Yes, but it’s part of what’s necessary. We need the population to be slowly decreasing in all countries. It can’t be decreasing too fast though. We can’t have a population whose average age is too high. Of course, it’s also necessary to make sure that many technological changes are put into wide-scale practice that decrease the waste of energy and materials.
Hence my sentence you neglected to quote.
You forgot your link.
But anyway - what you say severely understates the position because almost all the well off countries you list have birthrates well below replacement - they just have immigration levels that keep their population growing.
Pronatalist billionaires may loom large in popular United States consciousness but they are a distracting irrelevancy.
Most of the people around the world concerned about declining birthrates are national leaders and economists, who couldn’t give a rat’s ass about and are not influenced by pronatalist billionaires. Their concern is keeping their populace happy with a declining tax base and a growing medical and aged care cost.
I’m not commenting one way or the other on the rights or wrongs involved but my point is it’s not just or even significantly billionaires who want to enrich themselves who are urging people to procreate.
So, it’s a Ponzi scheme? We need an ever-increasing population or the economy collapses?
Yeah pretty much. Like I said, I wasn’t commenting on the rights or wrong, merely that (to use your analogy) it is a Ponzi scheme a lot of people other than merely pronatalist billionaires buy into.
Sorry, I forgot to include the link and I can’t find it now. In any case, the only countries in which the population is increasing is poorer countries and a small number of well off ones. The well off ones are only increasing by a small amount in each case. What we need to do is make the poorer countries better off. Once they are no longer so poor, their rate of population increase drops. As I said above, we need the population to be slowing decreasing in all countries at about the same rate. After this is true for a few decades, we will reach a population worldwide that is stable. To achieve this, we need to make many technological changes the decrease the waste of energy and materials.
Yep…the entire world economy is a Ponzi scheme, and has been for over a century. The government of every country on earth spends much more each year than it collects from taxes. Then they sell bonds to cover the deficit, which means they have to pay interest, so they have to sell more bonds to cover the interest payments, in a permanent cycle.
Now I have a question about birthrates: has anyone done research on the connection between number of babies a family has and the number of siblings the parent grew up with?
My personal, anecdotal observation:
People who grew up in a large, loving family with lots of kids want to have more babies. People who grew up as an only child want fewer babies.
Always has been, really. As was said earlier we’ve never managed to make an economy that handled getting smaller well.
On top of that we’ve just been through a long period of rapid population growth, and built our economy and policies around the assumption that would continue. So in some ways we’re probably set up worse to handle a population decline than people a few hundred years ago would have been.
That didn’t happen in Mormonland. Mormons traditionally have had more children than the national average, but it’s declining. It’s still higher than the national average, but it’s less than it was before.
This has been researched and documented. Here is one article.
(Just googling, about 42% of Utahns identify as Mormon, although the official statistics are higher.)
Mormons who grew up in the 80s in large loving families with lots of kids still didn’t have as many children as their parents, and it’s continued to decline.
This isn’t meant to a dig at Mormons but maybe the kids’ experiences was that they weren’t as loving as all that?
Anyway I’d suspect that their Z-score relative to the American average is fairly unchanged.
There is some research that backs this notion up, but a.) it’s a statistically significant but weak correlation, b.) it seems to be declining over time and c.) the correlation is driven by the extremes - only children vs. large families. The rise of the two child family as a societal norm, at least in France, seems to be swamping out other factors.
Of course I and I imagine most people could anecdotally cite numerous counter-examples. For example I have a few step-siblings from a couple of marriages (two of whom I was partially raised with). But both of my parents were each one of four and they opted themselves for only a single child before deliberately tying the tubes as it were.
Understandable in their case of course. I mean why fiddle further with perfection once it has been achieved 
?
Any evidence that Mormons are less loving than anyone else?
I was responding to a post that claimed without evidence that people who grew up in loving families with large numbers of kids want more kids.
No reason to presume they are. But yes there is some evidence of increased discontent at least within Mormon youth. Lower retention rates.
So reasonably possible that these young adults are not perceiving their childhoods as ideal happy families?
Not a dig. Just an observation.
I grew ew up in a large, loving family. I have three siblings. I and one brother have two kids. The other two have no kids. That’s not a high average.
I realize this is just a single anecdote, but i just don’t connect with that idea.
Oh very good, you can google and find a few cute, but did you actually read them?
As a policy, I don’t argue with people when I’m familiar with a culture (I grew up Mormon and most of my relatives are still Mormon) and when the other people is just googling cites they don’t understand.
I wanted to add some empirical support to this. My Grandma had 16 kids, and my Dad had 4 and he always said he was a bad Mormon (Jack-Mormon).
Yes read, and was already aware before googling. 
The comment though was not aimed at Mormons but at bad use of data inherent in using a very specific religious group as an example of something of a whole in a very superficial manner.
FWIW if we ignore the qualification of “loving”, because documenting that is hard (but it certainly is possible that children of one or the other family size may systematically perceive their families as more or less loving, and probable that large families and small families differ in many ways other than family size alone) the data is pretty solid and easy to, yes, Google and read and even understand! Family of origin size has less predictive value on current family size than it used to as a general rule. Parents are less likely to recreate the size family they grew up with than in the past and it remains a factor.
For example:
… A positive and generally significant correlation between parents’ and children’s fertility levels, ranging from .10 to .20, has been observed in several countries with very different fertility contexts since the late nineteenth century (review in Murphy 2013). In France, the first studies of family size transmission, which date back to the 1980s, found that family size increased with the number of brothers and sisters among women born between World Wars I and II (Desplanques 1985; Deville 1979). …
… we confirm a persistent positive link between parents’ and children’s fertility in France, demonstrating that the family size of origin is still a determinant in fertility decisions. The magnitude of the correlation is comparable with that observed in other countries …
… the correlation is driven mainly by small and three-child families …
… If the positive link between an individual’s number of siblings and her/his own fertility is weaker today, it is probably because the cultural habits of the family of origin have become less important to generations born in the second half of the twentieth century. The increasing emphasis on individuality during the second demographic transition already suggested that family background had become less prominent. …
I literally just linked to that study a half-dozen posts up 
.