from Hacker News

Is liberalism digging its own demographic grave? (2022)

by neverminder on 6/12/23, 1:23 PM with 68 comments

by api on 6/12/23, 2:24 PM
Illiberal societies like Russia, Iran, and China also have low birth rates, and falling.
The correlation is with economic development and education, which suppresses birth rates across all cultures and systems of governance. The only places in the world with very high birth rates are poor with high levels of illiteracy. As they develop their birth rates are starting to fall too.
It’s funny… I remember the overpopulation panic. If we’d kept reproducing like that we may well be facing a “Soylent Green” future, but it didn’t happen. Instead of celebrating the fact that humans seem able to self regulate our birth rates to avoid Malthusian catastrophes we are now panicking about that instead.
by shp0ngle on 6/12/23, 2:21 PM
The problem solves itself; the societies that are pro-natal will survive and the ones thay are not will die out.
by Georgelemental on 6/12/23, 2:31 PM
Israel is the one shining example of a country with a TFR well above replacement (around 3.0, and stable) despite being economically modern. They have lessons to teach the rest of us.
by photochemsyn on 6/12/23, 2:50 PM
The thesis that liberal societies are not replacing themselves seems incorrect. UK population was 60 million in 2000, and is 67.5 million today. The demographics are somewhat interesting in that 'white native British' has dropped from 99% or so of the population in the 1950s to about 82% today. In comparison the USA population is also steadily rising from ~280 million in 2000 to ~330 million in 2020. Now if the concern is that the relative ratios of different race-ethnic-religious groups is changing, why is that an issue? Children tend to adopt the societal norms they're surrounded by, even if this upsets their traditional-minded parents. That's certainly been the case in the USA, it's an assimilative process.
As far as birth rate data, as women acquire more rights and wealth they tend to choose to have fewer children later in life, and as medical care and knowledge improves, those children tend to survive to adulthood at rates unheard of a few centuries ago. Thus, while birth rates may indeed be falling, the population is stable or even growing due to the other factor the author seems to ignore, i.e. lower childhood death rates.
by twic on 6/12/23, 4:48 PM
The phenomenon of fertility falling as societies get more advanced is called "demographic transition".
But societies don't keep getting more advanced! Once a society has become a modern post-industrial, "liberal" society, the demographic transition effect stops. After that, other factors continue to act on fertility.
And there is evidence that fertility is heritable, and positively selected for (almost by definition, i think). So we might expect to see fertility slowly rise after demographic transitions are complete. If that is the case, the current situation of declining and ageing populations is only a transient state.
I read some stuff on this a while ago, didn't save the links, and now can't find it. But digging around now, i think these papers are relevant:
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2013.256...
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2015.015...
by JasserInicide on 6/12/23, 2:34 PM
One thing the article doesn't mention: how education levels impact this. Those with more education have fewer kids. I'm always reminded of the opening Idiocracy skit where the smart couple is worried about the financials of having a kid, and the white trash family just does it with reckless abandon.
by dash2 on 6/12/23, 2:27 PM
Damn, that's not just some random substacker - that's Paul Morland who wrote Tomorrow's People.
TBH that book was rather bland and milquetoast. The same argument he makes here is made at book length by Eric Kaufmann in "Shall The Religious Inherit The Earth", which is very good.
by hunglee2 on 6/12/23, 1:51 PM
"A clear pattern is emerging; liberal societies are not reproducing themselves"
Probably not to do with liberalism as illiberal societies are also suffering from the same phenomenon. The issue can be isolated to economic development, which itself is a result of female education and subsequent participation in the formal labour market. Turns out being a wage earner / consumer is in tension with being a parent, especially a mother. Interestingly, remote work seems to have an effect of increasing birth rate, we might be able to solve this by redesigning work around family making, rather than treating workers as atomic individuals with no social relations outside of the market
by Georgelemental on 6/12/23, 2:31 PM
Israel is the one shining example of a country with a TFR well above replacement (around 3.0, and stable) despite being economically modern. They have lessons to teach us
by ed25519FUUU on 6/12/23, 7:15 PM
I think this[1] is an interesting graph: income level vs children.
The group with the lowest TFR? White couples who make between $200k and $250k. Clearly it's not just about income because the uber poor and uber rich have about the same amount of children.
1. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FyYwPsBXoAEK1ur?format=png
by cmh89 on 6/12/23, 2:27 PM
The author was struggling along to make a point and then dropped 'wokeness' to completely lose credibility.
The author seemed to completely miss the point that, regardless of liberal or illiberal, when women have access to birth control, birth rates go down.
by gaoshan on 6/12/23, 2:48 PM
Isn't human population already too high for the planet (or at least headed that way)? I would think that a trend in the other direction is good, on the whole and over the long run.
by mbfg on 6/12/23, 2:31 PM
People largely worry about being able to afford children. Most people especially without children, don't care if the society in the future survives. I don't see how this is hard to understand.
If there are people who care about civilization surviving into the the future, making it economically advantageous to have children would be a good plan.
by anovikov on 6/12/23, 2:26 PM
It has nothing to do with liberalism, birth rates are plummeting everywhere and especially hard in places like China which are anything but liberal.
Don't look for scapegoats: people are not having children because they can. They never wished to procreate enough to sustain population, they only did because they had no way around it. It's incredibly stupid to portray achievement of progress as some kind of curse or even moral failure.
by incomingpain on 6/12/23, 2:52 PM
Please read the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Population_Fund
They have for many decades been working toward reducing the world population. Many policies are intentionally designed around reducing world population. This has been working effectively on the former 1st world countries.
What was discovered was the conservatives/republicans/whatever realized what was happening and decided on a unique strategy never normally used in politics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Give_'em_enough_rope
Left wing politicians feel unopposed, and without opposition they roll ahead with terrible decisions. Often feeling enabled to implement policies which are going to hang themselves. Absolutely what's happening and they don't realize it.
by bell-cot on 6/12/23, 1:46 PM
Perhaps 's/liberalism/modern capitalism/g'? Outside of a few ultra-religious niches, family sizes for modern conservatives are also plunging. Today's all-noses-to-the-grindstones short term economic "maximization" is squeezing ~every voluntary but not-quickly-monetized human activity out of existence. And it has long since figured out that a couple having one kid - whose "normal" birth runs up $100,000+ in medical expenses, and whose college education will cost $500,000+ - is a far better outcome for Wall Street than anyone being able to dream of having 4 or 5 kids in a fairly sane 1950's-style society and economy.
by AndrewKemendo on 6/12/23, 2:27 PM
It's as simple as inequality - fix that and all this goes away
We've seen this over and over and it's blatantly obvious what the problem is - too few people control the wealth of the world and that wealth is used to buy control and power in ways that continue to erode the power and comfort of the working class.
President Teddy Roosevelt, who died a socialist who wanted to live like his porters [1], led America at the turn of the century by attacking the robber barons, breaking the trusts, and generally crushing unethical business across the nation, leading the way for a revitalized society (he wasn't perfect but we're looking at the issue of oligarchies here).
I'm not sure that's possible anymore like that, and I think peaceful revolution inside the system is possible. We do it by building mutual voluntary employee owned cooperatives that create products and services and DENY the capital class the ability to continue to accrete wealth and power.
[1]https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/03/10/east-afric...
by PaulHoule on 6/12/23, 1:34 PM
Note that the first step of human reproduction is you feel lonely, then you seek out a lover, next you have more people.
When it is too crowded people don’t have the instinct to make more people. Places like the UK and Japan are way too crowded and of course people don’t want to have kids, it is entirely exacerbated by the problems with housing.
The problem will take care of itself if the population drops enough, if you want to be proactive the important thing is to reduce the perception of crowding which could be some combination of (a) dispersion (just tax people 200% of the median income if they want to dogpile into London or Tokyo and if rich folk complain there are no service workers they’re going to have to pay them more), (b) better housing and (c) psychological tricks that reduce the perception of crowding.