No it does not, not for countries like the US that are primarily composed of immigrants. I think we often forget that a lot of the white people here are immigrants, too, usually only a couple generations removed.
Presumably either the countries being emigrating from must be at replacement rate, or themselves declining? Somebody has to be producing the next generation, somewhere..
But the point is that the illness of developed nations is having the symptoms treated by infusions of immigrants from countries that don't _yet_ have the same illness. If it's a matter of "as countries develop they have less children", you'd better hope other places of the world stay poor and uneducated.
As rights for women progress, they choose not to have children. Which makes a lot of sense - having children is risky. The reason women in underdeveloped countries choose to have them is because they have less rights and less autonomy, as well as a worse economy.
If you're poor and require a husband to function, then having children is a huge boon. Not that you have much of a choice - your husband usually chooses. He bears little to no risk to having children, so of course he says yes.
What we cannot do in the West is backtrack on education and equality. It would probably work, yes, but we would literally develop backwards. Our economy relies on women working, our economy relies on education, etc.
So, instead, we should make having children a sweeter deal, rather than pseudo-forcing women to have children. We should offer generous and safe maternity leave, we should offer free childcare, and we should implement universal healthcare to eliminate risks associated with infant care, pregnancy, and postpartum care. We could even make higher-education free, to eliminate risks associated with saving for college.
Basically, women aren't having children because it's incredibly risky for little to no gain. By having children, you are ensuring greater economic hardship, health challenges, and less autonomy. It's a Catch 22 - if you choose to stay home, you have sabotaged your career. If you choose to work, you must pay exorbitant childcare fees.
We should not be surprised that women are opting out.
We live in such unprecedented times I'm again unsure why you would choose population growth rate as a factor to single out as particularly interesting and not, say, wealth inequality, climate stability, relative access to basic resources goods and services, perception of the competence of the ruling class, etc etc
The total number of people living in the world does not matter to local areas that see themselves age rapidly and hollow out as young people leave and they become unable to support the generous welfare we give to the old.
In other words: it's quite famous for how absurdly enormous swings in birth rate can be. It's famous for how critical it is for a species to have a stable birth rate.
I don't know where you got that idea. Some species critically depend on wildly unstable birth rates (grasshoppers and cicadas, but probably also deer and many other prey populations).
Stable populations are completely irrelevant at the microscopic levels; InBev would fold within a week if yeast populations were stable.
And both grasshoppers and cicadas are famous for suddenly disappearing across enormous areas. Which is a situation only very rarely referred to as "stable".
I know there's a joke in here about this being literally in the bible, with God using such an insect birth rate swing as a punishment for an entire state. That's how "stable" it is.
The population is rapidly shrinking because our “elites” only sow the seeds of despair. They only act in their own best interests. The commons are gone and all we have left is the memory of it. Stability is not on the horizon.
We can’t have billionaires with their own private space programs and 5 families with more wealth than 50% of America, and have a stable society.
This is just the natural and obvious outcome of what we’re already dealing with. The fertility crisis is just our refusal to deal appropriately with the ultra rich and the collapse of our institutions.
Who's we? If we had a consensus that they shouldn't be allowed to have that stuff it would be easy enough to vote it away from them without killing anyone. Seeing as we don't have a consensus, "we" are going to face a lot of opposition to the killing, let alone the redistribution.
At the very least, it would take enough automation such that the elderly don't need to either work or get wealth transfers from the working population to survive. Wealth transfers to the old only work when you have many more working-age people than retired people; if you don't, the whole thing implodes.
It would also take a society where people don't need investment appreciation to have enough wealth to live on, which again requires a much larger amount of automation and economic abundance than we have now.
It's not impossible, but it requires the kind of deliberate effort which seems beyond our political capabilities at the moment. The abundance people are at least aiming in the right direction though, hopefully they get more of a foothold.
Really? Because one obvious thing it'll require is about a doubling of the birth rate ... it's not about growth, it's about stability. At least at first.
Population stability and economic/societal stability don't have to be the same thing.
If someone cracks the "robots that can do human-like things" boundaries in the real world versus just text - and there are enormous efforts in this regard going on - I'd fully expect some tasks to be handled by non-human workers.
It seems a lot more likely than "number goes up" next-quarterism driven economies are to survive a thousand years.
I don't think that is possible so long as inflation occurs. When money is worth less, items costs more which means more economic growth is necessary (increased salaries, expenses, etc). Maybe I am missing something though?
I don't even know what you mean by that. Divorce rates have skyrocketed, and likewise women trapped in DV situations unable to leave has dropped considerably.
Today is far more urban than the US I grew up in. And organized religion is far less popular.
Population hasn't been stable since at least the invention of steam engines.
Etc.
I don't want "stable"; I want "safe". I want the next generation to live in a world that is AT LEAST as safe as this one, healthwise, likelihood of war, crimewise... and really I want better on all of those. As my childhood time vastly improved on the early 20th-C when my parents were kids.
First, we categorically lack the technology for wide-scale colonization of space or other planets. Second, no matter how much people like to deny it, the Earth does have some finite carrying capacity. We can argue indefinitely about what exactly that carrying capacity is, but it exists. It follows from those two facts that unbounded population growth is not possible. A continually shrinking population eventually leads to extinction, thus leaving a stable population as the only option that doesn't lead to either extinction or widespread chaos and calamity.
It's not really clear to me what the point of this question is. Are you advocating for infinite growth? For eventual extinction? Perhaps for a slow, long-term contraction but not extinction (i.e. eventual stability)? The latter is certainly what makes the most sense to me, but I'm just some random guy on the internet.
No hostility intended. No human being is a completely blank slate. Asking such an open ended question on an internet forum strongly implies that you disagree with the premise of the person you're responding to. Explaining if/how/why you disagree can lead to a more productive conversation.
It would take a TFR of 2.1, so depending where you live, a 40-250% increase in fertility.
There is no form of civilization that works with an imploding population and inverted demographic pyramid. Not even hunter gatherers could function like that
You’re answering the wrong question. That’s the answer to “how do we maintain the status quo?” We can absolutely exist in a world where growth does not exist from ever increasing population, but profits will evaporate as inflation increases and labor supply contracts. As a sibling comment mentions, automation will be a component.
Those in power should be building for a changing world where labor has more power, the cost of labor goes up, and it becomes increasingly scarce. They’re not ready to make peace with this though (or unwilling to between now and death). One of the few things we do well as a species is kick the can into the future, or steal from it, depending on perspective.
I'm pointing out that even in a profitless world, a dependency ratio of 2:1 is not workable. It literally does not matter how you distribute resources.
Sure, at a certain point, not replacing enough people means the species goes extinct over time.
That doesn't mean humanity going down to (random number) 1B people via gradual birthrate declines is automatically (nor rapidly) going to lead to that, if we have enough automation to handle it, and if we have a plan to stop the process at some point.
The electrical grid collapses in a couple weeks if not for constant maintenance by thousands of individuals. Many parts of our technology society are like that, it will be interesting to see how the system decays.
Automation would need some breakthrough as profound as life itself to be useful without the millions of people behind the scenes making automation possible.
Based on unemployment rates, wages, and profits, we have a long way to go before labor for infrastructure maintenance is so scarce it cannot be maintained.
But the point is that you must begin poaching people from other parts of the economy to keep the essentials going, and therefore begin to chip away at our standard of living.
I think the more important point is that at a 2:1 dependency ratio everyone would be expected to take care of half another person, either directly or through payments, and be required do whatever labor is required to do that.
In other words, there is a point, quite likely less dramatic than 2:1 where "allowing" people to be unemployed becomes economically absurd.
Why? The metaphorical "You" won't pay for children, won't pay for doctors, won't pay for research ... are you going to pay for robotics? And by that "pay for" I mean two things. First: having one human shared by about 12 elderly costs 2700 euro per month where I am (including room and -basic- food, apparently better food is 300 extra per month, and I think you really want that. Oh and that includes management. Really it's one person per about 16 elderly). Let's say robotics halves the human part of that. That'll make it about 2200 euro per month (about 40% more than the normal pension, that's being reduced).
This is a low-ball guess, it assumes it'll stay the same price, with not even inflation and just price stability requires a LOT more children than we have, and a LOT more immigration than we have. In fact, you can easily calculate it requires a lot more immigration than is available. Birth rates are dropping everywhere. Immigration into Europe and US will dry up over the next 10 years or so. Plus the metaphorical "You" also don't want neither children nor immigration.
Second: it means paying for effective robotics research (a lot more than is happening atm) NOW. I can only observe funding is going down through deliberate government policy (seriously, the US military is effectively sponsoring robotics research more than our own government, through hand-me-downs). Other critical elder-age (and younger age) needs are also being defunded, like medical care. Both the care itself and educating new doctors, nurses, lab technicians, ... So medical care is reducing in quality, and can't stop reducing further at this point for at least 4-5 years, with no change in sight.
This will also make elder care more expensive. Unless you enjoy suffering for months when you simply hit your foot at 60 years or older.
Of course, all your current actions effectively mean private companies will solve these issues, and raise the price of robotic care significantly. "You" COULD pay a little now, and have this covered, but even paying for maintaining the currently insufficient level of medical care is too much to ask (and my Northwest-European country is far from the worst, in fact it's one of the best. But waiting lists have doubled in 3 years, and are at this point 100% certain to increase again next year. Still better than UK I guess)
> My McDonalds order is already taken by a robot. Perhaps a significant part of my aged care will be as well.
No. It can't. Not if "You" act like this now.
You'll be paying a lot to private robotics companies instead. Not rich? Tough. Plus, without kids, I hope you enjoy loneliness.
Robotics is an investment into the future, not a word that means everything's free. If it's "You" investing, you'll profit of it. But "you" won't do that. Even a basic investment to maintain medical care that "you" WILL need is too much to ask. Robotics and AI (and medical care) are therefore becoming a race to the bottom where the name of the game is to outcompete humans for jobs, lower quality for lower price. In THAT game, what happens to outcompeted humans? They lose. But it's the game "you" want to play: it's the cheapest one right now.
I think the capital class will attempt all the things you suggest as this shift occurs, yes. I think that system inevitably collapses, though. At a certain point, you get a French Revolution style mess when you push the working classes to the breaking point.
The system IS collapsing, because people refuse to do basic math and prevent it. And if the "capital class" succeeds in doing this, it MAY prevent a full collapse and, frankly, those members of the capital class deserve a nice wad of cash for it, as far as I'm concerned.
This is an opportunity to see how to make it work. If it doesn’t, we’re all dead eventually. I find the idea of creating new life to keep a poorly functioning pyramid scheme going grotesque, ymmv.
Edit: If you want to have kids in this macro, good luck, you’re on your own (based on the evidence). And it’s only going to keep getting more expensive to exist in our lifetimes (shrinking labor supply, climate change, sovereign debt, etc).
Things that old people need are going to get super expensive with a shrinking population because there are so few working age people providing those services compared to the number of retirees.
So you're saying "don't have kids because things are getting so expensive", while the reason they're getting expensive is because people aren't having enough kids....
I’m absolutely telling people not to have kids into a macro that just wants economic slavery to pay back debt of all sorts incurred (sovereign, demographic).
Labor was cheap because of a population boom with a root cause of women not empowered. Now empowered, they are having less children (family planning, not having unwanted or unaffordable children). Suboptimal economic systems can change, and they should.
Can you say with a straight face, “Have more kids and be beholden to 1-2 decades of minimally compensated childrearing labor and potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in costs so the economy might get better and things might be cheap again?” I cannot.
You're screwed financially during child-bearing years if you have kids. You're screwed financially in retirement if you don't, because care is going to be super expensive if/when the population pyramid gets inverted.
The only way to not get screwed is to switch back to the standard non-Western care model: grandparents take on much of the burden of caring for children, and children take care of parents.
Yeah, the people in the year 1000 really had it a lot better than us. You see when they had 10 kids and realized that they couldn’t split up their plot of land 10 times. They just went off to war and took some of their neighbour shit we should really just go back.
This is like going along with the crowd in China when they started killing off all their young girls leading to this current population imbalance. The right solution is to go where no one else is at the moment and have large families.
No one is stopping couples from having big families (except their economics perhaps), but no one should help them either. There are 8 billion people on Earth, headed to 10 billion. We are currently unwilling to spend what it takes and reconfigure socioeconomic systems to provide quality of life for the humans here now. Fix this and then an argument to have more kids is potentially palatable. But "spit more expensive [time and fiat] kids into the torment nexus?" Neither a rational nor empathetic argument imho.
We currently have about 800 times the population as we did during the time of hunter gatherers, so we can lose quite a large portion of our population while still greatly exceeding the previous levels. It could be that we are seeing the end game of logistic growth. A decline in population would mean that resources would become cheaper, which in turn could stimulate population growth again.
A population that declines through birth rate attrition gets old. The average age in hunter gather communities was about 15 years old. In the next 10-20 years, the average age in a number of countries is going to approach 60.
You can't just think about raw numbers, you have to think about demography.
