Birthrates only matter because of mass immigration. If you don't have mass immigration they're irrelevant, especially with the pace at which automation via LLM (including in the material world with PaLM-E and other multimodal models for robotics) is advancing.
It doesn't really matter if South Korea's population falls from 50m to 10m provided two things are true:
Firstly, that total productivity can be maintained (this seems likely with LLMs able to take over a large percentage of white collar labor over the next few years, and robotics + multimodal LLMs likely to take over a large percentage of blue collar labor over the next decade or two). In this case, no economic collapse is likely, and while fiscal policy might need to adjust to redistribute generated wealth, that's not an existential issue.
Secondly, that those very same advances mean that military preparedness isn't damaged by falling number of young men, which again, advances in drone warfare suggest is likely. Plus, North Korea's birthrate is also collapsing (see Kim's recent comments) and it has half SK's population, so any disadvantage is unlikely to be large.
The main reason to be worried about birthrates is demographic competition as in Lebanon, in Israel, in India and so on. If a minority group has much higher birthrates than the native population, the long-term balance of power in a nation is almost guaranteed to shift.
If you don't have mass immigration they're irrelevant
Go back and look at that part about "every family". Only one out of the four of us, my siblings and me, have children and they're going to carry on their father's line (such as it is). So my parents heritage is pretty much at a dead stop. It's only as you get older you realise "this is why we have rituals, this is why we have customs" in order to carry forward memory (I think this is why Sam Bankman-Fried's parents did him such a disservice with, if I believe Lewis' book, no celebrations of Jewish festivals or secular festivals or even his damn birthday).
It's easy to say "It doesn't matter if my family has no descendants, look at the millions of other people living in this country" but as you get older and the older generations die off, it becomes very clear how fragile the chain of knowledge is. Things changed in my father's lifetime, and he told me of those changes; things have also changed in my lifetime. But there's no-one for me to hand that knowledge on to, and in future if any one is researching such-and-such a place and the changes there, they won't know the information I could have told them.
It's very easy to lose knowledge, to have things forgotten, lost, not handed on. If you're pinning your hopes on automation and robots to replace humanity, you may not care. But look at history and archaeology and other sciences which would love to have that exact information to fill in the gaps of the past, but the chain of transmission was broken.
Falling birthrates matter when it comes to individual families, because the last person ever to remember an event/speak a language/practice an art dies, and that information is lost, and no amount of AI will ever get it back.
My great grandparents and my wife’s great grandparents were born in the same decade. My great grandparents had one son, who had two children, two grandchildren, and only one great grandchild (working on fixing that!) Her great grandparents had five children, all of whom had huge numbers of kids, the lowest was 5 and the highest was 11.
Same ethnic group and religion too although her side actually practiced. Couples of the same era but one side has almost no living descendants and one has hundreds. Crazy. How do people ensure they’re on the side that actually reproduces if you can’t afford or don’t want to have 5+ kids?
I don’t actually disagree with you at all. I think having children is important, spiritually and in general. But - sans mass immigration - it is not the critical, existential issue in the short term that some on the right suggest. When people say they are concerned about birthrates, often what they’re actually concerned about is immigration.
It's easy to say "It doesn't matter if my family has no descendants, look at the millions of other people living in this country" but as you get older and the older generations die off, it becomes very clear how fragile the chain of knowledge is. Things changed in my father's lifetime, and he told me of those changes; things have also changed in my lifetime. But there's no-one for me to hand that knowledge on to, and in future if any one is researching such-and-such a place and the changes there, they won't know the information I could have told them.
This makes me think about the historical tradition of adult adoption.
Even in Rome the adult adoption ran in family. For instance Augustus was grandson of Ceasar's elder sister Julia Minor and Hadrian was Trajan's cousin. It is not a bad way of running the family - but we are talking about extended patriarchal clan-like family type that is typical in Sicilian mafia movies or in Middle East as opposed to egalitarian nuclear family of English/US type.
Which might be a worthwhile adaptation to falling birthrates. If fewer Americans are having kids, the kids that exist should naturally be spread more evenly.
Except they won’t be- IIRC parity is actually rising for women with children, but fewer women are having kids. So the decline in the birthrate is mostly about the increase in family size being unable to cancel out the decline in numbers, and that means kids are spread less evenly.
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Notes -
Birthrates only matter because of mass immigration. If you don't have mass immigration they're irrelevant, especially with the pace at which automation via LLM (including in the material world with PaLM-E and other multimodal models for robotics) is advancing.
It doesn't really matter if South Korea's population falls from 50m to 10m provided two things are true:
Firstly, that total productivity can be maintained (this seems likely with LLMs able to take over a large percentage of white collar labor over the next few years, and robotics + multimodal LLMs likely to take over a large percentage of blue collar labor over the next decade or two). In this case, no economic collapse is likely, and while fiscal policy might need to adjust to redistribute generated wealth, that's not an existential issue.
Secondly, that those very same advances mean that military preparedness isn't damaged by falling number of young men, which again, advances in drone warfare suggest is likely. Plus, North Korea's birthrate is also collapsing (see Kim's recent comments) and it has half SK's population, so any disadvantage is unlikely to be large.
The main reason to be worried about birthrates is demographic competition as in Lebanon, in Israel, in India and so on. If a minority group has much higher birthrates than the native population, the long-term balance of power in a nation is almost guaranteed to shift.
Go back and look at that part about "every family". Only one out of the four of us, my siblings and me, have children and they're going to carry on their father's line (such as it is). So my parents heritage is pretty much at a dead stop. It's only as you get older you realise "this is why we have rituals, this is why we have customs" in order to carry forward memory (I think this is why Sam Bankman-Fried's parents did him such a disservice with, if I believe Lewis' book, no celebrations of Jewish festivals or secular festivals or even his damn birthday).
It's easy to say "It doesn't matter if my family has no descendants, look at the millions of other people living in this country" but as you get older and the older generations die off, it becomes very clear how fragile the chain of knowledge is. Things changed in my father's lifetime, and he told me of those changes; things have also changed in my lifetime. But there's no-one for me to hand that knowledge on to, and in future if any one is researching such-and-such a place and the changes there, they won't know the information I could have told them.
It's very easy to lose knowledge, to have things forgotten, lost, not handed on. If you're pinning your hopes on automation and robots to replace humanity, you may not care. But look at history and archaeology and other sciences which would love to have that exact information to fill in the gaps of the past, but the chain of transmission was broken.
Falling birthrates matter when it comes to individual families, because the last person ever to remember an event/speak a language/practice an art dies, and that information is lost, and no amount of AI will ever get it back.
I was just wondering this morning if anyone even knows when the last native speaker of Hittite (or Etruscan, or Pelasgian) died.
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My great grandparents and my wife’s great grandparents were born in the same decade. My great grandparents had one son, who had two children, two grandchildren, and only one great grandchild (working on fixing that!) Her great grandparents had five children, all of whom had huge numbers of kids, the lowest was 5 and the highest was 11.
Same ethnic group and religion too although her side actually practiced. Couples of the same era but one side has almost no living descendants and one has hundreds. Crazy. How do people ensure they’re on the side that actually reproduces if you can’t afford or don’t want to have 5+ kids?
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I don’t actually disagree with you at all. I think having children is important, spiritually and in general. But - sans mass immigration - it is not the critical, existential issue in the short term that some on the right suggest. When people say they are concerned about birthrates, often what they’re actually concerned about is immigration.
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This makes me think about the historical tradition of adult adoption.
Even in Rome the adult adoption ran in family. For instance Augustus was grandson of Ceasar's elder sister Julia Minor and Hadrian was Trajan's cousin. It is not a bad way of running the family - but we are talking about extended patriarchal clan-like family type that is typical in Sicilian mafia movies or in Middle East as opposed to egalitarian nuclear family of English/US type.
Which might be a worthwhile adaptation to falling birthrates. If fewer Americans are having kids, the kids that exist should naturally be spread more evenly.
Except they won’t be- IIRC parity is actually rising for women with children, but fewer women are having kids. So the decline in the birthrate is mostly about the increase in family size being unable to cancel out the decline in numbers, and that means kids are spread less evenly.
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