In the 1550s the country was unrecognisable compared to now. England's total population was about 3 million, now London's population is 9 million (and was 100k then)...
Edit: Apparently, wolves in England had just become extinct at the time...
The major global cities will still grow in the next 200 years compared to now, just not as much as they have the previous 200 years.
As for reasons why: nobody has one single cause, but a major one is that current economies mean children are more of a cost than a benefit, and even the most ambitious incentive programs dont make up for the toll of both working a job and taking care of a helpless human.
As for why this is a bad thing: There are a lot of inbuilt assumptions to the way society is structured that will begin to break down. Things like: there are more workers than retirees. There are more students than teachers. There are more juior employees than managers. When these kinds of things start to change, we will have to adapt society or things will just fall apart.
You're already starting to see previews of this sort of crisis in sectors where few young people join, like becoming merchant ship captains. People having to be called back from retirement, buisnesses failing not from lack of buisness but from lack of employees
But in the meantime things may get interesting.
I hope to start a family before people start imposing measure to limit population growth.
As I noted earlier. the birth rate is below replacement rate in almost all developed countries. If not for immigrants population would be shrinking. If anything they would demand more children...
The current demographic trend is based on this assumption. It goes out the window the moment we start meaningfully reducing the probability of death.
What does “Meaningfully reducing the probability of death” mean?
I thought death is certain. Do you mean pushing death further into to future, say by hundreds or thousands of years?
Eliminating or reducing the probability of death correlated to chronological age means our average lifespan is likely to be thousand of years, but not unlimited since we will die to other causes, likely involving accidents and natural disaster.
That's a separate problem to the population crisis. People thinks population's going to decline. I am not so sure. Things can change a lot in a few decade.
All we can say that at this current time, the trend is toward population decline.
This won't work forever, but it may buy a century or so.
Women wants careers and equal opportunities. That means they wait longer and longer before they get children because they want to make sure they have a career to go back to. That is the single most important problem that we need to solve.
1. Provide a decent parental leave (1 year minimum) with full pay.
2. Women often end up as the primary care giver who has to take care of the child when it is sick or attend parental meetings. This often hurts their career. We should incentivise men to take an equal part in raising a child, so that this is more accepted in work situations.
3. Provide free child care and health care. Many simply can't afford the additional financial burden of a child.
4. Provide free education including University. (see point 3)
5. Reduce the financial risk by creating a good safety net. If one or both of the parents are not able to cover their part, the government needs to provide enough support.
Simply put, the choice of having a child should not hurt families financially, or hurt their careers. Humans are "programmed" to want to reproduce, so if we remove the financial barriers
Yes, this will be expensive but it will be less expensive than a future without enough young people to take care of the old.
You are free to ask "Why should my money go to others", but then you don't get to complain when you are 90 years old and only get to shower once a month because they don't have enough people to help you.
Even though we would like people to live outside the cities, cities attract a lot of potential parents. They end up in a situation where they have a long education and start their careers late and don't have the financial capability to get a decent family friendly apartment in the city. Many wait until it's almost too late, and having more than 1 or 2 is definitely not something most wants
The average age of first-time mothers is over 30 years old. A single child may be something the family can handle, but more than 1 or 2 forces the families to move outside the cities to be able to afford a house in addition to hurting the mother's career.
Tldr:
- Cost of living in the cities are too high
- If a second (or third) child forces them to move out of the city, many increasingly choose the cities
- Having more than one child after 30 will have a negative impact on the career as they simply can't work as many hours and has to spend long periods away from work
If we want to go back to a sustainable birth rate, we need a wide range of actions. Some may require to reduce the financial risks, while others require encouraging cultural changes.
Zones beyond 6 have existed since at least the late 90s. My vague recollection is that A-C basically meant "the top end of the Metropolitan line" - certainly how it seemed for me as an SW Londoner. Then at some point the letters were changed to numbers and more stations were brought inside over in Essex, Kent, etc. The Wikipedia page for stations in zones 7-9 has a changelog of sorts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stations_in_London_far...