Eric Kaufmann, a sociologist, wrote a book on this. It’s called Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? and basically argues that high birthrate cultures eventually win out against secular childfree or child-limited ones.
I find it to be pretty convincing. People tend to create projections of the future based on the current world, which is of course quite limited. Very rarely do we consider the actual cultural background of the “people of the future.”
Isn't the percentage of non religious rising globally? We can't really ever converge into one way or another since the distribution of intelligence among population will always be the same. Some people will need religion and some people will need rationalism. As long as we have religious freedom the only thing that will change is converging from imposed religious declaration to real/actual one
In absolute numbers, the nonreligious are growing. As a percentage of population, they are shrinking, largely due to birth rates.
Re:The Economics of Falling Populations
by concordDance on Monday April 05, 2021 @05:24AM
(#26696907)
Not just subcultures even! There's probably some people in the 7 billion people on Earth with a mutation that makes them really really want to have children. This mutation will spread like wildfire.
Re:The Economics of Falling Populations
by beforeolives on Monday April 05, 2021 @05:40AM
(#26697009)
This isn't about mutations; it's about economic status, healthcare and education. Wealthier countries consistently have lower birth rates.
IIRC education of women is the most significant factor in the decline of birth rates around the world, so those same groups would have to somehow limit access to education for women.
There is also a probability that either longevity research [1] or a technology to grow humans from any cell artificially [2] will be developed soon completely changing the population dynamics.
Re:The Economics of Falling Populations
by imtringued on Wednesday April 07, 2021 @03:54AM
(#26721637)
Where did all the non religious people come from though? What prevents the "atheism" wave from appearing again?
It will be a rather different population, likely more religious and more conservative, considering that many of the subcultures with higher birth rates are conservative religious subcultures – and, the more conservative and religious a group is, the higher their birth rate tends to be. A society dominated by religious conservatives may produce a slower rate of technological innovation as much as one with a more secular but declining population does. On the other hand, there will always be defections – even highly insular groups such as Old Order Amish and ultra-Orthodox Jews can still have a 5-20% defection rate, and with less insular groups the defection rate tends to be higher – and those defections will help replenish the secular component of the population.
Another factor to note, is that many wealthy countries are avoiding population decline through immigration. That won't change the global population trends, but may redistribute the downsides of population decline towards poorer countries. Given most innovation happens in wealthy countries and relatively little in poorer countries even at present, that may delay for longer any negative impact on technological innovation from declining population.