Moderating:
Once again you jumped off-topic, replying to someone else edging off-topic is not an excuse to go off-topic.
I’ll hide your post. We might change this to a Warning later.
I’ve read a lot of reports and trends indicating the population growth is leveling off and expected to start dropping even. I have nothing more specific than that and was only expression an opinion. Hopefully educated.
Moderating:
This is a follow-up to @What_Exit’s moderation of @Der_Trihs above. Three P&E mods took time to review the post and have agreed unanimously that a warning should be issued. As a stand alone post, we might have let it slide with a note as we have repeatedly done in the past, but @Der_Trihs has a history of posting screeds largely unrelated to the topic at hand including a post earning a warning for the same offense less than 30 days ago. @What_Exit had noted the thread only three hours prior about staying on topic, and while the post you were responding too was headed off topic, you chose to continue and greatly amplify it.
As such, this is an official Warning for Hijacking.
I support empowering women to make their own decisions, but I think I’m one of the few people to disagree that collective free choice will bring about the best possible result on this issue. That doesn’t mean we should control people’s decisions, just that collective free choice is the least bad of all the decisions, but its still going to have negative effects.
The reason is this. People who are dysfunctional have more children.
The following things are positively correlated with having more children:
Lower education
Poverty
Being highly religious
Childhood trauma
A big part of why people do not have kids, or stop at 1 or 2, is because they have good executive function and they can ask themselves ‘how will having a child now affect my life 10 years from now’. People who for one reason or another (trauma, low cognitive skills, being too stressed out about money, etc) are less likely to care about what happens 10 years from now. Their mental energy is devoted to surviving day to day. People who can’t afford birth control or who can’t figure out how to use it properly have more kids.
So the idea that society will work itself out isn’t something I agree with. The more dysfunctional people will have more kids. It doesn’t mean its a perfect correlation. But there is a connection. People who are traumatized, who can’t afford birth control, who can’t follow birth control instructions properly, who can’t afford abortions, who are too busy worrying about surviving in the present to plan for the future, etc have more kid on average.
Also larger families have higher rates of child abuse and child neglect. Statistically a family with 1 or 2 kids has lower rates of child abuse and child neglect than a family with 4+ kids. Then those kids grow up, and people with childhood trauma generally have more kids than people with loving childhoods and the process repeats.
People who devote most of their mental bandwidth to coping with childhood trauma or poverty and chronic stress don’t have the mental bandwidth to plan their lives or children’s lives decades from now as well as people with loving and safe childhoods who have financial resources.
Having said that, it probably doesn’t matter. Its like a family in the 17th century noticing that the more sickly families that only cut and stack 25 cords of wood for winter have more kids than the ones that cut and stack 30 cords of wood. Over time, more sickly people will have more kids, and everyone will die in winter. In theory. But it really doesn’t matter, because technology got rid of the need to cut and stack wood.
As medicine, mental health care, science, etc get better people will have more resources (one would hope) to deal with trauma, poverty, etc. So the effects will be minimal. Add in AI taking over many of our cognitive tasks, combined with advances in neuroscience eventually augmenting our cognitive abilities, and it doesn’t really matter if people with less education have more kids than people with more education.
With all that said, what we should be doing as a society is improving everyone’s quality of life. That way the people who want to have kids will be more willing, while the people who decide not to have kids will also enjoy their lives. People talk about economics and its role in the lower birthrate, but a lot of people don’t want kids due to things like climate change, fascism, the inevitable suffering in life, etc. One trauma can wreck a person’s mental health for life, and a lot of people don’t want to bring a child into that kind of world even if they have free daycare.
Women have been on the Pill for sixty years now. At least two generations. If this scenario were going to develop into a dysgenic Idiocracy, we would have noticed it happening by now. But I say the kids are all right.
Its not a rapid change, its a slow moving change. But either way, it doesn’t really matter because technology will help us deal with these things.
Empowering women is a good idea for endless reasons. But all the options (forced natalism, forced anti-natalism, letting people decide on their own) all have negative outcomes. But letting people make their own decisions has far fewer negative outcomes than the other 2.
People practiced effective birth control before the pill. My mother had one sister 4 years older than she was. All her parents’ friends had two children four years apart. Ambitious Jewish professionals wanted to send their kids to college, so they spaced their children out and didn’t have a lot of them. These were children born in the 1930s.
Not really, that’s not very long in evolutionary terms. Not with a species that has as high a population and as long a generation time as humans do. There’s an enormous amount of genetic inertia there; large populations evolve slower than small ones and our population is very large. A few generations in only part of the world isn’t going to do anything noticeable.
The basic problem with the various claims of “X social trend will cause Y result” is that human societies change so often compared to how slowly a species like humanity evolves that most such trends just don’t stay stable long enough to make a noticeable difference. Long before it matters genetically speaking things will have changed, one way or another. Artificial wombs? Genetic engineering? Collapse of civilization? Could be all sorts of things, but “the present trends go on forever” is unlikely to be what happens.
“Letting people decide for themselves” =/= “Do not attempt to influence their decision at all”.
Personally, I think both government and non-governmental institutions should be pushing a “negative population growth until some acceptable global stability level quite a bit less than 10 billion” message. BUT that must go hand in hand with pushing other measures like free childcare, many months of paid maternity/paternity leave[1], free education[2], free birth control, free healthcare, etc. for those who do decide to have kids and their kids.
BUT ALSO must not in any way penalize or compel non-kid-havers or kid-havers. Like the OP said, choice is paramount.
Indirect does not mean neutral. You’re doing the exact thing I outlined in my post:
decisions that are consciously there to affect birth rates and decisions where the unintended side effect is to affect birth rates and draws a bright red line where the former is forbidden and the latter is forbidden to be examined.
You just apply the giant cloak of “indirect effects” to anything you want to smuggle your ideology within and centrists like you will refuse to both examine it and also allow anyone else who has examined it to apply their corrective factors.
Reading the arguments between pro-natalists and anti-natalists convinced me they’re both wrong and dangerous, and the only sensible path is down the middle.
I think it’s clear South Korea is looking at imminent societal collapse. I feel they will not be alone. Birthrate is very much at the center of it, but as a consequence of many factors difficult to change.
Do you have a link to that at all? The only country I thought was heading for real issues was Japan.
You need 2.1 people per couple to sustain a population, South Korea is at .74 and falling. From AI:
AI Overview
South Korea is facing a “national emergency” due to the world’s lowest fertility rate, which fell to 0.72 in 2023 and tentatively 0.74 in 2024, threatening economic stagnation, labor shortages, and severe population aging. This demographic crisis stems from high housing costs, intense work culture, and educational pressures, with the population projected to halve by 2100.
[image]CNBC +4
Key Aspects of the Demographic Crisis
- Record-Low Fertility: With a 2023 fertility rate of 0.72, South Korea is the only country with a rate below 1.0, far below the
[image]
required to maintain a stable population.
- Aging “Silver Tsunami”: By 2030, 25% of the population is expected to be over 65, creating immense pressure on the workforce and pension systems.
- Shrinking Workforce: The number of young people entering the workforce is plummeting, threatening to cause permanent economic recession by the 2040s.
- Cultural Drivers: High costs of living, sky-rocketing housing prices, intense competition, and a high-stress educational system make people hesitate to have children.
- Marriage Decline: Marriage is largely viewed as a prerequisite for children, and with rising housing costs and demanding jobs, marriage rates have plunged.
[image]CNBC +6
Government Response and Future Outlook
- “National Emergency”: President Yoon Suk Yeol has labelled the situation a national emergency, prompting plans for a new ministry to focus on the crisis.
- Policy Initiatives: Proposed solutions include extending parental leave, increasing child care allowances, and introducing more flexible work schedules to reduce the burden on parents.
- Long-Term Impact: Projections suggest the population will decline rapidly, with the median age reaching 56 by 2044.
[image]Think Global Health +2
Despite government investment of over $200 billion over the past decade, the fertility rate has continued to break records, highlighting the deep structural nature of the crisis.
[image]Wikipedia +3
Not sure that this is factually accurate.
The big drop in the birth rate is in the 15-19 age group, and most people think that drop is a very good thing! There’s a much lower drop in the age 20-24 birth rate, and the birth rate among women 25+ is about the same as it ever was. (Sorry, no link: I looked up the stats on this a year or two ago.)
So any reasons why women are having fewer children than they used to don’t apply to women 25+ because they’re not having fewer children than they used to. And girls and women 15-19 are having fewer children because they’re not ready to be parents, and that surely applies to some extent to women 20-24.
But I agree that more societal support for families and single women raising children might possibly increase the birth rate among adult women. But it would be a good thing whether or not it had that effect.
Other East Asian countries are near or under a 1.0 rate. Apparently China and Taiwan are both heading for it soon if it hasn’t happened already. As China conclusively proved, lowering birthrates is easy; raising them nearly impossible.
Unlike @Wesley_Clark I correlate high births with degree of ruralness, although other factors like religion played a part until cultural changes and the birth control revolution tamped that. A billion or more people have moved into local middle class status in this century; another billion is forecast. For the first time in history, more than half the world’s population is middle class. Urbanization accounts for almost all this growth. Birthrates drop precipitously with prosperity. India went from a fertility rate of about 6 in 1965 to about 2 in 2023. People have always left rural farming to go to cities. Europe and America saw this starting two centuries ago. It’s Asia’s turn, creating megacities. With huge slums, to be sure, but with opportunities, especially for next generations. That affects birthrates.
Most of those East Asian countries have strictly discouraged immigration in the modern era and are paying the price as @Sitnam shows. As William Gibson famously said, the future is already here - it’s just not evenly distributed. I apply that to population as well. A better distribution because of prosperity and urbanization will provide the benefits that @Johanna desires, and probably also freer choices for women.
People have noted the “cities don’t replace their own populations” phenomenon for a long time. Traditionally this was attributed to higher disease mortality in cities, or more recently the use of birth control accompanying urban lifestyles. But is it just ancillary causes like that, or is there something inherently about cities themselves that somehow have an effect? Like, I dunno, rural isolation versus being continually surrounded by strangers having some sort of psychological effect?
Cities are inherently attractive because of their intrinsic potentials. What is the future path of a person on a rural farm? Historically and across cultures, kids, well, male kids, followed in their father’s occupation. Subsistence farming was the norm, especially if higher-ups took a portion of the yield. More kids required more food but also supplied more work-hours. Look at the London grew in the 19th century when industrialization made city life preferable to farm life. True, large families still were the norm among the poorest classes mainly because of the insanely high rate of child mortality but when proper sanitation took hold in the 20th century the birthrate fell proportionally.
Most of the world has moved away from subsistence farming to industrial farming paralleling the destruction of farmland as urban areas grew. Even in America we hear about the crisis in farming as generation after generation refuses to continue the uncertainties in farm life. They move to cities, large cities not small towns, which are hollowing out worse than the Rust Belt did and for the same reasons. When opportunities failed along with industry, people rushed to where the opportunities seemed greater, the South and West.
Multiplying that by millions gives a good view of the 21st century world. People elsewhere think and act economically much as Americans do. In our current world the group behaviors are known. Of course, rural life vs. city life produce psychological changes and other trade-offs. None has ever proved consequential for the mass movements.
Whether AI and climate change will disrupt these opportunities on a global scale is unknown. But hey, Gibson didn’t forecast our future either.