Birth rates have dropped 20% since 2007. I don't think we ever came back from the '08 crash. It's just been smoke and mirrors.
Birth rates have dropped 20% since 2007. I don't think we ever came back from the '08 crash. It's just been smoke and mirrors.
So I actually have agree with you, people blaming it on people being "too poor" are being reductive. I do think there's economic factors at play here but I think it's more complicated than just "too poor".
I would point out, birth rates are declining in most of the world, this isn't purely a rich developed white country thing, and there are some worrying societal implications to that. And yes educated women with more rights have less kids and that's a good thing, but I do also think there is a phenomenon of women who want children but find they can't for a variety of social and economic reasons in the modern world and I think that's also a bad thing.
I would get more into this but it's early and I'm having a hard time organizing my thoughts right now.
Yes, figuring out how to keep the global population sustained is eventually going to be a problem once (if, given capitalism) all developing countries fully industrialize and nowhere has a high birth rate.
Educated women work instead of having kids because two incomes is almost required at this point and having kids ruins career prospects. If it were somehow possible to have kids and maintain a job, e.g. by the spouse taking on an appropriate and equal amount of responsibility, or with free and government-funded daycare, women would probably be more likely (but not certain) to have kids. This can be seen in the 1970s in the GDR, where birth rates increased (at least temporarily) when free daycare was introduced. Also, employers need to give more vacation time all around so parents are not disproportionately taking vacation time and putting their careers at a disadvantage. This is actually, in combination with the fact that women are expected to do most of the parenting, a large contributor to the wage gap; Employers see women as a liability and pass over them for promotions and such because they believe they will have children and miss work, regardless of the truth of that for any individual.
However, this doesn't mean people will have many kids if circumstances allow, just that it would be more likely that a couple would have kids at all. As the other user mentioned, three kids is a lot.
TL;DR Economic conditions matter when having a kid only when the women are educated and required to be in the workforce but parenting is not accommodated by employers or governments (in non-financial ways). In countries where women are not expected to join the workforce, economic conditions and government policy have less influence.
Yeah, I have found myself using "too poor" as a shorthand for "no social support of any kind" which is the more general cause.
And even then, it's only a problem insofar as people are being denied choices. Overall population is only a problem for bourgeois economics, and even then it's probably not a top-5 problem.
I think if people had adequate social support and stability (in a hypothetical socialism or communism) they would tend to have kids at around the replacement rate, and if they didn't it would balance itself out over a few centuries.
There is a possibility that it would balance itself by returning to traditionalist agrarian society, which wouldn't be good.
IDK I could imagine some kind of solarpunk communism 300 years from now with world population that gradually stabilized at 500 million or something. Or a high-tech spacefaring star-trek communism also with 500 million. Or either of those with 20 billion population. I just think population is a relatively small factor compared to all of the rest of economic and social organization.
It is a very important factor. After all, all economic value come from labour, not to mention economy of scale and division of labour, which are more efficient with higher population. I really doubt you can get space-faring civilization with 500 million people, satellites and unmanned exploration would be its limit at best.
Also, I fear a scenario, where the world collapses back into agrarian traditionalism, because it is the only known way to sustain population and all the other societies just decline into irrelevance, and then we get another cycle of class society, until we finally manage to solve this problem.