From Palladium Magazine, April 6:
Birth rates are falling much faster than many dominant narratives imply. The global fertility rate for all of Latin America and the Caribbean fell below the replacement rate of 2.1 babies per woman in 2019. India will achieve that status in 2024. China is expected to be at half its current population by 2066. First-generation immigrants to the US fell below the replacement rate in 2019. Already, 115 countries representing about half the world’s population are beneath replacement, and by the end of the century nearly every country in Africa is projected to have a rapidly declining population.
Even strict religious fundamentalism does not protect against this drop. From the 1980s to the 2010s, the average Iranian woman shifted from having 6.5 to just 2.5 children, and as of 2021 it was 1.6. This drop in fertility beat China’s one-child policy. In the U.S., meanwhile, the Mormon population in Utah fell to almost below replacement in 2021. This is not a “canary in the coal mine” moment. We’ve reached the metaphorical point at which the miners’ skin is sloughing off—all while many claim this dramatic drop is a “minor inconvenience” or even a welcome development.
People underestimate how quickly this effect will be felt. South Korea currently has a total fertility rate of 0.81. For every 100 South Korean great-grandparents, there will be 6.6 great-grandkids. At the 0.7 fertility rate predicted in South Korea by 2024, that amounts to 4.3 great-grandkids. It’s as if we knew a disease would kill 94 percent of South Koreans in the next century.
People underrate how quickly this can become serious, once it is felt. As recently as the mid-1990s, South Korea had a birth rate of 1.7, which is close to the U.S.’s present rate. A fertility collapse takes around thirty years before it causes a population collapse, and once that happens, the collapse is inevitable. If 70 percent of a nation’s population is over age 50, and even though many of those people have almost half their lifespan left they are not going to be having any more kids.
Across the world, we see a similar phenomenon: countries explode in population as access to modern wealth expands, then drop off and begin to collapse as incomes rise and lifestyle modernization sets in. While many countries have yet to reach this crescendo, most are well on their way. But why is this happening?
Consider your personal social group. If you are like most in the developed world, around a third of your peers will have no kids and about a third will have two kids. If that group is to hover just above the repopulation rate, the final third must have over four kids each.
People misframe the question of stable birth rates when they ask “Why is everyone in my community not having two kids?” We already know that in the modern world, broken matchmaking and individual choice will drive a large portion of people to forego parenthood entirely. As such, if fertility in your community is to stay sustainable, it is up to a certain number of those who do have kids to have quite a few kids. Modern societies should not be asking: “Why isn’t everyone having kids?” but rather: “Why aren’t many in my community having five to seven kids?”
When the question is reframed, the answer is still obvious, but subtle in its implications. Purely hedonic returns from having more kids diminish significantly after two kids....
....MUCH MORE
Sorry kiddos, I get no more pleasure from three of you than from two. Somebody's going to have to go feral.
