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France's baby bust

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71–80 of 263 posts

Re: France's baby bust

#71
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens in the next 100 years?

We increase the human population by another 100x in the never-ending quest to increase GDP, then we run out of resources and die. Dolphins become the most intelligent life on the planet.

> We increase the human population by another 100x in the never-ending quest to increase GDP, then we run out of resources and die.

As Musk likes to point out, Japan already has adult diapers outselling baby diapers. I don't think running out of resources is a risk.

Re: France's baby bust

#72
post #64
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But it should have kept exploding.

Re: France's baby bust

#73
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Highly recommend you study history a bit more. If you truly think religion only “sticks” in the presence of coercion… well there’s a lot of history that would be hard to understand.

“Coercion” might be a strong word, but there’s many form of “very strong incentives” applied in most religions. Not being included in the group and face critically harsher survival conditions by not participating in the religion is a form of that for instance.

Re: France's baby bust

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, by the metric of Conservative and high birth rate Afghanistan is currently the most successful country on Earth, as I believe it has the leading population growth rate...

Lol. I was hoping the OP had some definition of success that wasn't literally population growth.

I thought we were discussing the article, sorry, my bad.

Re: France's baby bust

#75
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.

The Industrial Revolution was why they were able to colonise the world. Being much, much more productive means you can afford a lot more bullets/cannon/artillery/small arms and you need less of your population as a share growing food. Europeans were better at war than anyone else because Europe was always at war somewhere. It was geographically fragmented enough that any one power becoming hegemonic never happened again after Rome. The difference wasn’t big enough to explain conquering most of the world though. They Sikhs came very close to defeating the British and Japan was almost certainly outproducing Europe in firearms by the end of the Sengoku Jidai.

The Industrial Revolution made European conquest possible.

Re: France's baby bust

#76
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.

Also, why would we want to overpopulate? The whole premise is wrong. We need to weigh less on the environment, and currently farmers are receding in France, and it’s the first profession for suicide; All tells us that the next generation will be full-urban, which is an extremely bad thing. Of course, empires with more dense populations have more ability to dominate others, at least thanks to the variety of skills and…

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Re: France's baby bust

#77

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.

There are a handful of modern religious and fundamentalist groups that sociologists study for this purpose: Mormons, ultra-orthodox Jews, evangelicals, etc. The interesting thing about these groups is that they exhibit “carrying limits”: they get to particular community sizes and begin to experience attrition through secularization.

This does not accord with the Israeli experience. The Haredim have grown enough as a proportion that they shifted the Israeli median voter substantially to the right.

Re: France's baby bust

#78
post #22

> she declined over the next 250 years to be just another European power. Why would we want 300 millions inhabitants in France ? That's what we would have with the density of the Netherlands. Why couldn't France be on top of leisure, urban transports, ecology, natural ecosystems, technology, political innovation, and even military defense, with 70 million inhabitants ? Worlwide politics are biased, always considering…

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Re: France's baby bust

#79
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Orthodox ≠ Haredi

Re: France's baby bust

#80
post #51

Blaming the Catholic church specifically for high birth rates is a misstep especially since the author compares to England which has a long and varied history with Protestantism. The argument should be reframed around religiosity in general or he should show data for England that indicates a difference in fertility during the periods of stronger and weaker Catholic influence in England.

He never says the high birth rate is because of the Roman Catholic Church. Every place in Europe was deeply religious and had high birth rates at that time, regardless of the religion. He only blames secularization for the decline in birth rate. It just happens that the rapid secularization happened fastest where the Roman Catholic Church was strongest.
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