Declining Birth Rates and the Future of Humanity

Miscellaneous General
1

All over the developed world, birth rates are declining rapidly and governments are failing to keep us breeding. Since developing countries are becoming increasingly urbanized and developed, they are set to go down the same path. Japan and Germany have been throwing tons of money at parents, but to no avail. It costs about US $125K to raise a child to 15, and no government subsidy can compete with investing that money in the stock market (and a less stressful life).

Kids are no longer needed as farmhands and to look after elderly parents. They take about 10 years to grow a brain, and another 10 years to educate. In addition, with increasing innovation comes increasingly complex jobs. In the future, it will take longer to learn marketable skills, and there will be less blue-collar jobs around due to increased mechanization. This will further marginalize the earning opportunities of youth. So even if kids grow up as indentured servants to corporations and governments, there is no conventional way that they could pay back the cost of their own upbringing + 15 years’ interest + their student loan (at least not until they are ready to retire).

In the long-term future, this is going to result in declining innovation, labor shortages, ponzi-schemes going bust, etc, etc. I’m personally more interested in the future of the human race. Why pass on your genes if it costs you a house? Where is the fun in raising a poop machine into a teenage drama queen? Unless raising children becomes profitable, I predict that the human race will eventually die off and the survivors will revert back to subsistence, where they will once again have an incentive to breed. There is only one way that kids are capable of generating money, and it may become a social norm out of necessity.

2

How can this possibly be an issue when the number of humans on the Earth is INCREASING? There is a very short simple answer to this extremely complex problem: Allow immigration and end the Welfare State. Then the only immigrants that are willing to move would be there to work. And remove work place rules and regulations to allow people to manage their own lives with their own employers.

All the money diverted from earners to old people back to young people with children only destroys the plans of these younger people.

3

Actually while you would want to end the welfare state - in a modern nation state in this situation you would want to end immigration.

You do not want a labor surplus if you want to ensure a place in society for all the natural born citizens.

Just getting rid of the welfare state itself will create a labor surplus - and in a modern state you would have to follow this up with a drastic reduction in taxes to make these people employable, and the goods and services they want affordable.

Even then it will probably take a few generations for things to shake out.

4

500,

You provide no evidence for any of your unsubstantiated assertions.

As for raising a drama queen, yes if you are an incompetent parent you will suffer.

But if you have a little common sense, children are a great joy.

SMH.

5

There is no such thing as a labor surplus absent coercive government as laborers will simply reduce their wages to make them more appealing to employers and local employees are normally much more productive given their cultural experiences to those from other countries.

But any discussion of labor misses the point. Labor IS NOT AN END, it is a means to an end. Entrepreneurs employ people to do tasks that increase the supply of goods and services in society. It is those goods that are the wealth. Having labor even a suplus of labor means nothing. It is what the labor creates that has value. Getting rid of immigrant labor, even undocumented immigrant labor necessarily makes society worse off as the people in society have to forgo the production of the immigrants.

6
  1. At our current time the better question is who is having children as opposed to focusing on the false idea that no one is having children. There are plenty of nations in which the fertility rates are positive, and within countries where the fertility rate is low there are usually groups which have a high fertility rate. Usually these groups are poorer, and especially in the United States grow up in far worse urban conditions in a worse family condition. Conditions are better but still retain this general shape in Europe. As for the less developed countries, we see extremely high fertility rates. This means that increasingly those born are poor and in worse conditions. In some conditions this will make them just as if not more capable as those born into the richer families. I have high hopes that the poor hispanics who rise out of poverty will be extraordinarily hard working, just as many of the European immigrants before them were.

At the same time however there’s the possibility of gaps in racial intelligence, the problems which have wreaked havoc on African American families and which may well do the same for hispanic ones, and the possible political consequences of a rising Islamic minority and the racial nationalism this could in theory cause and has already caused in Europe are definitely scary. One can say the same for the rising population of more statist and impoverished countries with poorer educational systems. So as I said to start out with in our world it’s much more important to look at the countries and types of people who have high fertility rates, and what we see is not very encouraging.

  1. The evidence that you site in your OP seem to focus only on financial concerns and the negative aspects of having a child when this is one are in particular that people don’t seem to focus on much. In much of the Western world settling down and having a kid is still considered one of the keys to happiness, it’s a cultural phenomenon, something which is positive to do and something which everyone is in a small way implicitly expected to do so long as one is married. While it’s increasingly acceptable not to have children, I think it’s hard to say that it is not something which is often expected of long term couples.

No married couple I’ve talked to has ever said that they thought about the financial difficulties of having a child much beforehand, or that they even really considered the fact of having a child very much. I have a friend and she and her husband are attempting to have a child, and the way that she talks about the matter is similar to how I usually hear people doing so. It’s about “having kids” “raising a family”, rather than talking about the real live individuals that result from the process and the horrifying task of trying to help these individuals become healthy, functional, and happy human beings.

At any rate, I digress. I merely mean to say that I think that looking at things from a financial aspect is only half the story. While it is certainly a factor the fact is that financial considerations will play a larger role in peoples decisions about certain things rather than others, and I think that in the area of having a family it is relatively neglected. Evidence for this might be the fact that the poorer one is the more likely it is that one will have children.

  1. Even if we accept the entirety of your explanation of events the conclusion does not follow. Unless every individual in society has a low fertility rate then this will not be the case. So long as some people are more prone to breeding, either because of genetics or culture, then these people will continue to reproduce and as they do so we see the explosive growth which Malthus talked about.

This is bolstered by the fact that the economic relationship which you pointed out is entirely false after a period of time if we assume it to be true. As demand for education and child raising supplies decreases, then the cost of both these things go down, making having a child more affordable to any who might question the financial concerns and allows anyone who is having children from our “predisposed” groups to retain a certain amount of their money. Furthermore as the number of super low skilled labor decreases in the market, the associated wage of these jobs also rises, allowing teenage children to better pay for themselves by getting a job.

  1. It’s rather remarkable how far we have moved away from the predictions of Malthus where we even have discussions like this. It’s also interesting to see some people on one side fretting over what they believe to be inevitable human overpopulation, and others worrying about what they see as an inevitable decrease.

At any rate, the biggest solution to these problems without some sort of forced state fertility program is still free labor markets and free market innovation and improvement of education, hopefully making the entire process a more marketable and swifter one.

7

.500Ne,

  1. Define labor surplus

  2. “You do not want a labor surplus if you want to ensure a place in society for all the natural born citizens.”

Why do I want to do this?

  1. What do taxes have to do with employability? So long as these taxes are constant they effect wages not employment levels so long as they are constant and flexible. The second is an unrealistic assumption, but at any rate it doesn’t appear like it’s relevant to what you’re saying.
8

In the future, it will take longer to learn marketable skills

Non sequitur. We’ve had leaps and bounds of economic and technological progress without too significant an increase in the amount of schooling necessary, really.

there is no conventional way that they could pay back the cost of their own upbringing + 15 years’ interest + their student loan (at least not until they are ready to retire).

Student loan? You’re analyzing the future through the lens of the current system - where this problem might have some standing. In Libertopia (if you will), education would be much cheaper.

this is going to result in declining innovation,

Why?

labor shortages

Not with a market…

Why pass on your genes if it costs you a house?

Have you been a parent? I haven’t, but I imagine it’s a large paradigm shift. As in you see children as your continuation. I mean, think of it - in 60 years or so you will be lying on a bed, looking up, knowing that you will soon breathe the last breath of your life. But no, you’re just imagining it third person. Try to actually imagine it 1st person. Really, stop and imagine it. Looking up through real eyes. Knowing you will be no more. That all your thoughts, all posessions, all of the world to you (and certainly all that matters to you) will suddenly disappear. Scary thought. I’ve come to grip with this in two ways: 1) Live life so I have no regrets, so I can say “Well, I did well and my best and I left this place better than I found it” and 2) Having children will likely change my understanding of the world and what is valuable - you frickin bring a whole new life into existence! This life will make life of its own, and so on, passing down your genetics and knowledge and it will be you who caused it. So I think that there is a certain psychological factor to children that will persist.

Also, Bryan Caplan writes on why having more children can be motivated by selfishness:

http://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Reasons-Have-More-Kids/dp/046501867X

I have not read the book, but it might be interesting.

Where is the fun in raising a poop machine into a teenage drama queen?

Well, idk, why do so many billions of people do it?

I predict that the human race will eventually die off and the survivors will revert back to subsistence

Seriously?

9

But assuming all countries are on the long-term path to becoming developed, declining birth rates are set to become a worldwide phenomenon. One day, there won’t be enough people to relocate to low-birth regions. This is more of a futuristic question (which should not be out of place on an ancap forum).

If humans ever evolve out of their inertia and accept anarcho-capitalism, I think they would have to staunchly value reason over emotion. If all previous generations of human beings have chosen to be the architects of their own misery, their descendants would probably question the deepest taboos of the old world, including the whole point of raising children. It may end up being viewed as just another bastion of social conservatism. How long will people buy into the idea that they should buy a second house just because society expects them to?

The estimate of $125K excluded tax subsidies for education. There is no distinctive category of goods such as “child raising supplies”. Children need food, shelter and healthcare just like adults. Fewer people overall not only means less demand for those goods, but less supply as well. So I don’t think prices would dramatically drop.

10

  1. You do not address the fact that some people are more predisposed to have children

  2. Then you are either a Utopian or saying that the anarchist society is impossible. There is no evidence that this could ever happen or that the common person is even capable of this. Even if we assume all people are hyper-rationalistic, then I think we could well see a whole new level of reason for having a child, because if you are reasonable and intelligent then there’s a lot greater real reason to have children, since you will raise them reasonably and intelligently, leading to the creation of a healthy and pleasant human being. That would be the theory anyway.

  3. You talked about how expensive it was to complete a college education, this would still go down dramatically with a massive decrease in demand. If we’re living in the anarchist society we would expect a greater supply for everything. A lot of this also depends upon timing, how long people live, how low the fertility rate drops before it would theoretically pick back up again, and so on.

Anyway, the fact is that this would, at very least, make the whole matter indeterminate.

11

What if humanity conquers death within the next century or two? Then having so many children wouldn’t be a necessity for the continued survival of the species; as deathrate decreases, the birthrate needed to sustain any given population growth rate decreases too, so it would be possible to have a growing human population even if there were only on average 0.2 kids per parent. Considering the innovative powers of the free market, and the State-enforced limitations that currently exist on research due to ‘ethical’ concerns, if a ‘libertopia’ was achieved then scientific progress would likely accelerate rapidly, and the possibility of a solution to death being found within a century or two would not be unlikely. If you believe Kurzweil and the Singularity crowd, even at the current rate we’ll have super AI around the middle of this century, and technological progress will accelerate exponentially from there.

12

OP raises a good point - a population crash is just as much a possibility as over-population. Hoppe has discussed this issue in the most lucid way I’ve read or heard anywhere else here. Population control is like any other kind of central planning measure - doomed to be the cause of human suffering as it inevitably results in simultaneous over- and under-production and misallocation of resources from lines of production where they are needed more to where they are needed less.

I also think we do need to underscore the way that birth-suppression or birth-subsidy alters the make-up of the population. In the matter of just a generation or two, a human population can be completely remade, at least in terms of heritable traits. With governments worldwide consuming more than half the output of the productive sector and with both the primary areas of government expenditure affecting human reproduction (warfare and welfare), this is definitely a cause for alarm. It’s one thing if your automotive czar causes an overproduction of full-size pickup trucks, it’s another thing if the government’s meddling with human reproduction results in society-wide shifts in the heritable traits of human beings in that society.

Clayton -

13

Anyone ever question the population count? I haven’t been able to find much on it, but here’s something:

http://www.thecircleforhumanity.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=314%3Athe-inaccuracy-of-human-population-figures&catid=47%3Astephen-moore&Itemid=118&lang=en

I’ve also read a few articles/essays on birth and death rates with similar conclusions. I know the UN collects most of the statistics and they have a demonstrated agenda. I don’t think a credible source exists. Just something to think about. Or not.

14

Well, numeracy and literacy skills no longer differentiate you. But I suppose labor specialization reduces schooling requirements, with the exception of engineering fields.

If the world population shrinks by 25%, there will be roughly 25% fewer firms trying to find better ways of doing things, and so there will be 25% fewer opportunities for innovation. A labor shortage would be more of a short-term consequence, however.

That’s deep. But I can always choose not to think about death until I’m on my deathbed. I would rather spend a suitcase full of money on enjoying my life, than buy a few years of smugness on my way out. I think the relationships we have with other people, more than fill the gap of not having children. I can see the genetic incentive for having kids, but it seems absurd to put all your eggs in one basket.

The point is that fewer and fewer of them are doing it.

15

Neodoxy:

Actually, I agree that I’m crystal ball gazing. I should focus on how I think society would run better, rather than try to predict what society will look like 100 years from now.

16

While overall population is certainly icreasing, the rate at which is is, is also decreasing. Birth rates are declining even i places like Iran and Pakistan.

Also I don’t see immigration as the one size fits all solution. Some countries can handle immigration like the U.S, U.K ect. In fact all the countries in the world that have a good history of immigration are former British colonies and Britian itself. Australia, N.Z, Canada and so on.

The cultures of lets say Japan and China do have a sort of hive mentality and immigration goes very strongly against their national ethos of harmony that it just would not work. In Japan they are solving this issue instead with Robotics where they specialize in (and I as well). I recall seeing a Robot made in South Korea I think, if not Japan whos purpose is to teach children English so that foreign English teachers don’t have to be imported in.

17

As a human race, if we maintain an average fertility rate of 2.1 per woman, the population on earth is estimated to increase to 10 million and have a fixed population after that… this is why… (source: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies.html)

anyway, the current fertility rate is higher than this since only 84 countries have fertility rate less than 2.1, where as the rest of the world countries have fertility rate higher than 2.1, source ( http://lebanese-economy-forum.com/wdi-gdf-advanced-data-display/show/SP-DYN-TFRT-IN/ ), thus averaging to 2.45,

Now to address your question and assuming the poor contries with low income will reach the level of modernization found in advanced high income countries and this would cause a drop in the fertility rate, I dont’ see this is a problem.

I agree with you, raising a child is becoming exponentialy more difficult and costly, but the human insticts will set the extinsion alarms on as soon as we feel our existence threathened and if the fertility rate drops critically, eventually the human race fertility rate will increase again and overcome the financial difficulties of raising a child

18

Guise, I thought we were subjectivists.

Sorta related: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HB4I1292PEE