

Lower fertility is changing the world for the better - l0stman
http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14743589

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bh23ha
Is it too early to start a media panic about the shrinking humanity?

In all seriousness, I've always looked at birth control and education and
affluence as a virus which drastically reduces fertility. But obviously some
people, besides their sex drive, have another not so common drive. Despite
money, education and condoms they really, really want, not sex, but kids. And
over time this trait will become more widespread in the population. We better
have colonized space by then.

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mseebach
What makes you think that this not so common (as you yourself call it) drive
will become more widespread? The graph in the article suggest a very strong
correlation between wealth and low fertility.

Another trait is that of children-less lifestyles (sexual, medical or
otherwise). If we're to keep up with the replacement-rate, that obviously
means that someone needs to have more kids.

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xiaoma
>What makes you think that this not so common (as you yourself call it) drive
will become more widespread? The graph in the article suggest a very strong
correlation between wealth and low fertility.

Evolution.

Right now, most people aren't that well adapted (in a Darwinian sense) to life
in an affluent society. There's no reason to assume this will always be the
case. The current speed of human evolution is over 100 times what it was in
prehistoric times. Extreme environmental changes invariably lead to
evolutionary changes.

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mseebach
> Evolution

What biological advantage does a large family have over a small family in an
affluent society?

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jerf
"What biological advantage does a large family have over a small family in an
affluent society?"

The _definition_ of biological advantage is having a large number of offspring
rather than a small one! (Simplifying a bit; said offspring should also
reproduce, recursively, but it's a decent approximation to just consider
offspring.) What kind of weird question is that?

Also, to bundle a reply to another of your concerns, of course you don't
observe changes yet. If you have one population averaging 3 children per
couple and another of equal size averaging 1, in the first generation it may
not look like that big a deal, but by the fourth or fifth generation the
1-child-per-couple group has been effectively eliminated as a significant part
of the population. Surprisingly small differences magnify surprisingly rapidly
across generations; evolutionists have observed species going extinct because
of far smaller differences than that. I just used large numbers to make the
point more understandable, it applies equally to 2.1 children vs 2.15, it just
takes a few more generations in that case... and not even _all_ that many.

~~~
mseebach
> The definition of biological advantage is having a large number of offspring
> rather than a small one! (Simplifying a bit; said offspring should also
> reproduce, recursively, but it's a decent approximation to just consider
> offspring.) What kind of weird question is that?

In animals, yes. Humans, especially in affluent societies have more
sophisticated goals. Obviously, reproduction is important, but we will also
pursue irrational goals, such as self-realization, quality of life, love,
ethics and so on. The idea that we consider it a virtue to raise a child with
Asbergers syndrome or other genetic defects is evidence to that, and in an
evolutionary context decidedly self-destructive. In fact, I feel queasy even
writing this, so strong is our opposition to applying our intelligence to
raising the quality of our gene pool = eugenics.

My point is, although ill-articulated in a biological context, how does having
a large family further any of the goals that a affluent individual in a
wealthy society has? I'm not talking material wealth, even though that applies
as well, but also the "soft" goals of contributing great ideas, science, arts,
all the jazz, to the greater good of humanity. My point is; is a family with
10 kids more likely to foster a Miles Davis, Ernest Hemingway, Obama, Reagan,
whatever floats your boat, than a family with one or two?

~~~
jerf
And my point is that your point doesn't matter. Evolution doesn't care about
your "goals". If _any_ chunk of a population reproduces more than others,
consistently, it will eventually form the majority, in a fairly short period
of time.

You seem to be trying to prevent this from being true by sheer volume of
analysis. Evolution doesn't care about your analysis, either. It doesn't
matter _why_ some people have more children than others in an affluent
society. It doesn't even have to be an integer number of children like "3" vs.
"2", it only has to be a trend.

If you want to have a separate debate about how children impact your quality
of life, than say so and have at it. It is from my reading of your other
messages that I get the sense that you are almost willfully denying what other
people are saying. Perhaps that is not true. But step one is to agree that in
the end, it simply doesn't matter what the reasons are, only the actions and
their results.

~~~
mseebach
Yes, I was wrong to get this tangled up with evolution. Obviously, if it's a
hereditary trait, it will spread and become prevalent.

What I was trying to argue, clouded by my lack of understanding of the exact
biological meaning of the word trait (i.e. something hereditary rather than a
preference a person might have), was that there seems to be little evidence,
which is backed by the statistics in the article, that a preference towards
many children is hereditary.

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ramidarigaz
This is pure speculation, and I have no facts to back this up, but I suspect
that if humanity begins to shrink, it will become an age of robotics. I think
the biggest boost to robotics will happen when the number of people available
for hard/simple labor drops off.

But that's just speculation.

~~~
bh23ha
I think it's more then speculation. Japan very anti immigrant has relied on
much more robotics. The rest of the industrialized world, especially the US,
prefers immigration.

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radu_floricica
Japan does something else which is very interesting and less known: starts
hiring at _very_ low ages. My Japanese teacher told me her first job interview
was in secondary school, and it is pretty standard for somebody her age.

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patrickgzill
There is a lot wrong with this article, but I don't have the patience to go
through all of the unstated assumptions; so I will just use one point as an
example:

"And everywhere, it is changing traditional family life by enabling women to
work and children to be educated."

How is it that women working outside the home is better than women working
inside the home? There is an unstated assumption that working outside is
better; an assertion unsupported by any data.

Concerning children's education, one need only point to US literacy rates from
1850 to the present to see that the two (women working, children educated) are
not connected.

As a secondary point I will point out that demographics are not mentioned in
this article, apparently the author has never viewed the movie "Idiocracy" ...

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kungfooey
Obviously, the movie "Idiocracy" is a source of scholarly learning.

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Freebytes
That movie is fantastic. The entertainment value is beneficial, but the
predictive warning is certainly as influential as the book The Time Machine
which contained similar analogies.

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unalone
I'm gonna have to disagree. It was entertaining, but the movie was entirely
farcical. Its assumption re:how the world might potentially degenerate was
silly, but I'm baffled at how people think that could possibly happen. It's
like watching Office Space by the same director and thinking that taking a
guy's stapler will definitely lead to him burning down a building.

Comparing the influence of a cheesy movie to one of the stapleholds of science
fiction is ridiculous. The fact that Idiocracy owes its existence to the
concepts of The Time Machine suggests that it's a derivative work, meaning
it's not as influential at all. I'm not saying The Time Machine was a good
warning, either, not as much as 1984 and _certainly_ not as much as Brave New
World, which is arguably _the_ best prediction we've seen from a book, so
saying Idiocracy is as right as The Time Machine isn't saying much to begin
with.

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Freebytes
I never said it was true, and it is certainly for entertainment purposes as
its primary focus. If you were to summarize its predictive nature, it would
result in a one sentence statement. Brave New World and 1984 are better in
their predictive aspects, but I was not comparing Idiocracy to them. I was
primarily comparing it to The Time Machine and well... to itself in a way. The
intent of the movie was not as a documentary on the condition of humanity, but
as a plot device, it can serve the purpose of warning us of the danger of
thinking we can predict everything when we cannot predict much of anything at
all.

