Slowly enough that the greying population is not too great a drag would be great. Faster than that is something that needs to be planned for as a potential path.
Agreed.
As you’ve pointed out in other threads, a medically increased lifespan, especially with rather less increase in healthspan, is a double whammy. The number of infirm elderly person-years to be subsidized financially and cared for with precious labor hours only goes up, while the supply of labor hours only goes down.
Meantime the iron economic law of supply and demand says that in the face of fixed or limited supply, as demand goes up so does the price per hour. “More units” multiplied by “more cost per unit” is a very nasty spiral to kick off, much less to perpetuate for decades.
So how to plan for the possibility of greater than slow decline, accepting that increasing native birthrate is not feasible?
Immigration? As noted above the countries that have been running higher birthrates are apparently falling as well. Still there will be populations on the move as refugees from climate change and conflict. Not “the right sort of people” in some circles of course. “Some good people” of course …
Automation? AI, robotics … minimally increasing per capita productivity. Will happen to some degree but timing may be a mismatch.
“Acts of god”? We unfortunately can reasonably expect another pandemic to wipe out bunches of seniors sometime in the next decade or so …
Other?
But the remark was about free time and money. High earners may not have a lot of leisure, but what they do have is enough money to afford adequate childcare. And/or to support a family on one income, so the other parent can SAH.
Yes, most of the families i know with a lot of kids have a stay at home parent.
I agree. It’s entitled for people in developed countries to wring their hands that there’s no one to take care of them when their old when there’s 1B people in LDCs.
And feeding the retirement ponzi scheme with workers is at odds with climate change. There’s no reason to assume that continued growth is a viable option.
What is “LDCs”?
From context, I’d guess “less-developed countries.”
Correct. Sorry I should have included the definition.
My anecotal observation is that people who grew up in large families and had much of the work of raising younger siblings foisted off onto them want few or no children.
Children helping raise their siblings is a worldwide custom that date to when we were in caves. It is not new and it is not the cause of recent trends in birthrates.
I doubt there is one single cause for our current birthrates or lack thereof. Folks who wound up raising their siblings choosing not to have children of their own could be one factor in a multi-factorial situation.
One reason for a lower birth rate is that these days people have more options - I’ve known people who have inheritable conditions/syndromes/diseases choosing not to pass those on to a new generation. I’ve known people with serious mental illness who choose not to have children. Both of those above categories might well have had kids in past generations whether they wanted them or not. Of course, there are also people who delay having children to pursue a particular goal (education, professional advancement, whatever) who later find they’ve waited too long and can no longer conceive… but in the past they might have wound up with kids earlier in life because “effective birth control” is a relatively new thing in history. And yes, probably some people who wound up doing more than their fair share of minding their siblings who have decided they’ve spent enough of their lives raising kids and don’t want to do any more of it.
There are many reasons people choose to either have or not have kids and looking for a one-size-fits-all solution centered around just one factor isn’t going to have much impact.
As @Broomstick mentioned, though, what’s new nowadays is that people have more choice about whether to reproduce, and don’t have to choose between avoiding reproduction and having sex.
“Childrearing fatigue” on the part of older siblings in large families may indeed be contributing to declining birthrates, now that those older siblings have more of a choice about how many children they want in their own partnerships. Maybe it would have done so in the past as well, if effective birth control had been available then.
Following up to note that back in the days before birth control, there was a lot more ambivalence and abuse involved in motherhood than our modern Mother-Love stereotypes are comfortable with acknowledging. I’m reminded of the “stepwashing” of villainous mothers in the early 19th-c Brothers Grimm versions of European folktales, for example, described here in the work of a student researcher:
People are still very unaware of, and often resistant to realizing, the amount of abuse committed by mothers and other female childcarers. It was not better back in the days of largely inescapable marital motherhood.
Sure. Tell all those lazy men to step up and start carrying their fair share of the pregnancies.