As @DemonTree and others alluded to above, it comes down to culture. What people value and desire comes down to cultural norms, and many modern societies just don’t particularly value having kids anymore very highly.
I gotta say, it’s not a mindset I really understand. Maybe it’s a cultural thing, because I think @Alessan alluded to the same thing earlier, when he said something like “what good is a high paying job without a family to support it with” - I can’t find the exact post to quote it, but it was earlier in this thread. But that really resonated with me. I’ve never considered not having kids; for as long as I can remember, my main goal in life was having kids who I can give the best life I can. Other goals, like doing well in school, were instrumental to that task; I wanted to do well in school so I could get the sort of job that lets me support a family. Etc.
That said, another notable thing from the report:
I really don’t think that very many people are not having kids because they are “worried about overpopulation”. I suspect that very few people actually give much if any thought to future problems like that when making life decisions. And the report linked backs that up, with only 13% of childless people citing worries about the state of the world.
I specifically cited two examples of factors that drive that equilibrium – reluctance to have children because of anticipation of future environmental decay (which is alleviated in both the “anticipation” sense and the actual phenomenon sense by population reduction) and anticipation of inability of the next generation to afford their own homes (which is alleviated by reduced demand, and thus lower prices, as a result of reduced population).
First off, why the ecosystem as well? Not disagreeing, I can make up a why myself, but I must have missed that argument.
I do not think there is much disagreement here that rapid decline is a major problem for individual economies, because of that demographic pyramid, and a global rapid decline would also be even more … challenging.
There is also not much disagreement here that practical interventions are not likely to make huge impacts on birthrates. Some. Maybe.
And some agreement maybe that immigration can help offset the population pyramid impacts for some countries with some … okay maybe one poster … concerned about negative impacts of such. And bit of agreement that keeping members of our society healthy and functional as they age can help too. And increases in per capita productivity can help.
There is a position that ongoing population growth ad infinitum is A Good Thing and no worries about how much waste we create and damage to ecosystems. Geoengineer our way out of climate change, more people will mean more technology, which means more happiness! No problems. If you don’t want to see ever increasing human population size you must want a return to a time before modern sanitation systems.
As societies lose productive capacity due to a shrinking population, they will do whatever it takes to maintain the standards of living they’ve come to expect, including exploiting the environment in more and more destructive ways.
It’s a lot easier to keep the lights on with coal than with solar. The supply chain is much shorter.
Without advanced excavators and the tools to find rich veins of pre deep below the earth, we resort to techniques like mountain ruining:
Things like environmental impact study or mine reclamation are luxuries, luxuries that our incredibly rich society can afford. A society with less people and less surplus isn’t going to have time to worry about those things; they’ll be worried about immediate survival.
Either you’ve misunderstood my position, or you’re strawmanning it.
Well, you can claim that. But in practice, what seems to happen in places like South Korea and Japan is that as rural/suburban communities shrink, they are simply abandoned over time rather than seeing new demand due to low prices. The youth still end up in cities where they can find jobs and there are still people still around.
This is hardly unique to them. Whenever people complain about high housing costs, they don’t mean that there is no cheap housing whatsoever. They mean there’s no cheap housing in good areas with jobs and nearby amenities. And they’re right to complain! Even free housing in a ghost town is not attractive.
Maybe this will turn around when the outlying areas are almost completely abandoned, and even the urban centers start declining. We’ll see. I wouldn’t want to bet on that, though.
No, things like that are necessities. Ignoring environmental impact is why the former Fertile Crescent is now largely desert, and why entire island communities have died out when their food supply did.
Just because people decide to ignore consequences, that doesn’t mean the consequences will ignore them.
Babale put it pretty well. I’ll just reemphasize that due to demographics, it takes a long time for population to meaningfully shrink even after birth rates go down. So there will be a period where actual demand for electricity and other things will stay nearly constant but the human resources to maintain these things shrinks.
So, as Babale suggests, we’ll switch to cruder and more exploitative technologies. Maintaining the environment does have a cost, and people will almost certainly choose to maintain their standard of living at the expense of the environment.
The thing is, we do have an alternative, and that’s a rapid switch to clean energy. Solar especially. And solar is cheaper as long as we maintain the high-tech factories that the current industrial base enables. If that goes away, solar is no longer attractive (consider how it was in 1970). And thus we have no choice but to go back to coal or worse.
So I think it’s very important to maintain the current high-tech economy since I think it’s the only thing that will actually enable a transition to sustainable energy.
I think China is making a huge bet on this. They know their own demographic problems. They have the resources now to convert their economy–building more solar, nuclear, grid interconnects, etc. If they can build things out now while they have a chance, and invest in automation, they might be able to ride out the decline in a few decades. It’ll be easier to maintain these things than build them.
My cite is me and essentially everyone i knew at college. Not one of us had more than two intentional pregnancies. Because it felt irresponsible. And we knew our friends would judge it so, as well.
Don’t look at the people who don’t want kids, look at the people who did want kids, but didn’t have very many of them.
Clearly you don’t know what to tell me in response to my pointing out that “all else being equal” is the “assume we have a can opener” step in your argument.
There’s current debate over whether the European colonial empires were a net negative financially, considering all the costs of maintaining armies, navies, and administering the colonies. (The taxes Britain tried to levy on the US colonies were to pay for the expense of defending them in the Seven Years’ War.) The actual profits came from the trade the empires enabled, and that has only continued to increase since they ended. The benefits were not distributed evenly, to say the least, but this rapid technological development really did generate more wealth: world GDP has been rising exponentially since about 1800.
Yes, but the point is those people ignored environmental impact anyway. Because people who are focused on immediate survival don’t think about long-term consequences, if they even have the time to spare on understanding them. Addressing these things is treated as a luxury even if it is in practice a necessity, so we should try to ensure we have the capacity for luxuries.
Except we are also more and more deciding to ignore environmental consequences, while most of those societies were not, if fact so on the edge of survival that they needed to ignore the present. It’s a matter of culture, not necessity.
And the “We must BREED!” crowd tends to be much less interested in preserving the environment, as we are seeing in this very thread. Their long term plan seems to be to turn the world into Trantor or Coruscant; a world-city where nature is dead.
Something like 30% of the population were slaves. And rather ironically, women had no right to vote or own property, and were almost universally expected to marry and have children; things we’ve all agreed we want to avoid in our own societies.
Yes. People’s preferences and ambitions don’t exist independently of society.
Yeah, this wasn’t my experience at all. The prevailing attitude was that having kids was something you should only do if and when you had ticked a bunch of boxes first: career, marriage, owning a home, and at least a few years of having fun and enjoying life. Plus for the wealthier, experiences like foreign travel and volunteering, that were supposed to contribute to making you a more well-rounded person. Children were seen as an optional extra rather than a priority.
But I agree with @puzzlegal that worries about overpopulation contributed to these cultural beliefs. There’s this attitude that it’s selfish and irresponsible to have lots of children, even if you are able to care for them. (I think I was the only person in my family who was happy when my sister told us she was having a third, which is pretty sad.) I’ve seen so many young people on social media say they are planning to adopt, or that it’s better to adopt if you want to be a parent, so you aren’t contributing to overpopulation. Governments realised the lower number of kids saved them money in the short term by reducing the dependency ratio, so they encouraged these attitudes rather than trying to combat them.
This is hopeful in one way, since it suggests if we tried to reverse these attitudes, it could actually make a difference. Getting climate change under control, and birth rates continuing to fall towards replacement in poor countries (by improving healthcare and education) is probably a prerequisite for this, though.
That’s not something I want. I’d be happy with half the population and everyone having a first world standard of living. It’s correct that there are scaling effects - consider obvious ones like Hollywood: the cost of producing a blockbuster does not depend on the available audience, while the returns sure as hell do - but there are an awful lot of people who barely contribute to the modern economy, either as producers or consumers, so we could probably maintain current levels of technology with a somewhat lower population.
I just don’t think we can get there from here. Low fertility in the most developed, productive countries, and among the people who contribute the most to productivity in all countries, are not a recipe for increasing development and productivity in the world as a whole. It’s more likely to accelerate the decline. And even if we do reach this goal, we’ll be faced with the same problem of below replacement birth rate everywhere, so why not try to find ways to address it now, while there is still time and before countries like South Korea virtually cease to exist? Same with ways to encourage and help older people continue producing and contributing to society. That’s a great idea, but we mostly aren’t doing it. Short term thinking dominates.
That someone who is unfamiliar with a foreign culture sees only one solution to a complex problem, and that this one solution must be implemented urgently provides no confidence in the accuracy of the assessment.
It’s not surprising that an unfamiliarity with a culture leads a person to only see a singular cause, especially if that problem aligns with one’s own values. We are more enlightened, so the solution we see is superior to ones that may actually be effective for that culture.
But carry on. Do tell us what we in East Asia must do.
This is pretty disconnected from reality. Governments across the world are spending far more time and effort regulating industries for environmental purposes than ever in the past. Even in the US, where Trump is trying to take a wrecking ball to that world view, we are far ahead of where we were a few decades ago.
So we are certainly not “more and more deciding to ignore environmental consequences”; we care about environmental consequences far more than any past civilization.
And no, Native Americans were not Wood Elves nor Disney Princesses who were magically In Tune With Nature.
Humans are thought to have been at least partially responsible for the extinction of megafauna in North America.
The Maori hunted the Moa to extinction in New Zealand (and the eagle that used to prey on them also went extinct). There’s nothing new about lack of environmental awareness. AFAIK, it is quite novel to care about nature for its own sake, rather than as something useful to humans. I’m not sure if any other society has had the luxury of doing so
You know? My first knee jerk reaction to this criticism the first time it came around was to mea culpa. But this second time?
It begins to come off more like people who say someone who has never had a disease themselves cannot diagnose or treat it. Haven’t had ADHD? How dare you have an opinion about it. Not obese? Your statements are automatically dismissed.
Argue with what you see as the flaw in that analysis, which is based on the data provided in a cited article, instead of my alleged Western superiority complex, maybe?
The correlation at least is strong between which aspects cultures that have dropped off the cliff demographically share, and which ones have dropped off more modestly.
And the data is clear to date that other interventions tried in multiple cultures are marginally effective at best. A Dixie cup used to fight off the incoming tide at South Korea depressed levels.
If you have knowledge about why that analysis is incorrect because of some complexity and specialness of Korean culture that I am ignorant of then please do share. Reasons why methods that have been ineffective elsewhere will work there? Reasons why the fertility drop off the cliff correlation of economic growth being mismatched with role expectations is not actually a major causative factor? An alternate hypothesis even?
And to reduce my ignorance: is there a specific name for the fallacy you’ve engaged in? It is not ad hominem really but that’s close. It is one that occurs with medical and mental health conditions with some regularity … “if you don’t have my condition you can’t understand it so I won’t engage with the content you say.”