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!
How accurate would you have been? My impression is not very accurate.
But it's actually very accurate (outside of certain kinds of immigration), given that 1923 birthrates are nearly identical to modern birthrates (though the shift to urbanization kind of throws this off; 1923 had 50% rural whereas 2023 only has 20% rural, and rural areas tend to have more kids for farm labor reasons and because there's nothing else to do) and far lower than one or two generations before that.
I assert that the financial conditions and constraints on the average potential kid-haver is probably the same, because the same thing is happening- rural centers hollowing out for centralized urban industry- and aside from cheap land, cheap transportation, and an abundance of well-paying low-credential labor becoming available in the 50s and lasting until about 1973 or so that drove this trend backwards (and led to the significant outwards expansion of cities into suburbs) we've regressed to the mean for Western nations.
Yeah I think people have the impression that birth rates were high in the early 20th century and then dropped steadily until today. In fact we already had low birth rates in the 1920s and the only thing that saved us was the baby boom, which was totally unexpected and still I've never seen a really satisfying explanation for what caused it or how we could make something similar happen today.
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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!
But it's actually very accurate (outside of certain kinds of immigration), given that 1923 birthrates are nearly identical to modern birthrates (though the shift to urbanization kind of throws this off; 1923 had 50% rural whereas 2023 only has 20% rural, and rural areas tend to have more kids for farm labor reasons and because there's nothing else to do) and far lower than one or two generations before that.
I assert that the financial conditions and constraints on the average potential kid-haver is probably the same, because the same thing is happening- rural centers hollowing out for centralized urban industry- and aside from cheap land, cheap transportation, and an abundance of well-paying low-credential labor becoming available in the 50s and lasting until about 1973 or so that drove this trend backwards (and led to the significant outwards expansion of cities into suburbs) we've regressed to the mean for Western nations.
Yeah I think people have the impression that birth rates were high in the early 20th century and then dropped steadily until today. In fact we already had low birth rates in the 1920s and the only thing that saved us was the baby boom, which was totally unexpected and still I've never seen a really satisfying explanation for what caused it or how we could make something similar happen today.
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