how falling birth rates will get fixed in the end?

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Oldout
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26 Jul 2012, 10:18 am

Is this thread a F**king joke ?



enrico_dandolo
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26 Jul 2012, 10:27 am

HisDivineMajesty wrote:
YippySkippy wrote:
A stable economy with low unemployment would certain lead to more children.


No. In world history, a stable economy and low unemployment have been consistent with fewer children.
Even today, you can see that countries building a stable economy have declining birth rates.

In world history, a stable economy and low unemployment have not been consistent with any clear trend in natality.

In contemporary history, however, you are sort of right, up till now at least. To be precise, the process is something like this, as I understand it:
1- stable economy, etc., but especially major advances in medical practice;
2- progressive (in the Western world) or steep (elsewhere) decrease in mortality;
3- slow changes in attitudes towards fertility, and thus decreased natality, but not necessarly matching mortality precisely (be it because natality is much higher than mortality, and thus population increases, or because fertility is lower than the replacement level, like we see in many Western countries);
4- hypothetical equilibrium, which hasn't been reached anywhere to my knowledge.



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26 Jul 2012, 10:59 am

It's called demographic transition. I had to study that once. Demographic transition is the result of material wealth and a stable society. It is also, however, a cause of demographic concern in countries in the post-transitioning phase. At the moment, countries like Vietnam and Indonesia are in the transitioning phase, countries like Canada and France are in the post-transition phase, and most of Africa is in the pre-transitioning or early transitioning phase.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... Stage5.svg



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26 Jul 2012, 12:27 pm

Quantum_Immortal wrote:
Birth rates across the developed world are falling or very low alredy. Immigration can help, but obviously its not a real solution. For example, Germany and Japan alredy are losing population.

For any civilization, being able to reproduce it self is fundamental. This is not negotiable for obvious reasons. Our civilization in its current form isn't viable.

Why is this happening?How is it going to get fixed?

Are we going to see a rollback of certain individual freedoms?

Arranged marriages?
Rollback of women's freedoms?
Religion coming back?
Something new?


I'm very glad to be alive now. If I'm forced forced to get pregnant to or follow religion, I will kill myself.


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26 Jul 2012, 12:34 pm

HisDivineMajesty wrote:
Here's a surprising way of improving birth rates in the developed world a bit more: ban non-natural tans. Apparently, after analysis of 11,000 cases of skin cancer, tanning beds caused the risk of skin cancer in under-35s to double, and cause 800 people a year in Europe to die. That's a lot of children not born because their parents really needed to play Jersey Shore. Do they not know the people featured in that series are, sans-exception, ugly?

Death is a high price for a godawfully-fake tan after spending hours lying about being unproductive.


I like this idea on its own merits, but saving 800 a year across a whole continent won't have much of an effect. :P


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ruveyn
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26 Jul 2012, 12:43 pm

YippySkippy wrote:
A stable economy with low unemployment would certain lead to more children.


Quite the opposite. People will have smaller families and lavish much attention and material goodness upon their few children.

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YippySkippy
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26 Jul 2012, 3:51 pm

I'm not sure that broad historical trends are much use in this discussion, as it is the relatively recent invention of reliable and widely-used contraception that is mostly responsible for falling birth rates in developed countries. Given the choice, most women just don't WANT to have lots of children. If you want birth rates to rise significantly, you'd either need to make contraception illegal or unobtainable, or convince people that it was immoral or unsafe to use.

By the way, I don't really think increasing birth rates is a good idea. I'm just discussing HOW it might be accomplished, if one so desired.



BreezeGod
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26 Jul 2012, 5:35 pm

Societies with poor living conditions tend to have a higher birth rate. You should see the lower birth rate as a good sign.



enrico_dandolo
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26 Jul 2012, 11:35 pm

HisDivineMajesty wrote:
It's called demographic transition. I had to study that once. Demographic transition is the result of material wealth and a stable society. It is also, however, a cause of demographic concern in countries in the post-transitioning phase. At the moment, countries like Vietnam and Indonesia are in the transitioning phase, countries like Canada and France are in the post-transition phase, and most of Africa is in the pre-transitioning or early transitioning phase.

Indeed.

However, I don't see how it should be a source of concern. I certainly am not concerned in any way.



WilliamWDelaney
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27 Jul 2012, 9:45 am

Quantum_Immortal wrote:
Birth rates across the developed world are falling or very low alredy. Immigration can help, but obviously its not a real solution. For example, Germany and Japan alredy are losing population.

For any civilization, being able to reproduce it self is fundamental. This is not negotiable for obvious reasons. Our civilization in its current form isn't viable.

Why is this happening?How is it going to get fixed?

Are we going to see a rollback of certain individual freedoms?

Arranged marriages?
Rollback of women's freedoms?
Religion coming back?
Something new?
Increased life expectancy, increased number of productive years. Look, I am not of the school of thought that wants to continue on with the assumption that we're going to kick off after, oh, 100 years at most. I think it's very well possible for us to push our life expectancy well ahead of the curve of dropping fertility rates. I think we are on the cusp of many breakthroughs in anti-aging technology.

Sounds impossible, right? At one time, the jump in the world's population following the emergence of antibiotics and modern medicine was impossible, too. It wasn't some slow advancement, but it was a very rapid, dramatic spike in our population.

Image

What made it happen? A change in people's thinking. They realized, after the black death and various epidemics, that they could and should fight AGAINST the ravages of nature, that they were not helpless in the face of "god's wrath," and they were willing to pour in the investment of energy to combat the damage from disease and filth. This was a revolution NOT in technology but in people's habits of thinking. It's as simple as that.



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27 Jul 2012, 10:09 am

A low birth rate is easy to fix. A high birth rate is difficult to fix. You're worrying about the wrong thing.

What we should be doing is helping the rest of the world to become wealthy, so they will start having fewer children.

If it actually poses an existential threat (not very likely, in my opinion), I suspect that the problem will solve itself. People will feel a duty to raise the birth rate, and so they will. Remember, these will be wealthy, educated people. Exactly the type of people who would have the time and resources to notice the problem and fix it.



enrico_dandolo
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27 Jul 2012, 11:02 am

WilliamWDelaney wrote:
What made it happen? A change in people's thinking. They realized, after the black death and various epidemics, that they could and should fight AGAINST the ravages of nature, that they were not helpless in the face of "god's wrath," and they were willing to pour in the investment of energy to combat the damage from disease and filth. This was a revolution NOT in technology but in people's habits of thinking. It's as simple as that.

No, it was a revolution in "technology", or rather science.

People in the Middle Ages and before were not that dumb, you know.



DC
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27 Jul 2012, 11:45 am

enrico_dandolo wrote:
WilliamWDelaney wrote:
What made it happen? A change in people's thinking. They realized, after the black death and various epidemics, that they could and should fight AGAINST the ravages of nature, that they were not helpless in the face of "god's wrath," and they were willing to pour in the investment of energy to combat the damage from disease and filth. This was a revolution NOT in technology but in people's habits of thinking. It's as simple as that.

No, it was a revolution in "technology", or rather science.

People in the Middle Ages and before were not that dumb, you know.


They did kill women for being witches, that is pretty dumb...



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27 Jul 2012, 1:45 pm

That wasn't nearly as common as fiction would have you believe. The people actually killed in name of religion were both men and women, and usually because they refused to convert or existed in large groups with an alternative religion, like the Cathars and the occasional massacre of Jews. Actual witch hunts and witch burnings only really became popular after the Middle Ages, and remain popular in some parts of the world.



enrico_dandolo
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27 Jul 2012, 2:25 pm

DC wrote:
enrico_dandolo wrote:
WilliamWDelaney wrote:
What made it happen? A change in people's thinking. They realized, after the black death and various epidemics, that they could and should fight AGAINST the ravages of nature, that they were not helpless in the face of "god's wrath," and they were willing to pour in the investment of energy to combat the damage from disease and filth. This was a revolution NOT in technology but in people's habits of thinking. It's as simple as that.

No, it was a revolution in "technology", or rather science.

People in the Middle Ages and before were not that dumb, you know.


They did kill women for being witches, that is pretty dumb...

That's not the Middle Ages, that's the Early Modern Era. The period we idolize because of Galileo, Newton and the others.



WilliamWDelaney
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27 Jul 2012, 4:08 pm

enrico_dandolo wrote:
WilliamWDelaney wrote:
What made it happen? A change in people's thinking. They realized, after the black death and various epidemics, that they could and should fight AGAINST the ravages of nature, that they were not helpless in the face of "god's wrath," and they were willing to pour in the investment of energy to combat the damage from disease and filth. This was a revolution NOT in technology but in people's habits of thinking. It's as simple as that.

No, it was a revolution in "technology", or rather science.

People in the Middle Ages and before were not that dumb, you know.
It wasn't a matter of being dumb. Their views made sense at the time, considering their cultural heritage.

They were not kidding around about their religious faith. They might not have been entirely knowledgeable in it, nor are religious people today; however, people really and truly believed that their fates were in the hands of God. They MEANT IT.

If someone got sick from disease, God willed it. If there were an epidemic, it was the wrath of God in retaliation for general sinfulness on the part of the populace. It's easy to dismiss this as stupidly superstitious, but you wouldn't think so if it had been your upbringing. In that time period, you would have been just as determined to live a life "free of sin" as you presently are to be intelligent and educated. All of your mental resources would have been geared toward it, and you wouldn't have been kidding around about it.

If two men got into a sword fight and one of them died, God willed for the victor to survive; therefore, the victor was in the right. This belief persisted well into the modern age! It's only been a century and a half or a little over since dueling has been outlawed! We're not talking about something believed by backward savages. We are talking about people who lived in a world not all that much less technologically advanced than our own!

If you walked across hot coals and didn't get burned, it was because God protected you from harm. If you had grown up during the time, you WOULD have believed this. You would have been considered to be a "weirdo" if you had expressed any doubt about it.

They were not kidding around in their beliefs. It wasn't that they were stupid. Far from it. They were every bit as intelligent as modern people are. They just didn't have sufficient background on which to overturn the beliefs they had.

However, when the plagues came...when the plagues struck down millions of innocent people...people could no longer believe that the will of God was behind it. They grew some balls...not because they had some renaissance of character but because their lives had just been scarred by one of the most horrible tragedies in history. They chose to fight because they had no choice but to fight.

I think that the real revolution was not a scientific one at all. It was a really a revolution in how people viewed their relationship with the natural world.

Also, this is extremely tenuous. If zealots were to rise to power, they could take it all away.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/17/world/asi ... index.html

We could go back to dying of treatable illnesses. It's really that easy. We would just have to let a militant group of zealots take hold...to strangle out modern enlightenment...to relegate our perception of nature to being a product of divine edict...and we could go right back to the dark ages.

In the end, all of our technological marvels are just tools. What matters is the fact that we believe, in our hearts, that they are worthwhile. We believe that it is worthwhile to spend money on developing them. We believe that it is worthwhile to use them. This is not a permanent or irreversible state. Barbarity would welcome us readily into its arms.

But we could also move in the other direction. We need but to realize that we can, and we could do it. We could approach the realization that, if we were to throw enough reckless lunatic savagery into trying to do so, we could overcome death itself.

However, could we survive doing so?