Consequences of Forced Population Limits

Factual Questions
1

In a thread a while back, Dopers were discussing whether the current population growth was sustainable. Though I didn’t actually post in that thread, it seemed like my position was definitely in a minority. Essentially, I feel that it is overpopulation that puts much of the stress on society and the environment and that if people would just not make so many more people, much of the problems we face today (food problems, environmental destruction, pollution, climate change, etc.) would be significantly abated. However, that debate is not the focus here.

What I am asking is to imagine a hypothetical scenario: if, unknown to the rest of the world populace, I have in my possession a device which forces the global AVERAGE birth rate to not exceed some arbitrary value that I set (say, for the purposes of this discussion, slightly less than the replacement rate). This device works in an equal opportunity fashion; those in the developed world will face the same reproductive difficulties as those in the developing world.

I know this scenario is a little fanciful, but my question is this:
What would be the consequences of such a device? To what extent would the economies of the world suffer from this, considering the younger generations would constantly be smaller than the older ones? I imagine that currently sparsely populated regions would be abandoned as people are forced to migrate, but how much of a problem would this be?

2

You can look at China for what a lot of the consequences would be. There are a lot of mechanisms set up in a lot of different cultures and countries that depend on an increasing population rate. In the U.S. for example, social security would have severe financial problems since the older existing population would be taking money out but the money expected from a certain population of younger citizens wouldn’t be there. Health care would be a big issue in most countries. Countries that have private health care like the U.S. would find the cost of health care through private insurance companies skyrocketing. Countries with national health care would find more of their tax resources going to health care with less money coming into the system from the younger generation’s taxes.

China also has a problem where one child is now forced to take care of two parents when they get older, where before multiple children would spread out the financial responsibility. This creates even more financial hardships for the younger generation.

3

China’s birth rate is just slightly lower than that of the USA and higher tham many European and other countries.

4

Very difficult to speculate on a global basis. We see effects of less growth locally, e.g. when in country regions more and more people move to the cities (because of job opportunities and night life/culture), starting a cycle where only the old people stay behind - schools are closed when the last children are gone.

But these regional effects are balanced out by movements from other areas. Or in India, where the increase of abortion of girls (although it’s now officially forbidden to determine gender before birth, it’s apparently still easy to do; and the still high dowry makes girls too expensive for poor families) has lead to villages full of 20-something males, with nary a girl to marry in sight, leading to stealing girls from other villages, or buying them from the Philippines.

Similarly, when the reproduction rates in Western Europe go down partly because many couples can’t receive, some turn to fertility clinics, others look at Eastern European countries (in the US China and Asian countries or Africa) for easy-bought adoption.

But a global decrease? Do the people know that your device is causing this, or will they try desperately to receive? Is your set rate the standard replacement of one girl, one boy to exactly replace the parent pair, or (at least at first) less?
How will people (not only the economy) react if something - an accident, an illness, a famine/war, natural disaster - kills their children, and they can’t replace it?
What will the device do to couples who already can’t receive? If women stop ovulating once they’ve reached their limit, then all the selling of eggs for fertility research (and sperm for sperm banks), will stop. Also, all the research into stem cells will stop.
And the designer babies - babies specifically selected pre-implantantion to posess a cure for a sick sibling - will those be possible?

It could lead to much more overprotection of children, if everybody knows they can’t be replaced. Or to even more restrictions of their rights, because there are less children around than before.
Less children means not only less payers for all forms of generation-based retirement and social security and health insurance. It also means less workers - that can be a bonus, apart from the thorny tax/ social security net problem, because a lot of work is already done by machines, and employment places are becoming scarcer in the industrialized nations.
But it also means less consumers. If the machines make all the cars, but nobody buys them, then the current economy model won’t work anymore. We could start with a different model.

Depending on how your device works, individually every pair gets two children or statistically, every nation gets so and so many children each year, you could still have couples with no children and couples with five or six; or you could have lots of couples not ready for children suddenly having one or two. Maybe they will sell them off/ give them away to other couples, or there will be big state homes. Maybe all the third world countries will give their children to the first world countries.

Most likely, once people figured out that your device was causing this, they would send an army against you to destroy the device and kill you.

Because any changes a drastic globabl change like this would cause would require so many other adaptions to continue living that you could simply change the system without a magical device.

5

Thanks for the rather long post, constanze.

To clarify some questions that you’ve raised:

The reason I stipulated “unknown to the world”, is that no one can get revenge on any one person or country, but rather attribute the phenomenon to nature/God/etc.

You’ve brought up many good points, and I realize now that the wording of the situation drastically changes how things will play out.

I was thinking that if one set the maximum average birth rate at the replacement rate, at first people would naturally do what they do and as such the realized birth rate would be somewhat lower. As you’ve alluded to, as people understand that there is something funky going on, there will be more efforts at procreation, and thus the real birth rate might approach the replacement rate. The specifics here don’t really matter; what is important is that the world population ceases to grow and starts levelling off/decreasing.

As far as the actual mechanism goes, I was thinking more of a general increase in the rate of sterility; those that are already sterile remain so. People can have more than two children, but the law of averages demands that other couples will have less.

6

Peter MacDonald at the Australian National University has done a fair amount of research on population policies and their effects on the economy. You could browse through his work if you’re interested. Basically, capitalist economic growth pretty much depends on population growth; below replacement fertility and no in-migration is bad for market-based economies.

7

That would lead to many middle- and long-term problems in terms of genetic variety, I think: if sterile couples stay that way (and in western countries, many already have problems receiving, due to a variety of factors), but additionally, many other couples (esp. in the 3rd world countries, which have a high birth rate currently) become sterile, only a (relativly, compared to today) small pool of fertile couples would remain (would only married couples be fertile, or any couples? What about divorced and re-married couples?) That means more chances for recessive illnesses, and limited spread of mutations etc., though I don’t know enough biology to figure out how quickly this would become a problem.

But if the current 3world countries, which don’t have yet a working social system, but still heavily rely on extended families, don’t trust the state because of corruption, ineffeciency and other problems and history, suddenly face a drastic cut in reproduction (because you have to meet the statistical goal overall), this would cause massive problems: a lot of women would be cast out if they couldn’t give birth (in traditional societies, it’s always the women’s fault for not giving birth to sons, despite biology); and families would die without children to support them (and no state system to take care of them). This would take place quicker than the state could establish structures (and it’s not as if the first-world countries would see a reason to help them), so it would mean massive genocide against the third-world.

Also, the problem is that if large amounts of people become sterile (I assume it’s non-reversable, although it’s your magical device), then mankind is poorly equipped to deal with sudden disasters like famine, earthquakes etc that kill large numbers of people.

Aid agencies report best results in educating women, both with school so they can have jobs, as about health, and providing free contraceptives easy to use. Study after study, in different countries and cultures, have shown that educated couples, esp. educated women, have less children; and that families in the third world who are taught the relation between few children= healthy children, many children= malnourished, sick children, together with given the supplies, actually have less children. Together with giving them jobs they can support their families with, which again ties in to education. If your own income is not enough to feed the family, you need many children to sell them to the carpet-weavers or stone quarries or whatever.
This system of education and contraceptives still leaves wriggle room for the unexpected, and allows lots of families with few children for maximum of genetic variety. I think this system, if expanded, together with other system, will actually work long-time.

8

First of all, I think hypothesizing population growth limiting devices is totally unnecessary. We have proven, voluntary methods of limiting population growth that is in use by all industrialized nations. Among these: laws against child labor (thereby making children a liability rather than an asset), economies based on education rather than labor (requiring lengthy education before children can support themselves, also delaying the age at which adults choose to have children) and laws requiring child care (thereby making it illegal for your 10-year-old to babysit your other kids and further increasing the child-as-liability-rather-than-asset scenario).

So, population growth solves itself if we can build up the economies of the third world.

To address the question more directly, I think the general trend in reducing population growth is that a greater percentage of economic resources are devoted to maintaining an aging population. You can see that just by looking at the budgets in American and Europe - Social Security, Medicare and its equivalents are beginning to dominate the budgets. Eventually, I suspect we’ll start redefining things like retirement ages so that people have to continue working longer before they can count on public support. Even if you envision private support making government intervention unnecessary, there will still be pressure to keep the elderly working.

Some other economic effects may be harder to predict, since the effect of a stable or shrinking population may be countered by other things. I’m reminded of Thomas Malthus and his predictions of mass starvation by the end of the 1800s. His predictions were based on fact, but they never happened because the industrial revolution made it possible for vastly fewer farmers to produce vastly larger outputs.

So, for example, real estate is clearly driven by population growth, but it is also driven by wealth. The number of people owning two or more homes has increased greatly in the US. The same may apply to many markets where a shrinking consumer base could be offset by wealthier consumers demanding more. In the 1950’s, most households had one TV. Today, most households have one TV per room. (This assumes, of course, that wealth can continue to grow while supporting the large elderly populations).

As another example, labor markets could become increasingly tight as the number of workers shrinks, but you may see computers and robots making each worker increasingly efficient. Given sufficient technology, maybe no one will be employed in 100 years - the robots can design and build themselves and take care of us at the same time. In 100 years, maybe capitalism will seem as antiquated an economic system as feudalism does today.

So… I think a stable and decreasing population is going to be a natural by-product of economic growth. It will happen without any focus on population reduction programs like China’s. When it happens, we’ll see many effects and we’ll have to remember that a shrinking population is only one effect among many on the economy. It seems likely that technology is going to redefine our basic assumptions about the economy.

9

You should read on how Japan is dealing with it’s low birth rate problems. The couples there didn’t have kids because that took money away from the potential parents. They have trouble now that the population is getting older. People bank time helping people to be redeemed later when they need help. They are looking into robotic helpers. They were increasing allowed immigration. That’s all I can remember off the top of my head.

10

Although fictional, the movie “Children of Men” has an interesting take on a world where humans become infertile. Well worth watching.