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Birth rates are falling in the Nordics. Are natalist policies no longer enough?

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Re: Birth rates are falling in the Nordics. Are natalist policies no longer enough?

#91

Post by FeloniousHam »

PrimalDual wrote: post #63

Every time fertility decline comes up I consistently see the same arguments about why fertility is declining: people are just not comfortable enough to want to have children. I just don’t buy this. I have seen reasons like workspace discrimination, lack of parental leave, economic uncertainty and poverty in general used as reasons why young adults are not choosing to have children and it doesn’t quite make sense to m…

+1. It make me think: this is why _Brave New World_. It was out of necessity.

Re: Birth rates are falling in the Nordics. Are natalist policies no longer enough?

#92

Post by ipaddr »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #23

Crossposting from my own Reddit comment about the same article: No, it's just that the policies aren't changing fast enough to match the drop in culture pressure/attitudes that used to push people to have kids (especially religious ones). Major things that have pushed people to have kids: * De facto retirement plan / can actually make you richer (sorta) * Cultural/religious pressure * Emotional personal reasons: you…

I would add kids are a lifetime commitment. The relationship changes after 18, 21, 30 but still requires time/effort.

Re: Birth rates are falling in the Nordics. Are natalist policies no longer enough?

#93

Post by thijson »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #23

Crossposting from my own Reddit comment about the same article: No, it's just that the policies aren't changing fast enough to match the drop in culture pressure/attitudes that used to push people to have kids (especially religious ones). Major things that have pushed people to have kids: * De facto retirement plan / can actually make you richer (sorta) * Cultural/religious pressure * Emotional personal reasons: you…

This is a radical idea, but I think what may happen eventually is that we figure out a way to incubate mammals, ie. an artificial uterus. Governments start to raise people like we raise fish in fish farms. Those people are now loyal to the state, that's their family. It's similar to an ant colony. Natural reproduction may be banned, or severely penalized. Many science fiction novels have explored this idea. I can see communist countries loving this idea.

Re: Birth rates are falling in the Nordics. Are natalist policies no longer enough?

#94

Post by bequanna »

shadowgovt wrote: post #84
bequanna wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is assuming that all people/groups are essentially equally productive, which is not true. People in more developed countries are >10x more productive than people in undeveloped countries.

So they move to Norway to make up the shortfall and become more productive. It's not like the magic of birth is what makes people in more developed countries 10x more productive.

I don’t follow.

Your original post was saying that it is OK for population decline in the northern countries because it is too expensive to live there. And population growth in other (less productive) countries is fine because it evens out.

Re: Birth rates are falling in the Nordics. Are natalist policies no longer enough?

#95

Post by somenameforme »

bwestergard wrote: post #56

"Rotkirch is exasperated by those who think lower fertility rates should be welcome, given climate change. “Climate change has to be combated now, and if you look at fertility changes, they are long term." I don't understand Rotkirch's point here. Of course the kinds of population decline we're on track to experience cannot solve the acute climate change crisis, but it can open up the solution space for human civiliz…

You have to appreciate how fast fertility changes will change the face of the Earth. The change in a generation can be determined by taking their fertility rate and dividing by 2. So a fertility rate of 5 = 5/2 = 2.5 = the next generation is 250% larger. A fertility rate of 1 = 1/2 = 0.5 = the next generation is half as large.

A 'generation' is equal to a birthing window, so ~20 years. And these are exponential systems, because they keep multiplying against themselves. If you start with a population of 100 and a fertility rate of 1 then your first generation will be 50 people, then 25, then 12, then 6, then 3, then 1, then extinct. By contrast imagine for comparison if this group had a fertility rate of 4. It'd go to 200 people (4x as many), 400 (16 times as many), 800 (64x as many ignoring rounding), and so on. All in one human lifetime! Pretty insane.

It's really counter-intuitive how fast fertility changes will change the face of the Earth! And now consider demographics. If you want to predict fertility it's easy: high religiosity, low income, high conservatism, low education. And vice versa for predicting low fertility. And while people can obviously differ from their parents, it's equally obvious that most people will end up like the parents. So the group having lots of kids is also the group that's generally not too bothered by climate change. And the group not having kids is the group that is concerned about climate change. Guess who's going to win that argument in the future?

This also applies to just about everything. By not having children you're essentially conceding your opportunity to have a 'voice', even if not your own, in the future of humanity. People talk about things like wanting to transfer their consciousness into a computer, but that's nonsense. There is no "transferring" anything - you might create a chatbot in your likening, but you'll be dead all the same, and that chatbot will be along as soon as somebody gets bored of running totally_sentient_chatbot_v2.37.exe. Human immortality is a social thing - and little more than a continuation of the species. And we all get to choose whether we want to play our own little part in that, or not.

Re: Birth rates are falling in the Nordics. Are natalist policies no longer enough?

#96

Post by tristor »

ryandvm wrote: post #89

I don't understand worrying about falling birthrates. There are 8 billion of us. I think it's a little premature to be worrying about the extinction of homo sapiens. Something tells me when we're not all working 40+ hours a week scrabbling for the same 20% of the resources, just maybe our birth rate will sort itself out.

There’s a quiet part I am going to say out loud. On a global scale, population decline isn’t an issue. The problem is /where/ the population decline is happening. Most of the global birth rate is made up by countries with low GINI indexes, low education, and high religiosity. Most of the decline is in high GINI index, highly educated, secular countries.

This population shift has a seriously high risk of causing the global failure of egalitarian democracies, and pushing humanity back into a highly repressive and dangerous state.

Re: Birth rates are falling in the Nordics. Are natalist policies no longer enough?

#97

Post by PrimalDual »

shadowgovt wrote: post #90
PrimalDual wrote: post #63

Every time fertility decline comes up I consistently see the same arguments about why fertility is declining: people are just not comfortable enough to want to have children. I just don’t buy this. I have seen reasons like workspace discrimination, lack of parental leave, economic uncertainty and poverty in general used as reasons why young adults are not choosing to have children and it doesn’t quite make sense to m…

Alternatively, we just don't worry about it. We are a planet trying to find the resources for eight billion human beings and we already know the backbone of our global agriculture solution is an unsustainable fossil-fuel-based phosphate cycle. People choosing to not have replacement-number of children is one of the more humane ways to balance the cold equations for subsequent generations.

Although I disagree with the malthusian view on the world I still think there is a more important quantitative argument against this viewpoint. A fertility rate significantly below 2 results in an exponential decline in the population with a lag. In other words, fertility rates close to 1 (as seen in japan and korea), result in a sharp population decline a few decades later that could destabilize the society. Even if I concede the anti-human argument I don’t think the environment would benefit from a destabilizing population collapse. A slow gradual fall with rates close but not quite 2 seems like a much better alternative.

Re: Birth rates are falling in the Nordics. Are natalist policies no longer enough?

#98

Post by shadowgovt »

bequanna wrote: post #94
shadowgovt wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they move to Norway to make up the shortfall and become more productive. It's not like the magic of birth is what makes people in more developed countries 10x more productive.

I don’t follow. Your original post was saying that it is OK for population decline in the northern countries because it is too expensive to live there. And population growth in other (less productive) countries is fine because it evens out.

Two forces at play here:

1) There's no set "right number" of people who should be living in northern countries, no rule that says we need to replace every emigrant (or unborn person) with an immigrant. If it's too expensive to live up north, maybe just... Fewer people just live up north.

The population of Norway, right now, is higher than it's ever been in the country's history. Maybe a population decline looks more like a correction to a "right" amount?

2) To the extent that more people are needed, one can assume that the headcount shortfall from lower birth rate will be filled with skilled immigrants who like the climate and bring a competency that creates enough value to afford the cost of living.

Re: Birth rates are falling in the Nordics. Are natalist policies no longer enough?

#99

Post by shadowgovt »

PrimalDual wrote: post #97
shadowgovt wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternatively, we just don't worry about it. We are a planet trying to find the resources for eight billion human beings and we already know the backbone of our global agriculture solution is an unsustainable fossil-fuel-based phosphate cycle. People choosing to not have replacement-number of children is one of the more humane ways to balance the cold equations for subsequent generations.

Although I disagree with the malthusian view on the world I still think there is a more important quantitative argument against this viewpoint. A fertility rate significantly below 2 results in an exponential decline in the population with a lag. In other words, fertility rates close to 1 (as seen in japan and korea), result in a sharp population decline a few decades later that could destabilize the society. Even if…

> I don’t think the environment would benefit from a destabilizing population collapse.

Hard to predict. The resulting chaos could cause outsized environmental damage. On the other hand, the environmental damage caused by wars tends to be short-term (in contrast to the damage caused by, say, fossil-fuel-based energy production and agriculture, which is perpetually-increasing damage to feed the needs of a society with a stable population and status quo).

But you're making an excellent point. I'm certainly not advocating for societal collapse. I, for one, think the risk of such is a bit overblown (societies tend to adapt, not implode, even in the face of demographic turbulence).

Besides, automation's supposed to make up for much of the labor shortfalls anyway.

Re: Birth rates are falling in the Nordics. Are natalist policies no longer enough?

#100

Post by somenameforme »

anonporridge wrote: post #52
AlbertCory wrote: post #18

Hungary did succeed in raising its fertility rate, but in the last few years it's also been falling. https://www.statista.com/statistics/332502/fertility-rate-in... https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?page=&lo... I suspect that a couple years is not enough to draw any conclusions.

Hungary recently promised a lifetime income tax break to women who have 4 or more children. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/have-four-or-more-babies-in-... Have any other countries seen such a strong fertility rate bump as Hungary? I haven't seen any long trends that look that promising!

Russia has a pretty interesting one. [1] It's been rising every year since 1998, but it comes with a huge asterisk. They had a good fertility rate (by Western standards at least) up until the 1990s. But the collapse of the Soviet Union and the migration to a market economy in the 90s sent everything into chaos, and the country ended up in defacto anarchy for about a decade.

But I still think it's relevant, because it shows it is possible to get those rates back up again. They went from a rate of 1.247 to 1.826 in 20 years. Still nowhere near where it should be, but that's relatively rapid progress in a good direction. Perhaps more importantly, it also challenges many of the arguments people make about why fertility rates are collapsing in the West at large.

[1] - https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/RUS/russia/fertility-r...

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