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glowing-fish
Feb 18, 2013

Keep grinding,
I hope you level up! :)
There is something I've been reading about for a while: it is perhaps one of the most important stories happening in politics, but also one of the least dramatic.

World fertility rates are falling, and have been falling steadily since 1965. After World War II, fertility rates grew across the world (the United State's Baby Boom was just part of a world wide movement). But as quality of life increased, women started having fewer children. This happened first in North America and Europe, and then spread to East Asia. It has been going on around the rest of the world as well, although with different rates of decline.

This probably isn't news to anyone.

The extent of the decline perhaps is. At least it was to me. Perhaps because there isn't much of a story behind it, in a world where there is much more dramatic stories. "Woman doesn't have baby" is a story in the same way that "Dog doesn't bite man" is a story. But when I found that google's publicdata service could graph these things, I found some interesting information:


The world, broken up into seven mostly-intuitive regions. North America, East Asia, and Europe/Central Asia are the three world regions that are below the "replacement rate", which is usually taken to be 2.1 children per woman. Latin America is at around 2.2 children per women, meaning that it is just barely above the replacement rate, and is below the average for the entire world. South Asia and the Middle East are slightly above the average for the world. But all six of these regions are pretty close together compared to Sub-Saharan Africa, which still has a very high fertility rate.



Within a region, different countries have different histories, although the overall trend is always downward. Cambodia's fertility rate dipped under the the Khmer Rouge for very obvious reasons, but popped back up in the mid-1980s before heading back downwards. All of these East Asian countries are below the replacement rate, besides for Laos and Cambodia. For some of them, this is a recent change: for both Malaysia and Vietnam, it happened within the last ten to fifteen years.



Across Sub-Saharan Africa, most countries still have high fertility rates. South Africa is relatively low, and is on a downward trajectory. The other countries have a less certain pattern. I also am guessing that even more than in most countries, some of this data may be unreliable.



Beyond looking at the obvious, the thing that interested me the most about this is that several first-world countries have been dependent on neighboring or nearby countries for a cheap source of labor, an arrangement that has caused political and social friction for both countries. These countries were usually countries that had high fertility rates, but also had good enough educational systems that emigrants were able to be employed in first world countries. I use three immigrant countries and four emigrant countries in this graph: The United States, Germany and Saudi Arabia are destinations for immigrants, while Mexico, Turkey, Egypt and the Philippines have been sources of immigrants.
The United States and Germany have, for the most part, dipped below the replacement rate over forty years ago. Saudi Arabia is a unique case because due to economic, religious and social reasons, it didn't take the normal trajectory of a "first world country".
Of the emigrant nations, they have all followed the expected trajectory. Within the last ten years, both Mexico and Turkey have dipped down to where they are just at or above their replacement rates. The Philippines and Egypt, while still pretty high, are on a regular downward trajectory.

The question is: what happens to countries like the United States, Germany, Saudi Arabia, France, Canada and South Korea when they don't have a steady supply of Mexican/Turkish/Filipino/Egyptian/Indian workers? And what happens to China, Vietnam and Malaysia when their labor force stops growing?

The end of cheap labor, and the fact that countries might have to actively work to attract migrant workers instead of trying to keep them out, can obviously have a big impact on both foreign and domestic politics. It could be something that is beneficial to less-developed countries, as richer nations pay migrant workers more, and it could be terribly damaging, if those countries turn to more exploitive tactics to ensure cheap labor.

This might not even manifest as a single "big story", and yet I think it is the story that might be most important over the next few decades.

And with that, I am done with my :effort: for tonight this morning.

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Cingulate
Oct 23, 2012

by Fluffdaddy
Really surprised to see a country like Vietnam below replacement rate. I generally didn't know so much of the non-first world countries had birth rates that low.

rkajdi
Sep 11, 2001

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN
Something else to remember when we're talking about birth rates in the developing world: pregnancy is pretty drat dangerous. Especially if you don't have access to great medical care. Part of the reason why women are choosing for family planning outside the first world is because they don't want to die. If you can get a shot or an IUD that last for months or years, you can dodge the bullet of risky childbirth for awhile.

Also, the cost of raising a child has always been expensive. If the difference is between having 1-2 kids or having 5 and being a dirtfarmer, rational people are going to choose the former. A large part of the reason for higher birthrates was that women weren't given any agency, much less control over family size. It's now pretty apparent that outside of some zealot outliers, when women get to choose how many kids they want, they choose a sub-replacement number. You can't really "fix" this without destroying women's agency, so we might as well start planning for a world with less people instead of more.

DarkCrawler
Apr 6, 2009

by vyelkin
Always thought the labor needs of developed countries will eventually be filled by robots when most countries are developed and there is no longer enough cheap labor. I mean look how far we've come in the past 50 years, can't be much longer until that actually becomes viable on a grander scale beyond assembly lines.

glowing-fish
Feb 18, 2013

Keep grinding,
I hope you level up! :)

Cingulate posted:

Really surprised to see a country like Vietnam below replacement rate. I generally didn't know so much of the non-first world countries had birth rates that low.

That is kind of why I posted this: I was surprised to find this as well. Obviously the world has had a lot of other things on it's mind since 2000, and a story like this that is about incremental change doesn't really grab headlines.

Vietnam is actually kind of an extreme example, because most developing countries aren't quite there yet. But some are: Brazil and Chile, for example, are below replacement rate. Argentina, Bangladesh, Columbia, Indonesia and Venezuela are all slightly above, hovering between 2.2 and 2.5 children per women.

One of the reasons I brought this up is that I think that a lot of us, even people who are pretty well-informed about world politics, have a hard time overcoming our first impressions. I grew up in the 1980s, and a lot of what I learned about the world was formed from seeing "The Third World" on television with favelas and slums made from plywood, and streets swarming with young children. Its hard to shake a picture like that, even when data says that it is no longer accurate.

computer parts
Nov 18, 2010

PLEASE CLAP

DarkCrawler posted:

Always thought the labor needs of developed countries will eventually be filled by robots when most countries are developed and there is no longer enough cheap labor. I mean look how far we've come in the past 50 years, can't be much longer until that actually becomes viable on a grander scale beyond assembly lines.

Robots (really machines in general) are good for repeatable tasks with low variation, but a lot of those are already covered by machines. The benefit of people is that they're incredibly adaptable for the price you pay them (or even if you paid three times as much as what you do now).

To use one example, you can't make a robotic janitor. You can retool your system so that trash collection is automated (like having a garbage chute or whatever) but it's always going to be less expensive to pay someone to pick up the trash.

Small White Dragon
Nov 23, 2007

No relation.

rkajdi posted:

Also, the cost of raising a child has always been expensive. If the difference is between having 1-2 kids or having 5 and being a dirtfarmer, rational people are going to choose the former. A large part of the reason for higher birthrates was that women weren't given any agency, much less control over family size. It's now pretty apparent that outside of some zealot outliers, when women get to choose how many kids they want, they choose a sub-replacement number. You can't really "fix" this without destroying women's agency, so we might as well start planning for a world with less people instead of more.
It's also worth mentioning that before modern medicine, a sizable percentage of your children died very young. This is rare in most places now.

ChipNDip
Sep 6, 2010

How many deaths are prevented by an executive order that prevents big box stores from selling seeds, furniture, and paint?

rkajdi posted:

It's now pretty apparent that outside of some zealot outliers, when women get to choose how many kids they want, they choose a sub-replacement number. You can't really "fix" this without destroying women's agency, so we might as well start planning for a world with less people instead of more.

In Europe, at least, people actually want more kids than they are having, and women tend to desire more kids than men do. Only a handful of countries show desired fertility below replacement, and a handful are quite a bit above that - Denmark, Sweden, Finland, France, and Ireland are all around 2.5 desired kids. In Sweden, paragon of gender equality, single digit percent of young women want less than 2 kids, while close to half of want 3+. Hell, even in the low fertility countries, Austria is the only one where more than 25% want 0 or 1 kid. Sub-replacement fertility is more a factor of modern life making it harder to provide for the size family you want than a function of women not wanting to reproduce.

ToxicSlurpee
Nov 5, 2003

-=SEND HELP=-


Pillbug

ChipNDip posted:

In Europe, at least, people actually want more kids than they are having, and women tend to desire more kids than men do. Only a handful of countries show desired fertility below replacement, and a handful are quite a bit above that - Denmark, Sweden, Finland, France, and Ireland are all around 2.5 desired kids. In Sweden, paragon of gender equality, single digit percent of young women want less than 2 kids, while close to half of want 3+. Hell, even in the low fertility countries, Austria is the only one where more than 25% want 0 or 1 kid. Sub-replacement fertility is more a factor of modern life making it harder to provide for the size family you want than a function of women not wanting to reproduce.

Yeah I think another issue we have in a place like the States is that our economy is so hosed up that a lot of people that would otherwise want children literally can't afford to, ever without ultimately subjecting themselves to a life of abject, crushing poverty. Yeah you can get food stamps and rent assistance for children but that's all you will have. The system makes loving sure of that and thanks to the right this is getting even worse. Setting oneself up to actually provide properly for a family as well as ensuring that you can afford to get them a college education probably means acquiring an advanced degree for both parents, paying off the loans, and pursuing a career, often putting off having children until far, far later than women would in the past. Parents are sometimes not having children until the woman is in her late 30's or early 40's when her fertility has absolutely tanked, if she's capable of having babies at all.

I've met quite a few women in my life that have said things like "Oh I'd love to have like six kids but we can't afford it." While it's true that increased education and economic opportunity reduces birth rates I really do think that the choice to have children or not also comes down to a lot of people finding they don't want to make babies they can't afford. The other thing I'm wondering if part of this is just the economics of it being impossible. A lot of people are saying "birth rates below replacement rates is really bad" but we're already seeing the effects of overpopulation all over the place. Global warming is a big example. There is also only so much of this rock and everything on it to go around. 7 billion people might just turn out to be too goddamned many. Keeping our numbers in check could very well turn out to be a good thing. Now that we have reliable birth control it's entirely possible that we could keep a cap on our population. Of course it's also possible that we might not even need to actively do that as, like has been pointed out, people will often just not have children they can't afford. If resources get scarce many people can't afford children and just won't. Even so, I'd say it's probably a good thing for the human race as a whole if our birth rate dips below the replacement rate for a while. Assuming, of course, that we don't gently caress off into space.

Volkerball
Oct 15, 2009

by FactsAreUseless

computer parts posted:

Robots (really machines in general) are good for repeatable tasks with low variation, but a lot of those are already covered by machines. The benefit of people is that they're incredibly adaptable for the price you pay them (or even if you paid three times as much as what you do now).

To use one example, you can't make a robotic janitor. You can retool your system so that trash collection is automated (like having a garbage chute or whatever) but it's always going to be less expensive to pay someone to pick up the trash.

You can't make a robot for everything, but as technology increases combined with an increasing population, labor is going to be less in demand. China especially because they are modernizing at an unprecedented rate. Factories there are going to go from 500 employees to 200 to 70 really goddamn quick.

Pimpmust
Oct 1, 2008

ToxicSlurpee posted:

Yeah I think another issue we have in a place like the States is that our economy is so hosed up that a lot of people that would otherwise want children literally can't afford to, ever without ultimately subjecting themselves to a life of abject, crushing poverty. Yeah you can get food stamps and rent assistance for children but that's all you will have. The system makes loving sure of that and thanks to the right this is getting even worse. Setting oneself up to actually provide properly for a family as well as ensuring that you can afford to get them a college education probably means acquiring an advanced degree for both parents, paying off the loans, and pursuing a career, often putting off having children until far, far later than women would in the past. Parents are sometimes not having children until the woman is in her late 30's or early 40's when her fertility has absolutely tanked, if she's capable of having babies at all.

I've met quite a few women in my life that have said things like "Oh I'd love to have like six kids but we can't afford it." While it's true that increased education and economic opportunity reduces birth rates I really do think that the choice to have children or not also comes down to a lot of people finding they don't want to make babies they can't afford. The other thing I'm wondering if part of this is just the economics of it being impossible. A lot of people are saying "birth rates below replacement rates is really bad" but we're already seeing the effects of overpopulation all over the place. Global warming is a big example. There is also only so much of this rock and everything on it to go around. 7 billion people might just turn out to be too goddamned many. Keeping our numbers in check could very well turn out to be a good thing. Now that we have reliable birth control it's entirely possible that we could keep a cap on our population. Of course it's also possible that we might not even need to actively do that as, like has been pointed out, people will often just not have children they can't afford. If resources get scarce many people can't afford children and just won't. Even so, I'd say it's probably a good thing for the human race as a whole if our birth rate dips below the replacement rate for a while. Assuming, of course, that we don't gently caress off into space.

Lowish birth-numbers for now being a good thing, while true, I kinda wonder just how big a change there would have to be in society to "fix" the issue once it actually becomes pressing to get "replenishment" up when a country can no longer rely on importing young people (granted, a long while off). It does indeed not seem like current modern society is "sustainable" on this matter, mainly out of a family-economical perspective.

And it's less "it would be pretty good resource wise if we were like 3 billion people" and more "...and 75% of those people are old as dirt", that might become the issue? I guess Japan is going to be one of the first to find out how that problem is solved without immigration :iiam:

ToxicSlurpee
Nov 5, 2003

-=SEND HELP=-


Pillbug

Pimpmust posted:

Lowish birth-numbers for now being a good thing, while true, I kinda wonder just how big a change there would have to be in society to "fix" the issue once it actually becomes pressing to get "replenishment" up when a country can no longer rely on importing young people (granted, a long while off). It does indeed not seem like current modern society is "sustainable" on this matter, mainly out of a family-economical perspective.

And it's less "it would be pretty good resource wise if we were like 3 billion people" and more "...and 75% of those people are old as dirt", that might become the issue? I guess Japan is going to be one of the first to find out how that problem is solved without immigration :iiam:

One of the weird things about humans is that a woman can probably have like fifteen children over the course of her life if she really wants to. This could be one of those things were family planning becomes society. If somebody crunches the numbers and decides "oh hell we need to have more babies born right loving now" then you could have things like government incentives to have babies. As in "OK, any babies born between X date and Y date will have their education paid for when they become adults and will net the parents free food for them and the baby for 20 years." Economic incentives are a powerful thing and as we've already gone over parents that want children but otherwise couldn't afford them would be all like "oh yeah, it's baby time!"

Really I feel like this is one of those things that is going to turn into something that's organized on a more societal level rather than an individual one. There are solutions it's just a matter of finding them. That and getting any sort of government program past the rising conservatism in the world.

khwarezm
Oct 26, 2010

Deal with it.
I'm surprised some people have such a bad image of this at times. I mean yes there is a big problem with creating a large dependent old population and a more heavily pressed working age one, but if the last two hundred years have taught us anything is that machines are taking on more and more of the tasks that we typically left to labour and as such it will be far more difficult to employ large amounts of people, we've had threads here in the past about the impending (or rather currently happening) robot-revolution.

But in addition to that I think we have to keep in mind that a stable human population will make less of a demand on the earth's natural resources than a growing one, at least if you want to bring everyone up to first world levels.

glowing-fish
Feb 18, 2013

Keep grinding,
I hope you level up! :)

ChipNDip posted:

In Europe, at least, people actually want more kids than they are having, and women tend to desire more kids than men do. Only a handful of countries show desired fertility below replacement, and a handful are quite a bit above that - Denmark, Sweden, Finland, France, and Ireland are all around 2.5 desired kids. In Sweden, paragon of gender equality, single digit percent of young women want less than 2 kids, while close to half of want 3+. Hell, even in the low fertility countries, Austria is the only one where more than 25% want 0 or 1 kid. Sub-replacement fertility is more a factor of modern life making it harder to provide for the size family you want than a function of women not wanting to reproduce.

Expected and desired fertility are very difficult things to measure, because they often involve trying to operationalize subjective feelings and desires. I don't doubt that even in areas like Scandinavia, many women wish to have more children, but it is hard to tell whether that is a wish or a want. Despite self-reporting to the contrary, the pattern seems to be fertility below the replacement rate, and this has been consistent for about fifty years now, and across cultures. Its happened in Europe, North America and East Asia, and its happening in Latin America, even though Latin American culture is stereotypically oriented towards big families.

rkajdi
Sep 11, 2001

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

ChipNDip posted:

In Europe, at least, people actually want more kids than they are having, and women tend to desire more kids than men do. Only a handful of countries show desired fertility below replacement, and a handful are quite a bit above that - Denmark, Sweden, Finland, France, and Ireland are all around 2.5 desired kids. In Sweden, paragon of gender equality, single digit percent of young women want less than 2 kids, while close to half of want 3+. Hell, even in the low fertility countries, Austria is the only one where more than 25% want 0 or 1 kid. Sub-replacement fertility is more a factor of modern life making it harder to provide for the size family you want than a function of women not wanting to reproduce.

This is actually news to me. I thought Europe provided some decent assistance to families to help offset the huge cost of a child, and better insurance situations make for a much safer parenting environment. Am I misunderstanding the situation, or are there other variables at play?

Amused to Death
Aug 10, 2009

google "The Night Witches", and prepare for :stare:
Kids are hugely expensive, no nation comes close to providing for the full costs of kids. Also, kids cost time and effort as well, like A LOT of time and effort over a very long time. It creates an issue in a modern world where both parents tend to work or at least go back to work eventually.

rkajdi
Sep 11, 2001

by LITERALLY AN ADMIN

Amused to Death posted:

Kids are hugely expensive, no nation comes close to providing for the full costs of kids. Also, kids cost time and effort as well, like A LOT of time and effort over a very long time. It creates an issue in a modern world where both parents tend to work or at least go back to work eventually.

This is true, but in the recent past people still had kids. Or does it fit with my original "as soon as people started being able to effectively family plan, the birth rate went through the floor" point?

Amused to Death
Aug 10, 2009

google "The Night Witches", and prepare for :stare:

rkajdi posted:

Or does it fit with my original "as soon as people started being able to effectively family plan, the birth rate went through the floor" point?

It's probably mostly this, combined with a bit of modern living. People in theory want more kids, but it just keeps being put off since people can now effectively put it off.

Helsing
Aug 23, 2003

DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU :love::love::love: JOE BIDEN

computer parts posted:

Robots (really machines in general) are good for repeatable tasks with low variation, but a lot of those are already covered by machines. The benefit of people is that they're incredibly adaptable for the price you pay them (or even if you paid three times as much as what you do now).

To use one example, you can't make a robotic janitor. You can retool your system so that trash collection is automated (like having a garbage chute or whatever) but it's always going to be less expensive to pay someone to pick up the trash.

It's never a binary choice between capital and labour. If totally automating janitorial work is prohibitively expensive that doesn't mean that you couldn't replace a team of janitors with one or two people directing a fleet of janitorial robots or something like that.

I suspect that a lot of people in the 1960s would have been incredulous at the idea that because of computers we'd go from having basically one secretary for every office worker down to one or two secretaries for an entire office. They too would probably have said that "sure, you could automate secretarial work, but a human will always be cheaper and more flexible."

Of course this is assuming that the labour market keeps functioning basically the same way it functions now and a reduced supply of labour increases costs. It's conceivable that employers will come up with some new way to depress wages in the face of rising labour scarcity. Perhaps we'll see a return to some kind of indentured servitude where you pay off your debts by agreeing to work without a wage for x number of years or something. It's hard to imagine right now but if history is any precedent then society is probably going to change over the next fifty years in ways that are simply impossible for us to currently imagine.

Grey Area
Sep 9, 2000
Battle Without Honor or Humanity

Amused to Death posted:

It's probably mostly this, combined with a bit of modern living. People in theory want more kids, but it just keeps being put off since people can now effectively put it off.
It's also about much higher expectations of what a "normal" life style is than people had in the past and changing family structures. People now expect to (and are expected to by their employers and their peers)

* have full-time out-of-the-home jobs (which often involve well over 40 hours/week)
* have a big house of their own in the suburbs at great expense in both time (commuting) and money
* have lots of time for individual recreation
* have retirement time which they spend on individual pursuits rather than taking care of their grandkids
* spend lavishly on each kid in terms of time, space, education and recreation

There is not enough time for more than one or two kids in the lavish and individualstic lifestyle that is presented as normal in modern society. Government subsidies for daycare and education only goes part way to reducing these pressures on families, as shown by the fact that rich people do not tend to have larger families than lower-income families.

I'm not saying these developments toward liberal individualism are bad, but they do explain why women are choosing to have fewer kids.

Xandu
Feb 19, 2006


It's hard to be humble when you're as great as I am.
I've always found Russia to be an interesting example of this. Between Russians leaving the country, people dying at elevated rates, and women having less kids, its population has slowly declined since the early 90s.

computer parts
Nov 18, 2010

PLEASE CLAP

Helsing posted:

It's never a binary choice between capital and labour. If totally automating janitorial work is prohibitively expensive that doesn't mean that you couldn't replace a team of janitors with one or two people directing a fleet of janitorial robots or something like that.

I suspect that a lot of people in the 1960s would have been incredulous at the idea that because of computers we'd go from having basically one secretary for every office worker down to one or two secretaries for an entire office. They too would probably have said that "sure, you could automate secretarial work, but a human will always be cheaper and more flexible."

Of course this is assuming that the labour market keeps functioning basically the same way it functions now and a reduced supply of labour increases costs. It's conceivable that employers will come up with some new way to depress wages in the face of rising labour scarcity. Perhaps we'll see a return to some kind of indentured servitude where you pay off your debts by agreeing to work without a wage for x number of years or something. It's hard to imagine right now but if history is any precedent then society is probably going to change over the next fifty years in ways that are simply impossible for us to currently imagine.

I know it's not a binary choice, my point is that the modes of labor you want to automate (the cheap menial jobs) are quite often very very hard to do. What's more likely is that easier jobs (many white collar ones) are automated, and with labor becoming more of a rare resource, wages compensate for those "menial" jobs.

Indentured servitude is unlikely on a company by company basis because presumably they'll be paying your debt so it's likely more expensive to do that and feed/clothe/etc you than just giving you a paycheck. Plus that would likely make high turnover a difficult thing.

(On a sidenote I really hate the "society will change in x decades therefore you can't argue with me" statement because why even have the thread open if you're admitting to just pissing in the wind?)

DrSunshine
Mar 23, 2009

Did I just say that out loud~~?!!!
I've sometimes wondered about this myself. Let's be optimistic and imagine a world, perhaps a hundred years from now, when every nation has been brought up to OECD standards of living. We can already see trends, even in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the fertility rate is converging on something at or below the replacement rate. That means, in the world where every nation is rich like Europe, there will be negative population growth.

What will happen if all else remains equal? In many respects, this experiment is already in progress in Japan. Absent of any radical sea-change in the methods of production, distribution or social organization, it's reasonable to expect that transfer payments to retired individuals will increase, while net productivity generated by the working population will decrease. This will shrink the economy, and result in steadily degrading standards of living (again, absent of any other influences, in our thought experiment). Once the economy has shrunk below a certain threshold, it is possible that the number of young will again exceed the number of old, and that the situation will become so dire that people will find it acceptable to have many children in hope that at least one will survive.

Therefore in our thought experiment, the conclusion is that society will peak at a certain point, undergo steady decline, until the system reaches a breaking-point and the economy drops to a place where infant mortality rate is high enough to justify 4-6 children per woman again. It's something like the inverse of the Malthusian catastrophe.

Obviously there is no guarantee that this is what will happen, it's just what might happen if things were simply left to continue without any interference.

A Buttery Pastry
Sep 4, 2011

Delicious and Informative!
:3:
For retired dependents to represent a continuously greater part of the population, doesn't that mean the fertility rate would have to keep falling too? There is the possibility that it levels out at a sub-replacement level, which would create a new steady-state population structure that's sort of the inverse of the one humanity has lived with for thousands of years, if not as skewed toward the elderly as it was for the very young. There is of course the possibility of medical technology keeping old people alive longer and longer, which would exacerbate the issue, though the cost issue could be solved by not struggling to keep people whose bodies are obviously failing alive just because we can't accept that death will catch up with us eventually. IIRC, end-of-life care is hugely expensive in terms of added longevity compared to pretty much anything else doctors can do. Add to that the quality of life in that extended life, and you wonder if those resources might not be better spend at the start of life, not the end.

As for the point about shrinking the economy, I think that should be clarified to mean "shrinking the part of the economy which will actually have to pay for all the old people". More and more of the economy might simply become disconnected from the population at large, their contributions having been automated. Given enough automation, the economy could become completely independent of humanity.

woke wedding drone
Jun 1, 2003

by exmarx
Fun Shoe
Declining birthrates should be trumpeted by neoliberals as a benefit of rising prosperity. High birth rates represent women controlled by patriarchy who would be stuck at home from their early teenage years, married to an old man and constantly impregnated without consent. Once they get a hold of a very few manufactured goods, they can earn profit and independence for themselves. Next comes the final seal on controlling, abusive husbands' power, birth control :unsmigghh:

That's the positive spin on it anyway.

Miltank
Dec 27, 2009

by XyloJW
No, I don't think so.

Miltank fucked around with this message at 18:43 on Dec 7, 2014

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


DrSunshine posted:

I've sometimes wondered about this myself. Let's be optimistic and imagine a world, perhaps a hundred years from now, when every nation has been brought up to OECD standards of living. We can already see trends, even in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the fertility rate is converging on something at or below the replacement rate. That means, in the world where every nation is rich like Europe, there will be negative population growth.

What will happen if all else remains equal? In many respects, this experiment is already in progress in Japan. Absent of any radical sea-change in the methods of production, distribution or social organization, it's reasonable to expect that transfer payments to retired individuals will increase, while net productivity generated by the working population will decrease. This will shrink the economy, and result in steadily degrading standards of living (again, absent of any other influences, in our thought experiment). Once the economy has shrunk below a certain threshold, it is possible that the number of young will again exceed the number of old, and that the situation will become so dire that people will find it acceptable to have many children in hope that at least one will survive.

Therefore in our thought experiment, the conclusion is that society will peak at a certain point, undergo steady decline, until the system reaches a breaking-point and the economy drops to a place where infant mortality rate is high enough to justify 4-6 children per woman again. It's something like the inverse of the Malthusian catastrophe.

Obviously there is no guarantee that this is what will happen, it's just what might happen if things were simply left to continue without any interference.

The most likely result of long term low birthrates is just a shitload of destitute old people shut out of the productive economy to maintain the living standards of the young. I don't think living standards for working people will fall, though growth might sharply decrease or stop. All you have to do is stop paying old people pensions and the problem disappears (for the non-old people that is)

ChipNDip
Sep 6, 2010

How many deaths are prevented by an executive order that prevents big box stores from selling seeds, furniture, and paint?

A Buttery Pastry posted:

For retired dependents to represent a continuously greater part of the population, doesn't that mean the fertility rate would have to keep falling too? There is the possibility that it levels out at a sub-replacement level, which would create a new steady-state population structure that's sort of the inverse of the one humanity has lived with for thousands of years, if not as skewed toward the elderly as it was for the very young. There is of course the possibility of medical technology keeping old people alive longer and longer, which would exacerbate the issue, though the cost issue could be solved by not struggling to keep people whose bodies are obviously failing alive just because we can't accept that death will catch up with us eventually. IIRC, end-of-life care is hugely expensive in terms of added longevity compared to pretty much anything else doctors can do. Add to that the quality of life in that extended life, and you wonder if those resources might not be better spend at the start of life, not the end.

The biggest problem with this is that the elderly are WAY more expensive than the young. It's not a big deal if you have a 1:1 ratio of workers to dependents if most of those dependents are kids, who don't usually need expensive medical care or have expectations of defined benefits.

To make this population structure work, you'd have to severely cut health spending for old people and let nature take its course, to put it crudely, in a lot more cases, if you want this to work. Government old age pensions would also either have to but cut and/or the contribution rates would have to be raised and/or you'd have to make it so that people were forced to save more privately some how. Both of those are basically political non starters.

You'd also have to have a continually increasing rate of productivity growth as well. If the population is declining, then the economy can't grow without increases in productivity.

tsa
Feb 3, 2014

computer parts posted:

I know it's not a binary choice, my point is that the modes of labor you want to automate (the cheap menial jobs) are quite often very very hard to do. What's more likely is that easier jobs (many white collar ones) are automated, and with labor becoming more of a rare resource, wages compensate for those "menial" jobs.

Indentured servitude is unlikely on a company by company basis because presumably they'll be paying your debt so it's likely more expensive to do that and feed/clothe/etc you than just giving you a paycheck. Plus that would likely make high turnover a difficult thing.

(On a sidenote I really hate the "society will change in x decades therefore you can't argue with me" statement because why even have the thread open if you're admitting to just pissing in the wind?)

Even 10 years ago taxi drivers would have laughed at the idea of being replaced by driverless cars but it's probably going to happen within the next couple decades. I think you are greatly underestimating the number of low wage jobs that can be eliminated. Sure janitors sound hard but fast food chains? Warehouse operations (see amazon)? Self-check out lines have gone from basically 0 in 2005 to 400,000 in a decade, and that trend will only increase.

On the topic of the OP, I find it hard to believe that a small population decline should have us more worried than the fact that human population was virtually stable for millennial and then quadrupled in the last 100 years. Like when my grandma was born there were like 1.5 billion people on this planet and that's just crazy to me.

tsa fucked around with this message at 19:25 on Dec 7, 2014

glowing-fish
Feb 18, 2013

Keep grinding,
I hope you level up! :)

Xandu posted:

I've always found Russia to be an interesting example of this. Between Russians leaving the country, people dying at elevated rates, and women having less kids, its population has slowly declined since the early 90s.

Russia is also a really prime counter-example to the easy thesis that smaller families and demographic shift are part of a country improving in terms of economic and welfare. It could very well be that certain countries undergoing demographic shifts in the next 20-40 years will be facing the same problems that Russia is now.

icantfindaname
Jul 1, 2008


glowing-fish posted:

Russia is also a really prime counter-example to the easy thesis that smaller families and demographic shift are part of a country improving in terms of economic and welfare. It could very well be that certain countries undergoing demographic shifts in the next 20-40 years will be facing the same problems that Russia is now.

Russia's demographics aren't the cause of their problems. Anyways, it's an even worse comparison considering the most successful post-Communist countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia have demographics as bad or worse than Russia

Seriously look at this poo poo

quote:

Poland is aging rapidly. In 1950, the median age was 25.8: half of the Polish population was younger, half older. Today it is 38.2. If current trends continue, it will be 51 by 2050.[1] As the population is aging, it has also started to decline mainly due to low birth rates and continued emigration which is impacting the economy. The number of children born in Polish families (TFR of 1,31, down from 2 in 1990) is one of the lowest in Eastern Europe.[2][3]

:eyepop:

That's significantly worse than Japan, and yet Poland's economy is one of the best in Europe. I think Russia's demographics have actually stabilized too, between higher birthrates among minorities and immigration from Central Asia

icantfindaname fucked around with this message at 20:02 on Dec 7, 2014

Helsing
Aug 23, 2003

DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU :love::love::love: JOE BIDEN

computer parts posted:

I know it's not a binary choice, my point is that the modes of labor you want to automate (the cheap menial jobs) are quite often very very hard to do. What's more likely is that easier jobs (many white collar ones) are automated, and with labor becoming more of a rare resource, wages compensate for those "menial" jobs.

I agree that white collar jobs are going to be more heavily automated - we're already seeing its happen - but plenty of menial jobs could also be substantially more automated than they are now. McDonalds and Wal Mart have both demonstrated that even with very menial jobs you can go a long way in substituting capital for labour.

quote:

Indentured servitude is unlikely on a company by company basis because presumably they'll be paying your debt so it's likely more expensive to do that and feed/clothe/etc you than just giving you a paycheck. Plus that would likely make high turnover a difficult thing.

Perhaps the company gives you your food and clothing on 'credit' and then forces you to work unpaid hours to pay off your every increasing debt load. Arrangements like that one existed in the past and in theory there's no reason they couldn't reappear. Right now I think such an arrangement would run into legal difficulty and would generate a lot of public outrage but if inequality and general economic conditions continue to deteriorate then social norms will eventually adjust to reflect that.

quote:

(On a sidenote I really hate the "society will change in x decades therefore you can't argue with me" statement because why even have the thread open if you're admitting to just pissing in the wind?)

Where did you get the impression I was suggesting you can't argue with me? Pointing out that society will change in unexpected ways is just a common sense observation, not me attempting to shut down debate or force everyone to agree with me.

I think speculating about how trends in technology and demographics will change the economy is a valuable exercise on its own, regardless of whether it generates accurate predictions of the future. I just think we should balance that exercise against the recognition that the future is going to be influenced by events that we cannot anticipate in advance. Imagine somebody in 1900 trying to predict the world of 1920, or somebody in 1920 trying to predicted the world of 1940. We're no better off when it comes to imagining the world in 2034.

computer parts
Nov 18, 2010

PLEASE CLAP

tsa posted:

Even 10 years ago taxi drivers would have laughed at the idea of being replaced by driverless cars but it's probably going to happen within the next couple decades. I think you are greatly underestimating the number of low wage jobs that can be eliminated. Sure janitors sound hard but fast food chains? Warehouse operations (see amazon)? Self-check out lines have gone from basically 0 in 2005 to 400,000 in a decade, and that trend will only increase.
What I'm saying is that white collar work is easier to automate.

(and current labor is more expensive too)

Helsing
Aug 23, 2003

DON'T POST IN THE ELECTION THREAD UNLESS YOU :love::love::love: JOE BIDEN
What's your evidence for white collar being easier to automate? Obviously some tasks like calculating sums or typing are easier but can you quantify how "white collar" as a generic area of activity is easier to automate than any other large sector of the economy? Factories have become ridiculously automated compared to 100 years ago and even front line retail is a lot more automated now than in the recent past.

Vitamin P
Nov 19, 2013

Truth is game rigging is more difficult than it looks pls stay ded

ToxicSlurpee posted:

The other thing I'm wondering if part of this is just the economics of it being impossible. A lot of people are saying "birth rates below replacement rates is really bad" but we're already seeing the effects of overpopulation all over the place. Global warming is a big example. There is also only so much of this rock and everything on it to go around. 7 billion people might just turn out to be too goddamned many. Keeping our numbers in check could very well turn out to be a good thing. Now that we have reliable birth control it's entirely possible that we could keep a cap on our population.

The link between global population and global warming is iffy at best, and it's often used as a soft smokescreen against environmental controls, ie "It's this inevitable. uncontrollable fact of life that's causing global warming, so we may as well just let transnationals be,". If we are honestly concerned about not irrevocably loving up the planet then 'stopping people having babies' is a very minor and very complex (and very fascistic) measure that would be a long way down a practical list of interventions.

computer parts
Nov 18, 2010

PLEASE CLAP

Helsing posted:

What's your evidence for white collar being easier to automate? Obviously some tasks like calculating sums or typing are easier but can you quantify how "white collar" as a generic area of activity is easier to automate than any other large sector of the economy? Factories have become ridiculously automated compared to 100 years ago and even front line retail is a lot more automated now than in the recent past.

White collar work is typically concerned with transfers of information. That type of work has been and is being quickly subsumed by computer systems, and the trend of having consumers access and modify their own documents rather than relying on a (human) middleman.

If you want to lump in creative works (i.e., engineering, advertising and the like) into white collar then no, those won't be easily automated.

khwarezm
Oct 26, 2010

Deal with it.

Vitamin P posted:

The link between global population and global warming is iffy at best, and it's often used as a soft smokescreen against environmental controls, ie "It's this inevitable. uncontrollable fact of life that's causing global warming, so we may as well just let transnationals be,". If we are honestly concerned about not irrevocably loving up the planet then 'stopping people having babies' is a very minor and very complex (and very fascistic) measure that would be a long way down a practical list of interventions.

This is extremely flawed. The biggest driver to global warming is the high consumption of people in the developed world. It may be the case that you can have a high population and not have anywhere near as large an impact on the environment as a whole so long as their standard of living is kept low but that's exactly the catch. It becomes an awful trade off, keep people poor to keep the environment intact in exchange for a large population(so that we can... uhh), the worst of all worlds if you ask me. Bringing the rest of the world to even a quarter of the standard of living to the west will necessitate a large increase in consumption and likely weigh heavier on the planet, in that light the difference between 9 billion people and 15 billion people is pretty drat important.

Also there are environmental issues beyond Climate Change that have some (some, like everything else there's other stuff going on too) relation to population, deforestation and water pressure for example.

khwarezm fucked around with this message at 23:02 on Dec 7, 2014

ToxicSlurpee
Nov 5, 2003

-=SEND HELP=-


Pillbug

Vitamin P posted:

The link between global population and global warming is iffy at best, and it's often used as a soft smokescreen against environmental controls, ie "It's this inevitable. uncontrollable fact of life that's causing global warming, so we may as well just let transnationals be,". If we are honestly concerned about not irrevocably loving up the planet then 'stopping people having babies' is a very minor and very complex (and very fascistic) measure that would be a long way down a practical list of interventions.

What? More people = more consumption. More consumption = more emissions. Therefore, more people = more emissions.

computer parts
Nov 18, 2010

PLEASE CLAP

ToxicSlurpee posted:

What? More people = more consumption. More consumption = more emissions. Therefore, more people = more emissions.

Only if per capita consumption is constant. The technology currently exists (more or less) to replace the vast vast majority of emissions and it would be infinitely more palatable than trying to do population control for the populace.

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asdf32
May 15, 2010

I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

computer parts posted:

Only if per capita consumption is constant. The technology currently exists (more or less) to replace the vast vast majority of emissions and it would be infinitely more palatable than trying to do population control for the populace.

Population is a major factor. Per capita consumption matters but doesn't really relate to population. So population always matters.


On the general topic of automation it's interesting to note that decreasing birth rates will create additional general demand as retired people spend down their savings and specifically in areas like healthcare which are harder to automate. Like some other people, I wasn't quite aware of the scale of declining birth rates. It's actually a reasonably significant factor when talking about future job demand.

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