Yeah, I mean the fact that there are widespread organized efforts among conservative whackos to turn women into vote generation factories is annoying, but I’m not about to reverse my vasectomy to combat it. Bringing children into the world to be political pawns is gross and immoral, and I’m content to let that be a tactic of the right.
I’d say it’s not necessarily liberalism or conservatism as a certain sense of sociocultural privilege. “We” would raise our kids to uphold the truly better values and ways, “they” would raise theirs contrary to that.
This is exactly right. If the surplus of our economy benefited more people instead of fewer, there would be little concern about whether some metrics were growing.
But that population size might not provide the economy of scale necessary for some technologies to exist. I’m told that the most modern computer chip fabrication machines are so specialized that there’s exactly ONE facility in the entire world that makes them. Would that facility exist in a world with 1/4 or 1/8 the market?
I don’t know, show your work.
The factories can be built and I thought they were being built.
I don’t see a smaller market that is still 2 billion people doing much to tech advancement.
What’s North Korea’s excuse? Their GDP per capita is estimated at about $1300 but their birthrate is said to be 1.4 - 1.8
They did. The policy was always riddled with exceptions, but it was changed to a two child policy in 2016 and dropped entirely in 2021.
Check the chart I posted above and you’ll see that the birth rate dropped precipitously after 2016.
The reasons parallel those in the U.S. Housing got too expensive, prices rose faster than wages, the norms for a good life required more income, couples started putting off babies in two worker households.
China has already peaked in population. As we’ve seen in other threads, no planned method of raising birthrates significantly has yet been found. (Enormous disasters like Mao’s Great Leap Forward or the Great Depression spur spontaneous growth in the aftermath, but no sane country can accept that as policy.) They will now have to make the same decision every other industrialized country faces: allow immigration or accept stagnation.
I think as GDP per capita increases (countries and their citizens get richer), the birthrate declines.
Not just the USA baby boom but the enormous increase in global population growth that took place after modern sanitation and medicine began reducing childhood mortality rates. This had previously taken place in the developed world in the early 20th century, now the formerly abysmally wretched Third World started closing the gap.
Except science fiction writers. See “Soylent Green” (which incidentally thought that we’d be in Malthusian catastrophe by the time the USA population exceeded 300 million). Or the Star Trek episode “The Mark of Gideon” for one of the original series’ cautionary tales.
There’s a difference between something being technically possible and it being actually economically viable. Two billion wouldn’t be a “smaller” market, it was be an eviscerated market.
Counter to that is how much simpler a problem of food security, housing and education would become.
Better social welfare should also make things safer.
Ask the indigenous peoples of America how comforting it is that although they’re now nearly extinct, immigrants replaced them.
Perhaps stabilization is a better term.
As @Exapmo_Mapcase said they did change the policy in 2016.
Even though China has reversed the one child policy, people are still not having any more than one child.
Sorry, I don’t understand your comment.
My use of “idiocy” referred to this sentence talking about declining birthrates.
How are overpopulation fictions remotely relevant?
Stabilizing a declining population now appears as impossible as raising birthrates.
Malthus assumed that the population (of the world?) would eventually outpace production of food. This has not happened due to improvements in agriculture.
The UK has increased the age at which we can draw the state pension to 67 (both male and female), and this is likely to increase further. Oddly, some benefits, like free prescriptions, still begin at 65. I suspect the government will be taking a hard look at that.
As an octogenarian, I am not personally concerned, but I have grandchildren still in primary school, and I do worry about them.
Why would it be eviscerated? .The factory would still function.
Right now , there is only one fabricator of computer chips in the world (in Taiwan) which makes all the chips for 8 billion earthlings and their cell phones. The enormous cost of building the factory is split over 8 billion cell phones. If the population drops by a factor of 4 to 2 billion, then the factory would produce one quarter as many chips, and raise the price by a factor of 4. So you instead of buying a new iphone every year, we will buy one every 4 years.
But the price of housing will drop, because 2 billion people don’t need 8 billion houses. There will be lots of empty houses, even in large cities.
Life will go on..
We’ve already seen what happens to cities when populations drops. Look anywhere in the Rust Belt. Yes, houses are cheap compared to the ones in the fast growing South and Southwest. But the tax base has disappeared. Cities still need schools, police and fire, water and sewers, libraries, public transport, all of which needs to function across the same number of square miles with tinier resources.
The hollowing out of world population will work the same way. Some places will continue to prosper. Every other place will stagnate at best and descend into squalor at worst. Their residents will want to move elsewhere toward prosperity, setting up exactly the same immigration pressures and stand-offs as today.
Thinking that everybody can continue the same lifestyle just with a bit less consumerism is a deadly mistake. People will die from lack of resources. They are doing so already in many places. Straight-line extrapolation got us into this mess; more of it will not mitigate the problems. Only drastic changes in mindsets will do so.
Like discontinuing the conflation of economic stabilization with population stabilization.