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France's baby bust

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Re: France's baby bust

#61

Post by jefftk »

kubb wrote: post #40
jstanley wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why would we want to overpopulate? Half the reason we got out of the Malthusian trap is that we finally got enough people that specialisation and economies of scale start to pay off. Wanting to reduce the global population is like saying you want to eliminate economies of scale, which would make life harder for those who remain, not easier.

Economies of scale can happen with a billion people just as well as with 8 billion. The food production grew because of the invention of synthetic fertilizer, not because the more people we have, the cheaper the food can be.

By "just as well" do you mean "still happen some" or "still happen at least as much"? Because the former seems clearly true while there are many counterexamples to the latter (ex: anything with zero marginal cost).

Re: France's baby bust

#62

Post by AlchemistCamp »

swarnie wrote: post #23
langsoul-com wrote: post #6

The book, "shall the religious inherit the world" is relevant. I'd be interested what happens when general birthrate declines and a religious group, that massively encourages tons of children, take larger voting percentages.

I understand this is an America-centric forum but does religion play a major role in politics in the rest of the western world? I'm counting back though prime ministers and i can't recall one who made religion a major part of their platform in my lifetime.

> does religion play a major rile in politics in the rest of the western world?

Hasn’t the growth of Islam in Europe been a large and growing political issue for the past decade?

France in particular has had lot of debates about religious clothing at schools, what kind of criticism of religious ideas is and isn’t acceptable, etc.

From my POV, it looks like religion is a bigger deal in European than American politics. In America, politics are the religion for many and marrying across political lines now carries more opposition than across religious ones, for the majority of people. Things have changed quite a bit since the 80s.

Re: France's baby bust

#64

Post by bmacho »

rzk wrote: post #11
franky47 wrote: post #2

> In 1700, almost 1 in 25 inhabitants on Earth, and one in five in Europe, was French. Today, less than a percent of humanity is French. Why did France’s population decline in relative terms so dramatically, and did it really mark the decline of France? It seems far-fetched to use global population as a relative indicator of France's "decline", where the global population exploded after the industrial revolution.

If the explosion of the global population is driven by the industruial revolution, then it would've impacted France's population the same way. So it makes sense to compare this way.

France's population exploded sooner.

Re: France's baby bust

#65

Post by zwirbl »

mamonster wrote: post #18
langsoul-com wrote: post #6

The book, "shall the religious inherit the world" is relevant. I'd be interested what happens when general birthrate declines and a religious group, that massively encourages tons of children, take larger voting percentages.

You will get to see this within the next 50-60 years in Israel. AFAIK the expectation is that Haredi+Israeli Arabs will be 50% of the population by like 2070.

With so many orthodox jews there will also be barely any workforce left

Re: France's baby bust

#66

Post by epups »

throwaway4aday wrote: post #45
ookdatnog wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how you're getting to this enormous generalization. Seems to me that for the past century or so, liberal societies have been the dominant societies on the world stage. Which conservative, traditionalist societies are you thinking of that are more successful or have "higher fitness" than liberal societies? When I think of an archetypal "conservative, traditional" society, the first countries that spring t…

The United States was a conservative country at least until the 1960s

Not by the global standards of the 1960s.

Re: France's baby bust

#67

Post by makeitdouble »

The more I read this, the less I get his point on the religious influence.

> It is unclear why the Catholic Church’s influence waned so quickly and why France was the first country to secularize.

But then, if he doesn’t know enough about what’s happening in France during that period, how can he pin down the demographic decline as caused by the Catholic Church’s decline ? What if it was a completely different reason that he couldn’t find in his very limited set of documents ?

> The decline of Catholicism, and fertility, in eighteenth-century France turned it from a demographic powerhouse – the China of Europe – to merely a first-rank European power among several

Why wouldn’t it the other way round, with the core causes of the French decline also triggering less religiousness ?

This article has a lot of data, but the base logical argument feels off, like starting from a conclusion and sticking correlated statistics to it without ever coming up with definitive causality.

Re: France's baby bust

#68

Post by MakeUsersWant »

franky47 wrote: post #2

> In 1700, almost 1 in 25 inhabitants on Earth, and one in five in Europe, was French. Today, less than a percent of humanity is French. Why did France’s population decline in relative terms so dramatically, and did it really mark the decline of France? It seems far-fetched to use global population as a relative indicator of France's "decline", where the global population exploded after the industrial revolution.

So this is why Europeans were able to colonize the entire world roughly in the 1700s.

Re: France's baby bust

#69

Post by [deleted] »

pfdietz wrote: post #15
langsoul-com wrote: post #6

The book, "shall the religious inherit the world" is relevant. I'd be interested what happens when general birthrate declines and a religious group, that massively encourages tons of children, take larger voting percentages.

The assumption that religion is something that people stick with is dubious, though. In the absence of coercion people will tend to abandon religion. Look at what's happening to Christianity in the US.

[deleted]

Re: France's baby bust

#70

Post by nathan_compton »

koheripbal wrote: post #54
nathan_compton wrote: post #53

In my estimation its worth a decline in standard of living to be free of traditional, conservative values.

Poverty generates more conservatism, not less.

Poverty does, but not a small decline in standard of living. France isn't a third world country, its just not an imperial power. Seems great to me. On balance, I'd like to live in a modestly successful country without imperial ambitions.

Lot of Glaucons at Hackernews, I guess.

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