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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  for
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Dec 6, 2014 11:05
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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.
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Dec 6, 2014 19:39
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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.
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Dec 7, 2014 00:30
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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.
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Dec 7, 2014 19:41
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Grand Theft Autobot posted:I don't have time to effort-post this right now, but Thomas Piketty talks about population growth rate declines at length in Capital in the 21st Century. If UN estimates for future population growth and economic growth hold true, then the 21st century will largely see a decline to stabilization at low levels of both population growth and economic growth for most areas in the world. He points out that Europe has essentially already entered this steady state, and that America is likely not far behind. I think that applying economic models to wide demographic and technological change only works in the short to intermediate range. At a certain point, the assumptions about underlying conditions don't really don't make sense anymore. I think that making guesses about demographics and economic changes out to about 2040 or 2050 make sense at this point, but to talk about what the economy will look like in the later half of the 21st century is just like if someone in 1914 was trying to guess what the economy would look like in 1980.
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Dec 9, 2014 09:37
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