rebalance itself. 30 years ago as we approached 7 billion humans on the planet, everyone was worrying about how we would feed ourselves and what would happen if the rate of growth kept going the same way. (Yes, I'm that old that I remember the news stories). Now as we slowly decline, everyone wants us to make more babies. These things go in cycles. I think that as we get more advanced and men and particularly women, see participating and reaping the rewards of modern economies in pretty much every country -- more important than having children, it will drop even more. But as covid shows, events will happen that cause people to rethink that from time to time. In a way, its "life" that re-balances itself without even our intervention. It's a pendulum, and right now, it's swinging one way. It will swing back.
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  >Now as we slowly decline, everyone wants us to make more babies. It's irrelevant how much they want us to make babies (Western Europe), as unless real estate prices plummet to levels affordable to young couples without rich parents, you won't see birthrates in the west go up without heavy immigration from developing nations. They can't expect to have rising birthrates that would sustain the pyramid scheme of the welfare state while at the same time treating real estate as an investment vehicle that goes up faster than wages, squeezing the younger generations out. Either the welfare state in the west will collapse or the real estate market will. You can't have both going up at the same time.
  - alangibson 5y ago
    If the welfare state is a pyramid scheme, then so are all economic structures. Perhaps you're heard that productivity of individual workers increases over time...
    - skhr0680 5y ago
      If wages kept up with productivity increases, there would be more than enough tax money to fund national pensions. Thanks for the insight, I’d never thought about it that way
bullen 5y ago
The increase in population growth peaked in 1968. The economist are 50 years late on this one.
hd4 5y ago
Not even one mention of climate change in the article. Isn't this exactly what we wanted? This is fantastic news. I thought the whole shift in agenda towards female education and feminism in the developing world was precisely to create this demographic shift, i.e. to reduce global birth rates to almost nothing. We should be celebrating.
- neilparikh 5y ago
  At the very end they do have this: > Slower population growth could make the challenge of cutting carbon emissions less daunting.
causi 5y ago
In my self-interested opinion, this is why we need to increase immigration now, not later. We don't get a choice about the genetic makeup of Western countries a century from now, but we do get a choice as to whether our culture is preserved. Bring in the people with high reproduction rates now when they and their children will be maximally immersed in our culture and carry it forward. Don't wait until there aren't enough of us left to matter.
- cblconfederate 5y ago
  i think we need to calm down with demographic determinism
- newsclues 5y ago
  Some young people see immigration as a barrier to them having children as they have less career prospects and housing costs more.
  - neilparikh 5y ago
    This reminds of a passage from Dune (context: the planet the book is set on is a desert with a very limited amount of water): > "There were water riots when it was learned how many people the Duke was adding to the population," she said. "They stopped only when the people learned we were installing new windtraps and condensers to take care of the load." > "There is only so much water to support human life here," he said. "The people know if more come to drink a limited amount of water, the price goes up and the very poor die. But the Duke has solved this. It doesn’t follow that the riots mean permanent hostility toward him."
    - watwut 5y ago
      Dune is made up. While arguing with history makes some sense, arguing what might happen make some sense, arguing by "fiction had this story in it" does not make sense.
      - mensetmanusman 5y ago
jackcosgrove 5y ago
The "demographic contagion" is explained in the article as a spread of cultural mores towards smaller families. There could also be an economic explanation. Traditionally large families were favored because they provided old-age security to parents. If an immigrant from a developing country is able to support their parents with remittances from a developed country, then there is less of a need for large families in the developing country.
- FourthProtocol 5y ago
  The article does mention economic factors - e.g. the desire for families to educate their children, which for a family with many children is prohibitively expensive.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  > Traditionally large families were favored because they provided old-age security to parents. Were they? If we asked old women why they had 3, 4, 5+ kids, would they say it was so they would have old age security or were they having them because they did not have a choice to not have them?
  - thriftwy 5y ago
    When people don't want to have kids it's not very hard not to. You may end up with one or two children that way due to fallibility of naive contraception, but it's hard to imagine how a couple will end up with 4 children despite wanting none. There's a reason why Pushkin had 4 children by the time he got shot, the man was no fool to do that accidentally.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      The subtext of my comment is that the woman in the relationship may not have had a choice in wanting or not wanting children. It does not even have to be outright rape, just the implications of women being dependent on men or older family members and other societal expectations.
stephc_int13 5y ago
This kind of demographic transitions is not new, something similar happened among the elite in big cities during antiquity (Rome and Greece) Scholars and rulers were not happy with the situation. It forced them to offer citizenship to immigrants and slaves on as large scale. It also probably inspired religions that were created at the time to put a strong emphasis on family values and large families. I think we should both rejoice and try to better understand this self-regulating phenomenon.
wombatmobile 5y ago
I can’t speak for everyone in India etc. but for me, personally, I didn’t reproduce because I felt the world already had enough people for finite resources, and I didn’t think my descendants would get to experience as rich of a natural environment as the one I grew up in. I don’t regret this decision. Whilst I might have enjoyed being a parent, had things gone that way, there’s infinitely much to enjoy about being alive solo and free, and nothing to worry about in the aftermath.
- ulnarkressty 5y ago
  Maybe what we need is more people that are educated and think as you do, not less. Did you ever consider that your decision is actually applying evolutionary pressure the wrong way around (wrong according to your beliefs)?
  - wombatmobile 5y ago
    I note your observation that the outcome of this strategy is a world populated by people who don't share the strategy, but that doesn't worry me. I don't want the world to be populated by people who think like me. I just appreciate it for what it is. It's a big old interesting world, and I'll only ever get to see bits of it. There are so many people in the world, all of them different, each of them thinking different things and trying to get to different places. That's what I like about the world. It's an interesting, surprising place, full of variety, unexpected schema, and ways to do things that have never occurred to me. What parents want for their kids is just the starting point for kids anyway. Where they end up and why, who knows?
    - grover35 5y ago
      I will have two extra kids to cancel out your decision
    - cbshsjsh 5y ago
      > I don't want the world to be populated by people who think like me. I didn’t want kids for the same reasons, and because I am highly anxious and the world seems pretty grim place. Ended up marrying a girl who wanted kids, so now we have kids. I am happy to be parent but now that I am hanging out with other parents, there are no longer intellectual discussions. Everyone seems more focused on the money. And honestly it seems there is a relationship between number of kids and intelligence. These people are happier though. Now I sort of hope my kids don’t think like me. Even if it means overpopulation.
jl6 5y ago
Well this seems to be causing a lot of unnecessary worry. A fertility rate of 2.0 is fantastic news! It’s just below replacement rate, meaning a gradual decline in population size without a dramatic collapse. Gives economies time to adapt while avoiding the severe threat of exponential growth. “But this trend means we will eventually go extinct!” you say? Only if you believe we can’t correct the trend when the population starts to dip low. But we are centuries away from that and the remediation plan is trivial - just have more babies.
- mattigames 5y ago
  And the amount of people is just ridiculous, why 8 billion? When was this stablished to be the right amount? Why not -lets say- 1 billion and destroy the planet much much less?
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    Because a combination of women not having the ability to say no to sex and people liking sex. Women’s financial independence and IUD/vasectomies/birth control pills are relatively new, and still only available to a small portion of the population.
    - mensetmanusman 5y ago
      Surprisingly, about three condoms per year are made for every fertile male in the world.
  - r3trohack3r 5y ago
    I don’t want to live in a society where someone can establish an ideal population size. Free humans making their decision one birth at a time establish population sizes.
    - DFHippie 5y ago
      There's a difference between deciding an ideal population size and enforcing it. Also, there are different ways of enforcing it, many involving little that we would term coercion: establishing child tax credits, for example; funding schools and healthcare via mechanisms which make raising children more or less burdensome. Free people can react to these incentives via their own free choice while society at large, acting as a collective of free people, decide what these incentives should be. The incentives established by other people's choices are inevitable unless you want to go live like the Martian.
lkrubner 5y ago
It's important to balance this analysis with the fact that the human population of the Earth, in absolute terms, grew more during the last 60 years than at any other time in history. Or consider, there were about 4 billion humans on the planet when I was born, there is almost 8 billion now. There are situations where it is good to talk in percentages. There are other situations when it is good to talk about absolute numbers. Assuming the planet has some absolute environmental limits, then it is the absolute number of humans, rather than some percentage growth rate, that matters. Why are people having less children? Surely part of it is because of the strain of having to absorb the historic population surge that we have just lived through. We can see this most clearly in the nations that have seen the biggest surges. Iran had 6 million people in 1915. It then suffered a famine that weakened everyone's immune system, so it was vulnerable when the 1918 "Spanish Flu" arrived. It had 5 million survivors by 1921. It now has 83 million people, an astounding increase of 1,660%. Before it can go any further, it will need to rethink all of its institutions, government, education, culture, and worklife. In the same way that a corporation needs to fundamentally re-think everything after a 10x shift, so too do nations. I've studied Iran, but I have not studied Africa, but I believe in Africa you can find similar stories, such as what has happened in Nigeria. I don't mean to suggest that population pressures are the only reasons why people might be wary to have children, I only mean this is something to keep in mind when we discuss this issue. The human population of the Earth has exploded over the last century and especially the last 60 years, in absolute terms. Having to absorb a big population surge can leave any country a bit disorganized. Consider the USA. The biggest generation ever, the Baby Boom, came of age between 1965 and 1987. Given the big surge of the working population, you might think these would have been years of exceptional economic growth. Instead, the opposite happened, these were the years of "The Great Stagnation" with falling wages and falling productivity. No doubt the Great Stagnation was a complex, multi-factor event, but it is interesting that it happened when a naive model might have predicted a big surge.
- DFHippie 5y ago
  > No doubt the Great Stagnation was a complex, multi-factor event, but it is interesting that it happened when a naive model might have predicted a big surge. But there are a lot of different naive models making different predictions.
kgin 5y ago
As someone who grew up hearing the world was headed for certain and total disaster by overpopulation, it’s very hard for me to get upset by projections of a gradual and gentle move the other way for awhile.
LeanderK 5y ago
I've alway wondered the following: Since, in rich countries, nearly everyone who wants kids can have kids and if we assume a genetic factor in being drawn towards kids, then there would be evolutionary pressure towards wanting kids. If this is possible, could we already detect this? If one would assume such an hypothesis and model population growth, when could changes be detected?
mensetmanusman 5y ago
In my field it’s interesting to consider all the technology that wouldn’t exist if there were far fewer humans, because we rely on the billions of people wanting a $0.01 improvements to their lives to make investing in these super expensive machines viable. That, plus the fact that so few seem prone to understanding mathematics, probably plays a part in the technology innovation boon that aligned with the global population boon the last century,
Exendroinient 5y ago
There are many factors in the play here. Regular people can't afford good upbringing for a kid and even if money isn't a problem dystopian vision of the future clearly prevent from making that choice.

TL;DR: "The fashion for fewer births was probably rooted both in changes in outlook associated with secularism and the Enlightenment and in the spread of information about family planning"

thriftwy 5y ago
This is the vehicle of demographic decline. The reason for driving it is relative poverty[1], and insecurity in one's future, both of which are prevalent in many modern societies. 1. this one is hard to define in a comment.

wallacoloo 5y ago

> On November 24th India’s government declared that the country’s fertility rate had dropped to 2.0 children per woman. the writer (who appears to be anonymous?) shamelessly omits citing or linking to any source for this, and i can't find it. there's a WaPo article [1] claiming a similar thing, where their assertion is backed up by a broken link. when i search "India fertility rate" the most relevant thing i can find suggests this to be 2.18 as of this year [2]. this source's numbers match the St Louis Fed's numbers [3] up to the point that the fed lacks data (2019). help me out here. the claim that fertility rates are falling faster than predicted -- and that replacement rate has already been reached -- is central to this article. so on the surface, this article seems entirely untrustworthy. [1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/11/25/india-birth-rate-replacement-population/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/11/25/india-birth-... [2] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/fertility-rate https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/fertility-ra... [3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNTFRTININD https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNTFRTININD

guerby 5y ago

https://archive.md/qwYYD https://archive.md/qwYYD

rubyfan 5y ago
‘I am not a robot’ puts me into a loop instead of getting to the content. Anyone else run into this? I use ad blockers and vpn so I understand why I am asked to prove I’m not a robot but unsure why I can’t get through the test.
- gumby 5y ago
  I find that "test" is sometimes broken by ad block. Which makes me worry what else is going on with that captcha.

guerby 5y ago

Nice video about the subject of world population, in french: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxHwUt87izg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxHwUt87izg

foxhop 5y ago

Division reducing chance of Multiplication. https://pad.yohdah.com/827/why-the-blacksmith-needs-the-druid/raw https://pad.yohdah.com/827/why-the-blacksmith-needs-the-drui...

Ambolia 5y ago

Populations that stop reproducing is a problem that solves itself. Probably cultures and individuals that are more likely to desire babies will push forward.

cblconfederate 5y ago
unlikely. historically the most important cultures were a small minority of human population
- medstrom 5y ago
  That's a bold claim, can you unpack? Also, important for who?
  - cblconfederate 5y ago
    the whole constellation of western cultures that dominated the world came from small populations. Important for , let's say, technology, since technology gave them military advantage
    - gremloni 5y ago
      Dominated the world for the tiniest sliver of human civilization. Asia is coming back strong again.
- gremloni 5y ago
  Nonsense. For 95% of recorded human history the Chinese and Indians were the richest and most productive civilizations and you can’t call those populations small. It’s like you’re living in your own narrative.

cblconfederate 5y ago

Pity there isnt one such country in sub-saharan africa to help reverse overpopulation, the only low fertility rate seems to be Mauritius.

eric4smith 5y ago

At one time I thought, along with the orthodoxy, that falling population rates would be a big problem in the future. But now, it's just a way for humanity to rebalance itself. 30 years ago as we approached 7 billion humans on the planet, everyone was worrying about how we would feed ourselves and what would happen if the rate of growth kept going the same way. (Yes, I'm that old that I remember the news stories). Now as we slowly decline, everyone wants us to make more babies. These things go in cycles. I think that as we get more advanced and men and particularly women, see participating and reaping the rewards of modern economies in pretty much every country -- more important than having children, it will drop even more. But as covid shows, events will happen that cause people to rethink that from time to time. In a way, its "life" that re-balances itself without even our intervention. It's a pendulum, and right now, it's swinging one way. It will swing back.

ChuckNorris89 5y ago
>Now as we slowly decline, everyone wants us to make more babies. It's irrelevant how much they want us to make babies (Western Europe), as unless real estate prices plummet to levels affordable to young couples without rich parents, you won't see birthrates in the west go up without heavy immigration from developing nations. They can't expect to have rising birthrates that would sustain the pyramid scheme of the welfare state while at the same time treating real estate as an investment vehicle that goes up faster than wages, squeezing the younger generations out. Either the welfare state in the west will collapse or the real estate market will. You can't have both going up at the same time.
- alangibson 5y ago
  If the welfare state is a pyramid scheme, then so are all economic structures. Perhaps you're heard that productivity of individual workers increases over time...
  - skhr0680 5y ago
    If wages kept up with productivity increases, there would be more than enough tax money to fund national pensions. Thanks for the insight, I’d never thought about it that way

bullen 5y ago

The increase in population growth peaked in 1968. The economist are 50 years late on this one.

hd4 5y ago

Not even one mention of climate change in the article. Isn't this exactly what we wanted? This is fantastic news. I thought the whole shift in agenda towards female education and feminism in the developing world was precisely to create this demographic shift, i.e. to reduce global birth rates to almost nothing. We should be celebrating.

neilparikh 5y ago
At the very end they do have this: > Slower population growth could make the challenge of cutting carbon emissions less daunting.

causi 5y ago

In my self-interested opinion, this is why we need to increase immigration now, not later. We don't get a choice about the genetic makeup of Western countries a century from now, but we do get a choice as to whether our culture is preserved. Bring in the people with high reproduction rates now when they and their children will be maximally immersed in our culture and carry it forward. Don't wait until there aren't enough of us left to matter.

cblconfederate 5y ago
i think we need to calm down with demographic determinism
newsclues 5y ago
Some young people see immigration as a barrier to them having children as they have less career prospects and housing costs more.
- neilparikh 5y ago
  This reminds of a passage from Dune (context: the planet the book is set on is a desert with a very limited amount of water): > "There were water riots when it was learned how many people the Duke was adding to the population," she said. "They stopped only when the people learned we were installing new windtraps and condensers to take care of the load." > "There is only so much water to support human life here," he said. "The people know if more come to drink a limited amount of water, the price goes up and the very poor die. But the Duke has solved this. It doesn’t follow that the riots mean permanent hostility toward him."
  - watwut 5y ago
    Dune is made up. While arguing with history makes some sense, arguing what might happen make some sense, arguing by "fiction had this story in it" does not make sense.
    - mensetmanusman 5y ago

jackcosgrove 5y ago

The "demographic contagion" is explained in the article as a spread of cultural mores towards smaller families. There could also be an economic explanation. Traditionally large families were favored because they provided old-age security to parents. If an immigrant from a developing country is able to support their parents with remittances from a developed country, then there is less of a need for large families in the developing country.

FourthProtocol 5y ago
The article does mention economic factors - e.g. the desire for families to educate their children, which for a family with many children is prohibitively expensive.
lotsofpulp 5y ago
> Traditionally large families were favored because they provided old-age security to parents. Were they? If we asked old women why they had 3, 4, 5+ kids, would they say it was so they would have old age security or were they having them because they did not have a choice to not have them?
- thriftwy 5y ago
  When people don't want to have kids it's not very hard not to. You may end up with one or two children that way due to fallibility of naive contraception, but it's hard to imagine how a couple will end up with 4 children despite wanting none. There's a reason why Pushkin had 4 children by the time he got shot, the man was no fool to do that accidentally.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    The subtext of my comment is that the woman in the relationship may not have had a choice in wanting or not wanting children. It does not even have to be outright rape, just the implications of women being dependent on men or older family members and other societal expectations.

stephc_int13 5y ago

This kind of demographic transitions is not new, something similar happened among the elite in big cities during antiquity (Rome and Greece) Scholars and rulers were not happy with the situation. It forced them to offer citizenship to immigrants and slaves on as large scale. It also probably inspired religions that were created at the time to put a strong emphasis on family values and large families. I think we should both rejoice and try to better understand this self-regulating phenomenon.

wombatmobile 5y ago

I can’t speak for everyone in India etc. but for me, personally, I didn’t reproduce because I felt the world already had enough people for finite resources, and I didn’t think my descendants would get to experience as rich of a natural environment as the one I grew up in. I don’t regret this decision. Whilst I might have enjoyed being a parent, had things gone that way, there’s infinitely much to enjoy about being alive solo and free, and nothing to worry about in the aftermath.

ulnarkressty 5y ago
Maybe what we need is more people that are educated and think as you do, not less. Did you ever consider that your decision is actually applying evolutionary pressure the wrong way around (wrong according to your beliefs)?
- wombatmobile 5y ago
  I note your observation that the outcome of this strategy is a world populated by people who don't share the strategy, but that doesn't worry me. I don't want the world to be populated by people who think like me. I just appreciate it for what it is. It's a big old interesting world, and I'll only ever get to see bits of it. There are so many people in the world, all of them different, each of them thinking different things and trying to get to different places. That's what I like about the world. It's an interesting, surprising place, full of variety, unexpected schema, and ways to do things that have never occurred to me. What parents want for their kids is just the starting point for kids anyway. Where they end up and why, who knows?
  - grover35 5y ago
    I will have two extra kids to cancel out your decision
  - cbshsjsh 5y ago
    > I don't want the world to be populated by people who think like me. I didn’t want kids for the same reasons, and because I am highly anxious and the world seems pretty grim place. Ended up marrying a girl who wanted kids, so now we have kids. I am happy to be parent but now that I am hanging out with other parents, there are no longer intellectual discussions. Everyone seems more focused on the money. And honestly it seems there is a relationship between number of kids and intelligence. These people are happier though. Now I sort of hope my kids don’t think like me. Even if it means overpopulation.

jl6 5y ago

Well this seems to be causing a lot of unnecessary worry. A fertility rate of 2.0 is fantastic news! It’s just below replacement rate, meaning a gradual decline in population size without a dramatic collapse. Gives economies time to adapt while avoiding the severe threat of exponential growth. “But this trend means we will eventually go extinct!” you say? Only if you believe we can’t correct the trend when the population starts to dip low. But we are centuries away from that and the remediation plan is trivial - just have more babies.

mattigames 5y ago
And the amount of people is just ridiculous, why 8 billion? When was this stablished to be the right amount? Why not -lets say- 1 billion and destroy the planet much much less?
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  Because a combination of women not having the ability to say no to sex and people liking sex. Women’s financial independence and IUD/vasectomies/birth control pills are relatively new, and still only available to a small portion of the population.
  - mensetmanusman 5y ago
    Surprisingly, about three condoms per year are made for every fertile male in the world.
- r3trohack3r 5y ago
  I don’t want to live in a society where someone can establish an ideal population size. Free humans making their decision one birth at a time establish population sizes.
  - DFHippie 5y ago
    There's a difference between deciding an ideal population size and enforcing it. Also, there are different ways of enforcing it, many involving little that we would term coercion: establishing child tax credits, for example; funding schools and healthcare via mechanisms which make raising children more or less burdensome. Free people can react to these incentives via their own free choice while society at large, acting as a collective of free people, decide what these incentives should be. The incentives established by other people's choices are inevitable unless you want to go live like the Martian.

lkrubner 5y ago

It's important to balance this analysis with the fact that the human population of the Earth, in absolute terms, grew more during the last 60 years than at any other time in history. Or consider, there were about 4 billion humans on the planet when I was born, there is almost 8 billion now. There are situations where it is good to talk in percentages. There are other situations when it is good to talk about absolute numbers. Assuming the planet has some absolute environmental limits, then it is the absolute number of humans, rather than some percentage growth rate, that matters. Why are people having less children? Surely part of it is because of the strain of having to absorb the historic population surge that we have just lived through. We can see this most clearly in the nations that have seen the biggest surges. Iran had 6 million people in 1915. It then suffered a famine that weakened everyone's immune system, so it was vulnerable when the 1918 "Spanish Flu" arrived. It had 5 million survivors by 1921. It now has 83 million people, an astounding increase of 1,660%. Before it can go any further, it will need to rethink all of its institutions, government, education, culture, and worklife. In the same way that a corporation needs to fundamentally re-think everything after a 10x shift, so too do nations. I've studied Iran, but I have not studied Africa, but I believe in Africa you can find similar stories, such as what has happened in Nigeria. I don't mean to suggest that population pressures are the only reasons why people might be wary to have children, I only mean this is something to keep in mind when we discuss this issue. The human population of the Earth has exploded over the last century and especially the last 60 years, in absolute terms. Having to absorb a big population surge can leave any country a bit disorganized. Consider the USA. The biggest generation ever, the Baby Boom, came of age between 1965 and 1987. Given the big surge of the working population, you might think these would have been years of exceptional economic growth. Instead, the opposite happened, these were the years of "The Great Stagnation" with falling wages and falling productivity. No doubt the Great Stagnation was a complex, multi-factor event, but it is interesting that it happened when a naive model might have predicted a big surge.

DFHippie 5y ago
> No doubt the Great Stagnation was a complex, multi-factor event, but it is interesting that it happened when a naive model might have predicted a big surge. But there are a lot of different naive models making different predictions.

kgin 5y ago

As someone who grew up hearing the world was headed for certain and total disaster by overpopulation, it’s very hard for me to get upset by projections of a gradual and gentle move the other way for awhile.

LeanderK 5y ago

I've alway wondered the following: Since, in rich countries, nearly everyone who wants kids can have kids and if we assume a genetic factor in being drawn towards kids, then there would be evolutionary pressure towards wanting kids. If this is possible, could we already detect this? If one would assume such an hypothesis and model population growth, when could changes be detected?

mensetmanusman 5y ago

In my field it’s interesting to consider all the technology that wouldn’t exist if there were far fewer humans, because we rely on the billions of people wanting a $0.01 improvements to their lives to make investing in these super expensive machines viable. That, plus the fact that so few seem prone to understanding mathematics, probably plays a part in the technology innovation boon that aligned with the global population boon the last century,

Exendroinient 5y ago

There are many factors in the play here. Regular people can't afford good upbringing for a kid and even if money isn't a problem dystopian vision of the future clearly prevent from making that choice.