> solutions that are beyond “people have to have lots of children for cultural reasons!”
But you've already just framed it as a cultural dilemma in the preceding paragraph. Are you really meaning, "without challenging my own cultural values, how can I get someone else to provide the time and money I don't feel justified investing myself?"
Super-majority of families have 2 or less kids (about 80% up here in Canada). So it’s not just me who doesn’t want to subscribe to that idea.
No there isn't. People want to dick around without responsibility. That's fine. But most people don't really accomplish anything that would come close in worth to raising a child in those six years, in no way shape or form. Let's not frame it in economic terms. People just want to dick around and that's fine.
My decision to not have children is so I can focus my attention on other economic contributors and keeping my team employed. I'd hardly call that "dicking around without responsibility."
My sister, in her late 30s with 3 children, always emphasized how she wouldn’t be successful if she didn’t have unlimited support from her partner in terms of income and career. But that’s very rare for an average family.
On the whole, he's right. There are some people who can't have kids because they're too busy managing companies and employing dozens of workers, but such people are a very small fraction of the populace.
...And even that, I'd suggest, is cope. Lots of extremely successful people have children. They just hire nannies, utilize daycares, get grandparents involved, etc. It can be done.
There’s still some sense of “I should have children to survive in my later years” in developing countries. Not really needed for richer ones where things have established and you can get support in times of needs.
This shows up in economic data all the time, and disproportionately impacts women
Of course young women in high-intensity fields are hesitant to hamstring their careers just as they’re getting started
Nothing more than a modest proposal to spur discussion...!
In some civilization collapse scenarios that I am vaguely familiar with, they may have been proceeded by a dark age (like post bronze age collapse or post Roman empire collapse). But the world is connected in these days in ways that make that scenario seem less likely. Knowledge on things like fertilizer production are very wide spread and not central to one specific culture.
1. Industrial activity will continue to require nonzero human participation, even in the future.
2. Culture has no impact on the fertility rates of citizens in developed economies, they are incorrigible homo sovieticus, entirely shaped by material conditions and quality of life. Populations immigrating from other regions quickly reach the same quality of life, and follow suit.
3. There exists some level of economic contraction that would lead to present-day Western countries' inability to feed themselves. In one extreme case, if productive activity in the OECD went to zero, nobody would do anything at all, not even work knowledge-sector jobs; and therefore couldn't even afford to import fertilizer, food, etc. from other parts of the world. By a sort of intermediate-value theorem, assume the level in question exists, and lies between 0 growth and total cessation of industrial activity.
4. Starvation constitutes poor quality of life.
If the level of contraction (3) happened, I advance that one of two cases would happen.
1. People starve. The population does not stabilise. The marginal fertility response of humans in developed countries to this particular decline in living standards is zero or negative. The population continues to shrink. In the long run, if this happens again and again, the working-age population repeatedly falls below some number required to maintain successive level of industrial production, until there is fewer than 1 working-age human left. (This could take several hundred years.) By the first assumption, we need at least one person to continue all industrial production in the OECD countries, so at least one such minimum number exists; and so in that person's absence, we recover a situation with zero industrial activity. The remaining n non-working citizens cannot eat and quickly die.
2. People starve. The population does stabilise at a new equilibrium. This requires, by definition, at least replacement fertility in response to declining living standards, and constitutes a non-cultural solution as sought by the GP comment.
If at any point case (2) happens, then a level of industrial contraction of some degree solves the GP's request without requiring cultural factors. Otherwise, case (1) will happen again and again unconditionally, and we will go extinct in the long run.
It's a very unpleasant solution, but it does exist. I don't really believe that humans' behavioural responses are so non-smooth that the last two people on Earth would choose to have a single child, and then send that child off to learn the Haber-Bosch process -- it's only a limiting case.
As the most trivial example off the top of my head, I cannot imagine any situation remotely close to what you are suggesting without war. I don't think the cost of the precursors to fertilizer will stop Western countries from taking it.
At any rate, the idea that the nail in the coffin of our society will be our inability to produce fertilizer seems an unlikely and remote possibility. I'm not saying that there is no path to that outcome (we could probably spend all day making up scenarios where that is a possible outcome), it just seems rather unlikely.
The 20th century west made an all-in bet that those things might be correlated, and coaxed (and sometimes coerced) others into joining, but it's not clear that the bet is paying off or that it will.
And worrying about 'what will happen if human population actually drops to zero' is like worrying about commuter traffic congestion on Mars.
Why not? I don't think it will happen, but at the same time, I don't want to say anything about human behaviour without stating assumptions. If you think (as do I) that there is always some point above zero population at which birth rates do stabilise, then it's valuable to examine what exactly that would entail.
It sounds like we agree the point exists somewhere - we could extend your example to the whole Earth's population becoming 2 and the population becoming (8 bn / 2)% more productive. Why can't we extend it to the population becoming 1?
It's a completely different situation, and none of the shit we are arguing about applies to it. There's a fundamental difference between running and meeting the long-term needs of a human society of 10 billion people and a human society of 10.
The mathematics you're using is the same reduction to absurdity that leads a manager to believe that nine women can deliver one baby in one month.
The environment is the familiar one, but also at the expense of health safety (PFAS/lead/etc), and at the expense of our societal makeup. Perhaps the optimal distribution of labor for food production isn't 0.00001%, but would be good for growth and other intangibles if it were say 0.05%.
Oh no, that would be terrible.
My suspicion is that machines replace more and more economic activity within wealthy contracting nations. Humans already cost several $100k in the US once you look at health education and food subsidies. If a machine can pay for itself +ROI, it probably will be built.
Most of the most fulfilling and meaningful things in life don't always make sense or are reasonable. But they often almost always have to do with serving and sacrificing for others.
And again, so many young people right now have none or just one sibling. They can see it’s been okay for themselves so obviously there’s no pressure to have 3. If everyone had just 1 child, we still would have the same problem, except it would be harder to make “emotional fulfillment from having a child” argument.
Here are some ideas, some wild, some controversial, some super obvious that we can try. But we never will because the backlash from the usual suspects will always be too great.
1. Pay people to have babies. Seriously, tax breaks and literally free money. E.g. for every baby a citizen makes and cares for, we'll give them enough to times their monthly salary by 1.06. You could do this tomorrow, and people would have babies. That relieves the burden placed on people for the wonderful gift they brought into the world.
2. Make daycare a universal human right. Quality care and free for all your citizens, no questions asked.
3. Give mothers 1/2/3/4/5 years worth of paid maternity leave. No, don't get the companies to pay it. Should be a government salary that matches the employer's salary with yearly growth. That way pregnant women aren't a drain on a company, but rather the burden we happily accept as a society.
4. Pay people to get married and stay married if they have kids. Maybe even make divorce a hard thing to motivate for and only for the right reasons such as abuse. We don't want divorces breaking up family homes and our baby-making factories prematurely.
Some potentially wacky ones:
5. Ban dating apps and outlaw hookup culture. We want genuine relationships and marriages to form, as they're the backbone of a culture that values generational properties such as legacy and community.
6. Make promiscuity illegal. Track who hooks up with who and you can't do more than X per year. Seriously, sex needs to be hard to attain. Side note, ban sex work and porn.
7. Subsidized baby-assistance jobs. Pay to get a nanny or au-pair or teacher in every home. Bonus points you help with the unemployment question.
8. Baby making factories or make it a profession for women to do - however workable until we figure out artificial wombs. There are so many people out there that just will never be able to get the chance to be parents even though they'd make wonderful and loving parents, why not help them by letting them adopt.
And yes I know there are many ways the above could go bad, or are riddled with "a ha gotcha" holes, but at least we'd be doing something as a society. Right now, our governments are doing nothing and just complaining "oh shame look at our poor birth rates, we wonder why. Let's just conveniently import more of them from the poorest and most incompatible countries, that outta fix it and not cause problems down the line.".
We could fund most of the above by just getting rid of all the silly government expenditures such as military and who knows what other fat we have lurking in the government.
I think at some point you need to tie inheritence tax and wealth transfer into the mix, i.e. large % wealth/property can only goto direct kids, that scale up with # of kids. If you have 1 kid, max they can inherit is 40%, no properties. 2 kids and 80%, 3 kids and 100%. No kids, and 80% wealth/savings goes back to state redirected towards those with kids. Property gets auctioned off for same purpose. Positive incentives alone not enough, it has to be cripplingly expensive NOT to have kids.
Only to a certain extent. Looking at data of every single rich country, and my own circles, there’s just no appetite for most of people to have 3 children (2.1+ needed for replacement).
I weirdly think about this issue way too much, since I’m a part of a problem. All my girl friends, who want children, only want one or two. Why would anyone sacrifice, at the very bare minimum, 6 years of their youthful years for 3 children? There’s just too much opportunity loss compared to lower income / less rich countries.
I have no idea how to tackle this problem, but would be very interested to read about or somehow even contribute to potential solutions that are beyond “people have to have lots of children for cultural reasons!” argument.