Is There Any Practical Way to Increase the Birthrate?

Okay I am going to try to pull this thread back to the poor neglected subject of the thread.

The connection was that maintaining replacement value for fertility is immaterial of undesirable because the fewer humans the better for the planet?

But here’s the thing.

Societies will do very poorly when a relatively small number of working age adults are tasked with providing the tax base to support an upside down demographic pyramid with many in retirement and requiring healthcare compared to the working adult base.

Societies with large numbers of unhappy citizens do stupid things. They are focused on how much they are taxed and how little they personally get back. They want others to blame. They are less interested in things that cost them even more now to invest for the good of the planet. Across the world the resulting societal instability may lead to more wars, and wars are generally good for ecological diversity and robustness. Blown up power plants and refineries do not make the world a better place by most metrics.

Keeping human societies stable and content, if not actually happy, is good for the planet because we won’t just suddenly disappear without bringing a huge number of other species with us.

And that goal may be best served by maintaining replacement fertility.

Not if they are consuming resources at an unsustainable rate.

Regardless, all of this concern about ‘maintaining replacement fertility’ may a moot point if climate change reduces crop yields and marine food sources because an unfed population is a dead and dying population. And I think there are substantial indications that we are a lot closer to that than most people want to acknowledge,

Stranger

My understanding is that the unsustainable rate is less the current size of the population than the change to higher meat diets across large populations that previously ate little. Also the issue of inequitable distribution of food …

Neither of which an elder heavy population demographic would help with.

But yes all bets for current human civilization are off if global agriculture collapses due to climate change. And unstable societies are even less likely to take action there than current ones are.

And it starts even before they ever are pregnant. Just the potential of them getting pregnant could, and does, hamper their prospects (despite legislation against such discrimination).

Ironically, very generous family welfare policies may have the side effect of encouraging this kind of discrimination (PDF Cite):

Mandel and Semyonov (2006) argue that the generous and progressive family policy model employed by Nordic countries has restricted women’s access to the most desirable managerial jobs and has boosted mothers’ employment rates; this in turn has contributed to segregate women’s labour market participation mostly to “female-typed” occupation. Datta Gupta, Smith, and Verner (2008) confirm that family-friendly schemes have favoured female employment but have also extended a “system-based glass ceiling” that has hindered women’s career progression. More recently, it has been argued that the potential to hinder women’s career progression in relation to the family policy and welfare state model might be different across Nordic countries; Denmark, Sweden, and Norway appear to have performed better than Finland (Grönlund, Halldén, & Magnusson, 2017). At the opposite end of the spectrum, in primary earner model countries— where there is a lack of family-supportive working arrangements and different labour market structures—more restrictive and unequal employment access for mothers appears to be accompanied by a higher likelihood of highstatus managerial jobs attainment.

OT tangent on longevity

I realize that extrapolating between species is full of problems, but I’m sure going to do it anyway.

When talking about increased lifespan, most of us (including me) imagine a longer life when we are at our peak abilities (30-50, or so?), but I think it’s more likely that we stretch things out. The bowhead whale is the longest living mammal, reaching 200 years of age under good circumstances. They become sexually mature at 25, i.e. thats’s when they hit puberty1. It’s not about age as much as size. The sources I looked at all make certain overall lengths the threshold.
I did look for sources about how long puberty lasts, but couldn’t find any. I guess marine biologists aren’t concerned about changing behaviour and acting out in young whales.

Anyhow, this leads me to believe that a 200 year lifespan in humans might mean puberty onset at about 25, and lasting to our early 40’s. At the other end, dementia, old age ails and discomfort would also probably stretch out, meaning that we get maybe 50 years of life when we’re feeling just too damned old.

I’m not sure that’s a scenario I find very appealing, even if my peak ability aged was stretched from 50 to 100.

1Wiki puts it earlier, but all other sources say around 25.

Not just the pregnancy - there is rampant discrimination post-pregnancy as well, but it takes a different form.

Breast-feeding is held up as a social good, but most workplaces continue to be hostile towards it. My experience, working in corporate America, is that management level women get lactation benefits (privacy to pump, a place to store breastmilk, TIME to do this) and non-management women don’t. At best they can pump in a bathroom stall during whatever breaks they get, although that might mean going entirely without lunch for them (when they actually have higher caloric needs to produce that milk), often have trouble getting sufficient fluids, and that’s assuming they get breaks, or their breaks aren’t unduly delayed, and try to keep the breastmilk cool using icepacks and a lunch bag in their locker or, worse yet, their car (which leads all sorts of problems in summer with higher temperatures). Which is one reason lower-income women tend to depend much, much more heavily on formula to feed their babies - they aren’t given a choice. Formula, by the way, being pretty freakin’ expensive these days. So much for supporting motherhood and healthy babies!

This again gets into class distinctions. Wealthy/high status women get much more help and support for having children (although they, too, have to deal with anti-parent bias at work) but poor/low status women get none.

Sure, there are professions that are incompatible with pregnancy and lactation. Women in those professions might need more extended leaves to become parents, or rely on a partner for the post-delivery part of caring for an infant. But many, many more women could be better supported at work. As an example, the big box store I work at has ample space in the back room to set up a lactation room. It is possible to adjust break schedules/length, but there has to be the will to do so. Where/when supporting lactation is not possible them there should be subsidies for the expense of formula (which, to an extent do exist in the US) and society should also treat formula production as an essential service, not allowing suppliers to drop to just one or two factories where a fire or natural disaster could prompt a nation-wide crisis in feeding infants. Which state is where the US currently is heading with only 4 producers for 90% of baby formula.

It’s not so much that any ONE thing mentioned in this thread will do the trick but rather reducing the many small discouragements that exist in society.

There are things that can be done to improve the odds of people not only living longer but being healthier longer.

I’ve had co-workers in their 80’s who were still capable of working full time, even if they weren’t as capable of heavier manual labor as when they were younger. Being older does not inherently mean being feeble.

We even know what some of these things are, and some of them are not only cheap they save money. Ask any smoker how much their habit costs. Well, great, we as a society have lowered the number of smokers in our country, and reduced second-hand smoke indoors. This is a good thing.

Healthy eating - yes, the worst food can be cheaper but there are ways to increase access. My current employer gives a 10% discount on fresh fruits and vegetables to anyone paying for them with a SNAP/EBT card.

We can encourage exercise in part by making neighborhoods more friendly to pedestrians (walking is the cheapest form of exercise out there but still very healthy). We can encourage preventive medicine and treatment problems early when they are (for most things) more fixable and less likely to result in on-going debility.

That’s not going to prevent ALL the problems of aging - eventually, if we’re lucky, we all grow old in the end - but boosting the health and ability of people middle-aged and elderly means they are more able to care for themselves, more able to work either from necessity or choice (which latter may offset some of the issues of there being fewer people entering the workforce).

We could also try (somehow) to remove the notion that one must always “advance” in career and make it respectable for the older workers to do “less” either with time or effort. I know former managers who are now finding that being just “worker bees” to be much less stressful, former steelworkers who are no longer capable of the required physical labor for that but who can definitely perform other kinds of work (my current workplace has about a dozen of them right now), but expanding this would require removing the notion in some peoples’ heads that some types of workers are somehow acceptable targets for abuse.

A lot of people find retirement isn’t all roses. Many older people want to work, for a variety of reasons. If we can find ways to enable them to be capable of work then the lowering birth rate is less of a crisis.

It’s not so much that “old people are a burden” as that you can only have so high a proportion of the population out of the work force before that becomes a problem. If (number pulled out of nether regions) you need 70% of the population doing “productive” work to support the 30% who can’t do that it’s not entirely relevant whether that 70% cohort is mostly under 40 or more evenly distributed between 20 and 80. Everyone will go through an “unproductive” childhood, we need to recognize that pregnant women are very much productive even if they aren’t working outside the home, that being a parent is also productive and should not be penalized, and we should try to find ways to maximize the length of time that people are healthy and capable.

Except we do know things that aren’t expensive and exclusive that, even if they can’t extend absolute lifespan, have high potential for increasing the length of time people are healthy and capable. Sure, they aren’t trendy or sexy and don’t make large companies lots of money, but they do work.

Well, yes, we’re talking about two problems, really: the ills of too many people, and the ills of too few.

We really don’t want to return to an ever-expanding growth rate and allowing fertility to drop for a time could take our numbers down to a level more compatible with maintaining a health ecosystem and providing enough for all.

That said, we don’t want to have a population crash, particularly among the productive members of society.

Perhaps the better solution would be to try to sustain current fertility rates, even if they are below replacement, for another generation or even two while trying to maximize the health and ability of the older part of the population to continue to contribute to sustaining civilization. Meanwhile, look at ways to boost fertility to sustainable/replacement levels after our numbers are reduced.

If we fail to do this, of course, the result might be “mother nature” or warfare creating a quick and horrific reduction in human numbers. I’d prefer to avoid this, and I think others would also like to avoid it.

Assuming this was an error, and you meant to say “not good” (based on your next sentence).

Which is the point pertinent to this thread.

How I understand things (and there was a recent NYT article on this) healthy habits can get a large portion of us to our late 80s, maybe even lower 90s, with good odds of good function to near the end. Getting to 100 and beyond though is more a genetic thing, how we are wired to age.

The question is predicated on an intervention that replicates that genetic bit for all and amplifies it even.

Do these Methusalahs stay as part of the productive workforce? Say until a decade or so of predicted death? Do they or do they not become big consumers of healthcare? The “need” for new younger workers, producing and paying taxes, varies accordingly, and any transition might be fraught.

Yes. Apologies for the error. War is bad for ecological robustness.

Yes, this. Adapting to a slow decline (or rise for that matter) is much easier to handle. Look at, say, Japan; there’s still plenty of Japanese, what’s causing them problems is (combined with their refusal to fix it with immigration) the relatively swift drop in birth rate creating a seriously distorted population curve weighted to the elderly. If the decline is slower you don’t get that huge bulge of elderly that need aid & can’t/don’t work.

Japan and Korea are indeed Ground Zero for the looming problems in advanced nations and our government should be studying management solutions that are being tried there.

But that’s not something that our government does well. Even with moderate/progressive administrations, our focus is invariably on the next November election. And our impending administration will be a backward looking circus concerned mostly with grabbing everything it can pilfer from us.

It’s a wonder, with its resistance to science, if modern conservatism will even acknowledge the problem when it’s staring the rest of us in the face.

Forgive me if it’s been said, but just provide financial support (and daycare facilities) for women while at schools/universities.

Give single Mom’s the financial support, and access to day care, that they require to thrive.

Seems like a pretty obvious solution.

Modern conservativism is very concerned about raising the birth rate. Haven’t you been reading this thread?

It’s not just a matter of resources. Culturally, people don’t want to “settle down” until they’d gotten their fill of the single life.

Even better:

Forgive me if it’s been said, but just provide financial support (and daycare facilities) for women parents while at schools/universities.

Care misses the point. Life has intrinsic value, in its trillions of forms. It doesn’t take someone sentiently appreciating and enjoying it to be so. This is living things we are talking about, FFS.

The ego-centric, detached world view expressed here by a couple of posters is chilling and amoral, in my opinion.

Then by continuing to exist you are a genocidal monster. Your army of whiteshirts blood cells is massacring living creatures by the billions. THESE ARE LIVING CREATURES WE ARE TALKING ABOUT, for fuck’s sake!

I have to appreciate the staggering hypocrisy of condemning us while eating food that was produced through the murder of billions of living creatures - not just the plants (and animals, if you’re not a vegan, you monster) but the mice and aphids and locusts and hosts of other creatures who were unjustly slaughtered so they wouldn’t eat the food before you can.

Value to who?

(Emphasis added.) This is exactly my point–there’s always subjectivity because morality necessarily requires sapience. There is no other way it can be. And as far as we know, only humans apply subjective values.

Well, I hear that Athena is fond of owls, at least. And Poseidon digs horses.

Most of the trillions of forms are microbes, algae, maggots, worms, and the like, and Nurgle is a big fan of those.

Yeah, but the FSM hates all of them. Especially humans. As we can readily see by the world around us. His revenge will be sweet. To Him.

Well, the first followers of the FSM in “history” are Pirates, and they seem very much the model of the modern major American: pillage, then burn.