You said
That’s power-over, specifically.
This society rewards and respects “career advancement” and does not reward and respect child rearing, which is not considered a “career” but instead something one’s supposed to do in one’s spare time, if at all.
And that is what I’m saying we need to change, if we want people to be willing to have more children, or for more people to be willing to have children at all.
They were just examples. As you yourself said, a small business owner may not even have employees. But they do have the power to provide a service the way they want to.
It would help, but I don’t think it changes the fundamentals. Parenting doesn’t bring in a paycheck, among other things.
It’s an absolute mathematical certainty that if the growth rate of California realtors is higher than the growth rate of the population, that the entire population of California will become realtors, followed by a population explosion of realtors.
You haven’t established that to actually be the case.
As for wages, there are indeed substitution and income effects involved. Higher wages imply higher incomes which imply more kids, statistically. Higher wages imply greater opportunity for women outside the home which imply fewer kids.
I would opine that with sharply higher wages and drastically lower land/housing prices, that kids would become more attractive. But that’s an empirical question.
My take though is that the US has higher fertility than Italy or South Korea and if a never-seen-before-in-world-history demographic disaster occurs from persistently low fertility rates, we’ll have plenty of warning. As it is, South Korea has the 26th highest population density in the world, while Italy is ranked 76th. They have a ways to go. (The US is 187th, though that figure probably should be adjusted in some way, given Alaska tundra and Rocky Mountain deserts.) We’ve seen demographic disasters due to excessive fertility. I’d like to see an example of the opposite before panicking.
PS: I rertract my characterization of silliness, in favor of “highly dubious”. There is a big difference between the two: we need more long term thinking not less and Strangelove posits a fine topic of debate for this message board.
Let’s try a different example: the film camera. There was undoubtedly a point in the past when film camera sales grew exponentially as the population became aware of them. This growth could have happened at any rate over the replacement rate, but obviously leveled off as the market saturated.
Time passes. Digital cameras arrive, and film cameras start on an exponential decline. But unlike growth, there is no limit to how much they can decline. They can, and did, decline all the way down to (virtually) zero. A handful of enthusiasts remain, but as far as most people are concerned they are extinct.
Perhaps sometime during the decline, people came up with just-so stories about things that might halt the loss. As demand sinks, so do prices, and that will shore up the numbers. Or people will feel nostalgic for the loss and turn away from the coldness of digital. Whatever. None of this was relevant. Film simply declined down to zero.
The claim I am pushing against is the idea that there is inevitably some factor that pops up when things decline too much. This is actually the case for growth: resource limits are real. But there is no such factor which must inevitably pop up for decline.
Yes. And one that, so far, appears to be false. As evidenced by almost all developed countries having a decline in fertility rate with no sign of stopping. Also, housing prices won’t go down until the total population starts dropping. It’s not much related to fertility rate.
Now, I actually agree that here in the US there is no need to panic yet. We should probably get a handle on the problem sooner rather than later, but the greatest threat we’ll have is from changes in the world order as other countries face problems (like, what’s going to happen with Russia?). South Korea should probably panic, though. High population density isn’t going to make the problem easier.
There’s a very dramatic counter-example of a developed country that experienced increasing fertility in the past:
Here’s another:
Sure there’s been widespread international declines in fertility rates among developed countries. But the one-way mechanism you assert is refuted by the substantial fluctuations in the data.
Moreover, there were a number of serious demographers getting very nervous about a Malthusian disaster during the 1960s. I don’t know of any demographer with academic credentials laying down a case for a disastrous population crunch. Methinks overpopulation is a far greater problem.
There are plenty of experts very concerned about the challenges of an aging society. But that’s a different and more pressing concern.
I’ll acknowledge that a good world war would probably halt the decline, at least temporarily. Unfortunately, a pandemic doesn’t seem to have the same effect.
It’s exactly the same problem. A low birth rate necessarily causes an aging population. And a population biased toward the elderly can only be caused by a low birth rate (or massive emigration, or a war, or a few other significant events).
So does eliminating the need for, or even the existence of, wages at all.
That may be one of the things we need to change.
Where do you get the higher income implying more kids? A according to An Economic History of Fertility in the U.S.:1826-1960 (PDF warning) page 30, higher income families had fewer children even among the 1848 birth cohort, when higher income families would be unlikely to have had women working outside the home. Admittedly, this is US specific.
But that seems to have been a short-term aberration - a departure from the long-term trend. Your chart only goes back to 1920, but in my above link you can see going back to 1828 (page 22).
For those interested in the actual proportions of number of children per women (instead of just overall average), I have another PDF - Bailey and Hershbein – U.S. FERTILITY RATES AND CHILDBEARING, 1800 TO 2010 and the chart is on the second to last page. The difference in the 1850 and 1870 cohort is a thing to see. We can also see the baby boom era as the only time since then that more than two children was a common as 2.
Getting some actual numbers into the mix, the best that I’ve found is the Seattle Longitudinal Study.
In this, they began tracking a cohort of individuals from age 25, with retesting of various cognitive functioning every 7 years to see how they improve/decline with age. This is shown (at the link) in figure 3.
Some of these seem less pertinent to the matter at hand. Spatial orientation, for example, doesn’t seem likely to factor into things much. I’d, personally, put the greatest importance on inductive reasoning, verbal ability, and numeric ability. The first maps the closest to general reasoning power; verbal ability is central to understanding what’s being communicated to you; and nonsense and dishonest statistics tie in so tightly to misinformation that I have to assume that numeric ability is strongly tied to immunity against deceit.
However, when we look at numeric ability, we see that it’s a straight drop from 25 years old so, in terms of trying to determine where things start to decline below some reasonable level, the progression of that line doesn’t tell us much about what we’re comparing to.
Trying to continue the lines over to the left, I found this for numeric and reading ability. Using the “normal hearing” data (and ignoring the early reading result), while the researcher used a line fitting algorithm, the dots look to me like they curve a bit with a notable hook around 10-11 years old. This suggests that we would have non-linear growth from age 0 to 25 with a general curve and (as said) a hook at 10-11.
I found this result for inductive reasoning. As best I can tell, the line seems pretty linear between ages 9 and 16.
In all cases, we expect the line to the left of the graph to swoop in to meet the existing lines in a relatively smooth way, so that it looks like a single, continuous graph. This works well with verbal and numeric; I can get a nice line. For inductive reasoning, I either need to assume that we quickly gain it before age 9 or that we have a strange squiggle after age 16. The former seems more likely. I end up with something like this:
https://i.ibb.co/DL7xLpv/Aging.png
To be extremely generous, we admit that this is a vast guesstimate but minus someone else producing something better, it’s what we’ve got.
If we take the view - as society has often done - that we meet the threshold of mental fitness at 18, then the question is when we leave that same level again.
For numeric ability, it looks like we retain it - at the most - only until about age 40. Verbal ability seems to last out until about age 80. Inductive reasoning, I’m tracking out to about age 65. Averaging that out, 62ish seems to be the cutoff point.
We can also look at dollars lost to scammers, by age (p17):
However, this is going to be pretty difficult to tease a meaningful answer out of due to confounders.
I’ll look up some numbers and try to follow up with some additional info that may help to interpret these numbers in a more useful way. I don’t currently have any answer nor opinion.
I’m not sure that any of those figures translate into a greater likelihood to believe in political conspiracy theories, or otherwise in “political craziness” however that is defined: because greater experience may counteract diminished numeric ability, for instance; or because numeric ability may not have much of anything to do with what one believes politically, but only be used to rationalize beliefs arrived at otherwise.
True, I need to go back and respond to a few of the earlier posts that looked for studies that were more directly addressed. I have issues with their methodology.
Cognitive functioning is pretty straightforward and it can be (relatively) directly measured, so it gives us some amount of a baseline even if it doesn’t directly answer the question.
Measuring the thing that’s easy to measure instead of the thing actually being addressed is often a good way to get wrong answers.
Cognitive performance is the foundation of everything else.
For example, you might say, “Sure, you’ve proved that the guy is parallelized below the neck. But what does that have to do with the question of his ability to escape from bear attacks?” Well, potentially a lot. Dude can’t move!
Now, maybe he has an AI-controlled, motorized wheelchair with bear sensing radars. The question doesn’t 100% answer the question. But it certainly does tell us that, minus some external element that wasn’t part of the measurement, he’s going to do real bad.
It leads us to the question of, “Is there such a thing as an AI-controlled, motorized wheelchair with bear sensing radar?” Is it likely that our person owns one? How effective have these proven to be? Most motorized wheelchairs are pretty slow compared to a bear.
If you believe that there’s some external element, you can propose it and we can investigate whether that would counter the things that we’ve measured, to-date.
I know some really intelligent people who believe some really weird political stuff. They appear to just put that portion of their mind out of gear; although it works perfectly fine in other areas of their lives.
We understand a whole lot more about how our legs work than about how our minds work.
Let’s assume that the OP is correct, as written. At some point in the past, we had better capabilities among the general public, due to there being more young voters relative to older. Saying that “Some folk are crazy, yo.” While true, doesn’t impact the argument at all.
Some folk are crazy. Folk are crazy now, folk were crazy then. No one said that people are perfect - not young people, not old people, not people in the past and not people in the present. “Better” doesn’t mean “perfect”. It doesn’t even mean, “Sufficient.” It just means less bad.
Why? I’m almost entirely certain that the OP is incorrect, as written. And what cites have been brought in this thread about likelihood to believe in political craziness indicated that it’s not related to age groups.
That’s two assumptions and I’m dubious about both of them. There has been a whole shitload of political craziness in this country ever since it became a country. It may be worse at the moment than twenty years ago, but it isn’t worse than during all the rest of the country’s history, including times of different demographics.
And even if we posited that it’s worse now than it’s ever been, which it isn’t: that wouldn’t prove it’s due to demographics.
That appears to be exactly the argument in the OP; with the sole difference that the claim in the OP seems to be that old people are crazier than young people, and/or that all old people go crazy.
Because if you’re trying to disprove hypothesis A, and your counter-argument could hold even when we know that A is true, then your argument blows.
Sage: The sky may be blue.
Thorny: The sky is mostly made of nitrogen.
Sage: Okay, let’s say that the sky actually is blue. Would what you just said be disproven? No, because it can be both nitrogen and blue. Your counter-argument does not conflict with the proposition.
Nice citation. I was basically applying Becker’s model, as well as vague memories of empirical results.
Here’s what a 2003 lit review says.
We start by reviewing the regularities that inspired the first generation of economic models of fertility. These include a negative relationship between income and fertility…
Consistent with your paper. I add emphasis:
Based on empirical research of the past two decades, we then show that these regularities no longer characterize today’s data. The income-fertility relationship is now largely flat within many countries and increasing in the cross-section of high-income countries. … Meanwhile, the relationship between women’s labor force participation and fertility across countries has reversed. Even within countries, the relationship between women’s education and their fertility is no longer always decreasing. The literature has also documented new kinds of evidence about fertility behavior. For example, it has been shown that many couples disagree about whether to have more (or any) children. In addition, in countries where fathers provide a small share of childcare, such disagreement is greater and fertility rates are lower.
So the income relationship appears to have reversed in higher income countries - it is now flat overall and encouraging of fertility in higher income countries.
The new facts about fertility behavior in high-income countries do not mean that the ideas of a quantity-quality tradeoff or of a central role of the opportunity cost of mothers’ time were wrong. The tradeoffs emphasized by these models still exist and continue to be important in explaining fertility behavior in many places, including lower-income countries. What has changed, however, is that these tradeoffs no longer drive the major variation in the data for high-income countries.
That’s from page 2 of this literature review: I haven’t gotten beyond that.
My takeaway: consult with an economic demographer before panicking about fertility trends.
Is it possible to calculate how long it would take? I’m guessing at 1.8 children per woman it would take centuries to really notice a difference. If we slowly side to 4 billion people in the world, I’m okay with that.