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Fertility has fallen hugely, which is bad IMO. In addition to hundreds of millions of lives not lived, there are surely many discoveries and artistic products that were never made, because their creators were never born. I don't buy Malthusian logic, we could've used our resources more efficiently to sustain higher populations. Labour and brainpower is the most important economic input, more is better.
The advanced world is now below replacement rate, our civilization is literally unsustainable. A lot of people seem quite depressed and need powerful drugs to cope - I recall a statistic showing unmarried women in the 40-50 age group were hardest hit. Having children is probably good for you. At least it ought to be a default setting for wellness, like sunlight and sea-level air pressure. Our brains and bodies evolved to have children.
Anyway, the massive fall in fertility came just as the sexual revolution showed up, it's not like there was a massive plague or war at the same time. What other cause could there be?
Fertility has been dropping steadily since the early 19th century across the developed world. The sexual revolution at worst accelerated an ongoing trend, but if you look at the graph even that doesn't seem to be true, since the rate of decline since the 60s is actually lower than it was prior to the 40s - 50s baby boom.
Were people less depressed in 1932? 1832? Obviously most people would have said 'no' because 'I have depression' was not something that would have even crossed most people's minds, even if they displayed the same symptoms as someone who was 'diagnosed' with depression today, but would they have been popping SSRIs if they were available and socially acceptable? Does the question even make sense? Like I said in another comment, I don't really put a lot of stock into downward trends of positive answers to questions like "are you happy?" over time, because I doubt the invariance of the measurement. People were different in the past, even in very basic psychological ways. Someone then saying "I'm happy" and someone now saying "I'm not" doesn't imply the modern would be happier with the life of the premodern. Even if people are significantly more miserable today than the historical average, the sexual revolution is hardly the only thing that's changed in the past few decades. There's a huge inflection point in rates of self-reported anxiety and depression right at 2012 when social media exploded.
We evolved to have children not to enjoy children. It's not like the vast majority of people, at least not women, for the past million years had much of a choice in reproducing or not. The fact that rich people in every society in history offload as much of the hard work of child-rearing as possible onto servants strikes me as a very strong indicator that most people don't actually enjoy raising kids that much.
On a purely personal and selfish level having to marry a girl and raise seven kids sounds nightmarish and I am endlessly thankful that the technological and social change of the past century means I don't have to do that.
On the other hand we still have subgroups that maintain above replacement fertility, and they tend to not be the ones that leaned into the sexual revolution.
I don't like self-reports either. If they're dropped from all of sociology, we can dismiss them when discussing the sexual revolution as well, but not before.
Falling fertility seems to go hand in hand with both technological development and political/social liberalization. It's possible that only one is responsible for the effect, but since they almost never occur independently, it's hard to tell. If we all collectively decided to adopt the material and social circumstances of 19th century Russian peasants maybe we could get fertility rates back up, but this is exactly my problem with the "modernity is terrible because fertility rates are falling" argument. It is apparently the case that pre-modern society was able to reproduce itself, but I and a lot of people think pre-modern society was horrible in just about every respect and not worth reproducing. As far as I'm concerned, we either have to figure out some secret third thing that will solve falling fertility (whether it be artificial wombs or whatever) or resign ourselves to extinction. Either of those are preferable in my eyes to a return to pre-modern existence, though obviously the first would be better.
I don't want to defend all or even most of sociology.
It really is not that hard to make babies. Why would artificial wombs be needed?
Natural selection is making room for the ones that can figure it out. Like this bus driver in Japan.
Don't then. If you're not reproducing the future state of humanity is not really your business.
Absolutely, which is why all the vapouring about abortion rights and abortion is health care and we must pass an amendment to the state constitution to make and keep abortion legal.
See above about abortion. It's easy to have babies, but a lot of people don't want to have babies and will try very hard not to have babies. If you want babies, but nobody wants to have those babies the natural way, then you need technology and artifice.
But why want babies?
People's revealed preference is not to have any, or few. Is the concern coming from business owners who need cheap (preferably teenage) labor for fast food restaurants or janitor positions that cannot immediately be automated? Is it because we need able-bodied workers for care jobs in nursing homes?
The solutions are robots and deregulation. Let's just make it legally clear that if you drop your elderly relative that you don't care enough about to look after yourself in some kind of hospital or managed home, they may just end up dead for no reasonable reason. You sign on this or you take them home and you deal with them yourself.
There. No more liability, no more costly trainings and procedures to avoid liability, no more staffing issues...
Let's give the unloved elderly the same level of respect we afford unloved pre-birth children.
The economy. Babies grow up to be working age adults who get jobs, pay taxes, and contribute for decades which pays out the pensions/social welfare entitlements for the current aging population. If you have a bulge where the current population is getting older but there are fewer young people coming up, then your economy is in trouble.
If robots can earn money or produce revenue to support the welfare state, then that's the way to go. Otherwise it really is a crisis about "I never had kids and now mysteriously there are no working age adults around".
People really did believe, around the time of The Population Bomb, that there were way too many people on the Earth and unless populations decreased there would be drastic and terrible natural disasters. Overpopulation was a genuine worry. That's why China, for instance, started with the One Child Policy. Things like the expansion of Cairo, which had and has a population zooming up, creating a sprawling, expanding city that is more like a collection of slums, was a visible proof of the problem (or so it seemed) - not enough resources, too many bodies, too much demand on the scarce resources:
There are also the problems with pollution - air, water and land, as well as lead and copper smelting.
A lot of people thought Cairo and similar cities were the future, if population growth remained unchecked.
What nobody seems to have considered is that Western nations crashing their fertility rates from a combination of "overpopulation is the coming threat" and "I don't want to be tied down with kids, now that I'm young, in a good economy which gives me plenty of disposable income, and the sexual revolution and social liberalisation means I can have an entire smorgasbord of choices that my parents' generation never had about self-indulgence" would be a bad thing. We're still grappling with "the poor countries have way too many people which they can't support", but the fertility decline in the West isn't doing anything to help that and now we are facing the results of "who will pay the piper?" because if there aren't enough workers coming up, the benefits which the retirees expect won't be there.
And the future problem seems to be not alone the lack of recognition that "the people are the wealth of the nation" but that only a shrinking number of those workers will be considered economically contributing and valuable. Well-paying jobs that provide growing tax revenues are increasingly shifted to the white collar world, and to a particular sub-set of that - IT or finance. And with AI looming on the horizon, the lower levels of those niches will be chipped away.
Not everybody can learn to code and even if they do, there's the spectre of "the machine will do it better, faster and cheaper". I imagine that's why a lot of people and institutions are pinning their hopes on Fairy Godmother AI which will magically ensure an economy of plenty, like the cornucopia, where all we desire can be drawn out limitlessly, there will be trillions and zillions of money, and we'll dodge the bullet of an aging population and an increasingly unequal society.
Sounds like you need to change up your economy then.
What did the horse breeders do when Americans started driving cars? Carmakers can keep shifting their production to SUV and more accessible vehicles, and then eventually come back full circle and start making horse buggies again.
If Star Wars fans are not getting made anymore, perhaps media companies can shift to making Christian movies.
Or maybe we can scale down the welfare state? Make these retirement payments conditional to having had dependents (what you've provided on your tax returns...)?
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