I don’t understand why this is, or perhaps seems to be, the first question that’s asked. The more useful question, to me, is should the tide be turned?
I’m not advocating human extinction, nor even a return to some (fictional) 17th century agrarian Utopia. But I think there might be a sustainable, tech oriented, post-scarcity future that could exist.
Asking how we might get there actually ought to be the first question.
I thought Kaiser Busch's most recent video on the subject was very good.
In short: People don't feel the world is worth bringing children into anymore, it's likely educating women doesn't help, and the relative economic precarity young people live in makes it seem extremely irresponsible. Then on top of all of that most developed countries have focused on individual consumption and hedonism rather than evolving older social traditions that tended to encourage family formation so younger people don't even have the psychosocial tools to dig themselves out.
It just now occurred to me that maybe uneducated women get married and have kids out of economic self-preservation. The more educated, the more able to make their own way, the less they have to marry and have kids if they don't want to.
But maybe we're also in an over-reaction. Women felt stifled in that environment. So they got jobs and bosses and all the workplace stuff that we find... stifling. It's not necessarily better; it's just a different flavor of bad. As more women have time to try it and find it to be empty, we may see a reaction away from that as the ideal of what female success looks like.
They also get their own money. Being stuck at home dependent on others is generally a worse deal.
Women have always been able to work, there are plenty of low-education jobs available and the poorer they are, the more of those they need to get shifts for. You may notice women working in many crap jobs when you look around. Higher education changes the jobs generally for the better. Also exposes them to "hey, there are more things going on in the world besides squeezing out babies". Though the educated who like making babies can and do go right ahead.
Well we've got maybe half a generation left for them to figure themselves out before we get run over by people who never tried that and will probably undo it once they have the power to.
The biological imperative is to copulate. The more pregnancy, the less copulation, and the more time spent in child care. Contraceptives are the difference.
> The more useful question, to me, is should the tide be turned?
The primary reason this is a problem is due to the need to support an aging and/or non-working population via the next generation. Too few working compared to non-working can't support the system.
Generally the birthrate to keep things in balance is approx 2 kids per couple.
Productivity is already very high, it’s all just soaked up by the very wealthy. It’s a distribution issue, and the very wealthy are not interested in improving that. A rapidly declining fertility rate means socioeconomic systems will be forced to adapt as a forcing function, this is a good thing.
If anything, drive fertility rates lower faster through robust empowerment of women. As the labor supply compresses over time, labor will have more power as demand exceeds supply. Unwanted children? Solved. Systems that don’t provide for those in need? Less effort needed to force those systems to change. Everyone wins except extractionists.
But high productivity depends on large-scale division of labor. If the labor force compresses very far, can you maintain the high productivity?
I don't want to live in the 1920s, or worse, the 1820s. Can the population shrink, and we still maintain our level of tech (and even maintain some progress)? How far can the population shrink, and we maintain that?
Can you scope that question a little more tightly? (frex, who is "we"?)
I can tell you that I live in a country with a population well under 10% of the US', and memories of WWII giving us pretensions towards autarky, yet we still do cutting edge research, and most tourists consider the local standard of living reasonably high.
(in particular, we do not rely upon —as in my memories of the US last century— having pools of day labourers standing around waiting at "the wall" to be at your beck and call for all your low-productivity economic needs)
Someone else can figure out if this is sustainable when women have agency, autonomy, and self determination. Humanity can engineer a way out or suck it up.
Are you advocating for quality of life and consumer excess over human suffering?
Let's be clear. This only impacts where assumptions have been made about population growth. There is nothing which can't be altered in light of this.
I am old enough to remember scare stories about how the population was going to outstrip available resources so those people should be pleased.
People don't like change, but responsible governments can make the hard decisions to deal with this. Life can go on,just not quite how we are used to it.
Cue old folks panicking about any change in the status quo.
Yes, it's ok for birth rates to change. It would be prudent for us to prepare for the collapse of the economic bubble resulting from ever-expanding demand for everything. Maybe our AI overlords will have some suggestions for how to change our industrial and banking infrastructure to operate in a post-expansion world.
The problem is it's not just the economy that's going to collapse.
Other groups are not on board with the collective suicide thing and are already running over developed countries and replacing our ideas with their own. Things like women's rights, liberalism and free speech, even the way we value empiricism in Science are all on the chopping block. When we're gone no one else will be left to defend and argue for these things.
Maybe they are the wrong ideas if they don't lead to sustainable society. That is sustainable at least nearly population replacing society. Natural selection in essence. The other ideas are out competing them on long term, thus they must be superior ideas. Or at least more fit.
> but experts describe the fertility uptick as more of a “blip”. That hasn’t stopped countries including Russia, Greece and Italy giving baby bonuses a go.
So, this business of baby bounties is political tenable, but not an actual solution.
> Australia’s fertility rate peaked at 3.5 in 1961. By 1975 – not long after Gough Whitlam abolished the luxury tax on the contraceptive pill – it had dropped to replacement level (2.1), and now
Strange that no one seems to be doing a comparison between then and now to find out what factors would encourage replacement levels. They'd probably find that they need to pay people more and ensure job security, which is never popular with the autocrats.
Sometimes products are kept artificially rare, to keep their price up. Diamonds. (I suspect) Ozempic and its cousins.
If consumers were a relatively rare commodity, then products would have to work extremely hard to compete for them. For example, perhaps housing prices would come back down to widely affordable levels.
I’m not advocating human extinction, nor even a return to some (fictional) 17th century agrarian Utopia. But I think there might be a sustainable, tech oriented, post-scarcity future that could exist.
Asking how we might get there actually ought to be the first question.