Automation may actually be the answer to a declining birth rate, and we might stabilize at a much lower world wide population as a result (say 4 rather than 8 billion). People will complain less about Waymo stealing jobs when there are no uber drivers left, but we really aren’t there yet, we still have a surplus of labor.
But I’m not so sure about your second sentence. How does a situation where world wide population drops to 4 billion come about?
Even if US birth rates are declining, birth rates are climbing elsewhere so I’m struggling to see how in aggregate, the world population declines to half of what it is today.
Where are birth rates climbing? Narnia?
Every source I've looked at shows a drop in fertility.
You're talking about fertility rate, which is number of births per person. That's decreasing everywhere.
ayewo may have been talking about number of births. That is increasing in Africa, but even with Africa, is still decreasing in total worldwide:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-number-of-births-b...
From definitions I find online, first order vs second order refers to systems. So if you're applying those adjectives to a specific metric, I'm not sure that's correct.
I don't think we can say that people "universally" agree about what metric the term "birth rate" should refer to, because different people in this thread are using the term to refer to different metrics. However, I do think that generally the term "birth rate" refers to the number of babies born per year (or other unit of time), and the term "fertility rate" refers to the number of babies born per woman. Fertility rate is actually somewhat more complicated than that, because it takes into account the different fertility rates for women of different ages, and then sums those together, to simulate how many children a woman would have who passes through all the different ages.
In most countries with falling birthrates (save some exceptions like Japan) a huge part of this decrease is in the 15-25 age group. There is usually also a decline in the 25-29 but there's an increase or the same rates as we've had historically on the 30+ range.
What this mean is basically that we've eradicated teen pregnancy, and that's definitely something desirable in a developed society.
These are extremely important years for career building.
It's more about the fact that young women are choose to build their education and career (like men do) rather than have children.
>a huge part of this decrease is in the 15-25
It is.
Starting in your 30s, especially later 30s makes this extremely difficult. It takes months of perfectly hitting ovulation windows to get pregnant, and then you generally want at least ~9 months between children, so you're looking at ~2 years per child, all while fertility starts to rapidly decline as you head into your 40s.
The long and short is that a sustainable population is going to require the majority to start having children in their 20s. That figure going down has nothing to do with teen pregnancy.
30% of couples who don’t use birth control and who have regular sex get pregnant within one month.
60% get pregnant within three months.
80% get pregnant within six months.
"Women younger than 30 have about a 20 percent chance of getting pregnant naturally each month. By age 40, the chance of pregnancy is about five percent each month." [1]
Things like IVF do not dramatically change the odds either. They're better of course, but it's far from guaranteed - it's still just a rather expensive roll of the dice.
Then on top of all of this, having children later greatly increases the chances of miscarriage, developmental issues (like Down syndrome) and so on.
Life's brutal here - you're in a race against time, yet the later you start the longer it takes, and the harder it becomes.
> Things like IVF do not dramatically change the odds either. They're better of course, but it's far from guaranteed - it's still just a rather expensive roll of the dice.
Sadly, literally all of our peers who were trying and having kids in the same demographic as us, +/- a few years, struggled hard and most needed fertility treatments. At least 2-3 of them were never able to conceive, despite the expensive and time-consuming treatments. It's brutal.
I will also add, I have a number of friends who are >= 10 years younger than I am and many of them also struggled with miscarriages in their late 20s while trying to start families.
Most of the significant expenses people describe are optional. It is more rational to match your spending to what you can afford with howevermany kids than it is to match the number of kids you have to an arbitrary lifestyle.
I feel this in my bones as I read this while rocking my infant who won't sleep for the last 2 hours.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-06-04/why-australians-arent...
It's just now we suddenly consider that too bad. Back then it was normal, just like everyone else.
It may have been when my parents were born though (mid 1940s, one in what is now Israel and the other in what was then the Soviet Union).
But anyway my parents were 1983 Israelis, they didn't come with future-Israel purchasing power - so they were able to afford their housing on the income of the time :) Other kids in my class had ± similar housing. Some were poor and had worse housing, but not 5 people in a 62m flat level of poverty- for that to be common you had to go back another couple decades (e.g. my mother's childhood experience in the 40s-50s was more like that, might have been common up to the 60s).
Because in 2019 real estate was not only expensive by itself, but also all the future growth was added to a price.
Today in 2024 you can buy very cheap in some places (north, for example).
> there was a stock-market crash in 1983
Not just stock-market. By the time of the crash, Likud laid waste to the whole economy to undermine "the left".
In practice having 2 or 3 kids is going to mean going from studio/1 br to 2/3 br and double or triple housing costs.
[0]: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...