“I’m working hard for the next week or so.”

Well don’t worry too much, there’s no urgency in that sense, this is going to take years, if not decades.

“Older people will have to tighten their belts”

Yep, but what if those belts are in Thailand and China, where birthrates are already well below replacement, or, of course, Russia. In these societies there is no meaningful welfare state, and the belts are pretty tight already.

“Okay, in a hundred years the population of the U.S. is 900 million, maybe 500 million in 50 years…why do you care? Maybe the earth can sustain 12 or 24 billion people.”

Don’t worry, there is a peak, not in carrying capacity – see Ester Boserup – but in our reproductive drive. Population should peak somewhere around the 9 billion mark in the fourth quarter of this century, and after that it will be coming down, not going up. The only real issue is how far down is down. It’s impossible to say at this stage. And also by then we’ll be into technologically engineered humans, so who knows.

So the US at 900 million, this won’t happen, sleep calmly. I doubt it will reach 500. As I say, fertility in the US is long term on the way down, and the era of immigration will be past soon too. How many people from Ireland emmigrate to the US now? A trickle. Well the same will happen to Mexico, Ecuador etc etc. The Criaderos are about to go dry.

Give Morrocco ten years and Europe won’t be able to count on re-inforcement from that source either. Despite the silly things the Trolls say, the main future source of immigration for Europe is Sub-Saharan Africa, this has hardly been tapped to date, but then a lot of the outcome here depends on how the AIDS tragedy evolves.

So sleep peacefully tonight, but worry a bit more longer term I think .

One argument is that the younger work force at some point can’t support the aging population. Okay, so what? Older people will have to tighten their belts, work longer, whatever. Suck it up and get over their sense of privilege. No biggie if they see the corresponding benefit that the world can at least survive this way.

But I do want you to know that laying in bed last night I told myself to think around my prejudices…to get outside the box, or even to get a new box. Okay, in a hundred years the population of the U.S. is 900 million, maybe 500 million in 50 years…why do you care? Maybe the earth can sustain 12 or 24 billion people.

Nice to see you found your way here as you transit the globe, I don’t expect to be able to give you all the answers you are looking for, but to save me repeating myself you might try this thread just a few posts down, I think people are discussing many of the points which interest you:

http://fistfulofeuros.net/archives/001804.php

btw, I take the point about the third world, but I don’t think many people seriously doubt that ‘population policy’ means very different things in Niger and Japan. What’s wrong with us all? I don’t know, but I suppose many of us aren’t convinced that the developed world going to the dogs is going to help the LDCs too much.

im sure i heard this in relation to a bump in the number of babies born which was then traced back to these porn movies 9 months previously.

so according to that logic we need more porn movies on TV.

And even if you do feel that the marginal utility of an additional human being on this planet is negative, you should be concerned about a too-fast population decline, because in the aftermath of societal collapse, the environment tends to be the least of concerns.

Here’s a talk that looks at a number of proposed reasons why some countries are prosperous, and others not:

http://www.ieis.lu/lectures/Olson.PDF

I won’t endorse everything it says, but the things it has to say about overpopulation are interesting. For example, if overpopulation is the key factor in third world poverty; that is to say, if there are too many people for the amount of resources, then we would expect prosperity in poor nations to rise after mass emigration.

But even in the few cases where emigration has occurred on a scale sufficient to overcome natural growth (e.g., Ireland in the 1840s), we do not see this. We do see increased prosperity when poor nations drop their fertility from, say a TFR of 5 to 3; but this is a change in the age structure from children to workers; the population is still growing.

So to correct the quibble, what I should have said was the declining fertility of the hispanic US population (this is now declining steadily). Non-hispanic white is already more or less stable at European upper-end levels of below replacement 1.8 and may well not drop further.

On the other side of the quibble, and in defence of the spirit if not the letter of what I was getting at, this wasn’t what the original paper was about, since it related to the long term historic decline which has occured in fertility in the US just like the rest of the OECD. Didn’t you find any of that even a little bit interesting (Rupert) and worthy of comment?

Here’s a useful graph to illustrate the long term decline and recent plateau.:

http://www.prb.org/pdf/USFertilityTrends2.pdf

On the quibbling thing, you are dropping slowly, in 2000 you were at 2.1, and obviously over the last 50 years you have been dropping substantially. My opinion is that massive immigration from the late 80s has put a break on the drop, or if you like a small plateau.

The thing is Rupert there is not one fertility regime in the US but several. The end statistic is a composite. Lets let the prb explain:

“(Population Bulletin excerpt, June 2000) The United States has higher fertility than any other country in the industrialized world. At the end of the 1990s, the total fertility rate (TFR) was about 1.4 children per woman in Europe, for example, while the U.S. rate was about 2.1. Yet surveys find that women in all these countries say they want about the same number of children, most often two. Why is fertility higher in the United States?

One explanation for the higher U.S. fertility is that many European countries have racially homogeneous populations compared with the United States. In the United States, fertility rates differ among the nation’s varied racial and ethnic population groups. In 1998, the U.S. TFR of 2.1 children per woman was made up of several different rates: non-Hispanic white, 1.8; black, 2.2; American Indian, 2.1; Asian and Pacific Islander, 1.9; and Hispanic, 2.9.

Now its the relative weighting of the Hispanic component which seems to be important, and it is the fertility of this group which seems to be declining through a steady rise in age at first child from a very low base. I think mid term the US has just as much reason to be worried as anyone else here.

“Funnily enough I think we may have another asymmetry here. I’m not sure the decision to have children is an economic one, but the reasons for putting off having them often are, and this means at some level they can be addressed.”

It’s more than that. It is actually extremely financially punishing to have children for women. Numerous studies show that they are far more likely to lose their jobs and then have far more trouble getting new ones after the birth of a child. There is also the great loss of freedom inherent in having a child. (We just had a baby – believe me I know.) Also there is the great expense in raising the child, for example the expense of education, particularly higher education. Then there are health care costs for the child. Then there are the non-neglible health impacts from having a child, ranging from loss of bladder control to death. These are real issues that need to be dealt with if countries want to increase the birth rate.

Everyone already knows about decreased fertility, and they don’t care. Ultimately, they have weighed the burdens and joys of children against the joys of employment and travel and income and found children wanting. Only if you can tip the scales back can you improve that.

Here’s an example of a minimal threshold for pro-natal policies:

(1) Free day care for everyone
(2) Cash payments for children until the age of 18
(3) Aggressive enforcement of anti-discrimination laws against women, particularly on the basis of motherhood for employment.
(4) A nationwide network of licensed babysitters for times not covered by day care.
(5) Government-mandated paternal and maternal leave policies that must be offered but are not obligatory.
(6) Generous leave and vacation benefits for all workers – probably government mandated.

The only country which really comes close is France, and they have a relatively healthy birth rate for Western Europe.

Well, we agree .

“Warning women about decreased fertility is not going to work.”

Maybe not, but I presume you wouldn’t be against at least making the information available to them. At present, as Drago and Varner suggest, there is a lot of ignorance on this topic. I think it sould be taught as part of sex education in the schools, but then you need a lot of social policy instruments to back it up, otherwise you’re just going to skew gender relations again.

“Frankly, as long as there is a social safety net in place for old age, you really don’t need to have kids around to take care of you”

Yes, well obviously it’s the threat to this that may make people think about more children sooner. This may be the mid-term correction mechanism.

“if South Korea’s pro-natal policies are limited to cash payments, it won’t work very well.”

Oh, I agree. I only mentioned this not very interesting initiative because it was so symmetrical with the menarch? thing.

“You can’t pay people enough to overcome the lifetime earnings lost…”

Funnily enough I think we may have another asymmetry here. I’m not sure the decision to have children is an economic one, but the reasons for putting off having them often are, and this means at some level they can be addressed.