One thing I genuinely wonder about re: current and future birthrates is if the selection pressures stay relatively consistent. People always talk about the current bottleneck selecting for people who still choose to reproduce under modernity but do those selection pressures change too quickly to effectively select for anything? Things have changed so radically culturally and technologically just in my short lifetime. Are current births selecting for the same type of personalities as in the 2000s? What about now vs the 2030s and 40s? Maybe the type of personality that become DINKs in the 2020s would’ve had four kids in 1990 or will in 2040. For example right now (in the US at least) actually practicing a religion makes one much more likely to reproduce but could that reverse?
I genuinely don’t know. It makes it even harder to make any serious predictions
I think this is an important (and under-discussed) aspect of the birthrate discourse. Say you wound the clock back to 1923 and projected 2023 demographics on the basis of 1923 brith rates. How accurate would you have been? My impression is not very accurate. More generally, for how many century-long periods were birth rates at the beginning of the century predictive of demographics at the end of the century? My impression is not very many. And yet we're expected to believe birth rates in the present day are predictive of demographic composition in a century. Seems unlikely!
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Notes -
One thing I genuinely wonder about re: current and future birthrates is if the selection pressures stay relatively consistent. People always talk about the current bottleneck selecting for people who still choose to reproduce under modernity but do those selection pressures change too quickly to effectively select for anything? Things have changed so radically culturally and technologically just in my short lifetime. Are current births selecting for the same type of personalities as in the 2000s? What about now vs the 2030s and 40s? Maybe the type of personality that become DINKs in the 2020s would’ve had four kids in 1990 or will in 2040. For example right now (in the US at least) actually practicing a religion makes one much more likely to reproduce but could that reverse?
I genuinely don’t know. It makes it even harder to make any serious predictions
I think this is an important (and under-discussed) aspect of the birthrate discourse. Say you wound the clock back to 1923 and projected 2023 demographics on the basis of 1923 brith rates. How accurate would you have been? My impression is not very accurate. More generally, for how many century-long periods were birth rates at the beginning of the century predictive of demographics at the end of the century? My impression is not very many. And yet we're expected to believe birth rates in the present day are predictive of demographic composition in a century. Seems unlikely!
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