I disagree, I think in the countries and social spheres where this is an _actual_ choice for women, it is very much a "life choice" (because the rest of the world makes more than enough children to resolve the issues of "sustainable human society"). When we'll get to a point where world wide population growth drops below 2.1 factor, maybe then we can start reconsidering this policy.
And that said, longer term, what is not sustainable is a continuing growth of population, not reducing it. Yes I realize reducing population invalidates many things currently supporting our civilization but having to deal with the pain of those changes seems much better than dealing with the issues of an overpopulated planet.
That's not really a rebuttal to my point--just an assertion that we should take advantage of the arbitrage opportunity while we can. It tells us nothing about what a sustainable liberal society looks like.
And the fact is that the arbitrage opportunity won't last long. If you're 30-something, the world population is currently projected to start declining within your lifetime.
I think we are going to have to adapt to a post-growth world. Or maybe things will grow in other ways. I am not worried about declining birth rates. It's not like we are heading for a "Children of Men" scenario. The population will stabilize before it goes to zero. Or maybe we will just grow people in vats.
I'm not talking about endless growth. I'm talking about simply maintaining existing societies. The fertility rate in South Korea is now below 1. That's a society that's basically gone within three generations.
> The population will stabilize before it goes to zero.
Right--so what does society and culture look like then?
> Or maybe we will just grow people in vats.
We can't even fix male pattern baldness for god's sake.
Culture and societies change. No one can predict the future. If the population of South Korea goes down to 49 million (from 50 million today), why does that automatically mean that they will lose their culture?
>We can't even fix male pattern baldness for god's sake.
I'm sure we will fix that before the population gets to zero!
Elon Musk used to be bald. Now he’s not.
Who will raise the people who were made in vats? Which is the real problem here, not who reproduces.
I would say it depends. My wife would not want to miss it. Especially her first birth was indeed a wonderful experience. The second was too fast but still a wonderful experience.
Why children per woman? In such a world where humans grow in vats, it would be children per person...
Especially when there are other women (or people actually) looking for the same professionnal success while minimizing the impact of bearing (the only exclusively female element in this matter, note) and raising children on their careers as much as possible.
All I meant is of course you will be penalized for taking years off when some people (even of the same sex and with the same supposed disadvantages) don't.
And how do you ever fix that? There will always be people willing to not have kids to further their career. Or work 16 hr days. Or never see their family. These are often the people at the top. Do you force them not to do it?
Reminds me of this scientist I worked with. He’d work all day, go home get dinner, come back and work until 9 or 10. He was an internationally known scientist. No way he could do that and have a healthy family relationship.
Now try having a family and competing with this guy?
The problem is that there is overshoot - when you watched half your siblings die young, you don't simply take the doctor's word for it that your kids are all going to grow up strong and healthy. It takes a few generations to adapt. During this period of time, you have excessive population growth, and then even if these people have children only at replacement rate, the population will still increase as the more populous younger cohorts replace the smaller previous cohorts.
Eventually people start having sub replacement rate children as there are just too many people. In theory this is good, but soo too here will there be overshoot. If you were an only child and your parents were only children, it's hard to start having large families. Even if you wanted to, you need to support a lot of older generations, which puts a severe strain on your ability to also have lots of kids. Eventually yes, things will turn around and the population won't go to zero, but decades of population shrinking and the associated economic issues will do a number on the population. India will have to deal with this problem in a century, much of the developed world will have to deal with it a lot sooner.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109051381...
The heritability of fertility makes world population stabilization unlikely
Probably true, but eugenics motivations aside (and if you insist on going there we have egg donation technology), we probably don’t need to figure out a way to make motherhood and a small fraction of the most demanding jobs compatible.
There’s nothing fundamentally unworkable about a world where you can be a unicorn tech founder, big law partner, or Harvard professor or you can have children in your 20s but not both.
I don't think it's really that small of a fraction. It's not just tech founders who are faced with career tracks that have a pressure to perform in the key 25-35 age range.
> There’s nothing fundamentally unworkable about a world where you can be a unicorn tech founder, big law partner, or Harvard professor or you can have children in your 20s but not both.
Insofar as these are the people who become CEOs and politicians, that actually is a problem.
It's quite normal to have a population that increases exponentially, hits resource limits, and then decreases rapidly. (This was like literally 1/3 of my calculus class - it's a pretty classic example for coupled partial differential equations.) Eventually the population declines enough that the resource limits no longer apply, and people start having babies again. Population isn't a monolithic concept: there will always be some women who have children regardless of their incentives.
I'll just be happy if we can get there without war, famine, pestilence, and death, which are the normal results when a society hits resource limits.
Your best case scenario is population collapse, but to do it without disease or conflict? Just everyone peacefully getting old and dying without having children?
Oftentimes, what's good for the empire isn't good for the citizens of the empire. So yeah, I'm happy to leave behind the wreckages of a dead empire if it means more for the people in that empire.
Unfortunately, I'm guessing that we'll get the war, or the pandemic, or both. That's how things have historically ended.
We have some additional complexities in that a lot of those growth limits are because of the interplay between economics and population. There's plenty more room for humans on earth; there's not more room within major metropolises without triggering our "It's too crowded; better not breed" instincts. But economic forces needed to sustain those high populations promote concentration and crowding.
The problem with this viewpoint is that, at scale, having kids isn't just an individual "life choice." It's a basic requirement for a sustainable human society. People have to have 2.1 kids on average in order for society to keep existing. We're well below that in almost the entire developed world. That means the most liberal societies in the world, where women can choose to pursue careers and business, are also not sustainable and can't continue to exist without importing people from societies with traditional gender roles. In other words, they currently exist only due to a sort of arbitrage and aren't viable in the steady state the way they're structured now.
If you think liberal societies are a good thing, then we really need to figure out a way to allow women to have careers and also children. It's not "having it all." It's about pursuing two pillars of life that for most people are both necessary: work, and family. We should be thinking about it in the same way as we design buildings to have sufficient bathrooms for everyone--as a biological fact of life that we must accommodate.