This does appear to be a major problem everywhere that is going to be one of the big challenges we face in the coming decades.
Not sure what the answer is but off hand it seems that conservatives and those that are religious have higher birth rates than those who are secular and liberal thus part of this problem is clearly values/cultural.
It’s the best thing that could happen to reduce our destruction of the environment, and the pyramid scheme of ‘endless growth on a finite planet’ had to end at some point.
This means generally tolerance and science literacy could decline. That worries me.
I don’t know where politics is going in the short term, but I suspect it goes in cycles. Conservatism might be winning at the moment, but it will reach its limits, mistakes will be made and there will be a resurgence of liberalism.
Also, just because you believe your set of looney beliefs is not a religion does not mean that it's any different from any other religion.
I completely agree that magical thinking and conspiracy theory delusions seem to be growing and that's a real problem. I won't quibble about you equating it to religion, it's a valid point.
No. There is a lot of conversion from religious/conservative backgrounds to liberal/secular affiliations. Religious/conservative demographics having birthrates several times higher than the mainstream is a phenomenon that's been going on for centuries.
Poor, non and under developed nations with poor living standards are the only ones that still have persistently neutral to positive replacement birth rates. And, yes, this has many consequences, which his why I hope S. America, Africa and South E. Asia are the benefactors of a weaker China and they too begin to modernize as the whole Species stands to benefit from that and we decouple from the CCP's violent and belligerent stance against the World.
I agree that in the immediate sense a lower population is net boon to allow the Planet to heal itself from myopic Human action/pollution/over consumption, but as we're getting closer to becoming a multi-planetary species we will have to increase this population size significantly to meet the demand of those efforts and I think their is a significant lag time if the culture of having 2 kids per married couple and has been reduced to 2 dogs per married family for my generation and likely those to come and has become the norm in order to remain relevant in the ever shrinking labour market.
There are plenty of belligerent countries in those regions, it's just that they're not considered important enough for their saber-rattling to be noticed internationally, and their enemies tend to be sub-national groups formed around shared ethnicity, control of resources (drugs, oil, mines) or religion who are even less likely to attract attention.
By now, lots of people have heard about Mexican drug cartels, Kurdistan or Joseph Kony's "Lord's Resistance Army", but who cared about the Houthis in Yemen before their civil war turned into an international proxy war? Who could've predicted the civil war in Ethiopia? And who knows whether the Movement for the Autonomy of Kabylie, the Naga nationalist movement, the Wa state or the Free Papua Movement will be next to make international news?
Modernization doesn't guarantee peace and democracy; it also means higher availability of more powerful or more, cheaper weapons. Combined with population growth, even small areas are able to raise substantial armies, while declining resources (relative to population) incentivize wars to secure a larger slice of the pie.
I expect that we'll continue to see large countries only held together by shared colonial history disintegrate violently into smaller regions with more complex borders.
Not necessarily. It depends on the environment too and can shift with new generations. For example Poland was nearly 100% catholic a few decades ago and there's still lots of that influence, but even the official number is trending down. (Which means the real one of people who actually care is likely below 90%)
Very democratic governments are susceptible to be overthrown by this tactic again.
That's why they do it!
If it turns out it is the modern way of life/thinking, then that modern way of life/thinking is doomed, isn't it?
If the world population ends up stabilizing around one billion, for example, or half a billion or whatever, we would be far from "doomed", only a lot more sustainable than we currently are. Absent a whole lot of global catastrophes, it might take a couple of centuries for us to get there. Meanwhile everybody cries bloody murder because they have no idea how to extrapolate current trends into the far future.
We already have the capability to decouple sex and procreation.
Environmentalism is a luxury good that people think about when basic needs are met and requires capacity above that. It's going to be hard to care about coral reefs when we need to devote more of our scarce young people to the practical needs of a gerontocracy.
Who knew that the technology game will be won by some loonie that declares his basement a sovereign country?
I’m still amazed how many politicians think a pyramid scheme of population increase is a good, sustainable way to pay for pensions and healthcare.
The real crisis is the zombie crisis -- zombie empires and zombie societies that lost all touch with family values and morality, or mental sanity; the problem is all of the developed world is the same, so no winner to take over.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...
Thanks!
Wikipedia states this about the referenced 'demographic transition' model. Note the last sentence:
> It must be remembered that the DTM is only a model and cannot necessarily predict the future. It does however give an indication of what the future birth and death rates may be for an underdeveloped country, together with the total population size. Most particularly, of course, the DTM makes no comment on change in population due to migration. It is not applicable for high levels of development, as it has been shown that after a HDI of 0.9 the fertility increases again.
Mainly an issue with feminism being widespread but living/working conditions not having caught up with it. Society is set up assuming that the wife will stay home to care for the kids. As a result having children pretty much requires either enough disposable income to outsource caring for the kids (nanny, extracurricular activities, etc), or one of the parents staying at home.
For conservatives it's less of a problem because it's more accepted to have the wife stay home.
If we want birthrates to raise again we're going to have to figure out how to make having kids not be a stopper for your career.
Are you sure that women entering the workforce wasn't _because_ of economic reasons? It seems to me that "feminism", as you put it, may have only been allowed to win, because it was desirable economically.
In other words, could feminism be a result of living/working conditions and not the cause?
Following this, people are having less kids because there is huge economic incentive not too.
I'm not sure where the disagreement is there. Yes, one of the reasons women entered the workforce was the increase in income for two-earner households.
The point is that both having two earners per household and having good birth rates are beneficial to society as a whole, but we don't yet have a system where both are compatible; we just exchanged one for the other, as the negative effects of low birth rates aren't immediate.
The economic incentive to not have kids is where the problem lies, and it's what needs to be tackled. Flexible schedules, paid paternal/maternal leave, free education/healthcare, access to affordable housing for young couples... There is no silver bullet, it's a sea of deal breakers that need to be addressed individually.
Nobody cared 50% of children died before turning 5, nor that they got shit education, nor that women were oppressed.
Our expectations and sensibilities grew much faster than everything else, not the least or biological natures.
Long term yes. But did women enter the workforce because of the economic benefit originally? Then as women continued entering wages fell (supply and demand) and the working class ended up trapped, as you say.
Another huge factor is globalization. Women maybe had to enter to earn enough when work started being outsourced.
Some people making a choice causes a cascade, taking the choice away from everyone else, kind of like car ownership in the mid 20th century.
(And bad for all the men, too.)
"Feminism" is many things to many people.
To me it is like the abolition of slavery, makes perfect sense in a modern context.
"Feminism" as it stands today in the west, just like other "-ISMS" to me, are abominations, both the cause and effect, the narcissistic, entitlement and victim culture combined with hating (average)men -- it is the dragon eating its own tail that destroys the modern society.
A society with a lot of elderly = demand for huge amounts of daily care, which is hard to automate away, though probably not impossible. (The Japanese are definitely trying.)
The only way out of this conundrum would be a breakthrough in longevity, where people would live to 110 in a relatively good shape and being able to care for themselves, then die within weeks from some fast degenerative process.
Unless it was very well paid, this job is far from enticing. Trying to keep a doubly incontinent geriatric patient from smelling for decades is an arduous and depressive job with no perspective of improvement. Geriatry as a subset of medicine is struggling to find new recruits, because as far as prognosis of the patients goes, it is the single worst branch of healthcare.
There are people with wherewithal to do this for decades, but this pool of willing is going to be overwhelmed.
Most old people aren't anywhere near that bad. For those who are, it will have to be operating almost on rotation and with large financial incentive.
Let's don't forget that we are soon 8 billion people on this planet. Imagine 8 billion elephants or 8 billion Tigers living on earth. We are too many and that's not sustainable.
The rise of the far right in Europe is mostly caused by clashes of cultural norms of native Europeans vs. immigrant Muslims.
As of 2020, it is not entirely clear if France, for example, can prevent emergence of dozens of alienated urban zones which aren't part of the national whole in any meaningful sense - a scattering of small Gaza Strips across the map.
Neither is it clear whether all of the grooming gangs (mostly Pakistanis of Mirpuri origin) in UK have already been extirpated and how long will the P.R. disaster be remembered.
This is a huge headache, because even in the Islamic world, high fertility is typical for backward, bigoted regions. Secular urban centers like Tehran and Izmir are no better than Europe, as far as total number of kids goes, so they cannot serve as a reservoir of workforce.
Total fertility today is strongly negatively correlated with education of women, which means that most kids are born in places hostile to female education attainment. Such as Niger, Afghanistan or Yemen. But these are precisely the places whose cultural norms work as a bombshell when suddenly transplanted into Europe.
To think that we are in any kind of equilibrium is to delude yourself.
We've never been in equilibrium. We've continuously expanded at the expense of other species. It's just that now the limit of this expansion has become very visible
What makes you think that these countries will let in the desperate fugitives? No, that won't happen.
[1] For example, there would be serious problems in the German society if not for Eastern European immigrants who take care of millions of older people for pennies. If these immigrants were not there, the older people and their families would have to pay 3-4x times the amount for German caretakers, which would of course break the budget of many.
Not a sound argument.
Earth can easily sustain hundreds of billions of people even at modern day technology level in supreme comfort. By some calculations, even one trillion is possible without having anybody switching to algae diet.
Which doesn't mean it couldn't be done, but not the way it is done currently.
This obviously requires a paradigm shift but ultimately can be a net positive for the environment, quality of life, and individual wealth.
But let's remember that we were less than 1 billion not too long ago while we're on course to be 10 billion soon, with individual consumption massive increased on top of that. We won't solve climate and environmental problems unless this is tackled. The aim of civilization is to make people better off, not to squeeze them into a dystopian world of overpopulation and environmental collapse.
The easiest way to make everyone able to participate in that high-tech is to have high-density population centers with little infrastructure benefiting the most people.
A battery one order of magnitude better than what we have today would obliterate that need for infrastructure.
Internet from the sky, VR, remote education, remote(AI) medicine, flying electric cars, compact fusion power, would mean unchaining the whole world from the sociopaths that are running it today, but we can't have that, because the sociopaths at the top like centralization in order to leach off the rest of the world.
Let's just take one example; VR. For VR, you need VR googles. These need to be produced somewhere, in an industrial mass production because otherwise these VR googles would be prohibitive expensive. That means industrial scale energy production and industrial scale energy transportation and industrial scale energy storage. This industrial scale industry needs to be repaired and upgraded, probably by people. These people need housing, food, education, ... Now take a guess on what you need to provide each and every one of these? Yeah, right; infrastructure.
It's a rat's tail. You cannot get a way from infrastructure if you want any kind of technological civilization.
Preindustrial cities can't serve as reference.
Because the devastation would be unimaginable by preindustrial standards?
I don't want it to happen either, but that's not a valid reason why it couldn't happen.
Why are pre-industrial cities not a good model, i.e. why didn't pre-industrial cities provide the protection we have knowadays?
Exactly because we were able to leave out pre-industrial cities in times of turmoil. Since we cannot rely on our self-sufficiency to survive, we need to maintain infrastructure to keep us alive. Maintaining infrastructure is cheapest when the infrastructure is used by as many people as possible. Having a widely distributed population requiring well maintained, widely distributed infrastructure will not be possible.
Who and when will do it?
Are we willing to take away women's rights if its the only way to stop a population decline?
There's nothing to cheer if you really look into it.
Taking away women rights? Where does that come from, that's ludicrous. Countries where women have the most rights are the ones with lower birth rates as it happens, and for good reasons.
1. at some point we "HAVE" and humanity WILL put an end to birthrate decline.
2. "Countries where women have the most rights are the ones with lower birth rates as it happens"
Therefore, one solution would be to take away women's rights.
That's not something I would stand for, but for certain totalitarian countries, it would work.
That's a very easy solution any idiot could come up with, just like slavery.
The other, MUCH, MUCH harder solution would involve completely changing world order, creating a much flatter and equal society, which is IMPOSSIBLE to do by the current world wide idiocracy.