Your opinion about birthrates in a utopian society???

I would like to begin with some fictional facts and would be curious what anyone thinks would happen. First of all, my made up criteria:

Take a location on earth; make the temperatures mild and acceptable to everyone, year round. Food and water are available in any amounts necessary. There is no disease or germs. Everyone is healthy and this location starts with 13,000 people.

In the beginning, the people range from newborns to 40 years old, spread out as such: 10% ages up to 10, 20% ages 10-20, 30% ages 20-30; 40% ages 30-40. Men and women are about equal. All races and nationalities are represented & there is no bias about interracial marriages. 10% of the people are set in families already, with no more than 4 of anyone being related within 3 generations.
I will assume that you get my point. A fairly utopian society is dropped from the rest of the world and will never be bothered by the rest of us people ever again.

My question is: If you take this situation and still apply a basic ‘god fearing’ and ‘good principled’ belief system, where a man and a woman meet, date, marry and have children… What kind of birth rate do you suppose would occur amongst these people over 10, 20, 30, 40… 100 years?

Asking for our opinion? Wrong forum.

There is no factual answer to this question. Who gets to decide what a “God-fearing” and “good-principled” belief system is? Is it me? Then I select a God who ordains that good principles require abstinence from all sexual intercourse, to be implemented by any and all means necessary. The birth rate will therefore be 0 over 10, 20, 30, 40, and 100 years.

New to this board, but I can see by the next reply what you mean. :wink: I’m willing to take my chances and read through some fun answers to get to hopefully some serious replies. I would also be curious if any knows a better forum to posit such a situation?

Welcome to the board. Questions about matters of opinion or speculation go in our IMHO forum; I’ll move this there.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

Try “In My Humble Opinion” or “Great Debates”.

While I did get a chuckle out of your reply, and I truly do understand your cynicism… I must state that your ordained principle of abstinence was already disregarded in my question that said that men and women would meet, date, marry and have children. But thanks anyhow.

Thank you very much!

in utopian 18th century America birth rates were high. In utopian 20th century Japan birth rates are low. YMMV.

If its Utopian, the birth rates would be ideal.

Demographically speaking, data over the past half century or so suggests that birthrates tend to level out somewhere a bit below replacement rate in industrialized societies. Right now, there is much more discussion in the world of demography about how to raise birthrates in certain countries than there is about how to lower birthrates in others. (Japan, Russia, other countries of the former USSR, Italy, Greece, etc all have unsustainably low birthrates.)

My personal definition of a utopia includes assumptions that it’s perfectly possible to avoid unplanned pregnancies, and that there is no social pressure on people to have children if they don’t want to. However, if this society doesn’t have something in place to ensure that childbearing and child rearing are pretty easy, it won’t last long.

I don’t know that “utopia” is a discrete enough idea to quantify something like birthrate anyway.

Here’s a Utopia: Very industrialized nation where everyone works about 4 hours a day doing something they have been trained and selected to do based on their personal preferences. Every person is employed, and most people work inside, by themselves, either with computers, remote systems, or mechanized helpers. Hobbies are pursued almost religiously - excrcise, sports clubs, creative arts, all of these provide socialization for people outside work. Individuality, creative output, and personal autonomy are highly prized, and personal accomplishments (through work or play) are considered the best way of quantifying a person’s worth. Marriage occurs, but isn’t considered socially necessary, more of an organic extension of two highly-compatible “soul-mates” who have decided to join their lives.

Here’s another one: Agrarian society where advances in robotic and mechanized labor have made crop yields stable, and physical labor not as draining. However, the established religion focuses on remaining close to the earth and personally overseeing work, so most people are farmers or livestock keepers. In addition, the idea of community is valued above individuality, and community-members learn early where their talents lie in order to better support the whole. The focus on growing crops and tending to the community make large family blocks highly desirable, and entire clans develop among the individual crop-growers. Marriages are highly socially and religiously regulated (that focus on cultivating and growing again), and alliances between clans and families by hosting “foster children” or “clan wives” are sought after by everyone. Family dynasties control the various crops and goods produced.

So, you’ve got two societies, nothing like each other, which could both be utopian in nature for a good number and type of humans to flourish. The first one is going to die out, and the second one will grow (but probably split off schisms) rapidly.

Can you think of why that is? :slight_smile:

Basically, if you want to create a ficticious utopian community with a particular birthrate pattern, you have to figure out what social pressures will contribute to that. Alternatively, if the social structure is more important to you, then think about what the impact of those structures and ideologies will be for birth rates after you establish what you want to have.

A utopian society means a perfect society. A perfect society never has any need to change, because it’s already perfect. An unchanging society means an unchanging population level. Therefore, birthrates in a utopian society have to be *exactly *at replacement levels.

I think the OP is confusing “economic prosperity” with “utopia”. But above a certain economic point our happiness is not dependent on the amount of food and goodies available. It is dependent entirely on the social situation. You can have a rich country where life is a living hell because of how people (including individuals, organizations and government authorities) behave and treat each other. And you can have a not so rich country where everybody is happy (see America of the “era of good feelings” for an example).

If you want people to be altruistic enough to reproduce in the absence of obvious economic push, you need to keep them reasonably happy with the present and hopeful for the future. So the answer to the OP would depend on how effective this utopian place of his will be at resisting the slide towards alienation, oppression, hatred, perversion, violence organized and unorganized etc. The formerly utopian places like Sweden are not so utopian any more, thanks to their inability to resist many of these above-mentioned factors - all this despite arguably an economic situation that is better than the less-than-economically-utopian places like England and USA that also have plenty of (perhaps much more of) all this shit.