Well this seems to be causing a lot of unnecessary worry. A fertility rate of 2.0 is fantastic news! It’s just below replacement rate, meaning a gradual decline in population size without a dramatic collapse. Gives economies time to adapt while avoiding the severe threat of exponential growth.
“But this trend means we will eventually go extinct!” you say? Only if you believe we can’t correct the trend when the population starts to dip low. But we are centuries away from that and the remediation plan is trivial - just have more babies.
The issue is uneven distribution. While the world fertility rate is trending toward a moderate population decline starting mid century, this will be mostly driven by extreme declines in specific areas rather than a gradual decline everywhere. There are many developed countries are projected to lose more than half of their populations by 2100 using current estimates. That alone is a major problem for policymakers but what's worse, those estimates have been consistently underestimating the severity of the decline in number of births. In predicting future demographics, there have been longstanding assumptions that the birth rates of countries that fall significantly below replacement will eventually recover. This does not appear to be true, at least on timescales which would appear during any of our lifetimes. Instead, fewer kids reduces social pressure to have kids and results in fewer community resources available to parents (schools, playgrounds, etc). This further reduces the fertility rate.
You can see this in countries like South Korea[1] which are seeing rapidly shrinking elementary school populations and have been closing lots of schools as a result.
South Korea, always the overachiever, is down to a total fertility rate of 0.82 this year with that expected to fall below 0.8 next year. To put that into perspective, in a country without significant immigration, if that rate were sustained you would come to a point where the country would lose ~85% of its population every two generations. That's an extreme example, almost to the point of absurdity, but even so it sort of illustrates the problem. To support the ever increasing number of old people, policy makers can either A) Accept much higher levels of immigration (unpopular) or B) Increase the tax burden on the fewer and fewer working young people (which will probably decrease fertility even further). Even if we assume option C exists (no immigration but replace all workers with robots) you're still looking at a situation in many countries where the actual human population of the country is reduced by >90% within one human lifetime. While countries like the U.S. won't be hit quite as hard by this, the trends are pretty clear. Younger generations are having a fraction of the number of kids older generations had[2] and this trend will continue to accelerate in the near term.
And the amount of people is just ridiculous, why 8 billion? When was this stablished to be the right amount? Why not -lets say- 1 billion and destroy the planet much much less?
I can’t speak for everyone in India etc. but for me, personally, I didn’t reproduce because I felt the world already had enough people for finite resources, and I didn’t think my descendants would get to experience as rich of a natural environment as the one I grew up in.
I don’t regret this decision.
Whilst I might have enjoyed being a parent, had things gone that way, there’s infinitely much to enjoy about being alive solo and free, and nothing to worry about in the aftermath.
Maybe what we need is more people that are educated and think as you do, not less. Did you ever consider that your decision is actually applying evolutionary pressure the wrong way around (wrong according to your beliefs)?
It's important to balance this analysis with the fact that the human population of the Earth, in absolute terms, grew more during the last 60 years than at any other time in history.
Or consider, there were about 4 billion humans on the planet when I was born, there is almost 8 billion now.
There are situations where it is good to talk in percentages. There are other situations when it is good to talk about absolute numbers. Assuming the planet has some absolute environmental limits, then it is the absolute number of humans, rather than some percentage growth rate, that matters.
Why are people having less children? Surely part of it is because of the strain of having to absorb the historic population surge that we have just lived through. We can see this most clearly in the nations that have seen the biggest surges. Iran had 6 million people in 1915. It then suffered a famine that weakened everyone's immune system, so it was vulnerable when the 1918 "Spanish Flu" arrived. It had 5 million survivors by 1921. It now has 83 million people, an astounding increase of 1,660%. Before it can go any further, it will need to rethink all of its institutions, government, education, culture, and worklife. In the same way that a corporation needs to fundamentally re-think everything after a 10x shift, so too do nations.
I've studied Iran, but I have not studied Africa, but I believe in Africa you can find similar stories, such as what has happened in Nigeria.
I don't mean to suggest that population pressures are the only reasons why people might be wary to have children, I only mean this is something to keep in mind when we discuss this issue. The human population of the Earth has exploded over the last century and especially the last 60 years, in absolute terms.
Having to absorb a big population surge can leave any country a bit disorganized. Consider the USA. The biggest generation ever, the Baby Boom, came of age between 1965 and 1987. Given the big surge of the working population, you might think these would have been years of exceptional economic growth. Instead, the opposite happened, these were the years of "The Great Stagnation" with falling wages and falling productivity. No doubt the Great Stagnation was a complex, multi-factor event, but it is interesting that it happened when a naive model might have predicted a big surge.
> No doubt the Great Stagnation was a complex, multi-factor event, but it is interesting that it happened when a naive model might have predicted a big surge.
But there are a lot of different naive models making different predictions.
At one time I thought, along with the orthodoxy, that falling population rates would be a big problem in the future.
But now, it's just a way for humanity to rebalance itself.
30 years ago as we approached 7 billion humans on the planet, everyone was worrying about how we would feed ourselves and what would happen if the rate of growth kept going the same way. (Yes, I'm that old that I remember the news stories).
Now as we slowly decline, everyone wants us to make more babies.
These things go in cycles.
I think that as we get more advanced and men and particularly women, see participating and reaping the rewards of modern economies in pretty much every country -- more important than having children, it will drop even more.
But as covid shows, events will happen that cause people to rethink that from time to time. In a way, its "life" that re-balances itself without even our intervention.
It's a pendulum, and right now, it's swinging one way. It will swing back.
>Now as we slowly decline, everyone wants us to make more babies.
It's irrelevant how much they want us to make babies (Western Europe), as unless real estate prices plummet to levels affordable to young couples without rich parents, you won't see birthrates in the west go up without heavy immigration from developing nations.
They can't expect to have rising birthrates that would sustain the pyramid scheme of the welfare state while at the same time treating real estate as an investment vehicle that goes up faster than wages, squeezing the younger generations out.
Either the welfare state in the west will collapse or the real estate market will. You can't have both going up at the same time.
As someone who grew up hearing the world was headed for certain and total disaster by overpopulation, it’s very hard for me to get upset by projections of a gradual and gentle move the other way for awhile.
Populations that stop reproducing is a problem that solves itself. Probably cultures and individuals that are more likely to desire babies will push forward.
The "demographic contagion" is explained in the article as a spread of cultural mores towards smaller families.
There could also be an economic explanation. Traditionally large families were favored because they provided old-age security to parents. If an immigrant from a developing country is able to support their parents with remittances from a developed country, then there is less of a need for large families in the developing country.
> Traditionally large families were favored because they provided old-age security to parents.
Were they? If we asked old women why they had 3, 4, 5+ kids, would they say it was so they would have old age security or were they having them because they did not have a choice to not have them?
The article does mention economic factors - e.g. the desire for families to educate their children, which for a family with many children is prohibitively expensive.
Female literacy is very strongly associated with falling birth rates. The Taliban probably knew why they wanted to keep Afghan girls illiterate (or Boko Haram in Nigeria) - more young warriors in the future.
Edit: just to be clear, I am not condoning that. Only thinking about possible motivations.
> On November 24th India’s government declared that the country’s fertility rate had dropped to 2.0 children per woman.
the writer (who appears to be anonymous?) shamelessly omits citing or linking to any source for this, and i can't find it. there's a WaPo article [1] claiming a similar thing, where their assertion is backed up by a broken link. when i search "India fertility rate" the most relevant thing i can find suggests this to be 2.18 as of this year [2]. this source's numbers match the St Louis Fed's numbers [3] up to the point that the fed lacks data (2019).
help me out here. the claim that fertility rates are falling faster than predicted -- and that replacement rate has already been reached -- is central to this article. so on the surface, this article seems entirely untrustworthy.
In my self-interested opinion, this is why we need to increase immigration now, not later. We don't get a choice about the genetic makeup of Western countries a century from now, but we do get a choice as to whether our culture is preserved. Bring in the people with high reproduction rates now when they and their children will be maximally immersed in our culture and carry it forward. Don't wait until there aren't enough of us left to matter.
Why not make it attractive for young couples in the west to start families instead of increasing immigration from developing countries?
Believe it or not, the lack of babies in the west is not some fancy fashion choice started by the Millennials, but a consequence of the broken housing market formed by government economic and banking policies of the last couple of decades that turned real estate into an investment vehicle for the haves in the detriment of the have-nots who also suffered wage stagnation, effectively pricing out young couples out of decent homes, so instead of hanging a heavy bank loan around their necks for a shoebox for the next 30 years, they choose not to bother with kids or stay debt free and single.
So how about we solve the housing market first, instead of throwing more gasoline on the fire via uncontrolled immigration in an already broken housing and jobs market?
Immigration is a bandaid on an internal injury. It makes you think you’ve helped the problem for now, but you’ve really done nothing.
Most of the countries that act as sources of immigrants are beginning their own population decline. Very soon there’ll be a slim number of countries with enough population to maintain their numbers while having enough to send abroad. Within about 50 years or so, that number will be approximately zero. When immigrants come to a country and adapt, their birth rates drop off pretty quickly as well. It’s a one, maybe two generation patch that slightly sustains numbers and that’s it.
Figuring out how to get people currently living in your country wanting to have kids is the real solution. At that point you can recruit skilled immigrants and not just play a numbers game to try to stay afloat. You also don’t need to think you’re entitled to the population of other countries to solve your own demographic crisis, like so many western countries do.
I'm genuinely impressed that you seem to have come up with a pro-immigration spin on the Great Replacement conspiracy theory[1].
Culture changes constantly with or without immigration. Do you really think everything we have now is good enough that it should be encased in amber for the next 100+ years? Personally I'm more interested in what evolves out of it.
As one of those immigrants—that isn’t much of a sales pitch, man. My oldest (of 3) is 9, and I’m seriously questioning why I’d want to socialize my kids into this culture. I’m 37 and of my college and law school school friends didn’t have kids until my wife and I had been parents for 6-7 years. We’re by far the youngest parents in our oldest’s class. Maybe tFor a Bangladeshi it’s been such a lonely experience. I don’t want to be like these American parents hoping I get one or two grand kids. :-/
Not even one mention of climate change in the article.
Isn't this exactly what we wanted? This is fantastic news. I thought the whole shift in agenda towards female education and feminism in the developing world was precisely to create this demographic shift, i.e. to reduce global birth rates to almost nothing. We should be celebrating.
In my field it’s interesting to consider all the technology that wouldn’t exist if there were far fewer humans, because we rely on the billions of people wanting a $0.01 improvements to their lives to make investing in these super expensive machines viable.
That, plus the fact that so few seem prone to understanding mathematics, probably plays a part in the technology innovation boon that aligned with the global population boon the last century,
I've alway wondered the following: Since, in rich countries, nearly everyone who wants kids can have kids and if we assume a genetic factor in being drawn towards kids, then there would be evolutionary pressure towards wanting kids. If this is possible, could we already detect this? If one would assume such an hypothesis and model population growth, when could changes be detected?
There are many factors in the play here. Regular people can't afford good upbringing for a kid and even if money isn't a problem dystopian vision of the future clearly prevent from making that choice.
TL;DR: "The fashion for fewer births was probably rooted both in changes in outlook associated with secularism and the Enlightenment and in the spread of information about family planning"
This is the vehicle of demographic decline. The reason for driving it is relative poverty[1], and insecurity in one's future, both of which are prevalent in many modern societies.
[+] [-] guerby|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rubyfan|4 years ago|reply
I use ad blockers and vpn so I understand why I am asked to prove I’m not a robot but unsure why I can’t get through the test.
[+] [-] jl6|4 years ago|reply
“But this trend means we will eventually go extinct!” you say? Only if you believe we can’t correct the trend when the population starts to dip low. But we are centuries away from that and the remediation plan is trivial - just have more babies.
[+] [-] Ygg2|4 years ago|reply
That or something horrible like abolishing woman's rights, decreasing rate of survival, etc.
[+] [-] lotsofpulp|4 years ago|reply
What if economies had already borrowed from the future expecting exponential growth?
[+] [-] thunderbird120|4 years ago|reply
South Korea, always the overachiever, is down to a total fertility rate of 0.82 this year with that expected to fall below 0.8 next year. To put that into perspective, in a country without significant immigration, if that rate were sustained you would come to a point where the country would lose ~85% of its population every two generations. That's an extreme example, almost to the point of absurdity, but even so it sort of illustrates the problem. To support the ever increasing number of old people, policy makers can either A) Accept much higher levels of immigration (unpopular) or B) Increase the tax burden on the fewer and fewer working young people (which will probably decrease fertility even further). Even if we assume option C exists (no immigration but replace all workers with robots) you're still looking at a situation in many countries where the actual human population of the country is reduced by >90% within one human lifetime. While countries like the U.S. won't be hit quite as hard by this, the trends are pretty clear. Younger generations are having a fraction of the number of kids older generations had[2] and this trend will continue to accelerate in the near term.
[1]https://www.insider.com/south-korea-birth-rate-abandoned-sch...
[2]https://i2.wp.com/www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/...
[+] [-] mattigames|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wombatmobile|4 years ago|reply
I don’t regret this decision.
Whilst I might have enjoyed being a parent, had things gone that way, there’s infinitely much to enjoy about being alive solo and free, and nothing to worry about in the aftermath.
[+] [-] ulnarkressty|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cblconfederate|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] js8|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lkrubner|4 years ago|reply
Or consider, there were about 4 billion humans on the planet when I was born, there is almost 8 billion now.
There are situations where it is good to talk in percentages. There are other situations when it is good to talk about absolute numbers. Assuming the planet has some absolute environmental limits, then it is the absolute number of humans, rather than some percentage growth rate, that matters.
Why are people having less children? Surely part of it is because of the strain of having to absorb the historic population surge that we have just lived through. We can see this most clearly in the nations that have seen the biggest surges. Iran had 6 million people in 1915. It then suffered a famine that weakened everyone's immune system, so it was vulnerable when the 1918 "Spanish Flu" arrived. It had 5 million survivors by 1921. It now has 83 million people, an astounding increase of 1,660%. Before it can go any further, it will need to rethink all of its institutions, government, education, culture, and worklife. In the same way that a corporation needs to fundamentally re-think everything after a 10x shift, so too do nations.
I've studied Iran, but I have not studied Africa, but I believe in Africa you can find similar stories, such as what has happened in Nigeria.
I don't mean to suggest that population pressures are the only reasons why people might be wary to have children, I only mean this is something to keep in mind when we discuss this issue. The human population of the Earth has exploded over the last century and especially the last 60 years, in absolute terms.
Having to absorb a big population surge can leave any country a bit disorganized. Consider the USA. The biggest generation ever, the Baby Boom, came of age between 1965 and 1987. Given the big surge of the working population, you might think these would have been years of exceptional economic growth. Instead, the opposite happened, these were the years of "The Great Stagnation" with falling wages and falling productivity. No doubt the Great Stagnation was a complex, multi-factor event, but it is interesting that it happened when a naive model might have predicted a big surge.
[+] [-] DFHippie|4 years ago|reply
But there are a lot of different naive models making different predictions.
[+] [-] eric4smith|4 years ago|reply
But now, it's just a way for humanity to rebalance itself.
30 years ago as we approached 7 billion humans on the planet, everyone was worrying about how we would feed ourselves and what would happen if the rate of growth kept going the same way. (Yes, I'm that old that I remember the news stories).
Now as we slowly decline, everyone wants us to make more babies.
These things go in cycles.
I think that as we get more advanced and men and particularly women, see participating and reaping the rewards of modern economies in pretty much every country -- more important than having children, it will drop even more.
But as covid shows, events will happen that cause people to rethink that from time to time. In a way, its "life" that re-balances itself without even our intervention.
It's a pendulum, and right now, it's swinging one way. It will swing back.
[+] [-] ChuckNorris89|4 years ago|reply
It's irrelevant how much they want us to make babies (Western Europe), as unless real estate prices plummet to levels affordable to young couples without rich parents, you won't see birthrates in the west go up without heavy immigration from developing nations.
They can't expect to have rising birthrates that would sustain the pyramid scheme of the welfare state while at the same time treating real estate as an investment vehicle that goes up faster than wages, squeezing the younger generations out.
Either the welfare state in the west will collapse or the real estate market will. You can't have both going up at the same time.
[+] [-] kgin|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ambolia|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cblconfederate|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jackcosgrove|4 years ago|reply
There could also be an economic explanation. Traditionally large families were favored because they provided old-age security to parents. If an immigrant from a developing country is able to support their parents with remittances from a developed country, then there is less of a need for large families in the developing country.
[+] [-] lotsofpulp|4 years ago|reply
Were they? If we asked old women why they had 3, 4, 5+ kids, would they say it was so they would have old age security or were they having them because they did not have a choice to not have them?
[+] [-] FourthProtocol|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] inglor_cz|4 years ago|reply
Edit: just to be clear, I am not condoning that. Only thinking about possible motivations.
[+] [-] stephc_int13|4 years ago|reply
Scholars and rulers were not happy with the situation.
It forced them to offer citizenship to immigrants and slaves on as large scale.
It also probably inspired religions that were created at the time to put a strong emphasis on family values and large families.
I think we should both rejoice and try to better understand this self-regulating phenomenon.
[+] [-] wallacoloo|4 years ago|reply
the writer (who appears to be anonymous?) shamelessly omits citing or linking to any source for this, and i can't find it. there's a WaPo article [1] claiming a similar thing, where their assertion is backed up by a broken link. when i search "India fertility rate" the most relevant thing i can find suggests this to be 2.18 as of this year [2]. this source's numbers match the St Louis Fed's numbers [3] up to the point that the fed lacks data (2019).
help me out here. the claim that fertility rates are falling faster than predicted -- and that replacement rate has already been reached -- is central to this article. so on the surface, this article seems entirely untrustworthy.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/11/25/india-birth-...
[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/fertility-ra...
[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNTFRTININD
[+] [-] bullen|4 years ago|reply
The economist are 50 years late on this one.
[+] [-] causi|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ChuckNorris89|4 years ago|reply
Believe it or not, the lack of babies in the west is not some fancy fashion choice started by the Millennials, but a consequence of the broken housing market formed by government economic and banking policies of the last couple of decades that turned real estate into an investment vehicle for the haves in the detriment of the have-nots who also suffered wage stagnation, effectively pricing out young couples out of decent homes, so instead of hanging a heavy bank loan around their necks for a shoebox for the next 30 years, they choose not to bother with kids or stay debt free and single.
So how about we solve the housing market first, instead of throwing more gasoline on the fire via uncontrolled immigration in an already broken housing and jobs market?
[+] [-] forgotmyoldname|4 years ago|reply
Most of the countries that act as sources of immigrants are beginning their own population decline. Very soon there’ll be a slim number of countries with enough population to maintain their numbers while having enough to send abroad. Within about 50 years or so, that number will be approximately zero. When immigrants come to a country and adapt, their birth rates drop off pretty quickly as well. It’s a one, maybe two generation patch that slightly sustains numbers and that’s it.
Figuring out how to get people currently living in your country wanting to have kids is the real solution. At that point you can recruit skilled immigrants and not just play a numbers game to try to stay afloat. You also don’t need to think you’re entitled to the population of other countries to solve your own demographic crisis, like so many western countries do.
[+] [-] newsclues|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lexicality|4 years ago|reply
Culture changes constantly with or without immigration. Do you really think everything we have now is good enough that it should be encased in amber for the next 100+ years? Personally I'm more interested in what evolves out of it.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Replacement
[+] [-] rayiner|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cblconfederate|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hd4|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neilparikh|4 years ago|reply
> Slower population growth could make the challenge of cutting carbon emissions less daunting.
[+] [-] guerby|4 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxHwUt87izg
[+] [-] mensetmanusman|4 years ago|reply
That, plus the fact that so few seem prone to understanding mathematics, probably plays a part in the technology innovation boon that aligned with the global population boon the last century,
[+] [-] LeanderK|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cblconfederate|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foxhop|4 years ago|reply
https://pad.yohdah.com/827/why-the-blacksmith-needs-the-drui...
[+] [-] Exendroinient|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xchip|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thriftwy|4 years ago|reply
1. this one is hard to define in a comment.