how falling birth rates will get fixed in the end?

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Birth rates across the developed world are falling or very low alredy. Immigration can help, but obviously its not a real solution. For example, Germany and Japan alredy are losing population.

For any civilization, being able to reproduce it self is fundamental. This is not negotiable for obvious reasons. Our civilization in its current form isn't viable.

Why is this happening?How is it going to get fixed?

Are we going to see a rollback of certain individual freedoms?

Arranged marriages?
Rollback of women's freedoms?
Religion coming back?
Something new?

These things would encourage women to reproduce:
Government-funded, or at least subsidized, childcare.
Mandatory paid maternity leave of at least 12 weeks.

I don't know how one solves the problem of the least prepared/responsible people doing the majority of the breeding, however. Some people have the attitude that if they don't have as much money or education as their neighbors, they can at least have the most children.

More hanky panky

in many respects its a good thing.

falling populations are only really an issue if you cannot maintain a rise in productivity pr worker equal to that.

it also puts less strain on the enviroment.(depedning on wuite a few factors, rise in productivity will also mean a rise in enviromental impact with todays technology)

none of this is to say births arent a good thing, its another person to share and enjoy the world with, only that we have plenty already.

Nordic countries alredy did these things didn't work.

If they weren't for these people and immigration, the problem would be worse.

At the moment, the low and stabilizing birth rate in industrialized countries are compensated by immigration from poor countries with a high and quickly falling birth rate.

I don't think they should be "fixed". I think societies and mentalities will ajust and adapt themselves, and in an unspecified future, a new equilibrium will be reached.

There are several solutions to even out the current situation, where the developing world has massive population growth and the developed world has a slow but steady decline in population.

1. Encourage people to have children both at younger and older ages. I've heard somewhere that over half of Dutch heterosexual couples over 35 have already been treated so they're unable to have children now, and the average age of mothers having their first child is just a few years lower than that. My mother was 34 when she had me, and I'm the first of two children. She had to quit her job, but decided it was worth it because my father made most money to begin with. It's hard for people to 'stay behind' in a 24-hour economy, so people have little time to care for their children. Make it easier for parents to spend time with their children.
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2. Encourage healthy and productive families to have more children. If a family has a steady income, a good house and non-criminal parents, it might be a good solution to offer them money for children they have. I think one town in Russia or somewhere near Russia offered a large one-time subsidy for young couples who lived there to have children and stay there, and a lot of people eagerly took up that offer. If it works for rural Russia, it probably works for anywhere in the world.
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3. Encourage the population in the developing world to decline to a viable standard so the world can support more people at a higher average standard of living. This is one of my most controversial ideas so far, and it's been nicknamed "The Let Africa Starve Plan". It's not as cruel as it sounds, and it's not just Africa. Many developing countries have large amounts of people (more than half of Africa, according to some sources, hence the name) who exist without work, education or means of production, solely because of food aid. Cut all direct food aid and invest in durable solutions, meaning there will be fewer people left in developing countries, but they will be self-sufficient and able to develop other sectors because they're not caught up in trying (and failing) to keep up with population growth and competing with food aid as small-hold farmers.

Another thing you might want to consider for the developing world, when the population is nearing a viable level, is family planning. Quality over quantity. It seems to be working for Indonesia (and most of South America) - have fewer children, but have them treated through collective programmes for medical conditions, have them go to school. Basically, a pattern that occurs when a country is transitioning into a developed country, as happened with nearby Malaysia and Singapore a few decades ago.
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4. Appeal to collectivist thinking. That's an unpopular idea, but population growth is consistently highest in countries (and even in small groups; the highest birth rates here by far are among fundamentalist protestants and muslims) where there is a large sense of community. The developed world, meanwhile, has a system more similar to "every man for himself." If we get rid of that, and have more of a community feeling, population growth might restart.

Yes, currently we are in a mess with over population. But the trends are at the exact opposite.

Obviously population loss can't become structural. Reminds me of alien civilizations in science fiction that lost the capacity to reproduce and do crazy things to avoid extinction.

But it isn't. Global population is rising. Even in most rich countries, AFAIK, population figures are rising too because of immigration.

we would need to dip quite a bit before the world is in any danger.

the biggest danger is the fallacies presented within our current economic system,

Here's a surprising way of improving birth rates in the developed world a bit more: ban non-natural tans. Apparently, after analysis of 11,000 cases of skin cancer, tanning beds caused the risk of skin cancer in under-35s to double, and cause 800 people a year in Europe to die. That's a lot of children not born because their parents really needed to play Jersey Shore. Do they not know the people featured in that series are, sans-exception, ugly?

Death is a high price for a godawfully-fake tan after spending hours lying about being unproductive.

IIRC, that is less than monthly traffic fatalities in the United States. Demographically, it is not meaningul.

Last edited by enrico_dandolo on 25 Jul 2012, 2:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.

the population will peak and then it will fall back to probably lower than it is now before stabilizing. I don't think that's a bad thing besides as said our broke economic model.

Potential population growth in Africa is problematic from a sustainability and environmental viewpoint but before you advocate starvation of hundreds of millions of people you may want to bear in mind as a nationalist that the population of the Netherlands is also unsustainable.

If foreign nations ceased trading their precious food with you millions of Dutch would die.

Education, women's rights and access to contraception has been a fantastically successful way of bringing down birth rates in developing countries. Listening to mad mullahs or the pope is a catastrophically bad idea.

In the situation where a people have decided to reject all rational thought and breed themselves to destruction because it is the will of god I fully support locking down the borders and letting them starve. God caused the problem, let god fix it, I don't see why we should have to put up with importing millions of fundamentalists who hate us and want to destroy us just because they are too fundamentalist to fix their only problems.

Case in point - Pakistan.

Population at independence(1947) - 31 million
Population now - 180/190 million
Fertility rate now - 3.6 kids per woman
Predicted population in 2050 - 400 million

If you really want to look at the problems the world faces with overpopulation and respond by breeding for the glory of god fine, but don't think you moving over here with your vile rhetoric and views when it grows goes wrong.

Introduce better rules, then. This was a lighthearted remark, to provoke people into thinking about these things.
For my actual views, look above a bit for a post the size of a small encyclopædia. Finally, a use for that thing!



I'd question that. In terms of agricultural output, we're one of the most productive countries in the world even in absolute terms. We have a high-tech agricultural sector that constitutes approximately 10% of our GDP, and produces enough food to feed not only our population, but most of northwestern Europe. We export vegetables to Russia, and meat throughout the world. We can fit tens of thousands of chickens, cows and pigs on relatively small pieces of land, and we can grow any type of food in greenhouses that cover large parts of certain regions (http://goo.gl/maps/RVwr). If the situation really deteriorates, we can even trade in our flower trade, worth billions, to use the greenhouses for food production.

As long as there is electricity, there is plenty of food; and as long as there is land, there is sufficient food. Even a disaster that would cause all countries to be forced to depend on themselves would not be able to disrupt our food production - again, we're one of the world's largest producers. Not one person would starve if that happened and food was evenly distributed, and we'd still have to do what we're doing now - send literal trainloads of excess food to all places on this side of the Gobi desert.

The rest of your point is well-argued, and I'd almost say you live in Europe.

Don't make having children (or even marriage) unpalatable to those who think it through. When you think through the consequences for failure, having children seems like a bad idea. In the USA, there isn't any stigma associated with not reproducing either.