While the article mainly focuses on France, the world is mostly looking at China after its one-child-policy as the greatest example. France is a good example for other things though. Its extremely pro-pension policies makes it very hostile against the young. Both countries at either end of the world were spending their time breeding babies to try to feed them 50 years later.
I do not see why history would be a good indicator for the article’s question anyway. The fact that birth control is easily and nearly freely available and women have gained economic independence is a big factor.
It's a little more complicated than that: not all religious groups consider all forms of birth control to be sinful, and these trends don't apply in all countries. Increased religiosity won't necessarily increase the birth rate.
Disclosure: my mum, Marion Burkimsher, is a demographic researcher specialising in this area. She's also studied fertility of migrants (the TFR statistics are skewed).
I would imagine birth control plays some part. But the economic independence argument I think is the larger factor.
Before I get accused of sexism or whatever consider the actual economics of child rearing. 50 years ago assets weren't rapidly inflating and college degrees weren't required for a decent middle class living. The middle class has the best opportunity for raising children successfully (good education, good health, etc). The trade off? Someone has to stay home and tend to the house. It really doesn't matter who does, honestly, but historically this was the woman.
The feminists will spin women entering the workforce as empowering. Indeed, it is. But as a result birth rates decline rapidly. The shirking of that traditional role means child care must be offloaded somewhere. Several family members with children have told me that pre-K daycare at a decent, but not great, daycare runs anywhere between $800-$2000 a month. Absurdly expensive. Ignoring the actual _cost_ of having the child, taking care of the child before you can offload that responsibility onto the education system is prohibitive for all but the upper classes these days. These upper class people don't often have children. The alternative is to return to the old system but that requires one income to support a house. If you're not clearing six figures this might not even be possible in all but the most remote parts of the country.
This combined with rapid asset inflation means that in reality women entering the workforce wasn't for "empowerment" but rather necessity. With the price of goods going up every single year it's no longer feasible in most parts of the country to have one person stay home. The result? People have less kids.
I have no solution to this really. No amount of maternity/paternity leave, pay raises, etc will fix it. We can probably place the blame squarely on the big banks and the federal reserve. But, how do you bring wages back in line so that people can afford to have kids?
World is mostly looking at China after its one-child-policy as the greatest example.
China's one-child policy was a success. They were able to put on the brakes during the period between health care getting good and standard of living going up, which is when population goes way up. India didn't do that, and their population shot up beyond the country's water supply. France is just leveling off. Japan is in actual decline.
Let's wait to see which country, between China and India, can fare better over the next 60 years of economic development. India might not have enough water now but the raw material for solving any problem is found in problem solvers, not the ground.
India has more working-age people and is facing less of a population cliff than most countries. Whatever problems can be solved by workers, they will be in a better position to solve than anyone else. The US has immigration, India accomplishes the same thing but in one country instead of two continents.
China and India already had large populations compared to the western world, two centuries ago, and yet they were not doing better from an economic or military standpoint.
That really depends on if India is able to successfully educate and/or provide useful skills training, health care, nutrition, and safety i.e. polish its "demographic diamonds". As well as maintain a healthy, competitive economy, rule of law, and respect for property rights - all of which creates an environment in which they can work hard and prosper.
There are countries with large young populations that struggle to make a decent living due to a lack of investment or opportunities.[1][2]
Since India already has nuclear technology, they can use it to desalinate large amounts of ocean water. Nuclear energy is relatively easy to scale.
Producing good doctors, teachers, police officers, judges is much harder to scale. At the very least, India us known to nurture good engineers and doctors in serious numbers.
The effect of the one child policy was muted, since birthrates had already fallen in the years preceding the policy being enacted. And since the policy was relaxed, birthrates have not increased.
None of Korea, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan or Hong Kong had forced abortions and they also have declining, aging populations after long periods of rapidly rising living standards. China got to very much the same place they would have anyway but with much more human suffering and barbarity.
Not even remotely. One Child Policy prevented 300M births. There are still 600M in PRC trapped in lower-middle income who would have traditionally hedged via more children without family planning. Industrialization + reforms + global demand was not enough to drag everyone in PRC out of middle income - simply too many people. The difference is managing state of 1.4B people with 600M poor as result of family planning vs state of 1.7B with 900M poor without family planning in a geography/economy that relies heavily on imports. Family planning didn't crack down hard enough. A lot of current RC strategic burdens are result of still having too much people.
India is still at 59% agricultural employment. China is at 25% and dropping. The US is below 2%. Attempts to commoditize agriculture in India have caused riots by poor farmers.[1]
These are all much further developed nations than China 40 years ago. Sure China's birth rate would probably be about the same as it is today without the one child policy, but they would also probably have hundreds of millions more mouths to feed.
At the time it was enacted, the one-child’s policy’s goal was to conserve resources. It was also intended to prevent pollution and the spread of disease.
It was a direct response to overpopulation concerns (Club of Rome, Limits of Growth, etc).
Not only did it horribly failed, it did the exact opposite.
By encouraging industrialization, it resulted in more resource consumption, more pollution, and more disease.
It created an immense amount of wealth, and increased standards of living. But those weren’t the goals.
It was intended to avoid an apocalypse, not create a utopia.
If a time traveler went back in time and told Chinese leaders the effects of the their policy, they might very well outlaw contraception.
Edit: earlier family planning policies were focused on maternal health.
China's one-child policy was unnecessary. Fertility rates were already dropping for at least a decade before it went into effect:
> China’s controversial one-child policy continues to generate controversy and misinforma- tion. This essay challenges several common myths: that Mao Zedong consistently opposed efforts to limit China’s population growth; that consequently China’s population continued to grow rapidly until after his death; that the launching of the one-child policy in 1980 led to a dramatic decline in China’s fertility rate; and that the imposition of the policy prevented 400 million births. Evidence is presented contradicting each of these claims. Mao Zedong at times forcefully advocated strict limits on births and presided over a major switch to coer- cive birth planning after 1970; as much as three-quarters of the decline in fertility since 1970 occurred before the launching of the one-child policy; fertility levels fluctuated in China after the policy was launched; and most of the further decline in fertility since 1980 can be attributed to economic development, not coercive enforcement of birth limits.
> There are two leading candidates for explaining the pre-1980 drop in fertility. First, family planning existed before the one-child policy became a part of it. Pressure was placed on Chinese men and women about the “appropriate” age at which to marry, about the number of children to have and about how rapidly. A 1994 paper by researchers Judith Banister and Christina Wu Harbaugh argued that these measures alone were effective enough to explain the pre-1980 decline, before the one-child limit.[1]
> Second, China was growing during the 1970s. It is therefore possible that it experienced the same declining trend in fertility caused by growth that all currently developed countries experienced at some point. This is typically referred to as the “demographic” transition.
My country (Canada) is intent on making up for falling birth rates by increasing immigration. Sometimes I wonder if it is unethical for a rich country like Canada to effectively outsource (offload?) child rearing costs and to some extent education costs to the poorer countries that we are taking immigrants from.
What’s the solution though? If Canadians don’t want to have more children, you can’t force them and you probably can’t influence them much, so your other choice is to close down the immigration, which seems like it’s less ethical than the present condition.
I don't know! The cost of living and high cost of raising children here are popular scape goats for why Canadians are having less children. There's already baby bonuses, nationalized child care (in QC) but they do not have enough effect? One thing that isn't addressed is housing. Couples aren't going to want to have kids when all they can afford in a major city is a shoebox condo.
Yeah, I'm not from Canada so you obviously know a lot more about this than me, but essentially 100% of my Canadian friends and family cite this as their top or near top concern right now. Toronto in particular seems wild, though Vancouver may be worse.
We can say it's a win for Canada (gain people) and a win for the people coming (gain standard of living). But then, it's a loss for the place the people come from since that place loses the people that Canada gains.
Partial Sentence: Countries can increase their population through immigration without increasing domestic birth rates. Countries can decrease their domestic birth rates without decreasing immigration.
Global Sentence: Global Population = People born.
Once every country is pro immigration without being pro birth there will not be enough births to maintain the current population. The can is being kicked down the road.
The problem isn't the shrinking population though. It's the aging of the entire world. Someone has to take care of these people or they die alone with nobody to attend their funeral.
The truth is letting people die by the millions in a war tends to take care of problems like this.
Glad you brought up the ethics, because it is definitely interesting.
E.g. if Canada only searches out the best and brightest from struggling countries, that delays the success of those countries be decreasing the average capability level of improving conditions. This of course works in Canada’s favor, because it needs poor countries with conditions that facilitate child rearing.
You're not wrong, but the struggling countries may not have the infrastructure to fully take advantage of the skills and talents of the 'best and brightest'. By going to Canada (or wherever) they could be leveraged more effectively.
A lot of technology is making things easier in struggling countries, and if that technology can be made cheaper and commoditized it can improve more lives at more points of the income spectrum. The best and brightest may be helping to eliminate their own positions by making certain jobs easier to do in more places on the planet.
Right, on one hand if you wanted to maximize everyone's contribution, a 'top performer' moving to a rich country and being more productive there is ultimately a good thing. And like you said, if their work leads towards equalization between the two countries its even better.
On the other hand if the output of their productivity isn't flowing back to their home country, Canada/USA/UK/wherever are reaping the rewards tax/tariff-free and the increase in productivity isn't being redistributed.
You wouldn't let a foreign power extract oil or gold for "free" from your country, would you? I don't want to argue against personal liberties but at the same time it could be argued that those rights are being exploited by rich countries to the detriment of poorer countries.
Then there's the whole TFW (temporary foreign worker) program that looks a whole lot like serfdom where landowners in Canada buy labour at below market costs without even extending the notion of citizenship to the workers...
> In my opinion, our species population is big enough already, and this is the main driving factor of ongoing ecological problems.
That's the reason my wife and I decided to only have one kid. It's a statement. I don't care that future politicians shall have less future taxpayers. I don't believe eternal growth is the only model: I actually think it's unsustainable.
We can automate this with bidets. For a less literal interpretation, euthanasia (legal or otherwise) is how I'd like to avoid this stage of life entirely, it's now a legal possibility where I live if there's a terminal condition preventing me from wiping my own ass.
Many people get to skip this stage in life entirely though, either through good health or misfortune.
Life's better when you put on your Keynesian hat. Productivity went up faster than population in the rich counties, and we all loss leverage with our employers as there wasn't enough work to go around.
Now, if populations fall, there will be enough work again, and there will be a need to automate (maintaining the same standard of living is nice and uncreative) which will make more meaningful work for us programmers (the "productivity industry").
I agree, there is a limit to sustainability, even if technology is likely to improve I don't see why we should take the risk of pushing the limits.
If the population decline happen to be a seemingly unsurmountable problem 100 years down the road, we'll have more than enough time to react before risking extinction.
The core financial architecture of the world is pinned upon an assumption of monotonically-increasing global population on a 3-7 generation moving average. So far, history has not been kind to those civilizations exhibiting declining populations over sustained multi-generational spans. We're into generation one or two depending upon your definition of a generation, so we have some time before we see how this pans out.
I'm trying to find the data to establish whether we are engaging in the incipient factors of collapse as identified by the WEF [1]. To my untrained mind, demographics are a trailing indicator of those five factors and not a leading indicator, but I haven't rigorously analyzed this hypothesis.
From what I see from my limited perspective, I wouldn't be as cavalier as "we don't need a pyramid". As near as I can tell, this kind of demography at this global scale and technological strategy to try to King Knute hold back the demographic waters is completely uncharted territory for our species recorded history. I'd sure like those who study this at the intersection of demography and technology history to give some pointers to some of the analyses going on in the field. My Google-fu has so far failed to turn up solid leads on comprehensive data surveys.
> …civilization collapse has been highly overrated…
Yep, I wouldn’t even begin to advance a collapse hypothesis until a solid 7 generation trend has been established. However, the common assumption amongst contemporary policy makers is stagnation == collapse. So it is useful to observe for such data.
I don’t buy into that narrative, nor the “stagnation is fine” story, either. I simply don’t have sufficient data to evaluate what demographic stagnation over a few hundred years or even a millennia means at this time.
I will point out however: for many tens of millennia, our species teetered on a knife’s edge of viability, with an asymptotically curved growth rate that might as well have been stagnant. One hypothesis I’m exploring is demographic stagnation is a no-op in the presence of any species-wide median increase in cognitive density.
And we currently appear to globally be converging upon 1.7. We recorded instances of declines lasting “several centuries” [1], so I wouldn’t start to closely interpret trends until we hit at least 200 years of the same direction. As a species this won’t become material until it has manifested for about half a millennium maybe longer?
> So far, history has not been kind to those civilizations exhibiting declining populations over sustained multi-generational spans.
And yet Japan has some of the highest quality of life, a huge economy despite very few natural resources, some of the most innovative companies in the world and the longest lived people on the planet. It's been the poster-child for westerners as a failed economy with a lost decade and yet they keep on doing fine despite 30+ years of this narrative.
Try moving somewhere with rampant population growth and tell me it's great. The underlying general trend for the vast majority of people on Earth is to get the fuck away from other people and move to low density countries where the mineral and agricultural wealth is spread much thicker. GDP growth means nothing for the average person and most realise this.
Yes, I’m watching Japan with great interest. Wish I knew Japanese and Chinese cultures more intimately to be able to parse what we’re hearing as laypeople, but yay for specialists who do study that. Now if only I could find what those specialists wrote…
The apparent ability of our species to self-regulate its population growth when not disturbed by religion is something that I find to be an unexpected and pleasant surprise.
In the US it really seems to be. I don’t even understand how my American friends can have kids - daycare is so expensive it makes more sense for one parent to just stay home.
In Canada, children are already much more affordable (esp. in Quebec). In Europe even more so.
Once education, health care and day care are affordable (or free), children are not astronomically exoensive.
If you compare the total fertility rates in Canada and Europe (~1.5), even with their pro natalist policies, America still has a higher fertility rate (~1.7) with abysmal support for parents. Likely attributable to families that opt out of paid formal child care, and Medicaid picks up the slack for those below middle class means.
It’s important to note the the Institute for Family Studies is pro marriage, pro family, and pro natalist. They advocate for traditional family models and more kids versus less.
It's not a good situation because they all require fairly large sacrifices, but there are alternatives to paid childcare. I work with a developer who's taking care of a 1 and 3-year-old during working hours because the pandemic caused his and many other daycares in in our area to close and there's simply no availability right now anywhere else. He's absent a lot during the day, but he makes it to all the important meetings and spends a significant amount of time working in the evening after his wife comes home from her job, so overall puts in the same amount of work as before. He has no life whatsoever outside of working and taking care of his kids, but no outside care involved.
They are looking really hard for available daycare.
It is definitely a heavy burden for low income families. But I don't think it is as expensive as some people make it out to be. I just checked at the daycare we send our kid to part time. And it looks like all day, 5 days a week, including breakfast, lunch, and afternoon snack is $875/mo. And I live in an expensive California suburb.
Now, that will certainly get expensive if you have multiple kids under 5 all going at once. But it turned out to be a lot cheaper than I thought.
I think some of the parents complaining are the same ones that are "applying" to these fancy, artisanal day cares that will teach your toddler how to do algebra in French.
900$ is rent for many ppl. It’s half a full time minimum wage job.
In Quebec daycare is more like 150$/month, in Berlin 50$. That’s a huge difference.
Btw, parental leave is another item that makes kids cheaper in social democratic countries. Thats paid leave on one hand (e.g. 12 months), or unpaid leave allowing you to return to your job after an extended absence (e.g. 36 months).
I’d argue that in a nuclear family culture, kids are also expensive in indirect ways which are hard to account for. You sacrifice a lot of personal time and often health when you need to be there for kids virtually constantly, and while daycare is very expensive in some places ($1200 CAD/month for us) I feel like it’s one of the more manageable costs.
During the pandemic, having no friends or family around to help and needing to work full time jobs is a lot harder to manage than money.
I’m not complaining at all. I just spent a great day with my kids at the ocean and I love having them around. It’s still a daily task to juggle them, work, and my well being without much in the way of outside help. I’m fairly sure my life is shortening considerably as a result of the stress, so like I said, daycare seems pretty cheap in comparison.
Just my take on it - I know some people seem to manage it expertly, and maybe more people do than I realize.
In any case, that cost is still very high these days since both parents typically need to work. Money becomes easier to find than time.
> Warren’s central argument in the book is that this rise in household income was almost entirely driven by the increase in the number of two-earner families. And adding income by adding a second worker, she argues, has very different economic implications than rising pay for a single worker. In practice, the book says, the increasing ubiquity of two-earner households leaves families in more precarious financial circumstances with more brittle budgets that were more prone to tip over into insolvency if a problem cropped up.
> The “two-income trap,” as described by Warren, really consists of three partially separate phenomena that have arisen as families have come to rely on two working adults to make ends meet:
> The addition of a second earner means, in practice, a big increase in household fixed expenses for things like child care and commuting.
> Much of the money that American second earners bring in has been gobbled up, in practice, by zero-sum competition for educational opportunities expressed as either skyrocketed prices for houses in good school districts or escalating tuition at public universities.
> Last, while the addition of the second earner has not brought in much gain, it has created an increase in downside risk by eliminating an implicit insurance policy that families used to rely on.
Sounds almost like that if we (putting the hard hat on and hiding under the table) find a way to exclude one parent from workforce, things will get back to normal.
Long term, the fix is to push wages up so single earners can support a family and a stay at home partner. Short term, don’t have kids if you can’t afford expensive daycare and need both incomes to break even.
How would it work? Maybe I'm wrong, but once wage goes up there'll be prices growth for housing, daycare and other related things because more families is now able to afford it. It's simply the supply-demand equilibrium. So raising a single earner wage does not seem to do anything good, maybe without decreasing at the same time wage for the second earner (which is unacceptable for obvious reasons).
I wonder if a future advanced society will support women who want to have large families during their college/educational years.
Our family had 2 children in the dorms while I was getting my doctorate, and they were a joy for the floor (e.g. we didn’t require the emotional support animals they were sending to every floor). Also, having the communal environment was ideal for finding child care here and there.
A situation like this would help such women reach their (per Pew research) goal of ~3.
Imagine if you had free tuition if you had a child while in college? Raising children while young is also super helpful activity wise…
Well, that and health care (in the US). And housing. And those two don't go away until they're out of the house.
But yes, next to those three things most other expenses aren't that bad, or are avoidable with little down-side. Only other notable one's probably consumables (diapers, food, that sort of thing) which doesn't come close to any of the other three. Toys and clothes are practically free, if you're not picky. People get all kinds of expensive crap at baby showers, but very little of it's actually of much use, and most of the rest could have been had used for next to nothing.
Housing's technically an avoidable expense, but in most parts of the country one pays for school quality either directly (private school, in which case that expense replaces [and exceeds] most of the extra housing cost, if one wants it to) or by paying a premium for housing in a decent-or-better public school district (some of this may end up paid in extra transportation time & expense, as well—the accounting gets complicated, when a commute is part of the picture).
One with the means to avoid it could send one's kids to bad schools and save money, but not many people who can avoid bad schools take that option, for obvious reasons. And I assume in a few small, fortunate areas, or if one gets very lucky when house/apartment shopping, it's possible for this to end up not being that large an expense, but it's atypical.
I watch low-income multi-child parents pay for groceries and formula w/EBT and WIC vouchers on the daily. Children are subsidized by the government, it's definitely not cost-prohibitive.
Those programs don’t affect cost based decisions for people not eligible. WIC for instance can’t be had over 185% of poverty line, which is $49025 for a family of four. (That’s $185%, the poverty line is lower)
With a working mother, going 100% breast milk can be a very difficult task. And that's not even considering the scenarios where breast milk may not be an option.
Scenarios when breast milk is not an option do exist, but they're extremely rare.
Story time: when we were expecting our first one, me and my wife went to the hospital for their maternity facilities tour. Hospitals have these monthly, so that expecting mothers know what to expect (a pun?).
In the end of the tour the nurse asked who's gonna breastfeed and who's using formula. 7 out of 10 went with formula. FUCKIN 7 OUT OF 10.
All were first time mothers, so no, it's not that they knew something was wrong with their tits.
So unless you gonna tell me something is in the air of Alabama [1], no, I'm not buying your argument.
Based on the health differentials between formula/natural, I wonder if actuaries have calculated the effective cost burden of the different methods. E.g. are the health externalities of formula such that one should pay women not to use it?
It's surprisingly expensive! But I've heard it's also not particularly healthy even, being chock full of sugar/hfcs and allegedly plays a significant role in child obesity.
France birth rate per 1000: 11
France death rate per 1000: 9.4
However, the fertility rate (total births per woman) was 1.87 before the pandemic, which is well below the replacement level of 2.1.
Fertility rate is really the number that matters, as an aging population eventually hits the years where larger generations die off, and then the death rate is much higher than the birth rate, and the population drops dramatically.
Yes. I agree, birth rates have been lower in many places before the pandemic, probably in gradual decline over the last 60 years.
Perhaps I should've clarified that I fully expect that we'll be dealing with an ageing population in the future. The question here is whether or not the pandemic played any significant role. It's possible that it may have even slightly "helped" the problem of an ageing population.
Economic incentives are never going to really work well in improving fertility rates.
If you look at the data in the US, the biggest predictor of fertility is religion, with religious people in the US having 2-3x more kids than non religious people.
Most of the decline in birthrate within both western Europe and the US can be traced to increasing drops in religion.
Both education and religion play a role, but at least in the US religion has a stronger correlation.
The reason why the effect of education in the US is weaker (compared to third world countries) is probably because we require 12 years for all students.
It depends on what you mean by “education.” In the US, the high school graduation rate of women has exceeded that of men since at least 1940. The 20th century fertility rate peak happened in 1965, which also coincided with peak religiosity. During the first part of the 20th century, fertility rates, high school graduation rates, and church attendance all went up at the same time.
I think the biggest predictor will be women’s financial independence, as well as cheap or free effective birth controls.
I suspect the vast majority of women in the past were “coerced” into having the number of children they did, to put it in most charitable terms. If they had the same freedom and access to birth control that women had today, I doubt we would have seen all the 3+ children families we did.
Also note that women’s average goal for number of children is ~ 3. The differential between what they want and what they are getting may be contributing to the centuries long decline in life satisfaction among women.
> Most of the decline in birthrate within both western Europe and the US can be traced to increasing drops in religion.
I would debate this conclusion. The drop in people observing organised religions over the last 40 years also correlates with many other things.
Off the top of my head:
Increase in the cost of education
Increase in the cost of housing relative to income
Increased use of pesticides and artificial colours/flavours/sweeteners
Increased global connectivity
Greater average life expectancy
Lower taxation on the rich
And I’m sure there are many more. Determining which of these, if any, cause the lowered birth rate would take years of study.
I don’t think you can blame people for wanting pets over kids though, because pets are easy-mode in comparison. E.g. If you want to go on vacation, you can put them in a kennel somewhere.
Child mortality is the single measure for socioeconomic progress. Children are extremely fragile, requiring a lot of resources to protect/feed, and they're also extremely important to their parents and families https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_an...
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 177 ms ] threadDisclosure: my mum, Marion Burkimsher, is a demographic researcher specialising in this area. She's also studied fertility of migrants (the TFR statistics are skewed).
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Marion_Burkimsher/publi...
People who identify as secular have about 1 fewer child per couple when compared to the same local averages.
Before I get accused of sexism or whatever consider the actual economics of child rearing. 50 years ago assets weren't rapidly inflating and college degrees weren't required for a decent middle class living. The middle class has the best opportunity for raising children successfully (good education, good health, etc). The trade off? Someone has to stay home and tend to the house. It really doesn't matter who does, honestly, but historically this was the woman.
The feminists will spin women entering the workforce as empowering. Indeed, it is. But as a result birth rates decline rapidly. The shirking of that traditional role means child care must be offloaded somewhere. Several family members with children have told me that pre-K daycare at a decent, but not great, daycare runs anywhere between $800-$2000 a month. Absurdly expensive. Ignoring the actual _cost_ of having the child, taking care of the child before you can offload that responsibility onto the education system is prohibitive for all but the upper classes these days. These upper class people don't often have children. The alternative is to return to the old system but that requires one income to support a house. If you're not clearing six figures this might not even be possible in all but the most remote parts of the country.
This combined with rapid asset inflation means that in reality women entering the workforce wasn't for "empowerment" but rather necessity. With the price of goods going up every single year it's no longer feasible in most parts of the country to have one person stay home. The result? People have less kids.
I have no solution to this really. No amount of maternity/paternity leave, pay raises, etc will fix it. We can probably place the blame squarely on the big banks and the federal reserve. But, how do you bring wages back in line so that people can afford to have kids?
China's one-child policy was a success. They were able to put on the brakes during the period between health care getting good and standard of living going up, which is when population goes way up. India didn't do that, and their population shot up beyond the country's water supply. France is just leveling off. Japan is in actual decline.
China: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CHN/china/population
India: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/population
France: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/FRA/france/population
Japan: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/JPN/japan/population
This implies that the quantity of "problen solvers" is more important than quality.
There are countries with large young populations that struggle to make a decent living due to a lack of investment or opportunities.[1][2]
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Egypt#Age_dist...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_India
Producing good doctors, teachers, police officers, judges is much harder to scale. At the very least, India us known to nurture good engineers and doctors in serious numbers.
Given China is facing a demographics decline, not introducing that policy probably wouldn't have made much difference.
It was just immoral and one more reason for unnecessary female infanticide, which is responsible for the tremendous gender unbalance the country has.
None of Korea, Japan, Singapore, Taiwan or Hong Kong had forced abortions and they also have declining, aging populations after long periods of rapidly rising living standards. China got to very much the same place they would have anyway but with much more human suffering and barbarity.
Not even remotely. One Child Policy prevented 300M births. There are still 600M in PRC trapped in lower-middle income who would have traditionally hedged via more children without family planning. Industrialization + reforms + global demand was not enough to drag everyone in PRC out of middle income - simply too many people. The difference is managing state of 1.4B people with 600M poor as result of family planning vs state of 1.7B with 900M poor without family planning in a geography/economy that relies heavily on imports. Family planning didn't crack down hard enough. A lot of current RC strategic burdens are result of still having too much people.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932021_Indian_farme...
Tell that to lots of unmarried men with no prospects.
It was a direct response to overpopulation concerns (Club of Rome, Limits of Growth, etc).
Not only did it horribly failed, it did the exact opposite.
By encouraging industrialization, it resulted in more resource consumption, more pollution, and more disease.
It created an immense amount of wealth, and increased standards of living. But those weren’t the goals.
It was intended to avoid an apocalypse, not create a utopia.
If a time traveler went back in time and told Chinese leaders the effects of the their policy, they might very well outlaw contraception.
Edit: earlier family planning policies were focused on maternal health.
China's one-child policy was unnecessary. Fertility rates were already dropping for at least a decade before it went into effect:
> China’s controversial one-child policy continues to generate controversy and misinforma- tion. This essay challenges several common myths: that Mao Zedong consistently opposed efforts to limit China’s population growth; that consequently China’s population continued to grow rapidly until after his death; that the launching of the one-child policy in 1980 led to a dramatic decline in China’s fertility rate; and that the imposition of the policy prevented 400 million births. Evidence is presented contradicting each of these claims. Mao Zedong at times forcefully advocated strict limits on births and presided over a major switch to coer- cive birth planning after 1970; as much as three-quarters of the decline in fertility since 1970 occurred before the launching of the one-child policy; fertility levels fluctuated in China after the policy was launched; and most of the further decline in fertility since 1980 can be attributed to economic development, not coercive enforcement of birth limits.
* https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31431804/
* PDF: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/martinwhyte/files/challeng...
> There are two leading candidates for explaining the pre-1980 drop in fertility. First, family planning existed before the one-child policy became a part of it. Pressure was placed on Chinese men and women about the “appropriate” age at which to marry, about the number of children to have and about how rapidly. A 1994 paper by researchers Judith Banister and Christina Wu Harbaugh argued that these measures alone were effective enough to explain the pre-1980 decline, before the one-child limit.[1]
> Second, China was growing during the 1970s. It is therefore possible that it experienced the same declining trend in fertility caused by growth that all currently developed countries experienced at some point. This is typically referred to as the “demographic” transition.
* https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2016/october/china...
Propagandist on a pension?
Yeah, I'm not from Canada so you obviously know a lot more about this than me, but essentially 100% of my Canadian friends and family cite this as their top or near top concern right now. Toronto in particular seems wild, though Vancouver may be worse.
Moving to Canada improves their standard of living.
Global Sentence: Global Population = People born.
Once every country is pro immigration without being pro birth there will not be enough births to maintain the current population. The can is being kicked down the road.
The problem isn't the shrinking population though. It's the aging of the entire world. Someone has to take care of these people or they die alone with nobody to attend their funeral.
The truth is letting people die by the millions in a war tends to take care of problems like this.
E.g. if Canada only searches out the best and brightest from struggling countries, that delays the success of those countries be decreasing the average capability level of improving conditions. This of course works in Canada’s favor, because it needs poor countries with conditions that facilitate child rearing.
A lot of technology is making things easier in struggling countries, and if that technology can be made cheaper and commoditized it can improve more lives at more points of the income spectrum. The best and brightest may be helping to eliminate their own positions by making certain jobs easier to do in more places on the planet.
On the other hand if the output of their productivity isn't flowing back to their home country, Canada/USA/UK/wherever are reaping the rewards tax/tariff-free and the increase in productivity isn't being redistributed.
You wouldn't let a foreign power extract oil or gold for "free" from your country, would you? I don't want to argue against personal liberties but at the same time it could be argued that those rights are being exploited by rich countries to the detriment of poorer countries.
Then there's the whole TFW (temporary foreign worker) program that looks a whole lot like serfdom where landowners in Canada buy labour at below market costs without even extending the notion of citizenship to the workers...
I even suspect that the pro-family policies we can observe in the religions that were created afterwards were a tentative to fix this problem.
In my opinion, our species population is big enough already, and this is the main driving factor of ongoing ecological problems.
I think we can adapt to a differently shaped age structure, we don't need a pyramid.
That's the reason my wife and I decided to only have one kid. It's a statement. I don't care that future politicians shall have less future taxpayers. I don't believe eternal growth is the only model: I actually think it's unsustainable.
Many people get to skip this stage in life entirely though, either through good health or misfortune.
Now, if populations fall, there will be enough work again, and there will be a need to automate (maintaining the same standard of living is nice and uncreative) which will make more meaningful work for us programmers (the "productivity industry").
If the population decline happen to be a seemingly unsurmountable problem 100 years down the road, we'll have more than enough time to react before risking extinction.
The core financial architecture of the world is pinned upon an assumption of monotonically-increasing global population on a 3-7 generation moving average. So far, history has not been kind to those civilizations exhibiting declining populations over sustained multi-generational spans. We're into generation one or two depending upon your definition of a generation, so we have some time before we see how this pans out.
I'm trying to find the data to establish whether we are engaging in the incipient factors of collapse as identified by the WEF [1]. To my untrained mind, demographics are a trailing indicator of those five factors and not a leading indicator, but I haven't rigorously analyzed this hypothesis.
From what I see from my limited perspective, I wouldn't be as cavalier as "we don't need a pyramid". As near as I can tell, this kind of demography at this global scale and technological strategy to try to King Knute hold back the demographic waters is completely uncharted territory for our species recorded history. I'd sure like those who study this at the intersection of demography and technology history to give some pointers to some of the analyses going on in the field. My Google-fu has so far failed to turn up solid leads on comprehensive data surveys.
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/03/why-do-civilizations-...
Yep, I wouldn’t even begin to advance a collapse hypothesis until a solid 7 generation trend has been established. However, the common assumption amongst contemporary policy makers is stagnation == collapse. So it is useful to observe for such data.
I don’t buy into that narrative, nor the “stagnation is fine” story, either. I simply don’t have sufficient data to evaluate what demographic stagnation over a few hundred years or even a millennia means at this time.
I will point out however: for many tens of millennia, our species teetered on a knife’s edge of viability, with an asymptotically curved growth rate that might as well have been stagnant. One hypothesis I’m exploring is demographic stagnation is a no-op in the presence of any species-wide median increase in cognitive density.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_decline
And yet Japan has some of the highest quality of life, a huge economy despite very few natural resources, some of the most innovative companies in the world and the longest lived people on the planet. It's been the poster-child for westerners as a failed economy with a lost decade and yet they keep on doing fine despite 30+ years of this narrative.
Try moving somewhere with rampant population growth and tell me it's great. The underlying general trend for the vast majority of people on Earth is to get the fuck away from other people and move to low density countries where the mineral and agricultural wealth is spread much thicker. GDP growth means nothing for the average person and most realise this.
In Canada, children are already much more affordable (esp. in Quebec). In Europe even more so.
Once education, health care and day care are affordable (or free), children are not astronomically exoensive.
With regards to immigrants, children of immigrants rapidly align to fertility rates in their host country (at least in the US) [2].
[1] https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s...
[2] https://cis.org/Report/Immigrant-and-NativeBorn-Fertility-20...
https://ifstudies.org/about/our-mission
They are looking really hard for available daycare.
Now, that will certainly get expensive if you have multiple kids under 5 all going at once. But it turned out to be a lot cheaper than I thought.
I think some of the parents complaining are the same ones that are "applying" to these fancy, artisanal day cares that will teach your toddler how to do algebra in French.
In Quebec daycare is more like 150$/month, in Berlin 50$. That’s a huge difference.
Btw, parental leave is another item that makes kids cheaper in social democratic countries. Thats paid leave on one hand (e.g. 12 months), or unpaid leave allowing you to return to your job after an extended absence (e.g. 36 months).
I'm afraid there's no ready solution to that - unless we're willing to get back to the idea of extended family and village to raise a kid.
PS. I have three kids, I know what I'm talking about.
During the pandemic, having no friends or family around to help and needing to work full time jobs is a lot harder to manage than money.
I’m not complaining at all. I just spent a great day with my kids at the ocean and I love having them around. It’s still a daily task to juggle them, work, and my well being without much in the way of outside help. I’m fairly sure my life is shortening considerably as a result of the stress, so like I said, daycare seems pretty cheap in comparison.
Just my take on it - I know some people seem to manage it expertly, and maybe more people do than I realize.
In any case, that cost is still very high these days since both parents typically need to work. Money becomes easier to find than time.
I think that's the key. I'm still trying to figure out for myself if it has something to do with "we need more women in workforce"
> Warren’s central argument in the book is that this rise in household income was almost entirely driven by the increase in the number of two-earner families. And adding income by adding a second worker, she argues, has very different economic implications than rising pay for a single worker. In practice, the book says, the increasing ubiquity of two-earner households leaves families in more precarious financial circumstances with more brittle budgets that were more prone to tip over into insolvency if a problem cropped up.
> The “two-income trap,” as described by Warren, really consists of three partially separate phenomena that have arisen as families have come to rely on two working adults to make ends meet:
> The addition of a second earner means, in practice, a big increase in household fixed expenses for things like child care and commuting.
> Much of the money that American second earners bring in has been gobbled up, in practice, by zero-sum competition for educational opportunities expressed as either skyrocketed prices for houses in good school districts or escalating tuition at public universities.
> Last, while the addition of the second earner has not brought in much gain, it has created an increase in downside risk by eliminating an implicit insurance policy that families used to rely on.
I wonder if a future advanced society will support women who want to have large families during their college/educational years.
Our family had 2 children in the dorms while I was getting my doctorate, and they were a joy for the floor (e.g. we didn’t require the emotional support animals they were sending to every floor). Also, having the communal environment was ideal for finding child care here and there.
A situation like this would help such women reach their (per Pew research) goal of ~3.
Imagine if you had free tuition if you had a child while in college? Raising children while young is also super helpful activity wise…
If it was just feminism we should have seen a 20 hour work week to compensate.
But yes, next to those three things most other expenses aren't that bad, or are avoidable with little down-side. Only other notable one's probably consumables (diapers, food, that sort of thing) which doesn't come close to any of the other three. Toys and clothes are practically free, if you're not picky. People get all kinds of expensive crap at baby showers, but very little of it's actually of much use, and most of the rest could have been had used for next to nothing.
Housing - we lived with the kids in a 2-bedroom for three years. One room for kids, one for us. Not super pleasant, but overall acceptable.
One with the means to avoid it could send one's kids to bad schools and save money, but not many people who can avoid bad schools take that option, for obvious reasons. And I assume in a few small, fortunate areas, or if one gets very lucky when house/apartment shopping, it's possible for this to end up not being that large an expense, but it's atypical.
I am not talking about money, but time, opportunity cost.
Rapid population growth has been achieved by forced dedication of half of the population to this task, this is not free.
These parents definitely have too much money to spend.
Story time: when we were expecting our first one, me and my wife went to the hospital for their maternity facilities tour. Hospitals have these monthly, so that expecting mothers know what to expect (a pun?).
In the end of the tour the nurse asked who's gonna breastfeed and who's using formula. 7 out of 10 went with formula. FUCKIN 7 OUT OF 10. All were first time mothers, so no, it's not that they knew something was wrong with their tits.
So unless you gonna tell me something is in the air of Alabama [1], no, I'm not buying your argument.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/breastfeeding/data/facts.html
Beyond that, I'm from a dark blue state, so we may have different experiences to draw on
Has the birth rate dropped below the death rate? If not, then the naive approach to me, would be that this all works out in the wash.
More specifically, does the years of life "lost" due to premature death outweigh the years of life "lost" due to declining birth rates?
We won't really know until:
a) premature deaths return to pre-pandemic levels
b) birth rates recover to pre-pandemic levels
However, the fertility rate (total births per woman) was 1.87 before the pandemic, which is well below the replacement level of 2.1.
Fertility rate is really the number that matters, as an aging population eventually hits the years where larger generations die off, and then the death rate is much higher than the birth rate, and the population drops dramatically.
Perhaps I should've clarified that I fully expect that we'll be dealing with an ageing population in the future. The question here is whether or not the pandemic played any significant role. It's possible that it may have even slightly "helped" the problem of an ageing population.
If you look at the data in the US, the biggest predictor of fertility is religion, with religious people in the US having 2-3x more kids than non religious people.
Most of the decline in birthrate within both western Europe and the US can be traced to increasing drops in religion.
The reason why the effect of education in the US is weaker (compared to third world countries) is probably because we require 12 years for all students.
I suspect the vast majority of women in the past were “coerced” into having the number of children they did, to put it in most charitable terms. If they had the same freedom and access to birth control that women had today, I doubt we would have seen all the 3+ children families we did.
It seems higher incomes can increase fertility: https://ifstudies.org/blog/how-income-affects-fertility
Also note that women’s subjective well being has only decreased over the last century: https://ifstudies.org/blog/how-income-affects-fertility
Also note that women’s average goal for number of children is ~ 3. The differential between what they want and what they are getting may be contributing to the centuries long decline in life satisfaction among women.
I would debate this conclusion. The drop in people observing organised religions over the last 40 years also correlates with many other things.
Off the top of my head: Increase in the cost of education Increase in the cost of housing relative to income Increased use of pesticides and artificial colours/flavours/sweeteners Increased global connectivity Greater average life expectancy Lower taxation on the rich
And I’m sure there are many more. Determining which of these, if any, cause the lowered birth rate would take years of study.
People will talk all day about adopting a pet, but adopting a child is off the table.
There are already millions of children on this planet that desperately need parents, your biological desire to procreate shouldn't supersede that.
I don’t think you can blame people for wanting pets over kids though, because pets are easy-mode in comparison. E.g. If you want to go on vacation, you can put them in a kennel somewhere.