Couple of factors...

People in developing countries tend to have children in order to boost the family's income. As the economy develops, this turns out to no longer be beneficial.

Generally, people choose to have less children as infant mortality goes down. Introduction of better medical care leads to a temporary spike in population, as more people live longer. But, lower infant mortality means that people don't need to have as many children in order to have some survive, and so they typically choose to have fewer children. The adjustment period can be a problem, as we have seen in the developing world.

I think this is more a consequence of consumerism and the media-nature of modern society and not directly from increased populations. It just seems that way because science allowing for larger food crops, less child mortality, etc. coincided with the rise of media technology.

What's the mechanism by which consumerism and media lead to lower child births though?

It's easy to see that in poorer countries with minimal or no pensions or social security having more children leads to greater productive capacity for the family, and a better chance of the parents being cared for in old age. Family connections are crucial support networks everyone relies on. Each extra child is another insurance policy for the future. In wealthy countries with pensions and social security none of that is an issue.

Maybe it's not so much that media technology itself leads to lower child births, but that the particular media being pushed results in lower child births. Consumerism is the vehicle by which this happens, because corporations have little use for the family unit and much use for individualized consumers that buy, not make things.

My interpretation is that there are innumerable cultural things that are popular nowadays which discourage people from having children, whether that be TV shows that make "family values" seem outdated and backwards, urban housing that's too small for families, and so forth.

My general point is more that the problems with birth rates are more of a contemporary cultural issue (largely an exported Western one) and not something that just automatically comes with technological/economic development.

I just did some digging around on the research on this and that doesn't seem to be mentioned anywhere, and it's a well studied issue. After all, for example existing housing stock hasn't got any smaller so that's easy to correct for in the data. The main correlative factors seem to be economic affluence, higher education levels meaning more women have careers, and access to birth control.

I really don't but the corporations pushing an agenda theory. Like all conspiracy theories, people doing the conspiring would have to actually conspire. They would to communicate about it, lots of people would know, some of them would change their minds, there would be leaks, especially for a conspiracy that has broad reach and engages with huge swathes of public culture communications.

Where did I say anything about a conspiracy theory? Corporations care about their profits and shareholders, not on promoting any kind of societal values like family and children. This has nothing to do with a group conspiring in a smoky room. An entity pursuing its interests is not a conspiracy.

Honestly if your immediate jump is to accuse someone of conspiracy theory thinking, this isn’t a conversation worth having, because you’re not willing to think slightly deeper about the situation.

You're talking about corporations manipulating media ("the particular media being pushed") to discourage people having children. I'm talking about the pushing you referred to.

Even beside that I don't see how that works even from an incentive point of view. Lots of corporations sell things to children, or to parents for their children. There are huge swathes of industries organised around that. How is it to the benefit of companies to have fewer customers?

Well remember that prior to the 70s or so, it was normal for a single earner (the man) to be able to provide for an entire family, including the non-working woman. That is no longer the case and indeed often two incomes are often barely enough.

It doesn’t seem that far fetched to me that corporations care about more people being in the workforce and as consumers, than as family units with only one earner and spender. Whatever can be monetized will be monetized.

And if that wasn’t the case, why weren’t companies pushing for more flexible jobs (part time, etc.) that would accommodate working women and motherhood?

Maybe it’s an oversimplified to say corporations “push” stuff into the media; and more of a cyclical process of culture and corporate interests, but I find the examples I mentioned (popular TV shows, etc.) to be pretty obvious and undeniable.

>Well remember that prior to the 70s or so, it was normal for a single earner (the man) to be able to provide for an entire family, including the non-working woman. That is no longer the case and indeed often two incomes are often barely enough.

There are several major factors here. One is more women having access to higher education, driven by increased social independence and the feminist movement in the 60s and 70s. Women want education and careers, I have two daughters so I know this. No corporation is telling them to do it.

Another is competition for middle class jobs requiring an education, there are more jobs like this now in the developed world than ever before, and more educated people people seeking them out so competition is huge. This includes international competition, hundreds of millions of people in the developing world getting added to the global middle class has had a huge effect. It's meant a precipitous collapse in poverty, but devalued middle class jobs so that wages have stagnated.

Another is housing competition. Everyone wants the nicest house they can get for their family, but supply isn't keeping up with demand. As a result all those people with dual household incomes are competing with each other, bidding up the prices of houses. As a result the older generations are now pretty well off overall, but most of their net worth is tied up in their house.

>It doesn’t seem that far fetched to me that corporations care about more people being in the workforce and as consumers, than as family units with only one earner and spender. Whatever can be monetized will be monetized.

How are they expecting to get more individual consumers if people aren't having children? That makes no sense to me. The incentive structure is all wrong, particularly for the whole swathes of industries that cater to families and children.

>And if that wasn’t the case, why weren’t companies pushing for more flexible jobs (part time, etc.) that would accommodate working women and motherhood?

Every company I have worked for has done. The company I'm with now offers flexible hours, subsidises child care and offers far more generous parental leave than required by law. My previous company also had a specific hiring programme to recruit and retrain women returning to work after having children.

People make TV shows to make money. They'll make the show that sells, not ones that push some nebulous economic agenda that wouldn't even have any effect until a whole generation later.

The vast majority of corporations don’t offer the benefits yours does, nor have they for the last fifty years. Your situation is extremely unique and not at all typical.

If this was a conspiracy, your point about not having consumers would make sense. But it’s not a conspiracy, it’s merely entities acting in their short term interests - which they are incentivized to do by the nature of the stock market.

Also remember that this is during the era of increasing globalization, when global corporations are in many ways more concerned with international markets than with local ones.

You also vastly underestimate how social attitudes have changed in the last 70 years, and how this is not at all just something that “naturally” happened.

Consumerism and media affect everyone though, but even within countries and within specific demographic groups higher wealth and higher education lead to lower birth rates. That's true everywhere.

People aren't all just corporate puppets having all their strings pulled by shadowy overlords. It's not like China with the one child policy, which I'm familiar with as my wife is Chinese. Sometimes people just make their own decisions. They make them for reasons sure, that's why there is a trend because people in similar situations tend to make similar choices overall, but nobody planned for all of this to happen.

You are both (at least party) wrong since the demographic transition started as early as 1750 (in France) long before childbirth started to fall and even longer before media technology (unless you count the printing press as one, but then how come the transition happened more than a century later elsewhere in Europe?)

France is discussed here as being somewhat of a unique case:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_France

To be fair, the black death killed France's first demographic transition, China might have had 2, and it is possible that one happened during the golden age of Islam too (and we don't know nearly enough about mesoamerican natives).

Abundance of food, and local peace is clearly the common denominator for demographic transition. The reason it did not happen in continetal europe is the amount of warring that took place there.

> To be fair, the black death killed France's first demographic transition

Never heard of that, any sources to recommend on the topic?

> Abundance of food, and local peace is clearly the common denominator for demographic transition

That sounds really suspicious as description of France in the eighteenth century…

Louis-Henri Fournet was probably the historian I've read that from first. You can find the book on Amazon, but it's in French (tableau synoptique de l'histoire du monde). I used to be quite interested in the first empire era, then found his book on it, then found the book I've told you about and now I just read stuff on western history, from Louise de Savoie to the first world war

18 to 20 millions in a smaller territory than modern France. I also read that northern Italy demography was the same density, and only reach the same density circa 1850, but i'm not sure if it's from Fournet or a criticism of Fournet (I love reading historians' criticism, but the majority are academic papers or thesis)

[edit] > That sounds really suspicious as description of France in the eighteenth century…

Yeah, I was adding to the argument, I'm 100% in agreement.

> Louis-Henri Fournet was probably the historian I've read that from first. You can find the book on Amazon, but it's in French (tableau synoptique de l'histoire du monde)

Merci (ça ne va pas poser trop de problème ;))

The thing that lowers childbirths is education of women, in particular education about birth control. That plus economic opportunities for women.

Nothing to do with consumerist media, just letting women know how to prevent 5th child.

But economic opportunities for women in no way implies that these economic opportunities must preclude time for raising children. It's entirely conceivable for part-time jobs to exist, or for other economic setups that allow for maximizing the workforce while still promoting children.

This is a consequence of our economic and cultural systems, not because women working somehow become incapable of having children.

These were simply statistics. When women know how to prevent having many kids, when they are in position to make independent decisions, they want to have limited amount of kids.

Women with part time jobs and time for childcare still have easier time with 3 children rather then 5.

Disagree, wealthy countries are labor resource constrained so the cost of child care balloons compared to wages.

And I predict that as the cost of labor goes up, people will want to have more kids again because it will be profitable, not unlike subsistence farmers wanting kids to work on the farm.

Childcare has the problem of not getting more productive as other areas do get more productive, increasing the cost as wages go up.

I hear this argument a lot, but it makes no sense.

How would an economic phenomenon (requiring a typical form of green leaves to guarantee a happy life at old age) precisely counter a biological phenomenon (a desire to procreate)?

It seems more likely that readily available birth control and a particular willingness of women to join the labour force is the cause here.

What is stopping extremely rich narcissists from creating thousands of children once technology allows for it? We're in for a horrible population growth if you ask me.