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.
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.