That’s a valid point of view, but it doesn’t sound very convincing to be honest. I think in the developed world we’ve progressed beyond needing a large family as a support structure and now children are something you have because you want. This of course leads to more people having only one or two children, not “replacement level”, where in times past they might have had four or five. I wonder if state provided “social security” has had a hand in population decline too. Why feed five kids now that will look after us in old age when the state will do that job anyway?
That makes a lot of sense and is one I didn’t think of. I guess I should have considering the old slogan: “have one for mum, one for dad, and one for the country”
I think people will trade money for stuff regardless of how many new people are popping up. Marketing departments of big business may have to alter their strategies a bit, but I’m sure they already do extensive demographic studies.
What about the converse: socialism, or socialistic policies like the welfare-state, require(s) expanding taxation? One of the biggest concerns seems to be that a smaller amount of young people will have to support a larger amount of young people. It’s not going to be politically popular to increase taxation or reduce social security, but something will have to give.
Same in Britain ,indigenous birth rate has declined but the population has risen by 8% according to the recent national census but if we take into account illegal immigration or those immigrants that didn`t bother with or understand the census process its probably quite a bit more .
In the job sector manpower requirments in industry,white collar employment ,agriculture and even the armed forces have declined significantly and will continue to do so due to technological progress.If business IS depending on a continuously growing population to fuel its markets then it will be disappointed as much of that larger population will either be unemployed and living on welfare payments or have low payed government "make work"jobs neither of which will make for big spenders . More people means more pollution(and possibly climate change),more extinctions of flora and fauna and natural enviroment ,faster depletion of natural resources,more crime ,more war ,poorer quality of life in general and less ROOM! In Britain house prices are so inflated as compared to the rest of the economy( due almost entirely to an increasingly larger population living on a relatively small area )that house size itself ,is physically shrinking to almost toytown proportions (and gardens larger then a postage stamp forget about it !) If you want to live anywhere in the countryside or next to water ,wether its the sea ,a stream or a disused canal then to buy a cottage that used to house peasants surviving on the poverty level you`ll have to be pretty well off to even stand a chance of taking part in the bidding. This country and the rest of the world would be paradisical if only the population was half what it is today (Before you say "but when the number of people WAS etc.etc."I am basing this view with contemporary technology in mind NOT that of the early20th.c.)
Immigration can slow population decline, but it brings its own problems.
Like… how eager do you think young Muslims in France will be to shell out ever-increasing chunks of their income to support elderly white infidels, a few decades from now?
Or how eager will young Mexicans be to cough up half their paychecks to pay for white Baby Boomers’ nursing homes?
Also I have a suspicion that people have fewer kids in a more advanced economy for a number of reasons, one of which is that even if you have twenty it is still unlikely that they’ll support you in your old age - unless you own a farm or a solid family business.
Why are you so quick to dismiss the humansareaviruslol point of view?
We have made more species extinct than has occurred by any natural mass extinction in a long time (aren’t we the biggest since the one that killed the dinosaurs?) We have grown and grown, with no respect for the world around us, and the average person spends more time on MySpace per day than he worries about the environment per year. I find humansareaviruslolism to be a perfectly logical point of view.
I’ll admit it, though, I’m not a complete misanthrope. I do like games, music, sex, mathematics, architecture, and a lot of the other neat things that we’ve come up with (okay, not sex). However, there are simply too many human beings on Earth right now. Is a decline a problem? No.
However, I seriously doubt that a human population decline will occur just because it is occurring in many developed countries. There are some places where the average woman has six-or-so kids. That’s horrible.
I didn’t dismiss it in the OP, although I do dismiss it generally. To clarify, I meant that “Is population decline good for humans?” rather than “Is population decline good for the planet?” While making the planet inhabitable would be bad for humans, I don’t agree with the more extremist point of view that we should all die because the planet is beautiful and we’re a blight on it. That’s a topic for another thread though.
You could be right, although the UN seems to disagree for now.
The Economist seems to have a bit of a thing for over/under population. There’s a recent article (that’s I’ve not had time to read) where they lay out the benefits of a 300m population in the US.
The EU is seen as an aging place to live, where there won’t be enough young to support the old without immigration and the problems that causes.
Do you have a cite for that? My understanding that serfdom predated the Black Death, and the death of much of the nobility made it easier for peasants to get into cities, and helped grow the new middle class. Land and crops spread across fewer people also created a surplus of wealth that helped this process also.
IIRC there was something about this in the TV series History of Britain. The sudden lack of workers meant they could assert themselves with some authority now.