There are so many reasons that the birth rate could be declining, it’s almost dizzying. It’s seriously at least 15 or 30 separate stressors on modern life: smart phones, media, finances, housing, individualism, too many years of schooling, contraception, vacations and the comforts of modern life, irreligiousity, plastics, lack of community, etc. But lately I’ve started to realize it might come down to a simple inability to plan for the future. Even when we were all farmers, we at least knew what we would be doing when we became an adult, even if we were poor. We would be farming. But now? How can somebody make a 30-year plan if everybody’s job feels like it could end at any moment? Because we all feel that way, we stress out and put too much emphasis on our work, which adds to the problem. Each child is roughly a 20-25 year investment. It’s very hard to plan that far ahead these days.
I am a farmer for me when you have a kid it's a 5-year expense followed by a 13 to 15 year benefit when they start working and half the time they work for you for the rest of their life. Big part of the problem is people think their kids need to just go to formal education and you need to do all the stuff for your kids and your kids don't do any work for you That's just silly. Kids need to work and learn responsibility and the value of the dollar.
@@Ryanrobi thank you for commenting. Depending on where anyone of us lives, it’s rare to meet a farmer these days! Just imagine the dynamics of fertility and population growth when 80% of the society was farming on a small scale. Now, even the 2% of society that are farmers have so much industrial equipment and machine use that children are not as helpful as they used to be.
No it's not I'm a dairy farmer it's very easy to breed animals in captivity. They actually become very low stress and come into heat every 21 days and they show you when they're in heat. Humans are not a herd species though lol
@@Ryanrobi Only a tiny number of animals can breed on farms. 90% of wild animals can NOT be domesticated and breed.(ref Jarid Diamond) Humans are closer to wild animals in temeprement. We go mad in conditions that have no effect on domesticated animals. (ref Psychology Therapy)
Many animals are breed in captivity, and are breed for it. Humans will adapt by evolution. Some humans are going to be resistant or partly resistant and they will have more surviving children. Humans are the same in a evolutionary sense as other animas.
It seems to me that obvious place to start understanding this, though I have not seen anyone say it, is urbanization. Going back to ancient Rome, and likely much farther, large cities have rarely if ever maintained their population levels without immigration from the countryside. This has usually been explained away in economic terms. Maybe we should not be so superficial and look at deeper cultural forces emanating from hyper-dominant hyper-large urban places, and then how they diffuse throughout society. Especially how such factors and modes of diffusion have changed with modernity coming to each country or region since roughly 1900.
“Urbanization“ seems to be a catchall term for dozens of things that actually cause the decline. But as catch-all terms go, it’s not a bad one. Cities don’t reproduce, but the countryside does. But what happens when a society is 90% urban? Big population decline is the only avenue.
Urbanization means that people can no longer support all/most of their own needs and have to rely on the government to make sure their needs are met. Once their needs are met, they become obsessed with comfort and their definition of “comfort” gets more and more ludicrous as they become desensitized to their previous level of comfort. Since kids get in the way of comfort, they’re one of the first things abandoned. Since religion gets in the way of comfort, it’s also abandoned. Soon the society becomes so obsessed with comfort that it abandons other things that are necessary for a society to function but are uncomfortable. Eventually, society collapses and the light of civilization falls to those in the countryside.
I’ve heard that, besides some notable exceptions, industrialization has always led to below replacement populations. Industry largely takes place in urban centers so it’s likely all tied together.
Urbanisation could cause the mouse utopia affect as well. High densety living could be bad biology. Yes only in the last 70 years have citys TFR been above 2.1 But most now are bellow that. Farmers had Tfrs of 5+ now Citys are bellow 2
4:43 Not a single country in the Eastern bloc returned to the replacemen rate (TFR2.1) After the fall of communism. Only a countries in Central Asia .Which goes back to the glory days of the Soviet Union with TFR 2.5 Even the Caucasus countries collapsed TFR yes after the Soviet Union era like Eastern Europe. 5:33 After they legalized LGBT. Turkey Doom like Europe
It's all about Inflation and Wage growth. Inflation results in Wage growth then it results in Deflation, deflation makes it cheaper to raise Children. People have more children with high Inflation, Wages and then Deflation.
4:21 The only event in modern history where the birth rate collapse was successfully reverse direction is 1967. when the dictatorship Romanian🇷🇴 communist government banned abortion, causing the birth rate to jump from 1.90 in 1966 to 3.66 in 1967 and ending up stable at 2.44 -2.22 in the 1973-1989 period. and then the brith rate fell again simultaneously with the fall of the Romanian communist party.
Negative growth can be a good thing. For example, for Serbia, where I live. If we didn't have that for the last thirty years, as well as immigration, we would have 50% unemployment. We wouldn't have anything to eat, like in Africa. Now we even bring people from abroad India, Bangladesh, Nepal to work. Compared to 1989, today's economy and industry is several times weaker. Even today, 70% of young couples live with their parents because they cannot afford a house or an apartment.
Don’t you think it’s a really bad thing for the young people today? If the conditions in Serbia are as bad as you say, I suspect that means Serbia will experience a 90+% population decline over the next century or two.
Tfr is 1.6 Anyway work comes from pepole starting companys and employing others. Start a company doing some thing. Germany was a waist land after ww2 now its top 5 in the world. Also farners had a tfr of 5! Whats your countrys womens excuse for not having kids.
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Here is a hypothesis what if women working is what drives down the birth rate, cultural groups like The Amish what are the Orthodox Jews who don't allow their wives to work outside of the family have high birth rates, unfortunately I'm not very academic at all, so I'd like someone else to look into this
I don't think this works. Algeria, Egypt, and Iran all have the lowest participation of women in the workforce, but their birth rates are still plummeting. There is an inverse correlation between women's workforce participation and birth rate, but this could be caused by an independent factor. For a more concrete example of why the correlation doesn't prove causation you can consider the following alternative scenario. Imagine women began joining the workforce because valuable work is less physically intensive. And, men's access to sexually explicit material diminished their capacity to maintain a long-term relationship. Both factors correlate to the proliferation of computers, but neither would cause the other. e.g. reducing the number of women in the workforce wouldn't increase the birth rate in this scenario. For another concrete example, a rise of satellites also inversely correlates with birth-rate, but the two factors are not causal.
I replyed but it dissapeared. I said each effect adds up. One effect drops Tfr 5 to 2,4. Next legalising contraception drops Tfr bellow 1.5. This happened 3 years after its made law. I Checked loads of europian countrys. Would explain more on 5 to 2.4 but it will dissapear.
For north Korea, being communist, there is a certain amount of gender equality, that coupled with destigmatization of abortion and contraception due to lack of traditional religion and many more other factors including very boring lives without real wars and you get what North Korea is having.
What he's saying is very true I'm from Massachusetts pretty close to Boston My whole family besides myself and my little brother have never been outside of New England besides when they go on vacation in Europe or something or go to the West Coast. They think that cities in Wisconsin and the Midwest are boring and terrible but I've lived in the cities they're just as nice as anywhere else just much cheaper. My little brother recently moved from Portland Oregon to Columbus Ohio after a finally persuaded him that the Midwest is the best place to be he got a significant raise and his cost of living is down 50%! Hes never geen happier and the rest of my family is like wait i though ohio is awful? No people if anything Boston is worse overpriced and awful roads and homesless, and more crime.
The Enlightment says Humans and Things do not have souls. Christianity say Humans , Aminals and plants have souls. Humans have Spirit / Mind that is what makes us specale.
Asking someone on a first date if they would like to make babies, isn't a function of speed dating. It is your contribution to the survival of your gene pool.
Current population collapse is fatal, because its root cause is none other than the civilization advancement itself, if civilization cannot retrack, there is no pathway for birth rate recovery. Civilization is a very strange fella, it can produce people, who are self nihilism, these people think the planet earth will be better off without human, including themselves. This can only be the phenomenon of a high civilization, since animals or lesser educated civil people will be incapable of self hatred because it is unnatural and completely against the evolution principle. In other words, self hatred cannot exist naturally, it must be a post civilization phenomenon. Of course the population who have this self nihilism tendency is very small, but they are among the most highly educated group. The fact that they exist, the fact that they are the product of our high education system is very concerning, especially in an era of nuclear power. But they are not the real cause of human extinction, even after the catastrophic nuclear event which destroys the entire world, human who survived will rebuild fast as long as human still has the desire and capability of reproducing. Other than a moon size planet hit the earth, the only thing can destroy human civilization completely and cause human extinction is human stop reproducing, the only thing can stop us from reproducing is the civilization advancement. When civilization was at its lowest, human was 100% animal instinct driven, we followed what our gene programmed us without asking why, just like all other animals. Our gene told us to reproduce as much as possible by implanting us with all kinds of sexual instincts, so our gene can avoid the extinction and move up the evolution ladder quickly. Once we became little bit more civilized, our consciousness took over the animal instincts, then we followed the mythical culture and religion to reproduce as much as possible without asking why. Modern civilization completely lifted human out of the animal realm, we are no longer animals except our legacy body. It is a slow discovery and realization that our civilization is incompatible with our reproduction mechanism rooted from our animal heritage. If we are aliens and never exposed to the earthling reproduction mechanism, we would think the pregnancy is torture, giving birth is barbaric, and binding human reproduction with human life cycle is cruel and artificial. Of course, we do not think like aliens, not there yet, but our youngsters, our most progressive young mind which represents our future, are moving quickly to that same mindset through our civilization advancement in biology, health, and morality. Civilization, by definition, is bias towards rationale over natural instinct, Today our basic instinct of wanting children is effectively neutralized by the civilized rational concerns of the physical cost, emotional cost, social cost, and economic cost of having children. The result of this transformation is that having children becomes a project, requires planning and cost benefit analysis, the problem is that as the civilization advances, the individual life become safer, easier, richer, freer, and more secure, the perceived cost of reproduction can only goes up and the benefit of having children can only goes down. As the civilization advances, the old people will be taken cared of by the society through the work of the economy or the social safety net, the fear of a feeble elder life without children is removed. AI is probably the most convincing evidence that civilization will be the root cause of total collapse of human reproduction. With the emerging Intelligent service robots the benefit of children will be completely removed, from emotional support to physical support, cross all spectrum. To each individual human, especially women, the reproduction becomes all costs with no or minimal benefit. With advancement of civilization, human population is not just collapsing but doomed. Maybe at some point in future, we may have no choice but to accept the concept of human manufacturing through technology with quality control and auditing, all under legal provisions and governances, so that human reproduction and human civilization can finally be compatible again.
The Biggest problem is they truley beleve biology is bad. That the pain of human child birth is evil. That idea given to pepole when they have growen up is the problem. All over ideas you express are irelivant. The interstella Aliens could be giving birth like cats with little pain! So the complaint about child birth would just look like cowadice in the face of pain. You also suggest instinct is poor. Women still have boy friends and have sex! Every time they do they can have a kid and they still do it! Women are only sexually interested in Fertile Productive men. Instinct is stronger than you beleave. Our civalisation was doing fine for 1600 years till mass full time employment and contraception for women. The ideas that fear human biology, Push women into full time employment and contraception are causing the demographic decline. Those have to attacked and removed. You are well informed but do not want to remove what is causing this effect. Women still want sex so removing contraception and ways to stop pregnancys would stop this problem quickly. Modern rulers are ether scared of women or want women as cheap labour. Society will transform to the new situation or die a slow death. We are 3/4 of the way to the end. (sorry about the spelling)
I agree demographics are very bad, but its a slow collapse. Whereas AGI and ASI are on an exponentiation curve. I see the slow decline in the 2030's of population in SEA as a home for Automation (Human Robotics in the Factory and Home). I hope we have at least 2 orders of magnitude of scaling (Millions of H100's equivalents in Data Centres) which allows AI Research Bootstrapping.
The baby boom is not unexplained! It strongly correlates with decline in infant mortality. They weren't having more kids than previous generations, kids were dying less.
Then why did Germany, Japan, and Italy all have baby booms, but they were much smaller? And why did Argentina and Brazil not have a baby boom at all? And why did the baby boom begin around 1940, and then end in the early 1960s?
@@derek4412 access to life saving medicine. It ended cause fertility rate declined lower and lower, consistently with what you would expect when a new factor was introduced in the equation, its effect generates a boom and then normalizes.
@@derek4412 I checked and in europe the fertility collapse in each country happens 3 years after Pill / contrception was made legal early 1960s. Every country i checked. Tfr 2.4 dropped to 1.8 Brazil did have a boom ! 1940 TFR was 5.9 went Up to 6.14 in 1950 them dropped to Tfr 5.0 in 1970. You had a boom but its lost in your high 5.9 fertility at the time. Also country size has no effect on Tfr. Its kids per women. Also Brazill and Argentinia had high fertility compared to Europe so your boom is not as noticable.. Also Germany Italy and Japan lost the war and we did not save them or give them medical secrets. 6 million Germans died AFTER the war in reprisals for ww2. You forget most pepole HATED those countrys and we only gave them autonamy years after the war ended.
@@BeachandHills-hb2pq the US had a baby boom peak in 1957, with a TFR of 3.7 . The pill, to my understanding, was not widely available until 1962. So what caused it to peak so early and then decline? Contraception definitely played a role, but it’s probably not sufficient to say exactly why the boom ended. And we are still left wondering why the boom started if the US was below replacement rate in the 1930s, and most of Europe was as well. Why did the boom take off around 1940 in the US, which was before the war?
@@derek4412 Ok Anti Biotics being used on civillians raised the birth rate in 1940. Before then it was a military secreat. All countrys allowed to use these drugs had a Boom. I am still correct only HALF of USA had made legal contracetion in the USA before 1972. Tfr was ABOVE replacement. After 1973 made abortion and contracetion leagal for ALL of USA did the TFR fall Quickly to 1.7 !
Earlier people had kids without thinking much, now people think before having kids, I don't see that as a bad thing actually. The wolfs would always want sheeps to breed a lot.
The fact that multiple people have referenced sheep and wolves makes me think this is a meme or something. It’s going to create massive problems. Almost all first world country’s are setup with the expectation of growth, let alone decline. I understand why people have the attitude you have shared but don’t pretend this won’t create massive strife.
@@BeachandHills-hb2pq Ok so? You would die as well as everyone in the world, how many of the billions who lived are remembered? And even if you are remembered you wont exist because you will die. Better to live your life in the best way possible, ofcourse it can include having a child but not necessarily for everyone.
@@cendrizzi Whats the alternative, keep on having kids to infinity? We will have less people and then it will jump again as real estate would be cheap. The world population was 1 billion in 1800 and now we are 8 billion, I think its time to go down, and maybe after some time we will jump back again like a wave function.
@@pankajsinha385 We are all born to die. Every one alive has realised this as an Adult. Some Societys still remembr 15 generations of family names. Just because your society dosent not your fault. Your family line has survived 1 billion years dont let bad ideas take you out. Other pepole want you to fail. Why let them win? Like i said the future belongs to those who turn up. Maybe your kids can be there to?
