Generational despair, on the other hand …
What if the real issue isn't merely environmental or economic in nature, but simply the species itself pulling back on births because we feel we have too many people already? Maybe there's enough ongoing crises throughout the world (that we're increasingly aware of thanks to global media) that, internally, our drive is to reduce the population naturally through attrition? It could be to conserve resources, or until the environment supports such rapid growth again, or something else entirely, but it's plausible that the human organism is self-evaluating its current population numbers and deciding that, just like Big Capital is doing via layoffs, we can do the same with less people.
Just something to chew on.
Individual families making rational economic decisions about child-rearing costs, when aggregated across millions of families, could produce patterns that look like species-level decision-making without requiring any actual species-level consciousness.
For instance, Fred Rogers did more for improving the world than 10,000,000 people guiltily refusing to have kids would have.
So did Mother Teresa, who, through her work, both increased the population and inspired others to do good.
> Europe is post-religion
Some anecdata for illustration:
- Pope is based in Italy.
- my nice went to the first grade in Germany last year, that is a big deal there. Part of celebration was going to local church.
- it feels that US population is a lot more zealous with religion
- I’m not religious, but on average I do go inside of some church several times a year, because of “social occasions” e.g. when friends get married, when people die, and to my somewhat recent surprise when they start school. (Add several more, for tourist motivation to observe interesting architecture)
- based on reddit and HN posts, Americans atheists will never ever set foot into <insert some condescending way to describe a church>, because bridges had to be burnt.
Personally, I’m not trying to pretend that Europe is substantially more opposed to the institution of organized religion, I just think it’s a touch more nihilist than the US at present, and more atheistic, and specifically that Europeans are a little more likely to agree with the following: “There is no objective measure of good and evil; everyone should do whatever they want to do as long as it doesn’t harm anyone else. Life has no particular purpose or meaning, though individuals are free to make up whatever personal goals they want.”
It's falling in Western countries because we're commiting cultural suicide for the reasons I cited for Europe (the US is behind Europe, but seems to be on the same road). It's falling in countries like China because they moved like 70% of their population from farms to huge cities in the last 40 years, which causes their society to work much more like... the West. Places like Africa, etc. are falling as they get more access to birth control, work for women, etc.
I guess I should have said this: I theorize that the whole world is following a similar path, but different areas started sooner and are thus much farther along in their decadence. Africa is now where the US was in 1965. Europe today may be what the US looks like in 20 years.
Obviously though Western cultural beliefs are much easier to spread now than they were decades ago, so it could be that the developing world "catches up" much faster now. Maybe in 10 years, Africa will be more like US 2010 than US 1975.
My sex drive would not have been less a few generations back. The results would have just been possibly very different.
The strongest correlation I see is urbanization. People in cities don’t have kids as much.
(Also fewer child deaths)
- there's an inverse relationship between quality of life and density, even within individual households
- there's a higher premium on space in urbanized areas than in rural areas
- there's been a move towards urbanization across the world, high HDI, low HDI, high religion, low religion
I propose something similar to Parkinson's Law: Average family size expands (or contracts) to fill the physical space that is economically viable for a given individual/family.
Rationally, this couldn't be the only factor, given density and urbanization patterns predate the more rapid fertility decline in recent decades, but as one more factor on top of a pile of others that may also be contributing to the trend, I think it could plausibly play a contributing role in the decline.
Thoughts?
Take a family of five kids and give them a bedroom for each kid when young and they’ll end up clustering in one or two.
I think space and other pressures may have their place as causes, but are mostly downstream from whatever the root issues are.
Do you have anecdata on this? I grew up with a single sibling, and we had to share a room as young children due to economic circumstances, but we were both very excited to get our own rooms when our parents bought a larger house.
I have no kids of my own and don't plan on having any, but I'm fascinated by this perspective.
But even then they often want congregation, but the ability to retreat. I sometimes think the perfect “large family” house would be tons of tiny bedrooms but lots of common areas. Almost college dorm-like.
Another anectdata - I’ve never met a family with same-sex twins where the twins did NOT live in the same room, even when there was ample space to not do so. I presume the triplet case is even stronger.
It’s more similar to how families slept for millennia.
You say that likes it's a bad thing?
So it’s a good thing if you want Europe’s culture replaced by what the data show is happening, and it’s a bad thing if you think Europe’s traditional culture is worth saving.
You can have all those things without. Many do. But it requires extra work that organized religion does for you, and we're talking about a problem where people aren't having kids because they are extra work
> I speculate that a different thing is happening in Europe. Every time I hear European takes on issues, it feels like Europe is post-religion, post-values, post-meaning. Everything is relative; pleasure is the only personal goal, and not harming others is the only external goal. Why even have kids? Why get married? It's a lot of work,
Yes, to all this.
> plus there's a widely-held belief that Europeans/Westerners in general bear generational guilt because of what colonizers did in the 1500s anyway, so it feels virtuous to voluntarily decline as a civilization, freeing up more oil and resources for the developing world.
Uh? I've never heard about it in the media. The only thing vaguely similar would be the focus on minimizing our resource consumption so that our kids doesn't suffer "too much" about the man-made climate change, but usually the focus is about buying less thing, using renewable energy, not making fewer children.
Now that I think about it more, I shouldn’t have included that in my Europe hypothesis, as I’ve heard that kind of thinking in general but not more from Europeans.
I speculate that a different thing is happening in Europe. Every time I hear European takes on issues, it feels like Europe is post-religion, post-values, post-meaning. Everything is relative; pleasure is the only personal goal, and not harming others is the only external goal. Why even have kids? Why get married? It's a lot of work, plus there's a widely-held belief that Europeans/Westerners in general bear generational guilt because of what colonizers did in the 1500s anyway, so it feels virtuous to voluntarily decline as a civilization, freeing up more oil and resources for the developing world.
The US and Canada seem more traditional in that a lot of people would really like to have kids and don't think it's pointless, but it's just impractical for economic reasons, and they're choosing to allocate what little resources they have towards a more comfortable life (relatively!) instead of having an economic struggle -- OR they do have kids but because they wait for economic certainty first, they start much later and as a result have way fewer per couple.
Of course, North America has a very loud segment that agrees with the European degrowth narrative detailed above, and Europe has a loud segment which goes against it.