This has a religious angle. Some religions believe in having as many babies as possible. Other religions are seeing the effect and realizing their mistake.
What's the strong case against population dwindling other than supporting aging population? Given the AI armageddon, it just makes sense to reduce the population. If there's less population, we need less production and less workers. Of course, countries have to deal with oldest population for a brief period of time.
I don’t know what the right number is, but 8+ Billion doesn’t seem sustainable. It might be, if humans respected the environment, are nicer to each other etc. Since that doesn’t seem to be happening anytime soon, the next best option might be to just have less humans, which hopefully might lead to less pollution, less exploitation of the environment etc
If you believe extraordinary individuals are a product of nature and we don't know how to nurture them into existence then it makes sense. Whatever confluence of events triggers an Einstein has the greatest number of chances to occur.
Either way it seems dumb to structure our entire economy and future around elder care. I guess that is what you get when people older than 60 have 65% of the wealth and people under 40 have 7%.
Yeah, a large portion of this is caused by better access to birth control, anyway. This is a good signal of a society becoming healthier and wealthier and should be celebrated.
Given the constant productivity improvements, elder care is not something that can only be solved by having constantly growing populations.
Unless they roll-back women's rights and improvements in child mortality, societies will need to radically overhaul their entire relationship to supporting parenthood in order to reverse this trend. The economic costs of having children at a replacement rate are simply too high.
We need universal childcare services, provided by the state and available to all, and other childcare-enabling reforms like automatic right to work from home and other flexible working arrangements for those with children.
These won't be popular with everyone, but you'll won't solve the demographic crisis without them.
> societies will need to radically overhaul their entire relationship to supporting parenthood in order to reverse this trend.
Absolutely impossible to do in the modern age, not just in India.
Everyone is set in their lifestyle.
This reason and cost of living crisis + AI + pollution + lack of any support whatsoever is causing this baby bust but govt thinks it van give a one time $ 300 money grant for the 3rd kid! It takes about $ 1.5k to get delivery done in a good hospital in the cities. Checkup and pre delivery costs are above $ 500 at the least over 8 months.
> But demographers have long shown that what really counts is girls’ education.
That makes sense. I know that having less people is not a good thing, but I was brought up with the "impending population crisis" thing drilled into my head, so it's difficult for me to be alarmed.
I'm also all for getting women into parity with men. I know that there are a lot of men that will say that this is a bad thing, but I was raised amongst a lot of extremely capable women.
I feel that we need to support parents, if we want more kids. Right now, in the US, having kids is economically devastating, and there's almost no support from the government. I'll bet India is worse (but I could be wrong).
I feel that nature has controls built in. We see it all the time, in other species. I feel that if we drop too far down, the switch will be turned back on again.
Maybe economic struggle is not letting people take such a delicate and demanding responsibility. It's getting very difficult everywhere. It's not that just cost of living or housing affordability is a Western problem.
> One study showed how the arrival of cable television in Indian villages in the 2000s led to a moderate fall in fertility. Soap operas depicting urban, middle-class women with small families may have changed norms (though some wonder whether people were just watching TV rather than having sex).
The latter part seems like the most meaningful cause world wide. Sex is a boredom activity and we just aren't bored in the slightest, ever. I think most married people know that long power outages are the most romantic thing that can happen (though, less now with cell phones).
> But as India and others hurtle through their demographic transition, the consequences will not be pain-free.
Pain for whom? The people profiting from cheap labor probably.
Why is such a massive sin to scale down? To slow down a bit, I don't think the whole world is about to collapse, but even if it was, I rather that than turning it all into the hellscapes we see on some of the most overpopulated places in the world just so a mere 1% of the population can indulge.
Other Global South countries show the same trend. At roughly 1.6, Brazil is now in a similar range to countries such as the United States (slightly below replacement).
>But when Indian school textbooks are reprinted this summer, they will carry a very different message. They will warn not of the dangers of having too many babies, but of the risks of having too few.
The Chinese have discovered that it is easy to crank down the fertility rate, but impossible to raise it again when you want to do that. And they have brutal totalitarianism on their side.
Every single population growth and peak chart for the last 10 years (and maybe 20) has been wrong with growth slowing much faster than expected. It's basically the opposite of all the solar power growth predictions. I predict this article is wrong too and the growth continues to fall. Just wait until no kids becomes the norm for couples in their 30s in India like it is here in the US.
This has happened to every single society [*] as it industrializes [0], and offering extensive support and incentives to parents (e.g. as has been tried in Scandinavian countries) does very little to reverse this trend [1, 2].
My hypothesis is that as societies industrialize, they afford their population more and more activities that are simply more fun and rewarding than having children. So many people I know put off having children (or curtailed the number they had) because they were reluctant to give up the activities only available in a childfree/one-and-done life. Ultimately, we are hedonistic creatures, and having kids is antithetical to the myriad hedonic pursuits available in wealthy, industrialized societies.
[*] Israel is the lone exception, due to its Orthodox Jewish population.
I’m going to try to win the award for the most controversial theory on this thread.
The real reason we are having population shrinkage is because evolution did a crappy job. It didn’t tune us to want to have kids, it tuned us to want to have sex, and it linked to sex to reproduction.
As we got smarter, and eventually develop contraception, we are essentially reward hacking evolution’s crude hack.
What’s going to happen over the next few decades is that a few variants here and there are going to spread throughout the population that actually lead to more kids, not just through desire for sex. It will be a population crash, followed by a recovery.
And this is terrific news for the future. A nation of our size just cannot afford to have more than ~400 million people without severe issues causing extremely poor quality of life. We are already bursting at the seams at 1.5 billion and will be suffering deeply when it reaches 1.8 billion. (Also, the current adult population is higher than the official figures)
We have severe water scarcity, severe deforestation, severe pollution - the list of problems is endless. Some of these problems are being covered up by our current government by stupid changes in measure - agriculture is now treated as "forestation".
The massive change is the transformation of women's role in society and education.
Essentially for pregnancies at 25 years old or later there are no number changes. Women of that age have as many kids as they ever had.
But, pregnancies for very young women and teenagers has virtually disappeared. As women start having children much later, they simply have much less.
As a millennial in southern Europe, the average age of our mothers in early 20s.
35 years later, the average age of first time mothers in my group is 33+.
The article you're commenting points it out as well:
> But demographers have long shown that what really counts is girls’ education. Schooling means that girls gain more autonomy and a greater say in life’s decisions.
Even with extensive support and subsidies from the state, having children is an economic loss for the individual in today's society. Back in agricultural society, having children was an economic gain, because you could put them to do work for you.
Now if the state wants children it would need to pay both for the missed fun times and also the missed career opportunities that come from having children.
> My hypothesis is that as societies industrialize, they afford their population more and more activities that are simply more fun and rewarding than having children.
Or, as societies industrialize, life becomes more complex, time-consuming, and tiring than the simpler ways of life people were used to and able to manage...
I’d argue that most of those support and incentives are barely enough in modern societies.
In modern societies families are atomic. Parents don’t get support from grandparents very often and sometimes they don’t get any support. There is no community support either, or very very little unless you happen to belong in some ethnics. On the other hand, people are more aware these days and regulations are tougher, so you can’t do a lot of things back in the day, like my parents used to leave 4 years old me to my neighbours for work.
So I’d argue that our society is actually more and more difficult for parents to give birth to babies, especially middle class parents because they don’t even enjoy much of financial support anyway — those goes to poorer families.
And this becomes clearer if you look at wealth distribution. Nowadays, in my city, which is considered as the most affordable metropolitan in Canada, it is very difficult for working people to buy properties with median salaries — and rent has gone up too so you can’t say “just rent it”.
All in all, I don’t know about Northern EU but it is harder and harder for working parents in Canada to have babies.
I think this is close but misses the only thing that really matters: birth control makes it a choice. We are just 3 generations into being able to decide whether or not sex means kids. And making that positive choice takes a lot of energy.
"Hedonism" seems like an interesting term for a straightforward personal choice.
I don't have a specific reference, but both affluence and a decline of childbirth seem to be related to improving the education and economic agency of women. Society can cope.
Infinite economic growth depends on women having babies above replacement. Therefore, the economic value of a woman having three babies is virtually unlimited, and the economic destruction of a woman having less is also unlimited (when projecting far enough into the future).
It really makes you wonder if some actors would feel a need to exercise control over this scarce and limited resource...
BTW, the fertility rate is _increasing_ now (granted from an existing base of 1.2TFR) in the richer states of india, due to better availability of IVF and in general healthcare.
The combination of lack of prosperity as well as the effect of nuclearisation that I mentioned above was what made it go weirdly low. It's not that low if you exclude unintentionally non-reproducing couples. I'm not saying its replacement rate, but its also not 1.2.
Many poorer states of india will face the same nuclearisation of the family unit, but crucially when healthcare is more generally available, so you won't see those parts go as low as 1.2. Again, replacement rate is almost impossible in a nuclear family unit, unless you manage to substitute something else that contributes the benefits, i.e reinvent joint families from first principles (and maybe it will be better!)
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[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 93.5 ms ] threadhttps://ourworldindata.org/population-simulation-tool?demogr...
That’ll be less painful if there are fewer people. Lower populations should lead to lower emissions growth too.
Either way it seems dumb to structure our entire economy and future around elder care. I guess that is what you get when people older than 60 have 65% of the wealth and people under 40 have 7%.
Given the constant productivity improvements, elder care is not something that can only be solved by having constantly growing populations.
We need universal childcare services, provided by the state and available to all, and other childcare-enabling reforms like automatic right to work from home and other flexible working arrangements for those with children.
These won't be popular with everyone, but you'll won't solve the demographic crisis without them.
Absolutely impossible to do in the modern age, not just in India.
Everyone is set in their lifestyle.
This reason and cost of living crisis + AI + pollution + lack of any support whatsoever is causing this baby bust but govt thinks it van give a one time $ 300 money grant for the 3rd kid! It takes about $ 1.5k to get delivery done in a good hospital in the cities. Checkup and pre delivery costs are above $ 500 at the least over 8 months.
Interesting, guess our cavemen ancestors were much smarter and more capable than us since that seemed easy for them.
Hint: Imagine cutting defense budget and foreign meddling in favor of supporting families at home. Genius idea right?
That makes sense. I know that having less people is not a good thing, but I was brought up with the "impending population crisis" thing drilled into my head, so it's difficult for me to be alarmed.
I'm also all for getting women into parity with men. I know that there are a lot of men that will say that this is a bad thing, but I was raised amongst a lot of extremely capable women.
I feel that we need to support parents, if we want more kids. Right now, in the US, having kids is economically devastating, and there's almost no support from the government. I'll bet India is worse (but I could be wrong).
I feel that nature has controls built in. We see it all the time, in other species. I feel that if we drop too far down, the switch will be turned back on again.
[EDITED TO REMOVE TRIGGER WORDS]
The latter part seems like the most meaningful cause world wide. Sex is a boredom activity and we just aren't bored in the slightest, ever. I think most married people know that long power outages are the most romantic thing that can happen (though, less now with cell phones).
Pain for whom? The people profiting from cheap labor probably.
Why is such a massive sin to scale down? To slow down a bit, I don't think the whole world is about to collapse, but even if it was, I rather that than turning it all into the hellscapes we see on some of the most overpopulated places in the world just so a mere 1% of the population can indulge.
The Chinese have discovered that it is easy to crank down the fertility rate, but impossible to raise it again when you want to do that. And they have brutal totalitarianism on their side.
Kids are really expensive, and if you want people to willingly have them outside of accidents, you're going to need to pay them a lot of money.
My hypothesis is that as societies industrialize, they afford their population more and more activities that are simply more fun and rewarding than having children. So many people I know put off having children (or curtailed the number they had) because they were reluctant to give up the activities only available in a childfree/one-and-done life. Ultimately, we are hedonistic creatures, and having kids is antithetical to the myriad hedonic pursuits available in wealthy, industrialized societies.
[*] Israel is the lone exception, due to its Orthodox Jewish population.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/global-decline-fertility-rate
[1] https://pub.nordregio.org/r-2024-13-state-of-the-nordic-regi...
[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10049131/
The real reason we are having population shrinkage is because evolution did a crappy job. It didn’t tune us to want to have kids, it tuned us to want to have sex, and it linked to sex to reproduction.
As we got smarter, and eventually develop contraception, we are essentially reward hacking evolution’s crude hack.
What’s going to happen over the next few decades is that a few variants here and there are going to spread throughout the population that actually lead to more kids, not just through desire for sex. It will be a population crash, followed by a recovery.
Midsize sedan/SUV aren’t great at more than 2 parents + 2 kids (especially with car seats!)
Vacations are also more expensive since a lot of hotel rooms don’t allow more than 2 adults + 2 kids.
More is also harder on the parents !
and its use of United States tax dollars to fund social services that make it possible to raise their broods that American citizens simply don't get.
We have severe water scarcity, severe deforestation, severe pollution - the list of problems is endless. Some of these problems are being covered up by our current government by stupid changes in measure - agriculture is now treated as "forestation".
Most studies show that support and incentives is borderline money thrown away if the incentive is to have more kids.
You are giving money to people that would've had kids anyway.
Essentially for pregnancies at 25 years old or later there are no number changes. Women of that age have as many kids as they ever had.
But, pregnancies for very young women and teenagers has virtually disappeared. As women start having children much later, they simply have much less.
As a millennial in southern Europe, the average age of our mothers in early 20s.
35 years later, the average age of first time mothers in my group is 33+.
The article you're commenting points it out as well:
> But demographers have long shown that what really counts is girls’ education. Schooling means that girls gain more autonomy and a greater say in life’s decisions.
Now if the state wants children it would need to pay both for the missed fun times and also the missed career opportunities that come from having children.
> As indicated by the results: (1) Family welfare policies notably boost fertility, and the boosting effect is long-lasting
There appears to be a concerned effort to claim that incentivising raising children doesn't work.
Clearly the people with (control of) the money don't feel like spending it on this.
Or, as societies industrialize, life becomes more complex, time-consuming, and tiring than the simpler ways of life people were used to and able to manage...
In modern societies families are atomic. Parents don’t get support from grandparents very often and sometimes they don’t get any support. There is no community support either, or very very little unless you happen to belong in some ethnics. On the other hand, people are more aware these days and regulations are tougher, so you can’t do a lot of things back in the day, like my parents used to leave 4 years old me to my neighbours for work.
So I’d argue that our society is actually more and more difficult for parents to give birth to babies, especially middle class parents because they don’t even enjoy much of financial support anyway — those goes to poorer families.
And this becomes clearer if you look at wealth distribution. Nowadays, in my city, which is considered as the most affordable metropolitan in Canada, it is very difficult for working people to buy properties with median salaries — and rent has gone up too so you can’t say “just rent it”.
All in all, I don’t know about Northern EU but it is harder and harder for working parents in Canada to have babies.
We're having kids in our 40s when our parents started in their 20s. We're naturally less able to have as many because menopause kicks in.
There are no easy answers here. Younger pregnancy limits education and careers.
I don't have a specific reference, but both affluence and a decline of childbirth seem to be related to improving the education and economic agency of women. Society can cope.
It really makes you wonder if some actors would feel a need to exercise control over this scarce and limited resource...
BTW, the fertility rate is _increasing_ now (granted from an existing base of 1.2TFR) in the richer states of india, due to better availability of IVF and in general healthcare.
The combination of lack of prosperity as well as the effect of nuclearisation that I mentioned above was what made it go weirdly low. It's not that low if you exclude unintentionally non-reproducing couples. I'm not saying its replacement rate, but its also not 1.2.
Many poorer states of india will face the same nuclearisation of the family unit, but crucially when healthcare is more generally available, so you won't see those parts go as low as 1.2. Again, replacement rate is almost impossible in a nuclear family unit, unless you manage to substitute something else that contributes the benefits, i.e reinvent joint families from first principles (and maybe it will be better!)