how falling birth rates will get fixed in the end?

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It's called demographic transition. I had to study that once. Demographic transition is the result of material wealth and a stable society. It is also, however, a cause of demographic concern in countries in the post-transitioning phase. At the moment, countries like Vietnam and Indonesia are in the transitioning phase, countries like Canada and France are in the post-transition phase, and most of Africa is in the pre-transitioning or early transitioning phase.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/c ... Stage5.svg

I'm very glad to be alive now. If I'm forced forced to get pregnant to or follow religion, I will kill myself.

I like this idea on its own merits, but saving 800 a year across a whole continent won't have much of an effect.

Quite the opposite. People will have smaller families and lavish much attention and material goodness upon their few children.

ruveyn

I'm not sure that broad historical trends are much use in this discussion, as it is the relatively recent invention of reliable and widely-used contraception that is mostly responsible for falling birth rates in developed countries. Given the choice, most women just don't WANT to have lots of children. If you want birth rates to rise significantly, you'd either need to make contraception illegal or unobtainable, or convince people that it was immoral or unsafe to use.

By the way, I don't really think increasing birth rates is a good idea. I'm just discussing HOW it might be accomplished, if one so desired.

Societies with poor living conditions tend to have a higher birth rate. You should see the lower birth rate as a good sign.

Indeed.

However, I don't see how it should be a source of concern. I certainly am not concerned in any way.

Increased life expectancy, increased number of productive years. Look, I am not of the school of thought that wants to continue on with the assumption that we're going to kick off after, oh, 100 years at most. I think it's very well possible for us to push our life expectancy well ahead of the curve of dropping fertility rates. I think we are on the cusp of many breakthroughs in anti-aging technology.

Sounds impossible, right? At one time, the jump in the world's population following the emergence of antibiotics and modern medicine was impossible, too. It wasn't some slow advancement, but it was a very rapid, dramatic spike in our population.



What made it happen? A change in people's thinking. They realized, after the black death and various epidemics, that they could and should fight AGAINST the ravages of nature, that they were not helpless in the face of "god's wrath," and they were willing to pour in the investment of energy to combat the damage from disease and filth. This was a revolution NOT in technology but in people's habits of thinking. It's as simple as that.

A low birth rate is easy to fix. A high birth rate is difficult to fix. You're worrying about the wrong thing.

What we should be doing is helping the rest of the world to become wealthy, so they will start having fewer children.

If it actually poses an existential threat (not very likely, in my opinion), I suspect that the problem will solve itself. People will feel a duty to raise the birth rate, and so they will. Remember, these will be wealthy, educated people. Exactly the type of people who would have the time and resources to notice the problem and fix it.

No, it was a revolution in "technology", or rather science.

People in the Middle Ages and before were not that dumb, you know.

They did kill women for being witches, that is pretty dumb...

That wasn't nearly as common as fiction would have you believe. The people actually killed in name of religion were both men and women, and usually because they refused to convert or existed in large groups with an alternative religion, like the Cathars and the occasional massacre of Jews. Actual witch hunts and witch burnings only really became popular after the Middle Ages, and remain popular in some parts of the world.

That's not the Middle Ages, that's the Early Modern Era. The period we idolize because of Galileo, Newton and the others.

It wasn't a matter of being dumb. Their views made sense at the time, considering their cultural heritage.

They were not kidding around about their religious faith. They might not have been entirely knowledgeable in it, nor are religious people today; however, people really and truly believed that their fates were in the hands of God. They MEANT IT.

If someone got sick from disease, God willed it. If there were an epidemic, it was the wrath of God in retaliation for general sinfulness on the part of the populace. It's easy to dismiss this as stupidly superstitious, but you wouldn't think so if it had been your upbringing. In that time period, you would have been just as determined to live a life "free of sin" as you presently are to be intelligent and educated. All of your mental resources would have been geared toward it, and you wouldn't have been kidding around about it.

If two men got into a sword fight and one of them died, God willed for the victor to survive; therefore, the victor was in the right. This belief persisted well into the modern age! It's only been a century and a half or a little over since dueling has been outlawed! We're not talking about something believed by backward savages. We are talking about people who lived in a world not all that much less technologically advanced than our own!

If you walked across hot coals and didn't get burned, it was because God protected you from harm. If you had grown up during the time, you WOULD have believed this. You would have been considered to be a "weirdo" if you had expressed any doubt about it.

They were not kidding around in their beliefs. It wasn't that they were stupid. Far from it. They were every bit as intelligent as modern people are. They just didn't have sufficient background on which to overturn the beliefs they had.

However, when the plagues came...when the plagues struck down millions of innocent people...people could no longer believe that the will of God was behind it. They grew some balls...not because they had some renaissance of character but because their lives had just been scarred by one of the most horrible tragedies in history. They chose to fight because they had no choice but to fight.

I think that the real revolution was not a scientific one at all. It was a really a revolution in how people viewed their relationship with the natural world.

Also, this is extremely tenuous. If zealots were to rise to power, they could take it all away.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/17/world/asi ... index.html

We could go back to dying of treatable illnesses. It's really that easy. We would just have to let a militant group of zealots take hold...to strangle out modern enlightenment...to relegate our perception of nature to being a product of divine edict...and we could go right back to the dark ages.

In the end, all of our technological marvels are just tools. What matters is the fact that we believe, in our hearts, that they are worthwhile. We believe that it is worthwhile to spend money on developing them. We believe that it is worthwhile to use them. This is not a permanent or irreversible state. Barbarity would welcome us readily into its arms.

But we could also move in the other direction. We need but to realize that we can, and we could do it. We could approach the realization that, if we were to throw enough reckless lunatic savagery into trying to do so, we could overcome death itself.

However, could we survive doing so?

Your HisDivineMajesty. Instead of all of these complexed socialist programs, I recommend something simple. Law taxes. So a man can have enough money to feed his family. And let market forces and nature take its natural course. If birth rate is low but economy is good, migrants will find their way. If most of those immigrants are Muslim, so be it. Don't need to waste money re-creating Islamic qualities in non-Muslims when the Muslims already have those qualities.

The sources we have from those times are heavily biased. Who wrote them down? Almost exclusively monks. Estimating it, religion would probably have played a larger role in communities, but not an all-consuming one. Most would have gone to church obediently, and might have studied some verses for various reasons, but apart from that, religion was more of a political thing. Church leaders were known to openly have wives and children, and for much of the Middle Ages, European monarchs were fighting both the pope and each other over the right to appoint their own religious figures, usually family members.



Certainly, those were the things written down. And it would have been a good explanation. Compared to the current day, people knew very little about the world around them. Until the early twentieth century, certain local mists were described in rural regions of Europe as spirits of elves, and said to be dangerous to encounter on your own. If you know very little, and have no clue where to start, and are surrounded by a world in which most children die before the age of twelve, you're inclined to look for a reason. If a religion offers you one, you'll pick it over complete ignorance. But again, I doubt if everyone thought of it like that. Traveling doctors were extremely popular.

Similarly, during any epidemic, people were very eager to try any solution they were offered, from putting on herb masks to massacring the sick.



They had very little scientific background. All scientific background there was in those societies was concentrated in monasteries, and usually locked safely even for lower-ranked monks. Every slightly-feasible explanation would have done. The Black Plague was originally blamed by French physicians on the alignment of planets causing a bad air that infected people. It certainly wasn't just religion that was blamed.



Insh'allah. That's really the situation.



No idea what you're going on about here. I want to keep Islam out. The market doesn't regulate these people's migration. They don't usually come to Europe to supply labour. They're a burden on our society, both financially and in terms of crime. The only reason they're let in is because of artificial constructs forbidding the people of Europe to vote for immigration rules that make sense and refuse those who are known as violent, uneducated and religiously-conservative trouble-makers even in North Africa. If we let people decide, there would be more Asians and much fewer muslims coming here.