After the Wave, Winter: Demographic Decline and the “Production of Men” in the Twenty-First Century
brooklynrail.org
By the end of this century, Nigeria’s population, now just 218 million, will be larger than China’s, currently 1.4 billion. These projections were arrived at by complex demographic modeling, but the mathematics behind them are elementary. The African nation’s overtaking China in terms of total population is the simple result of diverging fertility rates: over five children per woman of reproductive age in the former, just over a single child in the latter (the rate necessary to reproduce a given population is a fraction over two). Put another way, the number of Nigerians will quadruple over the next seventy-five years, while the population of China will be halved.

some choice paragraphs:

He [marx] understood very well that wage-earning children represent a burden to families when business cycle downturns put them out of work; it is less certain that he could envision a proletarian family whose decisions about household size would be made according to “the constraints of income, prices, taste and time,” such that children could be considered “consumer durables” or “household produced goods.”34 Above all, he did not imagine the role the modern welfare state would play in mediating social reproduction, or that retired workers would be left to fend for themselves, rather than being cared for by their own children and extended family.

Control over family size and the choice to reproduce must also, it warrants underlining, include the choice to have children as well. If in Nigeria and sub-Saharan Africa the particular ways in which households reproduce themselves do not allow women simply to choose smaller families, access to education and birth control notwithstanding, in the industrialized nations real wage compression and the high cost of raising children mean small families are not simply chosen, nor are they testimony to the unequivocal success women have had in gaining control over their bodies and their laboring capacities. We can be certain, however, that in the coming decades the purported “existential” threat posed by the prospect of demographic collapse will mean women and “feminism” will be singled out as scapegoats.

...

When “family-friendly” pronatalist policies—longer parental leave, child tax credits, subsidized child care, etc.—are deemed to have failed, a more punitive (i.e. American) approach might be adopted, in which women are denied access to abortion, and perhaps contraception altogether.36 A generalized and perhaps novel form of misogyny will likely be the result, with childless women shunned and shamed, not just by their communities, but directly by the state; under such conditions, violence against women, deemed narcissistic and against life, would be normalized.

....

But much of the demand for labor in the more developed countries is for in-person services, which cannot be relocated to Lagos or Accra.

I quite liked this piece meow-floppy little bit scarce on graphs, but seems grounded in reality

author's tweet

  • iie [they/them, he/him]
    ·
    3 days ago

    (especially china, they can easily accept 3-4 million a year without noticing it, if they appropriately allocate workplaces)

    I should learn Chinese