- modern women have their lives back to front. Their bodies are best capable of having children in their late teens/early twenties, and the best paying years for careers are mid thirties through forties. But they are normally studying/working in their teens/twenties and not looking at children until they reach 30; bad for both their bodies and their bank balances.
- the development of serfdom also marks the end of large scale slavery in Europe. While the coloni lost rights, former slaves gained some.
Both good points. Mass slavery and mass serfdom are not really compatible: if you have one, you don’t have the other. Serfdom is cheaper than slavery and it means you already have the labour locally.
While not a fan of the Chicago school of economics (wherein all social phenomena have an economic explanation), I do think there is a transition point on fertility - when children flip from being assets to liabilities. This might be most obvious in urban settings, given the cost of living differential with suburbs and rural, but also keyed on the expectations of parents for the future of their children. Traditions die in cities, so the expectation for children to carry on those traditions would as well and be replaced with expectations for social mobility (climbing).
I have another economic explanation for the fertility drop: Before capitalism, children were the only consumer good. What I mean is that, for a peasant forced to farm for his master 4 days a week, provided with a cottage and tools, and paid nothing except essentials such as just enough cloth to cover themselves, there were precious few market goods besides children to spend your resources on. The question of whether to forgo more kids in order to go to college, or buy a summer home in the Catskills, never came up. There were no companies making products for peasants, since peasants had literally no money, and couldn't have travelled to the store to buy them even if they did. Before capitalism, everything we would consider a "consumer good" was made for the nobility.
Children were often one’s pension plan. They were also useful labour from a relatively early age. Children have become more consumer goods rather than less.
…in particular since rich countries now have generous welfare for the old.
That change would be the primary cause of children switching from producer goods / retirement plan to consumer goods no?
I don’t deny that urbanization hurts TFR, but boy it sure seems to me that a) wealth, b) generous welfare state for the old and c) birth control (contraception and abortion) play bigger roles.
Your urbanization thesis highly overlaps with wealth, so I can put that aside.
But don’t modern statistics show that it is the full-on advent of the welfare state that the average person/couple could be reasonably confident in relying on, coupled with the introduction of contraception and legalization of abortion, correlate very highly with the biggest drops in TFR?
The TFR data for the U.S, France and the U.K. all seem to show that, with peaks between 1960 and 1964, reaching lows by between 1975 (U.S.) and a few years later.
Capitalism has been around give or take two centuries, the fertility collapse is the last 50 or so years. Not to mention your reference to feudalism which ended with... capitalism!
I'm with you that until recently, children were an asset in an era when few could afford to buy many non-productive assets.
To pick a nit though, I don't think that's how feudalism worked. A peasant farmer worked his fields and kept what he grew, except for a tax he paid (in food or labor) to his lord. IIRC, the tax was on the order of 20-25%, one to two days a week labor.
At least, that was the western European experience. Eastern Europe was far closer to what you describe, lasting into the early 20th century. Serf rights were a factor in the Russian Revolution.
The system usually involved both working some days on the landlord's land, and giving some fraction of the food the serf grew on his own land to the lord. Delivering more than half of the fruit of one's labor to the master was common in Eastern Europe, and sometimes happened in France. England and France were not far behind. But we're talking about a roughly 1000-year period across all of Europe and Russia. So it's not worth arguing this point. My main point is that there were no consumer goods for serfs, and they had no money to buy it, and no freedom to go to the market; hence children were the only thing they could invest in.
Hi Lorenzo, I am interested in why you claim the causes of the postwar WWII baby boom remain a mystery. Not that I have any grounds for disputing this lol!
I am just reflecting on my own upbringing (born 1960). All of my family on both sides were working class (uncles & aunties) they all got married young, brought their own house and had between 4 - 6 children. They did all of this including sending their kids to private Catholic schools on a single wage!
When I think of today's young generation and cost of housing etc., there is no way in hell anyone except the rich could do this today. My father was a Fitter and Turner by trade who worked in the railways.
It is hard to imagine the cost of living that would have allowed for this compared to today!
Yes, there are economic factors that one can point to. Part of the problem is that it is not clear how specific they were compared to earlier eras and the baby boom did not happen in all Western countries, while the extent of the boom also varied between the countries that did have such a boom. It was most intense in the US, for reasons that are not all that clear. Was it because the US was less urbanised? More religious? But they are general characteristics that it is hard to connect to this specific period.
Yep, I am not in a position to offer any credible answers to this. Although I do note out of curiosity that my grandparents on both sides only had 3 children each. And I can still remember my grandmother advising my sister that 3 children were enough!
Lorenzo in WW2 the American soldiers sent home skulls to their sweethearts, the censors usually caught them and there was no ridiculous fuss about it.
If the message of “Prepare yourself My Dear Lady for a real man coming home to get his Patriotic Duty from you Madam” is lost on you , perhaps this clears it up. It’s rather like the Triumphant Football player and the Cheerleaders. Ahem.
Also the American soldiers came home with overwhelming victory at less cost than the other victors and was well paid, the economy due to successful management and lack of international competition (they were rubble or exhausted) meant a great and hopeful future and for decades this was true.
It seems to have ended about 1965 for reasons I’m sure are clearly obscure to all, as it should be…
"... various aspects of modern technology have fertility-suppressing effects. Cars that presume a maximum of three children, for instance. An effect that is worsened by compulsory baby car-seats. Or ticketing and accommodation that presumes two children or less. "
Perhaps there is a more universal, and evolutionarily novel, aspect of modern technology: no female of any species has ever had the capacity and capability to limit her fertility. No one knows how many children women prefer to have, because until the advent of the pill, the question had never been, in effect, asked.
It may well be that given the choice, regardless of anything else, on average women prefer to have fewer than two children. Nearly the entire globe is below replacement level fertility, which ranges from 2.1 to approximately 3.5 children per woman, depending on the society. Perhaps there is something more universal going on.
Polling suggests women in developed societies are having fewer children than they want to, but that runs into the expressed preference/revealed preference problem. There may indeed be something to what you say.
Fascinating, and disturbing! I'm curious regarding your remarks on topsoil erosion and the push in some circles towards plant-based diets, which you suggest worsens the topsoil erosion. My understanding had been that eating lots of meat requires even more agriculture, to grow food for the livestock (and then because all energy exchange is inefficient, it takes more crops to feed the livestock that feed you, compared to just eating the crops yourself). Is that mistaken?
To avoid this dilemma may I suggest you eat range fed Australian lamb and beef. Also wear merino wool grown under the Responsible Wool Standards program.
You can raise cattle and sheep on land not suited for crops. You can use herd animals to revitalise soil. A lot of the feed to animals, even from crops, is stuff humans can’t eat. So, yes, at the margin, there can be use of arable land to feed cattle, but it is way less significant than is often claimed. Animal food is also more nutrient dense, so more satiating.
Thanks for an interesting, original take on this topic! Population collapse does indeed appear to have multiple potential causes - many of them societal.
But I'm curious why so few who delve into this subject touch on the most obvious cause: skyrocketing infertility rates.
The WHO says 1 in 6 people in developed nations is impacted by infertility - over 17% of the population. One hundred years ago, that figure was just a few percent.
If 30% of couples don't intend to procreate as stats show, and 17% of the rest have trouble or can't conceive, infertility is a significant factor.
I would guess that an uninhabited land the size of New Zealand were found today, no one would go and develop it because the easy option, of just adding oneself to an existing and established city, is the preferred option.
As far as I'm aware, only the Gold Coast and Canberra are the new cities of Australia with a population greater than 100k -- every other large city was established in the 1800s.
As long as wealth is to be found in cities and agriculture is so efficient that it's best for large swathes of agricultural land to be administered by a few owners who can have their goods travel long distances, it seems we will be stuck going after agglomeration effects until there aren't enough people around to have any noteworthy agglomeration.
And as you say, I too don't like where this childless future takes us morally. Pure reason is a poor basis for morality, and reason is often what childless people will use to base their morality upon.
Anyway, here's also an essay I wrote on morality as a spontaneous order based on our way of life, not reason, and how our sense of morality shifts to suit the way we live:
I think you have failed to explicitly recognize a source of "is" reasoning in your moral development thesis, but in fact you have captured it "under the covers", or by accident. My apology that I have not read beyond this extracted paragraph from your post, but I can't afford the time right now to delve deeper, so perhaps there is something I missed later on.
But from this extract perhaps you can see that [as I perceive it] morality has both an absolute/genetic/instinctual/natural rights component that works through our evolved brain/mind/psychology, as well as the relative/cultural aspects that you mention as being dominant or prominent.
"Morality Outside of Reason
Considering that the cold workings of reason alone cannot establish ought, there is nothing universal remaining in the human toolkit from which to base morality. What is moral must be contingent. ... Certainly reason plays a role in all this, but in no way a decisive one. Instead, morality is spread out and worked out among people in social settings with the whole range of human faculties brought to bear on the question of ought.
In this way, morality is akin to language and economic life, a kind of spontaneous order. A person’s language is developed out of one’s own innate aptitudes and instincts combined with social learning and reinforcement over time; a person’s morality develops in much the same way. The moralities of societies respond to specific histories and traditions to promote community survival and flourishing; they live, die and adapt accordingly."
Just as human language is dependent upon both our genetic evolved brain/neural capabilities to structure syntax, etc., and on our particular society/culture within which we first learn a given language, so elements of our morality evolved (disgust at poop, resistance to incest, self preservation and avoiding murder of our in group, various elements of theory of mind, sense of fairness and justice (for self and others), reciprocity, etc.) vs. cultural variations. For example, some tribal, honor-shame, Islamic cultures find it appropriate to perform honor killing of wayward females, while essentially no culture with a guilt-shame orientation, such as those derived from Judeo-Christian tradition, would accept such a practice as moral.
Unless I have misunderstood you, this is basically the same as saying morality "is developed out of one’s own innate aptitudes and instincts combined with social learning and reinforcement over time..."; just as you claimed for language.
And upon rereading this: "Certainly reason plays a role in all this, but in no way a decisive one..." it is possible we are actually closer in agreement than I first thought, but then we might argue over just what "a decisive one" means. :-) To date I have been more concerned with establishing that both components contribute*, not their relative contribution. So maybe I need to spend some time on that eventually. Thank you.
*I.e., resolve the absolute vs. relative arguments about morality and religion, as "and" rather than "or".
The degree to which reason directs thing is impossible to ascertain. Reason and everything else is so intertwined that it won't ever make any sense to disentangle it.
Fascinating, but everything is and will be increasingly changing. Automation, robotics, Manufacturing ... can and will reduce labor requirement, That's what the port strike was all about. Note, in the revolutionary period,US workforce was around 98% 'employed/engaged' and farm / agriculture /livestock production; now perhaps 1% involved in agriculture / food production /transportation of food & agricultural products. Tops Soil preservation is an issue; mostly due laziness + greed. We can certainly do much better. Once you can figure out 'unicorning' sustainable cities (easy to set up B$ businesses, the problem will be licked; my expectation - stay tune ... do able ]
The impact of automation is much overrated and overhyped both for and against.
Mind you the internet and online have been very effective in intellectual overproduction and elite overproduction.
We actually need workers, what we have are bureaucrats and clerks. The technologies that make this possible are central banks and unlimited fiat, backed by aging nuclear weapons.
The bourgeois need for comfort and security …no matter how illusory… bought at the expense of the future make these fantasies possible.
There’s a manufacturing labor shortage in America.
There’s a dozen critical infrastructure fields I can name short young workers, and people do get old. Cable ship crews for instance- who keep the transoceanic fiber optic cables running… I can go on.
And on.
Fully automated luxury capitalism is as far away and as realistic as fully automated luxury communism, not to mention if it worked we’d all be caught in the resources curse trap.
We could certainly use less bureaucrats and more road workers and pilots in Western North Carolina now…
What is actually happening now is collapse piece by piece. East Palestine, San Francisco, Springfield Ohio, Asheville are the real future. It won’t be AI.
And in any emergency or natural disaster one redneck, or oil roughneck, or Longshoreman is worth a thousand PhDs and a million AI coders… which is why Musk flew in Starlink to establish communications. Musk isn’t being charitable, he’s gathering allies. He’s making allies for when he needs them.
Yep, I think labour shortages are driving a lot of automation. A concierge friend of mine at a very expensive Sydney hotel recently told me they'd basically automated the whole check-in/check-out process (and anything else they could) because of an inability to find/keep staff.
Well, let's see how 2025 plays out, TLW. I suspect a lot of workers – or at least knowledge workers – are underestimating just how eminently replaceable they are. But it's entirely possible you're right and it is being overhyped.
I think it’s over hyped certainly for stock market shilling, yes.
OTOH AI absolutely CAN do marvelous things, for instance I don’t have to learn coding now 🤣 which I don’t use at work anyway. More importantly AI in additive manufacturing (3D printing) is absolutely stunning in its capabilities, I believe the same for flight in certain respects.
I’d never buy a self driving car though. Any human choice or competition and it’s fail.
I’m in networking, like the several networks we’re communicating over now. When they tried to really automate or software define networks the limits kept getting hit. You can automate objects, people won’t conform. You can’t cross the boundary from your network and you have to…
…standards always require adjustments by human discernment and judgement, tweaking the network…
Not to mention all the network automation or even AI I’ve seen is just reading me a school book answer.
Let them AI Reddit/r/ networking and see what happens… that would be interesting. But not a replacement.
All good points for discussion. Automation is NOT synonymous with level 5 autonomy. There are fine gradations which almost everyone skips over. The L011 jet I was on 40 years ago, for a transatlantic flight, could be landed remotely at Gatwick , without on board pilot control, using software, automatic control,
Contd. pilots have routinely used autopilot to fly planes in calm weather over long flights and take naps during that time …. The challenge of course is that when tough decisions are required in unusual situations, it’s often best under human control. There are military systems that are fully automated… … that’s a different area… in any case AI is NOT up to full human abilities in all areas…. Yet.
I’m kinda hyped out as in maxed out on the hype on AI.
So what if you get laid off?
We all do.
The impact of technology over time has absolutely been not to reduce human populations or spread misery and poverty- people do that , technology can be a tool for harm or greed.
Even in war on the battlefield the impact of technological advances has in general led to less casualties for any engagement (before people get irate, Leipzig killed over 110,000 in 3 days, The Somme killed a million over 5.5 months, not the same).
The impact of technology over all has been increased human populations, health, food and prosperity. The poor now eat better and live better than ancient Emperors and Kings.
A harvester Combine is not quite the same as automation, never mind automation and AI are not the same- mind you I am not against technology, I’m going to need hard info.
The Hype around AI approaches Global Warming levels of earnestness… which means…
All good points! And I write that as an overeducated surplus elite type. But in answer to your final question, I suspect AI is soon going to make substantial inroads into the work currently being done by overeducated surplus elite types. As you rightly point out, automating the tasks that, say, a plumber does is going to be far more complicated. Nonetheless, I'm not sure replacing, say, a longshoreman (or a freight truck driver) is going to be anywhere near as difficult. That's precisely why the ILA recently took industrial action and why you don't see too many dock workers on many Asian and European docks nowadays.
Problems; As Yarvin * posted the other day, this would mean resource curse.
“If you liked outsourcing to China, you’ll love AI.” Now that was in response to some statement by Sam Altman to the effect we’re all finished and the last 10 engineers will control AI and the world… etc.
Altman’s world is the males are coders and the females sex workers, East Bay (San Francisco) as Yarvin puts it.
Cum grano salis.
IF this happens, worry not- there’s always “Compliance.”
HR will never die, nor fade away.
No machine can replace their sleepless, sullen malice.
Mind you compliance will include police, corrections officers, social workers, drug rehab counselors etc etc. They’ll also be the required Dark Side of Compliance- gangsters and cartels, their bankers and NGOS, at scale one is not possible without the other, the Yin to Yang.
It’s a sustainable ecosystem as long as the parties involved discipline their appetites.
SOLUTIONS; Manufacturing, and Space. Manufacturing and much other work can be assisted by automation but not replaced (Musk rejected it when he saw the Germans found it wasn’t cost effective). I know my two fields- networking civilian and military citizen soldier the human can’t be replaced. They tried and failed in networking. Once you leave a closed loop that’s it.
Space; the infinite awaits, as does infinite wealth and opportunity… and we’ll need people because machines cannot adapt, and there is absolutely no way we can plan for everything in the infinite. I suspect we’ll get major surprises just settling Mars and mining asteroids. No , machines cannot adapt. They can automate, but what are you automating?
… no space? Then we can stay here and wait for nuclear war because the Democratic Party is polling bad into the midterms elections;
See Cuban missile crisis 1962
Ukraine (US 🇺🇸 🤫) Russian War of 2022- present. We came extremely close to nuclear war in April 2022. As an aside, I don’t think nuclear weapons should be controlled by Democracy. I’m very likely to be proven right.
Mind you it’s also possible another party could start a nuclear war for selfish political reasons… but the Democratic Party has USED nuclear weapons twice, and bought us to the brink twice. We’re still on the brink now.
Sadly, my work hasn't yet been (entirely) automated so I'll have to bow out of the comments thread and earn a dollar now. But once again, all interesting points and, yes, you're undoubtedly right that many jobs won't be automated anytime soon.
As luck would have it, I used to be a print journalist. Then I was a freelance content (marketing, mainly) creator. Until ChatGPT dropped. So this is a topic of more than purely academic interest.
To second Elan's point, is it possible that in the near future (a) cities could cease to be demographic sinks or (b) we could see widespread counterurbanisation of the kind that occured on a small scale during the Covid lockdowns if continued technological advances mean (a) people are only working 15 hours a week (as per Keynes' famous prediction) and/or (b) can increasingly work from anywhere.
I have no idea what we would need to do to stop cities being demographic sinks and neither has anyone else. Not for 5,000 years. Population dispersal enabled by technology may be an answer: we simply don’t know.
The difference now (from past history) might be that the cities socially dominate less now. Washington DC (et al) could collapse and would America really be reduced to nothingness?
The cities have lost their economic rationale and have only democratic political rationale in America now. Distributed power, transportation and communications cost them their reason for existence. The military and security reasons have been disappearing since gunpowder.
That’s why in America migrants are imported en masse, to justify local governments and as vote banks. *
This is all desperate makeshift, the cities have no reason to exist, not economically, not for security, not for social reasons. They may persist for political reasons, but this will require greater repressions than we have yet seen, and they’re becoming sinkholes in all respects. The History of cities that have no economy is not encouraging, probably the port cities will continue as they have a point.
*NOTE; the migrants aren’t going to the polls, they’re registered at the DMVs (motor vehicles) then NGOS are sent the information and fill out ballots en masse, or load them into voting machines via USB. That’s the point of automatic voter registration, aka motor voter.
(Very efficient at government when they want to be. )
Nigel and Lorenzo, I am not saying anything will be easy. There will need to be almost a total overhaul of ideologies and traditions. I have been spending some time on how empires rise and fall, and it is literally staggering that empires that were immensely powerful essentially disintegrated never to come close to their former selves. There's only one exception currently, and that is China. There have been multiple upheavals, but China seems pretty 'coherent'. Also interesting is that they do not subscribe to the types of theologies that have taken hold in other empires. Interestingly the tradition of excellence in 'civil service exam' and more utilitarian practices have kept their strengths, where as they've diminished elsewhere. [these are not fine words,of course, -- there's a lot to study, understand, and use. I prefer to think that if there's a real desire to succeed, it can be done. However it must be based on reality and wishful / mythological thinking.
China’s coherence over time is mainly geographical. Until the arrival of the Western Powers, it really only had one open border, being otherwise surrounded by seas, jungles, mountains, and desert. They also managed to not destroy their topsoil. That coherence absolutely had cultural consequences, but the geography is key.
Conversely, once Rome had spread the social technology of state construction across much of Europe, the geography of Europe ensured that there never was another such empire and that there was too much cultural diversity. All the would-be unifiers, even of the Mediterranean basin, found themselves playing a strategic game of “whack a mole”: there was always someone else they could not quite deal with.
This podcast includes an argument that the development of appointment by exam under the Sui dynasty led to China being unified much more regularly. This adjusts my argument—social technology increased the tendency to unification—but it was still enabled by the geography.
#2 is a technical problem, and we've shown we're good at those. Given the world's population is still increasing (albeit more slowly), calories per person is also, and land under cultivation is decreasing, I'm reasonably comfortable it can be resolved.
#1, though...while I'm still not convinced on correlation/causation (but it's a great hypothesis, and appears likely-ish), if you're right I'm far more pessimistic about the outcome.
That is a spectacularly unhelpful comment. What is wrong with what I wrote? I am relying on this book. David R. Montgomery, ‘Dirt: The Erosion of Civilization,’ University of California Press, [2007] 2012.
Yes, that is the sort of spans Montgomery is talking about. Those figures are less reassuring than they look, even taking just the 100 year span, but he talks about around a 1000 year cycles. Ironically, falling population lessens the problem.
Adjusting farming practices as farmers are currently doing also reduces the problem. And they do this because it is currently economical for them to do so.
It is a bit like “we are running out of oil” panic.
Actually we will utilise oil reserves appropriately according to the cost of doing so.
There is no particular problem and nothing to panic about.
Montgomery makes the point that the incentives are not always good. Not over-capitalised family farms are much more likely to be better at soil management than over-capitalised family farms or corporate farming. The second because financial pressures shorten time horizons and the last because managerial incentives can shorten time horizons and go for scale rather than differentiated management.
It is absolutely possible to manage soils so they are maintained, or grow, and various cultures did. But plenty didn’t. De-forestation has often been a problem, for instance.
I think that generally this is not the case, particularly for arable crops, because lower traffic, lower cultivation farming is simply cheaper and works very well.
Adding materials like green waste compost or animal manure, and using cover crops is also a no brainer as far as economics goes and most will do it.
There might be less of an incentive to add manures and plant cover crops for renters on rented land, but it is in the interest of the owner who will often do it or stipulate that renters do it:
Overall, at least where I work, I think the problem is mostly solved compared to the 1980s and 90s where annual tillage was much more common.
Nonsense. Smaller populations will help humanity win the battle against life threatening climate disaster and save the other species we share the planet with.
Robots equipped with artificial general intelligence will wipe our aging asses and grow and prepare our food.
Young people will have less competition for jobs so their wages will rise and with less demand for housing the cost of the existing housing stock will become more affordable.
Paul Krugman recently looked at low birth rate Japan and penned an amazingly optimistic report on its economic conditions. "In some ways, Japan, rather than being a cautionary tale, is a kind of role model - an example of how to manage difficult demography while remaining prosperous and socially stable.
I'm not sure I buy the thesis and would like to see some data. The common perception I have of immigrant neighborhoods in the 1800s is tenements crowding large families into tiny, squalid apartments.
I think there's a far simpler explanation: better medicine and birth control. Until the advent of cheap and reliable birth control, specifically the pill, people who wanted to have sex (which is pretty much everyone) were going to have lots of kids. I'd have to look up the numbers but bearing 10 babies was not uncommon. As I'm sure most of us are aware, before vaccines and antibiotics, half those children died before they were five. I don't know if that death rate was higher or lower in cities versus the country. I could easily believe the mortality rate in cities was higher.
I think the dominant factors in reduce fertility are better (and more socially acceptable and more widely used) birth control, improved economic outlook for women, and since the 60s, a constant worry that we're overpopulating the planet (leading families to decide to have fewer children). Women for the first time have the ability to choose how many children to have, for the first time in history they have other attractive options, and we've spent 50 years telling young adults that having children is bad for the planet. No kidding they're deciding to have fewer.
Note, I have no data to back up my theory. We both ought to find some statistics to confirm our assertions. If declining fertility began in 1920, I'm missing something important.
(There's a joke: In the 50s, a 18yo would walk into a drug store and loudly say "Gimme a pack of Camels" then whisper "...and a pack of condoms." In the 90s, he'd loudly ask for the condoms and whisper the ask for smokes.)
That cities were demographic sinks is not a controversial statement, at least for cities before 1800. I am merely pointing out that the demographic transition and the baby boom obscured the fact that cities, particularly apartment cities, remain demographic sinks.
Yes, you had the “teeming tenements” but they also had high infant and child mortality and then pattern shrank away well before the invention of the Pill.
As you can see from the graph above, the pattern of declining fertility was well in train in the 1920s, and re-appeared after the baby boom.
Yes, there are absolutely factor that have aggravated the trend, but they did not create it.
See my reference above or ask ChatGPT to spit out TFR data for you. I did it using 5 year intervals and saw that the major TFR reduction maps pretty neatly to the availability of birth control, the legalization of abortion and the widespread generous elderly safety net of Social Security and a Medicare in the U.S. (and at least roughly similar in the U.K. and France).
Very good!
A couple of (admittedly minor) points:
- modern women have their lives back to front. Their bodies are best capable of having children in their late teens/early twenties, and the best paying years for careers are mid thirties through forties. But they are normally studying/working in their teens/twenties and not looking at children until they reach 30; bad for both their bodies and their bank balances.
- the development of serfdom also marks the end of large scale slavery in Europe. While the coloni lost rights, former slaves gained some.
Despite these quibbles, excellent article.
Both good points. Mass slavery and mass serfdom are not really compatible: if you have one, you don’t have the other. Serfdom is cheaper than slavery and it means you already have the labour locally.
While not a fan of the Chicago school of economics (wherein all social phenomena have an economic explanation), I do think there is a transition point on fertility - when children flip from being assets to liabilities. This might be most obvious in urban settings, given the cost of living differential with suburbs and rural, but also keyed on the expectations of parents for the future of their children. Traditions die in cities, so the expectation for children to carry on those traditions would as well and be replaced with expectations for social mobility (climbing).
I have another economic explanation for the fertility drop: Before capitalism, children were the only consumer good. What I mean is that, for a peasant forced to farm for his master 4 days a week, provided with a cottage and tools, and paid nothing except essentials such as just enough cloth to cover themselves, there were precious few market goods besides children to spend your resources on. The question of whether to forgo more kids in order to go to college, or buy a summer home in the Catskills, never came up. There were no companies making products for peasants, since peasants had literally no money, and couldn't have travelled to the store to buy them even if they did. Before capitalism, everything we would consider a "consumer good" was made for the nobility.
Children were often one’s pension plan. They were also useful labour from a relatively early age. Children have become more consumer goods rather than less.
…in particular since rich countries now have generous welfare for the old.
That change would be the primary cause of children switching from producer goods / retirement plan to consumer goods no?
I don’t deny that urbanization hurts TFR, but boy it sure seems to me that a) wealth, b) generous welfare state for the old and c) birth control (contraception and abortion) play bigger roles.
Your urbanization thesis highly overlaps with wealth, so I can put that aside.
But don’t modern statistics show that it is the full-on advent of the welfare state that the average person/couple could be reasonably confident in relying on, coupled with the introduction of contraception and legalization of abortion, correlate very highly with the biggest drops in TFR?
The TFR data for the U.S, France and the U.K. all seem to show that, with peaks between 1960 and 1964, reaching lows by between 1975 (U.S.) and a few years later.
Capitalism has been around give or take two centuries, the fertility collapse is the last 50 or so years. Not to mention your reference to feudalism which ended with... capitalism!
I'm with you that until recently, children were an asset in an era when few could afford to buy many non-productive assets.
To pick a nit though, I don't think that's how feudalism worked. A peasant farmer worked his fields and kept what he grew, except for a tax he paid (in food or labor) to his lord. IIRC, the tax was on the order of 20-25%, one to two days a week labor.
At least, that was the western European experience. Eastern Europe was far closer to what you describe, lasting into the early 20th century. Serf rights were a factor in the Russian Revolution.
The system usually involved both working some days on the landlord's land, and giving some fraction of the food the serf grew on his own land to the lord. Delivering more than half of the fruit of one's labor to the master was common in Eastern Europe, and sometimes happened in France. England and France were not far behind. But we're talking about a roughly 1000-year period across all of Europe and Russia. So it's not worth arguing this point. My main point is that there were no consumer goods for serfs, and they had no money to buy it, and no freedom to go to the market; hence children were the only thing they could invest in.
Hi Lorenzo, I am interested in why you claim the causes of the postwar WWII baby boom remain a mystery. Not that I have any grounds for disputing this lol!
I am just reflecting on my own upbringing (born 1960). All of my family on both sides were working class (uncles & aunties) they all got married young, brought their own house and had between 4 - 6 children. They did all of this including sending their kids to private Catholic schools on a single wage!
When I think of today's young generation and cost of housing etc., there is no way in hell anyone except the rich could do this today. My father was a Fitter and Turner by trade who worked in the railways.
It is hard to imagine the cost of living that would have allowed for this compared to today!
Yes, there are economic factors that one can point to. Part of the problem is that it is not clear how specific they were compared to earlier eras and the baby boom did not happen in all Western countries, while the extent of the boom also varied between the countries that did have such a boom. It was most intense in the US, for reasons that are not all that clear. Was it because the US was less urbanised? More religious? But they are general characteristics that it is hard to connect to this specific period.
Yep, I am not in a position to offer any credible answers to this. Although I do note out of curiosity that my grandparents on both sides only had 3 children each. And I can still remember my grandmother advising my sister that 3 children were enough!
Lorenzo in WW2 the American soldiers sent home skulls to their sweethearts, the censors usually caught them and there was no ridiculous fuss about it.
If the message of “Prepare yourself My Dear Lady for a real man coming home to get his Patriotic Duty from you Madam” is lost on you , perhaps this clears it up. It’s rather like the Triumphant Football player and the Cheerleaders. Ahem.
Also the American soldiers came home with overwhelming victory at less cost than the other victors and was well paid, the economy due to successful management and lack of international competition (they were rubble or exhausted) meant a great and hopeful future and for decades this was true.
It seems to have ended about 1965 for reasons I’m sure are clearly obscure to all, as it should be…
"... various aspects of modern technology have fertility-suppressing effects. Cars that presume a maximum of three children, for instance. An effect that is worsened by compulsory baby car-seats. Or ticketing and accommodation that presumes two children or less. "
Perhaps there is a more universal, and evolutionarily novel, aspect of modern technology: no female of any species has ever had the capacity and capability to limit her fertility. No one knows how many children women prefer to have, because until the advent of the pill, the question had never been, in effect, asked.
It may well be that given the choice, regardless of anything else, on average women prefer to have fewer than two children. Nearly the entire globe is below replacement level fertility, which ranges from 2.1 to approximately 3.5 children per woman, depending on the society. Perhaps there is something more universal going on.
Polling suggests women in developed societies are having fewer children than they want to, but that runs into the expressed preference/revealed preference problem. There may indeed be something to what you say.
Fascinating, and disturbing! I'm curious regarding your remarks on topsoil erosion and the push in some circles towards plant-based diets, which you suggest worsens the topsoil erosion. My understanding had been that eating lots of meat requires even more agriculture, to grow food for the livestock (and then because all energy exchange is inefficient, it takes more crops to feed the livestock that feed you, compared to just eating the crops yourself). Is that mistaken?
To avoid this dilemma may I suggest you eat range fed Australian lamb and beef. Also wear merino wool grown under the Responsible Wool Standards program.
You can raise cattle and sheep on land not suited for crops. You can use herd animals to revitalise soil. A lot of the feed to animals, even from crops, is stuff humans can’t eat. So, yes, at the margin, there can be use of arable land to feed cattle, but it is way less significant than is often claimed. Animal food is also more nutrient dense, so more satiating.
Ahhh I see, thank you!
Thanks for an interesting, original take on this topic! Population collapse does indeed appear to have multiple potential causes - many of them societal.
But I'm curious why so few who delve into this subject touch on the most obvious cause: skyrocketing infertility rates.
The WHO says 1 in 6 people in developed nations is impacted by infertility - over 17% of the population. One hundred years ago, that figure was just a few percent.
If 30% of couples don't intend to procreate as stats show, and 17% of the rest have trouble or can't conceive, infertility is a significant factor.
I would guess that an uninhabited land the size of New Zealand were found today, no one would go and develop it because the easy option, of just adding oneself to an existing and established city, is the preferred option.
As far as I'm aware, only the Gold Coast and Canberra are the new cities of Australia with a population greater than 100k -- every other large city was established in the 1800s.
As long as wealth is to be found in cities and agriculture is so efficient that it's best for large swathes of agricultural land to be administered by a few owners who can have their goods travel long distances, it seems we will be stuck going after agglomeration effects until there aren't enough people around to have any noteworthy agglomeration.
And as you say, I too don't like where this childless future takes us morally. Pure reason is a poor basis for morality, and reason is often what childless people will use to base their morality upon.
Anyway, here's also an essay I wrote on morality as a spontaneous order based on our way of life, not reason, and how our sense of morality shifts to suit the way we live:
https://clubtroppo.com.au/2020/11/08/ought-anchored-to-is-morality-as-a-spontaneous-order/
Space settlement is the answer.
I think you have failed to explicitly recognize a source of "is" reasoning in your moral development thesis, but in fact you have captured it "under the covers", or by accident. My apology that I have not read beyond this extracted paragraph from your post, but I can't afford the time right now to delve deeper, so perhaps there is something I missed later on.
But from this extract perhaps you can see that [as I perceive it] morality has both an absolute/genetic/instinctual/natural rights component that works through our evolved brain/mind/psychology, as well as the relative/cultural aspects that you mention as being dominant or prominent.
"Morality Outside of Reason
Considering that the cold workings of reason alone cannot establish ought, there is nothing universal remaining in the human toolkit from which to base morality. What is moral must be contingent. ... Certainly reason plays a role in all this, but in no way a decisive one. Instead, morality is spread out and worked out among people in social settings with the whole range of human faculties brought to bear on the question of ought.
In this way, morality is akin to language and economic life, a kind of spontaneous order. A person’s language is developed out of one’s own innate aptitudes and instincts combined with social learning and reinforcement over time; a person’s morality develops in much the same way. The moralities of societies respond to specific histories and traditions to promote community survival and flourishing; they live, die and adapt accordingly."
Just as human language is dependent upon both our genetic evolved brain/neural capabilities to structure syntax, etc., and on our particular society/culture within which we first learn a given language, so elements of our morality evolved (disgust at poop, resistance to incest, self preservation and avoiding murder of our in group, various elements of theory of mind, sense of fairness and justice (for self and others), reciprocity, etc.) vs. cultural variations. For example, some tribal, honor-shame, Islamic cultures find it appropriate to perform honor killing of wayward females, while essentially no culture with a guilt-shame orientation, such as those derived from Judeo-Christian tradition, would accept such a practice as moral.
Unless I have misunderstood you, this is basically the same as saying morality "is developed out of one’s own innate aptitudes and instincts combined with social learning and reinforcement over time..."; just as you claimed for language.
And upon rereading this: "Certainly reason plays a role in all this, but in no way a decisive one..." it is possible we are actually closer in agreement than I first thought, but then we might argue over just what "a decisive one" means. :-) To date I have been more concerned with establishing that both components contribute*, not their relative contribution. So maybe I need to spend some time on that eventually. Thank you.
*I.e., resolve the absolute vs. relative arguments about morality and religion, as "and" rather than "or".
Yes, I think we're basically in agreement.
The degree to which reason directs thing is impossible to ascertain. Reason and everything else is so intertwined that it won't ever make any sense to disentangle it.
Fascinating, but everything is and will be increasingly changing. Automation, robotics, Manufacturing ... can and will reduce labor requirement, That's what the port strike was all about. Note, in the revolutionary period,US workforce was around 98% 'employed/engaged' and farm / agriculture /livestock production; now perhaps 1% involved in agriculture / food production /transportation of food & agricultural products. Tops Soil preservation is an issue; mostly due laziness + greed. We can certainly do much better. Once you can figure out 'unicorning' sustainable cities (easy to set up B$ businesses, the problem will be licked; my expectation - stay tune ... do able ]
The impact of automation is much overrated and overhyped both for and against.
Mind you the internet and online have been very effective in intellectual overproduction and elite overproduction.
We actually need workers, what we have are bureaucrats and clerks. The technologies that make this possible are central banks and unlimited fiat, backed by aging nuclear weapons.
The bourgeois need for comfort and security …no matter how illusory… bought at the expense of the future make these fantasies possible.
There’s a manufacturing labor shortage in America.
There’s a dozen critical infrastructure fields I can name short young workers, and people do get old. Cable ship crews for instance- who keep the transoceanic fiber optic cables running… I can go on.
And on.
Fully automated luxury capitalism is as far away and as realistic as fully automated luxury communism, not to mention if it worked we’d all be caught in the resources curse trap.
We could certainly use less bureaucrats and more road workers and pilots in Western North Carolina now…
What is actually happening now is collapse piece by piece. East Palestine, San Francisco, Springfield Ohio, Asheville are the real future. It won’t be AI.
And in any emergency or natural disaster one redneck, or oil roughneck, or Longshoreman is worth a thousand PhDs and a million AI coders… which is why Musk flew in Starlink to establish communications. Musk isn’t being charitable, he’s gathering allies. He’s making allies for when he needs them.
Can AI do that?
The earliest major automation was in agricultural applications
Look at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combine_harvester. You’ll see Australia being a leader, primarily due to labor shortages
Yep, I think labour shortages are driving a lot of automation. A concierge friend of mine at a very expensive Sydney hotel recently told me they'd basically automated the whole check-in/check-out process (and anything else they could) because of an inability to find/keep staff.
I’m in no way against technology or automation, but it’s being cargo cult-d for both hype for money and as a boogeyman that’s gonna get us all !!
What if it CAN’T do either?
Well, let's see how 2025 plays out, TLW. I suspect a lot of workers – or at least knowledge workers – are underestimating just how eminently replaceable they are. But it's entirely possible you're right and it is being overhyped.
I think it’s over hyped certainly for stock market shilling, yes.
OTOH AI absolutely CAN do marvelous things, for instance I don’t have to learn coding now 🤣 which I don’t use at work anyway. More importantly AI in additive manufacturing (3D printing) is absolutely stunning in its capabilities, I believe the same for flight in certain respects.
I’d never buy a self driving car though. Any human choice or competition and it’s fail.
I’m in networking, like the several networks we’re communicating over now. When they tried to really automate or software define networks the limits kept getting hit. You can automate objects, people won’t conform. You can’t cross the boundary from your network and you have to…
…standards always require adjustments by human discernment and judgement, tweaking the network…
Not to mention all the network automation or even AI I’ve seen is just reading me a school book answer.
Let them AI Reddit/r/ networking and see what happens… that would be interesting. But not a replacement.
(Ps that’s all I actually do on Reddit, BTW).
All good points for discussion. Automation is NOT synonymous with level 5 autonomy. There are fine gradations which almost everyone skips over. The L011 jet I was on 40 years ago, for a transatlantic flight, could be landed remotely at Gatwick , without on board pilot control, using software, automatic control,
Contd. pilots have routinely used autopilot to fly planes in calm weather over long flights and take naps during that time …. The challenge of course is that when tough decisions are required in unusual situations, it’s often best under human control. There are military systems that are fully automated… … that’s a different area… in any case AI is NOT up to full human abilities in all areas…. Yet.
I’m in no way against technology.
I’m kinda hyped out as in maxed out on the hype on AI.
So what if you get laid off?
We all do.
The impact of technology over time has absolutely been not to reduce human populations or spread misery and poverty- people do that , technology can be a tool for harm or greed.
Even in war on the battlefield the impact of technological advances has in general led to less casualties for any engagement (before people get irate, Leipzig killed over 110,000 in 3 days, The Somme killed a million over 5.5 months, not the same).
The impact of technology over all has been increased human populations, health, food and prosperity. The poor now eat better and live better than ancient Emperors and Kings.
A harvester Combine is not quite the same as automation, never mind automation and AI are not the same- mind you I am not against technology, I’m going to need hard info.
The Hype around AI approaches Global Warming levels of earnestness… which means…
It’s probably at least part scam.
All good points! And I write that as an overeducated surplus elite type. But in answer to your final question, I suspect AI is soon going to make substantial inroads into the work currently being done by overeducated surplus elite types. As you rightly point out, automating the tasks that, say, a plumber does is going to be far more complicated. Nonetheless, I'm not sure replacing, say, a longshoreman (or a freight truck driver) is going to be anywhere near as difficult. That's precisely why the ILA recently took industrial action and why you don't see too many dock workers on many Asian and European docks nowadays.
Problems; As Yarvin * posted the other day, this would mean resource curse.
“If you liked outsourcing to China, you’ll love AI.” Now that was in response to some statement by Sam Altman to the effect we’re all finished and the last 10 engineers will control AI and the world… etc.
Altman’s world is the males are coders and the females sex workers, East Bay (San Francisco) as Yarvin puts it.
Cum grano salis.
IF this happens, worry not- there’s always “Compliance.”
HR will never die, nor fade away.
No machine can replace their sleepless, sullen malice.
Mind you compliance will include police, corrections officers, social workers, drug rehab counselors etc etc. They’ll also be the required Dark Side of Compliance- gangsters and cartels, their bankers and NGOS, at scale one is not possible without the other, the Yin to Yang.
It’s a sustainable ecosystem as long as the parties involved discipline their appetites.
SOLUTIONS; Manufacturing, and Space. Manufacturing and much other work can be assisted by automation but not replaced (Musk rejected it when he saw the Germans found it wasn’t cost effective). I know my two fields- networking civilian and military citizen soldier the human can’t be replaced. They tried and failed in networking. Once you leave a closed loop that’s it.
Space; the infinite awaits, as does infinite wealth and opportunity… and we’ll need people because machines cannot adapt, and there is absolutely no way we can plan for everything in the infinite. I suspect we’ll get major surprises just settling Mars and mining asteroids. No , machines cannot adapt. They can automate, but what are you automating?
… no space? Then we can stay here and wait for nuclear war because the Democratic Party is polling bad into the midterms elections;
See Cuban missile crisis 1962
Ukraine (US 🇺🇸 🤫) Russian War of 2022- present. We came extremely close to nuclear war in April 2022. As an aside, I don’t think nuclear weapons should be controlled by Democracy. I’m very likely to be proven right.
Mind you it’s also possible another party could start a nuclear war for selfish political reasons… but the Democratic Party has USED nuclear weapons twice, and bought us to the brink twice. We’re still on the brink now.
*Yarvin Cum Grano Magnum Salis
Sadly, my work hasn't yet been (entirely) automated so I'll have to bow out of the comments thread and earn a dollar now. But once again, all interesting points and, yes, you're undoubtedly right that many jobs won't be automated anytime soon.
I don’t know what you do, but it probably can’t be automated if human judgments or interactions are involved. Such as money or business.
As luck would have it, I used to be a print journalist. Then I was a freelance content (marketing, mainly) creator. Until ChatGPT dropped. So this is a topic of more than purely academic interest.
Yes, the impact of technology is a complicating mystery. Yet cities remain demographic sinks.
To second Elan's point, is it possible that in the near future (a) cities could cease to be demographic sinks or (b) we could see widespread counterurbanisation of the kind that occured on a small scale during the Covid lockdowns if continued technological advances mean (a) people are only working 15 hours a week (as per Keynes' famous prediction) and/or (b) can increasingly work from anywhere.
I have no idea what we would need to do to stop cities being demographic sinks and neither has anyone else. Not for 5,000 years. Population dispersal enabled by technology may be an answer: we simply don’t know.
Well, we've stopped cities from being cesspools of disease, as you yourself mentioned.
The difference now (from past history) might be that the cities socially dominate less now. Washington DC (et al) could collapse and would America really be reduced to nothingness?
The cities have lost their economic rationale and have only democratic political rationale in America now. Distributed power, transportation and communications cost them their reason for existence. The military and security reasons have been disappearing since gunpowder.
That’s why in America migrants are imported en masse, to justify local governments and as vote banks. *
This is all desperate makeshift, the cities have no reason to exist, not economically, not for security, not for social reasons. They may persist for political reasons, but this will require greater repressions than we have yet seen, and they’re becoming sinkholes in all respects. The History of cities that have no economy is not encouraging, probably the port cities will continue as they have a point.
*NOTE; the migrants aren’t going to the polls, they’re registered at the DMVs (motor vehicles) then NGOS are sent the information and fill out ballots en masse, or load them into voting machines via USB. That’s the point of automatic voter registration, aka motor voter.
(Very efficient at government when they want to be. )
Nigel and Lorenzo, I am not saying anything will be easy. There will need to be almost a total overhaul of ideologies and traditions. I have been spending some time on how empires rise and fall, and it is literally staggering that empires that were immensely powerful essentially disintegrated never to come close to their former selves. There's only one exception currently, and that is China. There have been multiple upheavals, but China seems pretty 'coherent'. Also interesting is that they do not subscribe to the types of theologies that have taken hold in other empires. Interestingly the tradition of excellence in 'civil service exam' and more utilitarian practices have kept their strengths, where as they've diminished elsewhere. [these are not fine words,of course, -- there's a lot to study, understand, and use. I prefer to think that if there's a real desire to succeed, it can be done. However it must be based on reality and wishful / mythological thinking.
China’s coherence over time is mainly geographical. Until the arrival of the Western Powers, it really only had one open border, being otherwise surrounded by seas, jungles, mountains, and desert. They also managed to not destroy their topsoil. That coherence absolutely had cultural consequences, but the geography is key.
Conversely, once Rome had spread the social technology of state construction across much of Europe, the geography of Europe ensured that there never was another such empire and that there was too much cultural diversity. All the would-be unifiers, even of the Mediterranean basin, found themselves playing a strategic game of “whack a mole”: there was always someone else they could not quite deal with.
This podcast includes an argument that the development of appointment by exam under the Sui dynasty led to China being unified much more regularly. This adjusts my argument—social technology increased the tendency to unification—but it was still enabled by the geography.
https://www.chinatalk.media/p/autocracy-and-stagnation-how-imperial
#2 is a technical problem, and we've shown we're good at those. Given the world's population is still increasing (albeit more slowly), calories per person is also, and land under cultivation is decreasing, I'm reasonably comfortable it can be resolved.
#1, though...while I'm still not convinced on correlation/causation (but it's a great hypothesis, and appears likely-ish), if you're right I'm far more pessimistic about the outcome.
Fantastic article.
Education kills female fertility.
That’s it.
Not to worry, feminism expires with Fiat $ death; that’s now… BTW.
I was enjoying the article and finding it convincing up until the point where you mentioned topsoil degradation and population collapse.
This is something I do know about, and so undermines the rest of the article for me on topics I don’t have a clue about.
That is a spectacularly unhelpful comment. What is wrong with what I wrote? I am relying on this book. David R. Montgomery, ‘Dirt: The Erosion of Civilization,’ University of California Press, [2007] 2012.
Sorry about that.
This is a good summary of the truth behind the frequent media scares around top soil degradation:
https://ourworldindata.org/soil-lifespans
Yes, that is the sort of spans Montgomery is talking about. Those figures are less reassuring than they look, even taking just the 100 year span, but he talks about around a 1000 year cycles. Ironically, falling population lessens the problem.
Adjusting farming practices as farmers are currently doing also reduces the problem. And they do this because it is currently economical for them to do so.
It is a bit like “we are running out of oil” panic.
Actually we will utilise oil reserves appropriately according to the cost of doing so.
There is no particular problem and nothing to panic about.
Montgomery makes the point that the incentives are not always good. Not over-capitalised family farms are much more likely to be better at soil management than over-capitalised family farms or corporate farming. The second because financial pressures shorten time horizons and the last because managerial incentives can shorten time horizons and go for scale rather than differentiated management.
It is absolutely possible to manage soils so they are maintained, or grow, and various cultures did. But plenty didn’t. De-forestation has often been a problem, for instance.
I think that generally this is not the case, particularly for arable crops, because lower traffic, lower cultivation farming is simply cheaper and works very well.
Adding materials like green waste compost or animal manure, and using cover crops is also a no brainer as far as economics goes and most will do it.
There might be less of an incentive to add manures and plant cover crops for renters on rented land, but it is in the interest of the owner who will often do it or stipulate that renters do it:
Overall, at least where I work, I think the problem is mostly solved compared to the 1980s and 90s where annual tillage was much more common.
Nonsense. Smaller populations will help humanity win the battle against life threatening climate disaster and save the other species we share the planet with.
Robots equipped with artificial general intelligence will wipe our aging asses and grow and prepare our food.
Young people will have less competition for jobs so their wages will rise and with less demand for housing the cost of the existing housing stock will become more affordable.
Paul Krugman recently looked at low birth rate Japan and penned an amazingly optimistic report on its economic conditions. "In some ways, Japan, rather than being a cautionary tale, is a kind of role model - an example of how to manage difficult demography while remaining prosperous and socially stable.
I'm not sure I buy the thesis and would like to see some data. The common perception I have of immigrant neighborhoods in the 1800s is tenements crowding large families into tiny, squalid apartments.
I think there's a far simpler explanation: better medicine and birth control. Until the advent of cheap and reliable birth control, specifically the pill, people who wanted to have sex (which is pretty much everyone) were going to have lots of kids. I'd have to look up the numbers but bearing 10 babies was not uncommon. As I'm sure most of us are aware, before vaccines and antibiotics, half those children died before they were five. I don't know if that death rate was higher or lower in cities versus the country. I could easily believe the mortality rate in cities was higher.
I think the dominant factors in reduce fertility are better (and more socially acceptable and more widely used) birth control, improved economic outlook for women, and since the 60s, a constant worry that we're overpopulating the planet (leading families to decide to have fewer children). Women for the first time have the ability to choose how many children to have, for the first time in history they have other attractive options, and we've spent 50 years telling young adults that having children is bad for the planet. No kidding they're deciding to have fewer.
Note, I have no data to back up my theory. We both ought to find some statistics to confirm our assertions. If declining fertility began in 1920, I'm missing something important.
(There's a joke: In the 50s, a 18yo would walk into a drug store and loudly say "Gimme a pack of Camels" then whisper "...and a pack of condoms." In the 90s, he'd loudly ask for the condoms and whisper the ask for smokes.)
That cities were demographic sinks is not a controversial statement, at least for cities before 1800. I am merely pointing out that the demographic transition and the baby boom obscured the fact that cities, particularly apartment cities, remain demographic sinks.
Yes, you had the “teeming tenements” but they also had high infant and child mortality and then pattern shrank away well before the invention of the Pill.
As you can see from the graph above, the pattern of declining fertility was well in train in the 1920s, and re-appeared after the baby boom.
Yes, there are absolutely factor that have aggravated the trend, but they did not create it.
I agree with most of what you suggest.
See my reference above or ask ChatGPT to spit out TFR data for you. I did it using 5 year intervals and saw that the major TFR reduction maps pretty neatly to the availability of birth control, the legalization of abortion and the widespread generous elderly safety net of Social Security and a Medicare in the U.S. (and at least roughly similar in the U.K. and France).
You can’t have software defined human organizations .
Relax. 😌
I am curious as to ILA positions regarding automation. I only saw wage increases and with inflation rampant it’s fair.