After watching this video I am left with this question.
The video ultimately claims that humans will not disappear, but doesn’t do a great job explaining why.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but for the (or a) population to be and remain stable, the total fertility rate needs to be equal to the global replacement rate (which recently was 2.3).
And since the total average fertility rate appears to be currently at this 2.3, any drop in the fertility rate in place A would have to be compensated with a rise in the fertility rate in place B (assuming that, at some point, we would like to stop population decline)?
I guess one way for a population to remain stable, while women are having fewer than 2.3 children, would be to have fewer men? If a population has 100 women and 10 men, each woman would only have to have on average (a bit more than) 1.1 child? (Which would of course also require a collective form of prenatal sex selection.)
I realize that would be bonkers and unethical. Just wondering out loud.
If it stays there forever, yes.
It won’t though, as there become fewer humans it’s likely it will become easier to have more children again (fewer people for the same amount of finite resources) and the rate will increase.
(fewer people for the same amount of finite resources) and the rate will increase.
Funny way to think…
Actually it is poor countries (less ressources) that have the higher birth rates.
I’d say, having children is hard work, but people in rich countries are lazy :-)
Blaming this on “laziness” is a really naive and unfair take on why rich nations have less kids. The more likely reasons, and more commonly accepted reasons are:
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better career opportunities for women
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better education
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costs of children
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challenges with child care
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easier access to contraceptives
I like how we phrase this as “better education” and “better career opportunities for women”. While technically true relative to poor countries, these explain nothing about why fertility rates are so low. They are related, but framing them differently will help us understand.
Why do people have fewer kids? Because economic life in most developed countries is relatively unstable, and to ensure economic stability, we require people to develop years of education and work experience to receive a comfortable salary. In many places we now require two such incomes. This mean women really don’t have a choice but to pursue advanced education and work, whether they want to or not. And we are not willing to accommodate children during education or work. This means women (and increasingly men too) are severely penalized economically for having children, and so of course people will have far fewer on average.
Another likely factor is the atomized nature of the modern family. Many people need to move to distant places for work, severing their direct ties to family and community. Human mothers aren’t well equipped to raise children solo, and even two parents is a stretch if you have 2+ kids. In past times we always relied on neighbors and extended family to help keep an eye on the youngsters and to teach parents the skills they need to do it right.
If you look at the very wealthy, there is some evidence that they have higher fertility, though I couldn’t find good data on this so take it with a grain of salt. But they have access to enough money to buy personalized childcare, which solves almost all of the above issues.
In developing countries, children often mean free labor and form the basis of your retirement through elder care, so while the economic conditions are of course worse overall, the opposite incentives exist. Another factor is that poor, agricultural societies are almost always extremely patriarchal, which tends to lead to high (involuntary) fertility.
In my view, egalitarian economic reforms will help bring fertility rates in all countries towards a healthy moderate level.
In poorer countries, the investment into each child is minimal. By the time they were 8 or 9 years old they were expected to contribute to the family. Higher child mortality rates also plays into this, as most families lose a few kids to disease etc. Children are seen as a commodity that they control to make the parents/grandparents lives better.
In industrialized societies the amount of resources dedicated to each child is more than the the resources dedicated to 5 or 6 families in poorer countries. Children are dependent on their parents well into adulthood. As the cost to raise the kids increase the average family size decreases because of limited resources.
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No, the only people complaining about replacement rates are governments that are in bed with corperations that need endless growth to feed thier capitalists machines.
If a generation is 25 years, there 7.9 billion people on Earth, and the replacement rate is 1.0, then humans will disappear in about 800 years.
If we enforced a 1.0 replacement rate for two generations, the global population would decrease by 75%, leaving 1.9 billion people in play. This is the global population in 1919. If we go three generations, we could get down to 985ish million prople.
That would be amazing for our climate goals and would be considered ethical and humane by most.
The replacement rate isn’t static. It depends on both how many people exist and how many people are having babies and how many babies they’re having. If the total number of babies per year stays constant, then whether it’s below or above the replacement rate depends on the size of the population. So for a hyper simplified example, if 100 babies are born per yer, that’s below replacement for a population of 110, but above replacement for a population of 90, but overall the population size will trend towards 100. Obviously real life is way more complicated, but even if the birth rate is low now, it’s far more likely we’re just moving towards a different population size, not a population of zero
