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..........The only continent on the planet that is seeing continued high fertility rates is Africa, but even there, wherever modern education has uplifted the women, birth rates have plunged.
True enough, I have learned.
The fertility rate was not calculated for most of human history. No one really knows what it used to be, but I think we can safely assume it was a BUNCH!
The whole thing of falling fertility rates being closely associated with education and women's emancipation leads me to believe the fate of humankind was baked into the equation from the very beginning, some 80,000 years ago.
We were always destined to succeed and multiply and cover the earth and then, because of our success, our numbers are destined to decline to some as yet unforeseen number.
150 years ago we were learning new ways of doing things and growing in every conceivable direction. 200 years from now there will be abandoned cities and towns all over the world.
I would note that we here in the U.S. almost take it for granted that family is a shared responsibility, but it wasn't that long ago that men pushing a stroller was a novelty.
The "egalitarian" attitude towards child-rearing much confounds me... not because I harbor some notion that women belong in the home, and men in the workplace, but because onset of parenting has robbed me of my male friends.
The transformation over my own lifetime was stark. In my childhood, men had minimal responsibility with the kids, especially until the kids were ~10 years old. Women were just starting to engage in full-time work outside of the home. The result wasn't more caregiving/nurturing by men, but rather, the kids fending for themselves, going to school alone, returning in the afternoon to an empty house, before going out to play - unsupervised, of course. Fathers presumably focused on their careers, or perhaps their social lives, with other men.
When I entered the workforce, it was my expectation that the culture would involve "hanging out" with other men, be it working on cars, drinking beer, or something like playing chess. Instead, to my dismay, the culture had changed. Men were getting married and having children. Nothing new there, but what was new, was that these new fathers were very much of the stroller-pushing contingent. They'd need to leave the office at 5 o'clock sharp, to retrieve their kids from daycare. Weekends weren't about wrenching in the garage... instead it was enrichment-activities for their kids. So as the men around me became fathers, I kept losing friends.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Listener2307
The whole thing of falling fertility rates being closely associated with education and women's emancipation leads me to believe the fate of humankind was baked into the equation from the very beginning, some 80,000 years ago.
What do we know of Mankind prior to the Neolithic Revolution? Were gender roles starkly delimited, or were the tribes/clans more egalitarian?
True enough, I have learned. The fertility rate was not calculated for most of human history. No one really knows what it used to be, but I think we can safely assume it was a BUNCH!
The whole thing of falling fertility rates being closely associated with education and women's emancipation leads me to believe the fate of humankind was baked into the equation from the very beginning, some 80,000 years ago. We were always destined to succeed and multiply and cover the earth and then, because of our success, our numbers are destined to decline to some as yet unforeseen number.
150 years ago we were learning new ways of doing things and growing in every conceivable direction. 200 years from now there will be abandoned cities and towns all over the world.
There NOW are abandoned / never occupied entire cities in China where overbuilding ran amok. Here's a link to some photographs. It's nothing short of breath-taking to see something like this. Some of this manic building spree now generates agonized worries about a possible financial debacle due to real estate loans that may default.
Most of this is probably just simple overbuilding but I wonder if any was based on bad population growth expectations and/or bad extrapolations of industrial needs to house workers and/or an era of low interest rates and/or bad central planning by the communist regime -- or a perfect storm of all these things.
Truth is stranger than fiction.
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There NOW are abandoned / never occupied entire cities in China where overbuilding ran amok. Here's a link to some photographs. It's nothing short of breath-taking to see something like this. Some of this manic building spree now generates agonized worries about a possible financial debacle due to real estate loans that may default.
Most of this is probably just simple overbuilding but I wonder if any was based on bad population growth expectations and/or bad extrapolations of industrial needs to house workers and/or an era of low interest rates and/or bad central planning by the communist regime -- or a perfect storm of all these things.
Truth is stranger than fiction.
Even stranger...There are also fields in China, full of bicycles, new bicycles, thousands of them. There's a field full of new electric cars, hundreds or thousands of them. The factories were told to make a certain number, far more than they could sell. A shame that these couldn't be sent to developing countries in Africa or some such. Just rusting in a field.
China has been mismanaged for so long that it essentially has no naturally evolved checks and balances, just a nasty authoritarian regime trying to control everything and largely failing.
Their latest, and possibly worst, failure is the One Child policy that has basically destroyed the family, destroyed hope for the future, and is leading to ruin.
I believe the other Asian countries in this boat will find ways to turn it around, because they are more democratic and concensus oriented. In mainland China, young people despise and fear the government, so when it tells them to turn left, they turn right, for spite.
Even stranger...There are also fields in China, full of bicycles, new bicycles, thousands of them. There's a field full of new electric cars, hundreds or thousands of them. The factories were told to make a certain number, far more than they could sell. A shame that these couldn't be sent to developing countries in Africa or some such. Just rusting in a field.
China has been mismanaged for so long that it essentially has no naturally evolved checks and balances, just a nasty authoritarian regime trying to control everything and largely failing.
Their latest, and possibly worst, failure is the One Child policy that has basically destroyed the family, destroyed hope for the future, and is leading to ruin.
I believe the other Asian countries in this boat will find ways to turn it around, because they are more democratic and concensus oriented. In mainland China, young people despise and fear the government, so when it tells them to turn left, they turn right, for spite.
Alright we get it you don't like China, but can we keep the conversation as a debate about the shrinking global population. There are a host of "I don't like China" threads in the Asia and Politics and Controversies subforum for you to vent.
Alright we get it you don't like China, but can we keep the conversation as a debate about the shrinking global population. There are a host of "I don't like China" threads in the Asia and Politics and Controversies subforum for you to vent.
Not really; I did my bachelor's and master's degrees in Chinese studies, and I'm very interested in the region, obviously. China up until this year was the world's most populous country, and now its population is crashing, for various reasons including the fact that its economy and social framework have been terribly mismanaged for many decades.
To me, this is all quite relevant to the topic. And no, I don't "hate" China but I do reserve the right to criticize them.
Typical of the Times, the photographs are great. What I found interesting or crazy about one photo of a marriage ceremony is one set of parents is holding a Mickey Mouse doll and the other set of parents are holding a Minnie Mouse doll. Can't make this stuff up.
One thing not seen in any of the photographs: fat people.
Excerpts from the article:
"Because of a cultural preference for boys during the government’s one-child policy, which ended in 2016, China has around 35 million more men than women, fueling a sense of economic competition for marriage." [What happened to about 35M female babies during those years?]
"The share of women age 25 to 29 in urban China who have never been married rose to 40.6 percent in 2020 from 8.6 percent in 2000, ..."
Several excerpts from among the hundreds of reader comments to that article:
"This pattern of delayed marriages and more childless couples exists in ALL developed countries: N America, Europe, etc. And the reasons are not unique."
"low birth rates are not the disaster, high birth rates are if anyone considers climate, biodiversity loss, resource depletion and competition for resources, ocean pollution etc"
"This is the beginning of the end of growth based economic approach to everything. Birth rates are plummeting around the world we will all start to have economies that mimic Japan"
"Marriage is rooted in believing there is a better future. China's young are sending a clear message to their government: they do not see a brighter tomorrow."
"We should also keep in mind that many, many women of previous generations did not actually want to marry or be mothers either but there were no other viable options (besides maybe becoming a nun.) So while birth rates are declining, perhaps they’re leveling out at ‘normal’ levels because half of the population is no longer being coerced into reproducing for their own survival."
"Getting married (and/or cohabitating) is a great financial decision. Instantly double your income while halving many of your costs. Children, on the other hand, are financially ruinous."
"Well both our governments only make life easier for billionaires, the rest of us not so much. Having kids isn't attractive here in the United States either. ... "
Hard to say how global population will sort itself out. I'm sure it will trend down for a while, but how much, for how much long, and with what consequences remain to be seen.
Maybe birth rates will revert to a constant level over time to create a stable global population. Maybe not.
Too much can go wrong in a hundred different ways. Crystal balls aren't much help. Educated guesses are about the best we can do. Speculating is fun.
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I suspect that as cost of living goes up and fertility rates continue to drop and planned parenthood becomes more available, it will become fashionable for rich people to have more kids as sign of wealth. Now days and especially in the past there’s a stigma that people with large families are poor and uneducated, but I think in the upcoming future it will be a way to flaunt your wealth similar to how Elon Musk has 10 kids. Although I don’t think this will be healthy for these families with such attitudes, but I suspect it will slightly bump up the rates.
I suspect that as cost of living goes up and fertility rates continue to drop and planned parenthood becomes more available, it will become fashionable for rich people to have more kids as sign of wealth. Now days and especially in the past there’s a stigma that people with large families are poor and uneducated, but I think in the upcoming future it will be a way to flaunt your wealth similar to how Elon Musk has 10 kids. Although I don’t think this will be healthy for these families with such attitudes, but I suspect it will slightly bump up the rates.
Marriage already functions this way. There's a huge difference in divorce rates between classes, and increasingly marriage rates as well. I think your prediction will come to pass as out of wedlock birth rates continue to drop. If lower classes did not have children outside of marriage (avoiding which is objectively the wise thing to do, see all the work by Isabel Sawhill), then the upper middle class would already have higher birth rates.
Marriage already functions this way. There's a huge difference in divorce rates between classes, and increasingly marriage rates as well. I think your prediction will come to pass as out of wedlock birth rates continue to drop. If lower classes did not have children outside of marriage (avoiding which is objectively the wise thing to do, see all the work by Isabel Sawhill), then the upper middle class would already have higher birth rates.
I observe this as well. A traditional family with children is becoming more of a middle-class or upper-middle-class venture. The working classes are weighing their options, and often deciding that a married-with-children lifestyle is not logistically appealing. It is plausible (though I have no data to cite) that single-motherhood is becoming less popular.... single women with fewer pecuniary resources are maybe eschewing reproduction, even among the traditionally fecund socioeconomic lower-classes.
There also appears to be a positive correlation between religiosity and wealth. Historically, the poor were more pious, while the wealthier were more worldly (literally and figuratively). This trend looks to be reversing. The man in the pews tends to be wealthier than the average man on the streets. So from the religiosity standpoint, we may expect higher fertility among the upper middle classes, in relative terms. We may end up with a smaller cohort of children, but one that's better taken care of... a good thing, no?
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Why China’s Young People Are Not Getting Married
