The converse (that a fertility rate above replacement is guaranteed to result in catastrophic collapse) is equally true. Being so afraid of Scylla that you slather yourself in Charybdis’s favorite condiments is not a convincing argument.
Another thing–
I don’t know if this is true for you or not, but the impression I get from a number of people, both here and on other forums, is the belief that if the fertility rate is below replacement, then the population will just stabilize at a lower value. Like if the rate is 1.0 instead of the needed 2.1, then we should expect the population to be half what it is.
This is not the case. Growth/contraction is geometric. If the rate is half what’s needed, then every new generation will be half the size of the last. This only stops when the rate goes back above 2.1. But there don’t appear to be any natural factors to cause the rate to go back up.
In the worst case, that collapse resets the fertility rate. It’s not an existential risk because it’s self-limiting. And in any case, contrary to the predictions of the 70s, there appear to be other self-limiting factors that don’t require large numbers of people dying.
On the other hand, there don’t appear to be any self-limiting factors on the low end. Maybe once we get really, desperately poor again we’ll achieve birth rates similar to other desperately poor communities throughout history. It would be nice to avoid that outcome.
Exploit it? Half the country wants to slam the door on it.
And we need them if various old age programs arent to collapse.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the case. Obviously, the population stabilization is the result of incentives (and thereby fertility rates) shifting as circumstances shift in response to population-driven circumstances (e.g. the aforementioned upward pressure on wages resulting from a smaller cohort entering the job market, relieving downward pressure on fertility rates caused by uncertainty about being able to afford child-related expenses).
No, it’s not. It’s an absolute mathematical certainty that if the rate stays below the replacement rate, the population will shrink forever, all the way down to negligible levels.
It’s possible that some other effects will cause the rate to go up again. But there is no reason to believe this must be true. Nor is there any reason to believe that 2.1 represents some kind of mean to regress to. It is absolutely possible for the rate to simply stay below 2.1 from here on out. The factors you mention could be self-reinforcing, making it even more difficult to raise the rate again after it dips.
Again: South Korea is already at 0.8 and still dropping. It’s not enough to halt that decline. It has to go back up to 2.1 (or nearly so) to avoid collapse. They’re a fairly rich country that could support a 2.1 replacement rate, but that’s not happening. Why are these incentives not kicking in?
I’m not so sure about your theory, but assuming arguendo that it’s true:
If couples get busy tonight to make more babies, the first national election those babies will vote in will be the Presidential election of 2044. The youngest Boomers will be turning 80 that year, and the oldest will be 98, which means that in all likelihood, most Boomers will be dead, and (barring the discovery of dementia cures between now and then) a fairly large portion of the rest will likely have lost the mental capacity to remember what they said two minutes ago, let alone be able to follow politics and vote.
So the solution you propose would arrive after the problem you’ve identified - a surfeit of aging Boomers - has largely taken care of itself.
If by the past you mean four years ago, this is relevant:
My link suggests the pre-election polls could be wrong. But if they are correct, as is probable, the answer to your question may be — No, just the opposite. And it’s fully relevant to the thread, suggesting that the OP idea of stopping the elderly from voting could easily have the opposite of the intended effect. Good thing the idea is politically impossible.
I strongly suspect that one factor is that working something recognized as a job gets both pay and respect; while raising children, despite a bit of lip service, in modern societies generally gets neither: despite the fact that the childbirth part of the job risks the mother’s health and life, and the fact that the rest of the job, although it can be massively rewarding, also involves a great deal of (often literal) shit work plus the risk of being forever excoriated for screwing up, even for those trying their best not to. And the near certainty of being criticized by strangers whatever you do.
We’re expecting people to birth and raise children in their spare time, while all adults in the family hold down at least one thing recognized as a “full time job”; while telling them that most of what those children need is the parents’ responsibility, not society’s. I’m kind of surprised we get as many kids born as we do.
I’m with the crew that says we need a smaller population. We had plenty of civilization and lots of innovation and art with half this many people. But it’s going to be hell on everybody if the population comes down fast; what we need is a very slow decline – an average for a while of maybe 1.9 or 2.0, not .8. I don’t know if we’ll get that. Humans don’t seem to be great at this.
And people in all age groups go in for crazy politics. Some young people grow out of it. Some old people grow into it. Some people never do it at all, and some people do it all their lives. Blaming any age group for crazy politics is silly; and rather obnoxious.
Now that is definitely true. Society has changed a hell of a lot, in multiple ways, just in my lifetime. A lot of those changes are for the better. Some of them IMO aren’t. But there most certainly have been changes.
It is possible that we’ll start genuinely respecting and supporting parenthood. I don’t have a guarantee that that would work; but I think it’s quite possible.
It’s unfortunately also possible that we’ll start flat out requiring women to give birth, by one technique or another, some of them nastier than others but all of them nasty. I’d rather we die out, myself.
I’m not sure that’s enough. The trouble is that there really is a tradeoff between a career and being a mother. Yes, we could do better when it comes to participation of the father and maternity/paternity leave and all that, but that can never fully eliminate the tradeoff. Hours spent with the kid are hours not spent advancing one’s career.
One problem I see–and this is somewhat anecdotal–is that there are couples that have kids and those that don’t. The ones that do have kids have two. So the average is necessarily less than two. Even if you incentivize more couples to have kids, it won’t work on all of them and so the average will still be less than two.
What if we incentivize the kid-friendly families to have more kids? 50% of couples having 4 kids is as good as 100% having two. Or even 25% having 8. 2->3 kids is undoubtedly a smaller jump than 0->1. And 7->8 smaller yet! But they all have the same net result on the population.
The latter is indicative of factors (e.g. the economic effects I described earlier in the thread) that cause people who want children to conclude that they can’t afford as many children as they want. As I noted, upward pressure on wages solves that problem.
Yes, I keep trying to tell this to people who smugly say “demographics will take care of the conservative menace.”
and I’m like… um… have you met the young conservative generation? They may be smaller in number but they punch above their weight in crazy.
It may. You haven’t established that to actually be the case. It may also be that higher wages cause people to make a different tradeoff: if one of the people has a low-paying job, then there’s not much loss to having another child, even if it means losing the job completely. With a higher wage, the person may decide to stick with the job vs. having another child.
But both this and your claim is just-so storytelling without actual evidence.
How come raising kids isn’t a career?
I’m not trying to make a value judgment here, just using the terms in the way they’re normally used. Raising kids is obviously of great value to society and should be respected as highly as anything else. Nevertheless, if a woman wants to be a high-powered CEO or the like, then she’s starting from a deficit if she dedicates the first few years after school to raising kids. One can optimize this tradeoff but it’s impossible to eliminate.
If we want to fix this problem, we’re going to have to start using some terms differently.
And only a very small percentage of people are ever going to be “high powered CEO”'s. (Lots of people don’t even have any desire to.) One of the things we need to stop doing is disrespecting people for not being one of that handful.
Regardless of what terms we use, people desire power one way or another. I don’t mean this in a pejorative way; almost everyone desires power in some form, whether money or social influence or product creation or whatever. Parents only have influence over a handful of kids, who themselves have no power. People with late-stage careers in the normal sense (whether high-powered CEO or small business owner or the like) generally have more power than that.
Power over and power to are not the same thing. Almost everyone desires the power to make their own choices. Not everybody desires power over other people.
And there are a whole shitload of people who don’t wind up being either high-powered CEO or small business owners or the like. Where would any of those people be without employees?
(Extremely small business owners may not have employees. But they’re not getting power over others, either: only the power to prevent others from having power over them. Which, again, is also enough for quite a lot of people; and is more than quite a lot of people get.)
Right, which is why I said “power” and not “power over” and gave some examples of such. Whether one is an executive or manager or individual contributor or self-employed or some other possibility, a person with an advanced career has more power than someone without. Most people find this desirable, even if it’s just, say, being respected by one’s peers (although concrete things like money also help).
But any of these things take time, and it happens that prime fertile years and prime career-building years are largely the same. So there is a tradeoff, and those who prioritize career will be ahead of those that don’t.
Again, I’m not making any value judgment here. I’m just making the plain observation that people do desire career advancement and that’s not fully compatible with childrearing. I’ve seen my own friends make the decision in both directions.