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The global fertility rate is falling

bbc.com

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Re: The global fertility rate is falling

#161

Post by skissane »

aahhahahaaa wrote: post #47
unstatusthequo wrote: post #3

This may be unpopular, but I already feel the earth is well beyond it’s ideal human population capacity. We are straining resources because of our bad policies and practices and politics.

It's obviously very difficult to predict, but there's also some expert speculation that affluence will spread widely enough to slow the birth rate down to be close to the death rate and we'll reach some sort of equilibrium.

I think another factor is traditionalist religious minorities – ultra-Orthodox Jews, the Amish, Latin Mass Catholics, etc – many of these minorities still have big families, and are sustaining those big families generation after generation. (Even though some people who grow up in those kinds of communities defect to mainstream society, something like 80% choose to stay.)

Those religious minorities are quite small right now, but if they manage to sustain their current growth into the coming decades, they may end up being a much more substantial component of the population.

Re: The global fertility rate is falling

#163

Post by arp242 »

cheez wrote: post #13
_bxg1 wrote: post #10

There's a short-term problem of society becoming "top-heavy", where there might not be enough young to pay for the continued care of the old. But in the long run this seems like a win. I wonder what impact it might have on climate projections.

Why does it seem like a win?

The planet is of finite size, so unlimited growth was clearly never an option. The question is, what is the best population size, and how do we get to that level?

Re: The global fertility rate is falling

#164

Post by Arn_Thor »

anon9001 wrote: post #118
all_blue_chucks wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pushed from the top? What on earth? Guy, there's no conspiracy required to explain urbanization. It is a simple matter of better agriculture tech. We just don't need much labor on farms anymore.

It's absolutely pushed from the top. Nobody outside of extreme religious communities sees increasing the population as a noble goal. At least in the US, children are effectively a tax on the working class. How many people do you know that had to keep working to put their kids through college? Why do workplaces have tax-incentivized college savings accounts? Why does it cost employees to add children to employer-spons…

This article is about global birth rates falling, which is true. But your comment is about conditions specific to the US. Yet birth rates are falling in countries which don't have the warped incentives you point out in the states, and where having children is supported (see Europe, much of Asia, etc.). So although you accurately point out that there are downsides, if not disincentives, to having kids in the US, that cannot be the driving cause of falling birth rates in the rest of the world. And therefore there's no indication of any kind of "top-down" force there either.

Re: The global fertility rate is falling

#165

Post by ken47 »

mindfulhack wrote: post #74
dutch3000 wrote: post #12

another chicken little article. worthless speculation about the future. who knows what will happen if the population declines. one thing is for certain though. it will be a positive for the environment. at some point the ponzi scheme, infinite growth society must have it’s day of reckoning

I support this sentiment 100%. In human population, we should be aiming for quality, not quantity. Quality also means diversity. If higher quantity unavoidably brings a higher proportion of human suffering, then we have no other choice but to promote quality over quantity. I fear for the future of our species. Our evolutionary instinct to multiply combined with the tech we've created is now bringing this planet to th…

People may believe that they fear for the "future of our species," but at a meta level, is it not merely an expression of the same innate human desire that caused us to build up civilization and medicine to the point that we're facing the aforementioned issues?

Without getting into a long spiel, human intelligence appears to actually be extremely limited, compared to a theoretical perfect intelligence, and any explicit actions we may take to enforce "quality over quantity" could end up doing more "harm" than "good" as soon as 1 "move" beyond the furthest move that we're capable of calculating.

IMO, there is no "saving" humankind. We're all doomed in some way. Life is just a way of postponing death.

Re: The global fertility rate is falling

#166

Post by chillwaves »

ve55 wrote: post #58

Sad the amount of technological progress we may be missing out on by this, I rarely see it discussed but I think fertility is important in order for society to be able to maintain a steady course of improvement in science and technology.

What about the people who are already here but living in crushing poverty?

Re: The global fertility rate is falling

#167

Post by zanny »

voisin wrote: post #131

Millennials can’t afford to move out of Mom & Dad’s basement, get married, and have kids. Our society is profoundly sick, both figuratively and now literally.

Its working completely as intended. The stratification of class is a measure to maximize profit. The disconnect of markets from actual human wellbeing feeds into a perpetual profit loop that makes capitalists numbers bigger without actually being based on anything real.

If anything it is a mercy that todays kids will go childless because any children they would have will just be even more thoroughly screwed by economic mandates placed upon them by long dead barons of industry.

Re: The global fertility rate is falling

#168

Post by ChuckMcM »

dragonwriter wrote: post #137
ChuckMcM wrote: post #121

Well that is a particularly click baitey article. My index is failing me here but I recall a paper that had looked into falling birth rates as standards of living increased and found that birth rate correlated strongly with the "cost" of children. The supposition (it really wasn't a theory or even a solid hypothesis) was that as parents became more educated and society's measure of success became more material, the p…

> My index is failing me here but I recall a paper that had looked into falling birth rates as standards of living increased and found that birth rate correlated strongly with the "cost" of children. The supposition (it really wasn't a theory or even a solid hypothesis) was that as parents became more educated and society's measure of success became more material, the parental effort to provide the "best" for their k…

I don't disagree (someone does though :-)) The argument is that given an expected pool of available wealth K to a couple, and a predicted cost p per offspring. Is O = K / p variable? or constant?

More simply, if you change one and not the other, does the value of O go up and down? The article was trying to look at that question by evaluating K and p and comparing O for different values.

Re: The global fertility rate is falling

#169

Post by ojbyrne »

Guy2020 wrote: post #16

Children have become more of a burden than a benefit in many ways. We once had much use for our children. When people were more independent and everyone pretty much had a small business, children were seen as the life blood of that business. Now, we are pretty much expected to fill a role at some large corporation -- which Japan is the greatest example of. Also, the family centered culture has changed to a work cente…

If by “from the top” you mean women entering the workforce, perhaps. But to me that didn’t seem dictated by anyone.

Re: The global fertility rate is falling

#170

Post by inopinatus »

dqv wrote: post #106
tclancy wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started to read this waiting for the punchline to a Dad joke. Kids can still mow lawns for sure. >This stuff is being pushed from the top. Is this some kind of Sparta thing? Like you all go up to the top of the mountain and someone pushes Dad off? Because if you actually mean there's a "top" that is dictating human sexuality I am deeply, deeply interested in seeing a schematic diagram for how that system works. >It…

>Because if you actually mean there's a "top" that is dictating human sexuality I am deeply, deeply interested in seeing a schematic diagram for how that system works. First, a top dictating human sexuality is hilarious to read out of context. Also somewhat accurate. Anyway, I don't think they mean there is a concrete system designed to keep people from reproducing. It's more of a feedback loop where the richest peop…

I think you're trying to very generously interpret a conspiracy theory that doesn't stand up to a moment's scrutiny. Access to contraception, and a rise in women's education and employment, are not a message imposed on society by the wealthy, inadvertently or otherwise, nor have they occurred on the timeline of concerns such as climate change and resource exhaustion. They are social consequences of the Enlightenment.
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