I set out to write an essay on falling fertility and the implications of population decline — but one essay turned into two, and now two have turned into three. Here I’ll wrap up my survey of some of the stranger possibilities of life in an emptying world.
You're underestimating how big and young the current world population is. There are eight billion of us, and the replacement rate is still above 1. Apart from catastrophic mortality, there's no way the world population will be below 4 billion by 2100, or even in the lifetime of anyone already born. A lot more of the future population will be African, but some kind of mixture is bound to predominate in the end.
My main hesitation about the "population implosion" thesis is that we don't have any reason not to expect technological breakthroughs that extend life expectancy, perhaps indefinitely.
That won't stop population decline from eventually beginning whenever the TFR is less than 2.1. But it would push the issue back by many centuries, until the population of nearly-immortal adults was large enough that even a very small annual death rate would exceed the absolute number of births.
In fact we can't be sure it wouldn't rule out population decline altogether. If people only died from rare non-natural causes, are we sure the average woman would continue stopping at one or two children? Maybe the more typical pattern would be to have a baby every 50 years or so, just to keep things interesting.
It all seems hard to predict, but I wouldn't assume that the new consensus will be more durable than Paul Ehrlich's was.
The comment that we expect modern parents to be subsidised to do what their forebears did on their ‘own dime’ is inaccurate, or potentially wildly inaccurate.
The real cost of raising children is massively higher than one or 200 years ago. Not only do children now not support family income, they are dependent for much longer and on average have much much higher education costs. In addition, as any parent knows, children are highly ‘ time intensive’ and the opportunity cost of time increases with real incomes.
This is why parents are unresponsive to subsidies of a few thousand dollars, and why, as described in the article, a meaningful figure is more like 1/2 to 1 million dollars.
This kind of intervention would bring with it, a massive set of moral hazard and perverse incentive problems - teenage girl millionaires with three children - not to mention the potential for exploitation of same. Eligibility and payments would need to be carefully geared around the encouragement of secure, loving parenting - lots of tricky policy questions.
I don't see how we can produce artificial wombs ethically. They require testing on unwitting human subjects and many of those tests will surely fail or produce side effects that are unknown for years, decades even.
As historically insular populations grow, one has to ask how they might be changed by that growth in turn. Coordinating larger and larger populations may eventually require the use of communication technologies they currently eschew, for example.
I continue to think that the main distinguishing mechanism the Amish, Haredi etc have is not their insularity per se or their resistance to the temptations of consumerism, but the fact that their cultural "close-knit-ness" drastically reduces the incidence of loneliness. There's a famous book on the old culture of the Eastern European shtetl called "Life is With People" and I think that title captures it: when loneliness is basically never a problem, people don't have much trouble forming relationships and eventually families. This gets back to what, again, I think is one of Lyman Stone's main points: that even in very low-TFR countries, married couples have at- or above-replacement TFR, and the overall TFR decline is thus almost entirely driven by the decline in marriage.
Now maybe you want to claim that consumerist/individualist societies are inevitably high-loneliness ones, that people essentially have to be forced to connect with each other by denying them alternatives to that connection. I don't buy that: AFAICT people still *want* to have more friends, just as they want to have more kids than they have. It may well be that specific technologies or institutions are loneliness generators, but let's then rigorously identify and set limits on those rather than rejecting the whole consumerist package.
The other question I think is underexplored is whether there might be some environmental chemical exposures that have made us less psychologically effective at making interpersonal connections, and the Amish etc just happen to have been less affected by those. If lead exposure can be a major factor in the rise of crime, might something of that sort be a factor in the rise of loneliness and the decline of marriage?
"and pray that governments end up preferring carrots to sticks."
We've already imagined that stick-wielded world in Margaret Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale', brought terrifyingly to TV-life a few years ago where sagging fertility rates were the driver, and pronatalist religious-right nutjobs became the fourth reich, Murica-style. Atwood's premise was biologically driven sagging fertility rates, and in our present-day reality this is most likely to be via the endocrine disruptor chemicals we now know to be infiltrating our immediate environment and lowering inherent 1st-order fertility rates, independent of - and underpinning - the higher-order impact of affluenza lowering fertility rates as your article describes.
Which brings me to my point. Your posts, as broad-thinking and thought-provoking as they are, are still significantly predicated on a continued business-as-usual when it comes to energy availability, as well as a raft of other issues that would seem to pose just as much of a challenge to the progress of the Anthropocene, and which together present us with "the meta crisis". I no longer think business-is-usual is likely beyond this decade.
I've come to these observations thanks to following the work of Nate Hagens, whose YouTube channel interviews lots of smart experts across a wide range of topics that all interrelate to "the meta crisis" we face, and the seemingly intractable challenge presented by our "human super-organism" which no one person controls, leading to what he refers to as "the great simplification"; not necessarily a collapse, but almost certainly a major simplification of human affairs, one that will indeed need people to be much more local-community-engaged in order to survive, bringing me back to your post.
You can get a good overview in a recent episode where one of his interviewees interviews Nate, and he lays out in the highest level of details what his observations are based on that collected observation of his interviewees inputs:
We're getting into really interesting territory. Fertility trends do portend big follow-on effects, whether explicit cultural and policy changes, change by selection effects, or technological innovation. I hope we mostly go in the direction of much greater monetary and non-monetary benefits for parents rather than some attempt at collective mass production of babies.
I think Brink is well aware of this, but as a society I think we still underrate how many missteps we made in the 20th century in the spirit of streamlined modernism. From authoritarian government to economic regulation to urban planning and architecture, there's been a big impulse towards central planning that neglected the value of individual incentives and information. And it turns out that in many cases central planning doesn't do a very good job compared to organic economic or social activity. As an extreme example, check out the effects of China's one child policy. I'm sure this impulse will play a role again as we try to figure out what to do about fertility. (Of course, in some cases like local housing development, we may have now erred too much in another direction by giving everyone a veto.)
Artificial wombs would be a big positive for society, but I hope they supplement individual families' options rather than becoming a centralized resource. I don't think the latter would typically go well.
I think the other trend that will interact with the fertility picture will be AI and automation. We're already at a point where AI and robotics are starting to do many formerly human-only tasks. It also seems like we're going to spend hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars continuing to develop these technologies, so on some time frame much of our current work will be automated. I'm optimistic that we'll find other valuable things to do with humanity's time (although it may be that this is the next big struggle we have to work through), and maybe having and raising kids will be a big one.
I think your discussion on cost/benefits of having children strikes the core of why global fertility is falling.
Cash transfers, as you note, thus far have not done much to ease the slide in fertility. Either the transfers need to be much larger or, as I have argued, we need to address the other end of the equation, the cost of having children.
Housing, education, childcare, and healthcare are all industries afflicted with significant “cost disease.” As it happens, all of these sectors greatly inflate the cost of having a child.
Regarding Miller's "heritable variation in personality", I think this shouldn't be discounted as a pathway out of low fertility. Biology will act to close the widening gap between the indirect cues for fitness (e.g., how much sex do I have), and fitness itself (e.g., how many babies do I have). This is what biology does.
We ordinarily think of genetic evolution as a very gradual process, but when selective pressure is high enough it can happen in a handful of generations. The peppered moth in 19th century England is a well-known example.
A woman with a high innate desire for children might have 3 or 4 kids, while another might have 0 or 1. This is a selective pressure unlike anything the human race has seen since perhaps the invention of language. (In the not-so-distant past, either woman would have had 7+ children because reproduction was outside her control.) These shifting genetic predispositions will come clothed in cultural terms, like "a return to traditional values", or an anti-consumerist movement like you describe.
Regarding Miller's "heritable variation in personality", I think this shouldn't be discounted as a pathway out of low fertility. Biology will act to close the widening gap between the indirect cues for fitness (e.g., how much sex do I have), and fitness itself (e.g., how many babies do I have). This is what biology does.
We ordinarily think of genetic evolution as a very gradual process, but when selective pressure is high enough it can happen in a handful of generations. The peppered moth in 19th century England is a well-known example.
A woman with a high innate desire for children might have 3 or 4 kids, while another might have 0 or 1. This is a selective pressure unlike anything the human race has seen since perhaps the invention of language. (In the not-so-distant past, either woman would have had 7+ children because reproduction was outside her control.) These shifting genetic predispositions will come clothed in cultural terms, like "a return to traditional values", or an anti-consumerist movement like you describe.
My totally unauthoritative understanding of the populations that currently reproduce above replacement -- ultra-Orthodox Jews, Old Order Amish, Mennonites, Mormons, not to mention North Africans -- is that their rates, while all still above 2.1, are all declining. I would love to see some real research on this point.
Artificial wombs strike me as a solution in search of a problem. MAKING lots of new humans is not the hard part. Convincing people to want to invest decades of their life into raising lots new humans is. I'm honestly more optimistic about the prospect of technologies to increase human longevity as a solution to our current fertility crisis than I am the prospect of womb tanks. Let's give people more time to both have kids and have a fulfilling career.
You're underestimating how big and young the current world population is. There are eight billion of us, and the replacement rate is still above 1. Apart from catastrophic mortality, there's no way the world population will be below 4 billion by 2100, or even in the lifetime of anyone already born. A lot more of the future population will be African, but some kind of mixture is bound to predominate in the end.
My main hesitation about the "population implosion" thesis is that we don't have any reason not to expect technological breakthroughs that extend life expectancy, perhaps indefinitely.
That won't stop population decline from eventually beginning whenever the TFR is less than 2.1. But it would push the issue back by many centuries, until the population of nearly-immortal adults was large enough that even a very small annual death rate would exceed the absolute number of births.
In fact we can't be sure it wouldn't rule out population decline altogether. If people only died from rare non-natural causes, are we sure the average woman would continue stopping at one or two children? Maybe the more typical pattern would be to have a baby every 50 years or so, just to keep things interesting.
It all seems hard to predict, but I wouldn't assume that the new consensus will be more durable than Paul Ehrlich's was.
The comment that we expect modern parents to be subsidised to do what their forebears did on their ‘own dime’ is inaccurate, or potentially wildly inaccurate.
The real cost of raising children is massively higher than one or 200 years ago. Not only do children now not support family income, they are dependent for much longer and on average have much much higher education costs. In addition, as any parent knows, children are highly ‘ time intensive’ and the opportunity cost of time increases with real incomes.
This is why parents are unresponsive to subsidies of a few thousand dollars, and why, as described in the article, a meaningful figure is more like 1/2 to 1 million dollars.
This kind of intervention would bring with it, a massive set of moral hazard and perverse incentive problems - teenage girl millionaires with three children - not to mention the potential for exploitation of same. Eligibility and payments would need to be carefully geared around the encouragement of secure, loving parenting - lots of tricky policy questions.
I don't see how we can produce artificial wombs ethically. They require testing on unwitting human subjects and many of those tests will surely fail or produce side effects that are unknown for years, decades even.
As historically insular populations grow, one has to ask how they might be changed by that growth in turn. Coordinating larger and larger populations may eventually require the use of communication technologies they currently eschew, for example.
I continue to think that the main distinguishing mechanism the Amish, Haredi etc have is not their insularity per se or their resistance to the temptations of consumerism, but the fact that their cultural "close-knit-ness" drastically reduces the incidence of loneliness. There's a famous book on the old culture of the Eastern European shtetl called "Life is With People" and I think that title captures it: when loneliness is basically never a problem, people don't have much trouble forming relationships and eventually families. This gets back to what, again, I think is one of Lyman Stone's main points: that even in very low-TFR countries, married couples have at- or above-replacement TFR, and the overall TFR decline is thus almost entirely driven by the decline in marriage.
Now maybe you want to claim that consumerist/individualist societies are inevitably high-loneliness ones, that people essentially have to be forced to connect with each other by denying them alternatives to that connection. I don't buy that: AFAICT people still *want* to have more friends, just as they want to have more kids than they have. It may well be that specific technologies or institutions are loneliness generators, but let's then rigorously identify and set limits on those rather than rejecting the whole consumerist package.
The other question I think is underexplored is whether there might be some environmental chemical exposures that have made us less psychologically effective at making interpersonal connections, and the Amish etc just happen to have been less affected by those. If lead exposure can be a major factor in the rise of crime, might something of that sort be a factor in the rise of loneliness and the decline of marriage?
"and pray that governments end up preferring carrots to sticks."
We've already imagined that stick-wielded world in Margaret Atwood's 'The Handmaid's Tale', brought terrifyingly to TV-life a few years ago where sagging fertility rates were the driver, and pronatalist religious-right nutjobs became the fourth reich, Murica-style. Atwood's premise was biologically driven sagging fertility rates, and in our present-day reality this is most likely to be via the endocrine disruptor chemicals we now know to be infiltrating our immediate environment and lowering inherent 1st-order fertility rates, independent of - and underpinning - the higher-order impact of affluenza lowering fertility rates as your article describes.
Which brings me to my point. Your posts, as broad-thinking and thought-provoking as they are, are still significantly predicated on a continued business-as-usual when it comes to energy availability, as well as a raft of other issues that would seem to pose just as much of a challenge to the progress of the Anthropocene, and which together present us with "the meta crisis". I no longer think business-is-usual is likely beyond this decade.
I've come to these observations thanks to following the work of Nate Hagens, whose YouTube channel interviews lots of smart experts across a wide range of topics that all interrelate to "the meta crisis" we face, and the seemingly intractable challenge presented by our "human super-organism" which no one person controls, leading to what he refers to as "the great simplification"; not necessarily a collapse, but almost certainly a major simplification of human affairs, one that will indeed need people to be much more local-community-engaged in order to survive, bringing me back to your post.
You can get a good overview in a recent episode where one of his interviewees interviews Nate, and he lays out in the highest level of details what his observations are based on that collected observation of his interviewees inputs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GocuMZX3hIs
We're getting into really interesting territory. Fertility trends do portend big follow-on effects, whether explicit cultural and policy changes, change by selection effects, or technological innovation. I hope we mostly go in the direction of much greater monetary and non-monetary benefits for parents rather than some attempt at collective mass production of babies.
I think Brink is well aware of this, but as a society I think we still underrate how many missteps we made in the 20th century in the spirit of streamlined modernism. From authoritarian government to economic regulation to urban planning and architecture, there's been a big impulse towards central planning that neglected the value of individual incentives and information. And it turns out that in many cases central planning doesn't do a very good job compared to organic economic or social activity. As an extreme example, check out the effects of China's one child policy. I'm sure this impulse will play a role again as we try to figure out what to do about fertility. (Of course, in some cases like local housing development, we may have now erred too much in another direction by giving everyone a veto.)
Artificial wombs would be a big positive for society, but I hope they supplement individual families' options rather than becoming a centralized resource. I don't think the latter would typically go well.
I think the other trend that will interact with the fertility picture will be AI and automation. We're already at a point where AI and robotics are starting to do many formerly human-only tasks. It also seems like we're going to spend hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars continuing to develop these technologies, so on some time frame much of our current work will be automated. I'm optimistic that we'll find other valuable things to do with humanity's time (although it may be that this is the next big struggle we have to work through), and maybe having and raising kids will be a big one.
I think your discussion on cost/benefits of having children strikes the core of why global fertility is falling.
Cash transfers, as you note, thus far have not done much to ease the slide in fertility. Either the transfers need to be much larger or, as I have argued, we need to address the other end of the equation, the cost of having children.
Housing, education, childcare, and healthcare are all industries afflicted with significant “cost disease.” As it happens, all of these sectors greatly inflate the cost of having a child.
No discussion of the trade-offs of these religious insular communities especially with respect to gender-equality?
Regarding Miller's "heritable variation in personality", I think this shouldn't be discounted as a pathway out of low fertility. Biology will act to close the widening gap between the indirect cues for fitness (e.g., how much sex do I have), and fitness itself (e.g., how many babies do I have). This is what biology does.
We ordinarily think of genetic evolution as a very gradual process, but when selective pressure is high enough it can happen in a handful of generations. The peppered moth in 19th century England is a well-known example.
A woman with a high innate desire for children might have 3 or 4 kids, while another might have 0 or 1. This is a selective pressure unlike anything the human race has seen since perhaps the invention of language. (In the not-so-distant past, either woman would have had 7+ children because reproduction was outside her control.) These shifting genetic predispositions will come clothed in cultural terms, like "a return to traditional values", or an anti-consumerist movement like you describe.
Regarding Miller's "heritable variation in personality", I think this shouldn't be discounted as a pathway out of low fertility. Biology will act to close the widening gap between the indirect cues for fitness (e.g., how much sex do I have), and fitness itself (e.g., how many babies do I have). This is what biology does.
We ordinarily think of genetic evolution as a very gradual process, but when selective pressure is high enough it can happen in a handful of generations. The peppered moth in 19th century England is a well-known example.
A woman with a high innate desire for children might have 3 or 4 kids, while another might have 0 or 1. This is a selective pressure unlike anything the human race has seen since perhaps the invention of language. (In the not-so-distant past, either woman would have had 7+ children because reproduction was outside her control.) These shifting genetic predispositions will come clothed in cultural terms, like "a return to traditional values", or an anti-consumerist movement like you describe.
My totally unauthoritative understanding of the populations that currently reproduce above replacement -- ultra-Orthodox Jews, Old Order Amish, Mennonites, Mormons, not to mention North Africans -- is that their rates, while all still above 2.1, are all declining. I would love to see some real research on this point.
Artificial wombs strike me as a solution in search of a problem. MAKING lots of new humans is not the hard part. Convincing people to want to invest decades of their life into raising lots new humans is. I'm honestly more optimistic about the prospect of technologies to increase human longevity as a solution to our current fertility crisis than I am the prospect of womb tanks. Let's give people more time to both have kids and have a fulfilling career.