Women and the slowing global population

https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/women-and-the-slowing-global-population

by anotherevan • 8 years ago

38 93 8 years ago

pursuit.unimelb.edu.au

rayiner2• 8 years ago

Although fertility has stabilised at levels above two children per woman in some countries, in the countries of Central Asia, the fertility rate (which had been close to two) has risen to around three children per woman. This is linked to the fact that many women there are having the number of children they want to have.

That last fact is interesting. The average ideal family size reported by adults in the US is 2.7, with 40% believing that three or more is ideal: https://news.gallup.com/poll/236696/americans-theory-think-l.... The birth rate is quite a bit below that. In countries like Spain or Germany where the birth rate is below 1.5, the ideal number of children is 2.2+.

watwut2• 8 years ago

The question arises, "ideal" for what?

sys_64738• 8 years ago

To keep a constant population or you end up with a bubble. What people also don't realize until they think about it is that you want a higher rate as that means higher probability that there will be people funding your social security when you are older. That requires 2.2 in the USA and rates like 1.5 mean a bubble of older people and not enough paying in.

lotsofpulp2• 8 years ago

Different people have different goals. Status symbol, experience of raising children, support network for old age. There are even a few cults in the US (and worldwide) that basically pump out as many kids as possible to take over all the local resources and stack elected positions with members of their own tribe.

toasterlovin10• 8 years ago

My pet theory is that humans are poorly adapted to modern life. More specifically, there is something about the information environment that scrambles whatever mechanism we have for determining if we are doing well enough to bring more children into the world. I mean, it has to be that, since objectively speaking families in the developed world are able to provide for children at a level higher than anywhere else in the world, both past and present, yet we are having less children than we want.

jerf• 8 years ago

In generational terms, birth control and safe abortion are less than three generations old even in the first world and there are still places they have not penetrated. I expect that if the world as it is today in that sense froze, that eventually we'd evolve out "people who were willing to use birth control".

But that would take several generations even so, and the world is not going to stay as it is for the requisite "several generations".

In the meantime, we are certainly not adapted for those things, though I think many if not most people reading this would not particularly care for what "adapted for those things" actually looks like, since it pretty obviously amounts to "not using those things" over the long term.

Rinzler89• 8 years ago

families in the developed world are able to provide for children at a level higher than anywhere else in the world, both past and present, yet we are having less children than we want.

Answer in 3 words: Real estate prices.

If you're a couple in the developed world you probably want to give your kids living standards to match. Fat chance doing that unless you and your partner aren't high earners

21• 8 years ago

Conventional Explanations of Changes in Fertility:

Mortality decline has meant that most children survive, so that families do not need to have large numbers of children to ensure one or two survivors. In addition, in modern, urban, industrial society, children have turned from being an asset to constituting a financial liability. Children cost more to raise and support in cities, child labour is not acceptable, and public education is common and required. As a result, the period that children need to be supported before becoming independent is long, resulting in high costs for families. As incomes improved, many families began to emphasize quality over quantity

http://uregina.ca/~gingrich/mar1298.htm

Sharlin4• 8 years ago

yet we are having less children than we want.

How so?

Evolution has not programmed into us any sort of drive for careful family planning to optimized the number of offspring. We simply have a drive to have sex. For the vast majority of human (pre)history, optimization of offspring number occurred the same way as with all sexually reproducing species: natural miscarriage and child mortality.

Now that we have control of our own fertility, there's still nothing that drives us to especially want to raise a somehow evolutionarily optimal number of offspring. As with almost any other human behavior it's up to societal values and norms and individual preferences.

baud1472582• 8 years ago

My pet theory is that humans are poorly adapted to modern life

Or modern life is not adapted to humans

cynicalkane• 8 years ago

I think it's the contrast between what people want for themselves and what brings status. Maintaining status while raising kids--and having status for the kid you're raising, like sports teams or good schools--is expensive. Status is how society signals you should do something, so it's a strong incentive.

The situation, at least in NYC where I live, seems reversed for the very rich, where more kids is a clear signal that you have a lot of money and yet spare time for your kids.

pdimitar8• 8 years ago

As a guy living in Eastern Europe: definitely not the case around here.

It's just that life is way too uncertain and everybody is fighting for scraps. Many couples either decide they don't want to bring a child in such uncertain conditions -- like me and my wife -- or they risk it and end up providing very subpar support for their kids. You should see two parents crying and hugging each other and their kid in front of a store because they cannot afford to buy it a $50 LEGO set... It can break your heart and give you a new perspective on the perceived notion of "the world, globally speaking, gets better".

We the people adapt quite well to basically everything, I'd say. But the developed world you speak of is basically the smaller part of the civilized territory on the planet. Go ask people in Nepal, my country Bulgaria, or Hungaria, or Serbia, or Brazil about the average living standard and what miracles many parents achieve just so their kids get decent education, are well-fed and have some small entertainment budget on top of that.

I mean we are most certainly both correct for the respective filter bubbles we are living in. But I still wanted to offer you another perspective.

PunchTornado• 8 years ago

For me the ideal is 3 kids, but I don't want to raise 3 kids.

YinglingLight3• 8 years ago

Even though responsibility is what gives life meaning. I feel like many men are 'checking out' of society's responsibilities (which need not be related to raising children) for a number of factors.

k__• 8 years ago

Interesting.

A few weeks ago I heard the population would peak at about 10billion and that women would get two children if they knew the children don't die early.

epx2• 8 years ago

That was the only one thing me and my wife were in complete agreement - 0.5 sons (either 0 or 1). Did vasectomy 2 months after kid was born, because I knew she would change her mind :D And no, I won't reverse, I am deadly afraid of needles and doctors.

beerlord2• 8 years ago

Highly intelligent and conscientious people (which I presume as a HN reader you are) having fewer children leads merely to Idiocracy :-(

Look up the work of Richard Lynn, get that reversal, and do it for civilisation :-)

epx2• 8 years ago

Yeah, I have heard that argument from many friends. This is the failure mode of current civilization - child rearing has been made too damn expensive and even a legal liability for responsible people, while irresponsible people reproduce like rats and that's ok then. I see that happening, but I won't change the tide and I won't pey the personal cost.

jatsign• 8 years ago

Ethical question - is it unethical to contribute to a charity/foundation/whatnot that works towards people having fewer children, given that such would inevitably be most effective in third-world countries where the birth rate is highest? Or would that be western imperialism pushing our values on the less developed world?

namanyayg• 8 years ago

Such a charity would possibly educate women or increase access to safe sex, how is that a problem? Speaking as a citizen of a developing country, I personally wouldn't mind at all.

llampx2• 8 years ago

To quote Idiocracy, the people seeking out contraception are the ones we want reproducing, either because of their values or their genes.

samnwa• 8 years ago

Yes it's ethical. No it's not pushing our values on the less developed.

beerlord2• 8 years ago

Gentle answer:

No, because there are millions of women who have an unmet need for contraception. You are simply helping them access what they already want. Additionally, having fewer children allows more resources to be concentrated into each individual child, so that they are more likely to receive education and healthcare, and escape perpetual poverty.

Harsh answer:

Africa is simply incapable of handling 4 billion people (forecast for 2100). Already the continent is a net food importer. If they are willing to accept our aid, investment and technology, why should we not expect them to moderate their total fertility in return? By having fewer children now, starvation and destitution is being prevented into the future, particularly as climate change worsens. And what is wrong with pushing our values? As we have seen with the actions of Saudi Arabia and China recently, the West, for all its imperfections, is the best culture that Humanity has available. Generally Western societies are safe, innovative, and wealthy. Why not push the values that make those things possible onto the developing world?

francisofascii• 8 years ago

Depends on the methods used to promote fewer children. Education, great. Sterilization without consent, bad. The right to procreate is a fundamental human right, so we can't lose track of that.

pdimitar8• 8 years ago

Many women in developing countries only have kids as a side effect of unprotected sex. They didn't want the children but adapted and made it work.

Nothing unethical about supporting a cause where such women can protect themselves from unwanted pregnancy until they feel they are really ready for children.

mihaifm• 8 years ago

I would argue that the exponential increase in population in the 20th century was a "bubble", explained by the discovery of antibiotics and other advances in medicine. People that were not expected to live past the life expectancy (which was 40 years or so) lived on, thus overlapping with the next generations.

If there won't be any other similar breakthroughs in medicine, I don't think the exponential growth can last much longer, people will be born and die in a more predictable pattern.

Cthulhu_• 8 years ago

I get the feeling this article is conflating birth rate with actual population growth. One reason why people have less children is that more of them survive. Happy to be shown I'm wrong though.

qubax• 8 years ago

I get the feeling this article is conflating birth rate with actual population growth.

It's not. Fertility rate for the US and the developed world is below replacement. And in the developing world, it has been dropping consistently.

One reason why people have less children is that more of them survive.

That's a reason why women don't have 5 or 6 children, but that's not a reason why women has less than 2 on average.

lev994• 8 years ago

In an agricultural society children are an asset. In an industrial or service based economy children are a sacrifice. This has always been my view on why birthrates are declining.

belorn5• 8 years ago

But - big picture - what’s important is that reproductive rights are extended to all women and men.

Reproductive rights for men as consistently ended at the point of conception, with the modern feminist movement seemingly being one of the strongest voice against men having any rights beyond that point. Did Professor Peter McDonald just mistype when he includes men in this part off the article?

annabellish3• 8 years ago

I don't think this is a fair analysis of either current feminist thought or the current state of affairs. The reproductive rights of men are important and there's no suggestion any should be removed, but that doesn't mean that in a sexually dimorphic society both members of a childbearing couple (or more generally, all members of a childbearing group) have the same _options_.

Men and women both have the right of bodily autonomy. In a "traditional" childbearing couple of one straight, cisgender man and one straight, cisgender woman, this identical right expresses itself in very different ways between them, but that doesn't mean that "reproductive rights for men are ended at the point of conception" unless you really, _really_ try.

belorn5• 8 years ago

Talking about bodily autonomy to be the start and end of reproductive rights is a bit unfair to the concept at large. Planned parenthood is not "planned bodily autonomy", except given a different name. Planned parenthood, pro-choice, and similar initiatives talk about the choice to be a parent and the benefit in society where children are born from adults that want to have children. There is no physical reason why a sexually dimorphic society can not provide planned parenthood that gives both adults the same choices, rights and responsibilities regardless of gender or if its woman - man, woman - woman or man - man. In Sweden we even have a new law where the state will sponsoring single women that want to become single mothers through artificial insemination.

After the point of conception what rights do men in general have? Its not their signature on the paper that specify who the parents to the child are. They can't decide if they will become a parent or not. All rights and responsibilities are exclusively decided by the mother, as the law dictate. Bodily autonomy has nothing to do with those laws, and the human right of bodily autonomy doesn't need to end simply because men are given the choice to decide if they want to take the responsibility to be a parent and raise a child.

lev994• 8 years ago

What specific right do you want to give men after the point of conception?

bwood2• 8 years ago

In most developed countries there is no easy way for man to "opt out" of responsibility for an existing pregnancy. The argument goes that women can have an abortion or give the child up for adoption if the pregnancy is unwanted, but men have no guaranteed say in what happens. One slip up and they are on the hook for child support, etc.

Basically, some people think men should have a right to abdicate responsibility for a pregnancy at least up to a certain point.

gottebp• 8 years ago

A wise person here once suggested viewing the world population as a parallel computer, with each human mind working to move us forward. With this view in mind, as soon as space travel opens the solar system Malthusian philosophy dies forever -- we are going to need as many people as possible both to colonize and to discover answers to all the new problems that will arise. What would technological growth look like with a trillion minds across the Galaxy inventing and discovering?

intralizee• 8 years ago

the cpu would burn out

sbarker• 8 years ago

War.

drdeadringer2• 8 years ago

Please expand upon whatever you mean by this one-word comment.

lev994• 8 years ago

I wish more people held this view. It surely leads to an increased investment in education.

tzs• 8 years ago

Even with space travel and even assuming an infinite universe there exists no growth rate R > 0 such that human population can grow at that rate or higher indefinitely, unless we get faster than light space travel, so it is not going to be as easy as you think to entirely eliminate Malthusian concerns.

Exponential growth, even with a small exponent, is astounding.

Suppose, for instance, we squeeze all of humanity into one densely populated volume. Let's give each person just one cubic meter. As population grows, we expand that volume, maintaining the density of one person per cubic meter. With all of space at our disposal, we are now set for a very long time, right?

Right, we are, but probably not as long as most people would guess. Let's say that the humans of Densopolis have a growth rate of 0.01%. Each year the population is 1.0001 times the year before.

After 900k years of that growth, the frontier of Densopolis needs to be expanding faster than the speed of light to make room.

If they grow at 0.1%, or 1.001x per year, it only takes 84k years to hit the speed of light limit. At 1%, or 1.01x per year, they hit it in under 8k years.

Another neat illustration. Instead of packing densely, let's say humanity spreads throughout the Milky Way. If they maintain a growth rate of 1.0001x per year, after 940k years all the mass of the Milky Way will have been used to make human bodies. There will be none left for stars, interstellar dust, planets, or any other life forms.

At 1.001x, we need all the mass after 94k years. 1.01x does it in under 10k years.

lmm• 8 years ago

Why the assumption that a smaller global population is better?

Most of the things that make life good come from other people. People are moving to cities because, on balance, it's better to live around more other people than fewer. Prices for natural resources continue to fall in real terms, because we have more than enough - the most limited resource that modern civilization depends on is human ingenuity.

Oowee1Ee• 8 years ago

the most limited resource that modern civilization depends on is human ingenuity

The most limited resource are ecospheres. We currently only have one of those. Overtax that one up and things go downhill.

evunveot• 8 years ago

Imagine a world with double the amount of people living in it.

I find it mildly disturbing that the author assumes everyone reading this sentence is going to agree that it's an ominous prospect. Obviously, the implication is that it would be a world of fourteen billion people the vast majority of whom are on the brink of starvation, but we've (as a species) overcome Malthusian obstacles before. Why shouldn't having as many thriving human lives as possible be a goal worth striving for? If every human life has intrinsic (not to mention economic and cultural) value, then declining reproductive rates are a form of opportunity cost, not "one of the most important ... achievements in human history." And if we can't agree (or at least agree to act as if) every human life has intrinsic value, we're on our way to undermining the foundations of peaceful coexistence.

quotemstr• 8 years ago

FWIW, this idea is what philosophers call "the repugnant conclusion", and the problem it presents is largely unsolved in normative ethics. It's one reason that I don't think formal ethical reasoning is a useful activity: in the end, we do what feels right or wrong, and we can't reason ourselves into a feeling.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/

conscion• 8 years ago

I think a lot of these articles miss an important consideration. The underlying economies of the world have functioned on an unseen assumption: the population (i.e. consumers & producers) always increase. This has been true for the entirety of modern history. There should be some discussion on how that changes once the population either stops increasing, or declines.

This is somewhat discussed with the aging baby boomer generation being larger than their childrens, but that dynamic will likely become the new norm in many countries. Japan in particular is experiencing this first hand with one of the lowest birth rates.

OctoberThoughts2• 8 years ago

Posting from a throwaway account for privacy on this one.

For me personally it's never seemed worth it, even though I am well off and healthy. I've never been with a man I trusted enough to feel safe with, like he could protect me or take care of me while I was in the vulnerable state of pregnancy / early motherhood. Partly this is emotional and not rational, I'm capable of taking of myself. The men, on the other hand, have all had chronic depression.

I told each of them fairly early on in each relationship that I did not want to have children, but I never told them why. It's a harsh thing to say, right? "I don't want to have your children because you have depression and so it'd be worse than raising kids alone."

But I would rather never have children than try to raise them with someone who can't get themselves to work on a regular basis. My partner right now already needs so much from me, if we had children there'd be nothing left of my life.

He is a brilliant, loving person, but if it weren't for birth control I'd never risk a relationship at all with someone like him.

All this exposition is for my point: which is that even if you have food and shelter, there's reasons to not be willing to bear the responsibility of a(n additional) child.

pdimitar8• 8 years ago

You have a lot of respect from me and all men who appreciate honesty! There's a lot of us out there, trust me -- and we are able to handle ourselves and aging parents quite adequately as well.

I was also very open with my wife when we sat and discussed whether we should live together (4-5 months into a very successful and passionate relationship where absolutely nothing was ever wrong -- that was 4 years ago). I told her in very plain terms that since she is yet to invent herself -- she is still very young -- and since only I provide the money, then I am not willing to increase the stress and responsibilities on myself just because. I was very upfront and told her outright that if her plans include kids then we should just remain casual passtionate lovers and not seek a deeper relationship.

She agreed with me on the no-kids policy -- and we started living together -- because she feels that where we live (Eastern Europe) life is way too hard and economically unstable to bring a kid into. She is quite a bit younger than myself but already suffered a lot and our relationship naturally evolved into this sacred island where we both find comfort, love, passion, friendship and time for ourselves. We feel ZERO desire to have kids even 4.5 years into the relationship.

My wife, like your partner, is also a brilliant and loving person but I don't know how much more years I can provide for both of us (and my widowed mother) before I collapse. We are both well aware that the modern civilization is as unnatural and hostile to the human soul as it can get and that many people simply cannot adapt and end up being an endless drag on somebody else... but she knows that she eventually has to adapt. I take a lot of bullets for her in the hopes of her repaying the favor one day but if it doesn't happen then we could eventually part ways.

...I am way too chatty these days. Sorry.

What I am getting at is this: IMO your partner should have some direction and goal. It's a very good strategy against depression and is recommended in many therapies. Receiving a soft ultimatum from your loved one -- "I am giving you 5 years to reinvent yourself and start participating in the family's finances" -- might sound harsh but definitely lands people right back in reality. Money does not grow on trees. Depression is a b1tch but you need a strong partner standing right beside you and not always behind you. Your partner must be aware of that.

Don't take this as an unsolicited advice. I am mostly saying that I strongly relate with you and I am sharing my thoughts on the topic. Keep going!

kazinator2• 8 years ago

The problem is that this slowing of birth rates due to the improvement in women's status will basically destroy those societies. Those societies where women have low status shall inherit the Earth while the rest peter out. Too bad that a good thing has to be self-defeating.

Women and the slowing global population

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