(no subject)

[vyvyanx]

Inspired by a discussion on cam.misc recently, I wonder how people I know feel about reproduction and related issues. (I would make this into a poll, but I don't have the right sort of account.)

If it is true that the UK population (in particular, that part of it which is working age) is falling, and likely to fall more dramatically in future, does this worry you or please you more? If you see it as mainly a problem, do you think that encouraging people to have more children is the solution? Would encouraging more immigration be a solution? Do you think there are other solutions?

Just curious. (If you're not in the UK, I'd be just as interested in your views on population trends in the country you're in.)

Comments

[surje.livejournal.com]

i guess you have to compare that number with the number of jobs available. the trouble with eugenics (positive or negative) is that you don't know what kind of factors you are selecting in favour of or against. the only way to "encourage" people to have children is basically tax relief. the question is, are you going to give more or less tax relief to the poor or to the rich (relatively to earnings).

is the problem that intelligent, educated, middle classes with potential capability are also inclined to be busy, career obsessed, neurotic, and impotent; or the old prejudice that the working classes have "nothing better to do"?

is it reasonable to project that affluent, educated couples are more likely to have the resources to effectively support and nurture children and be actively involved in their education?

on the other hand, you could say that if there was some kind of disease that killed 90% of the UK population (and was then cured, everything back to normal), what would happen? clearly there would be a destabilised period with lots of essential services disrupted, but once you've got things under control, flattened the worst housing atrocities, and redistributed resources and jobs to prosperous areas, you might argue that the country now has the same amount of resources to share between less people; that the same industrial capacity can produce the same amount of exports, whilst we require less imports; that we will gain benefits similar to other euro / scandinavian countries that have smaller population densities (higher standards of living, begetting lower crime rates, creating a virtuous circle).

then you get back to eugenics. and it's awfully tempting to ensure that the literati, or the politicians, or the upper crust, or the high earners, or even the media, or whatever criteria you choose for your eugenics programme, to survive, along with the other randomly selected 2 million.

but maybe you got it wrong, and the telephone sanitisers were the most important after all.

[ptc24.livejournal.com]

Extreme-long-term, the role of eugenics may have something to do with selecting for people that otherwise wouldn't reproduce. The reasoning:

Long term, there can only be a stable population. This can be high birth rate-high death rate, low birth rate-low death rate, or extinction. I think most people must prefer the second, although some religious fruitcakes[1] would no doubt prefer the first, and some depressively-thinking types would go for the third.

So how is the birthrate kept down so low, seeing as we seem to be doing pretty well at it these days? Contraception provides the means, and a combination of factors - notably the fact that modern lifestyles make children much more of a liability and much less of an asset (these days we don't need so much cheap farm labour, and we have pensions that mean you don't have to have grown-up children to take care of you in your old age) - provide the will. We don't have lots of kids because we don't want them, rather than because we die young.

Under these circumstances, we start to select for characteristics[2] that circumvent this - carelessness with contraception, anti-abortion views, fundamentalist religions, oooh-aren't-they-cute-I-want-one. And so one might expect it to become harder and harder to gently encourage people to have the right number of children, rather than too many.

This is all extreme-long-term, of course, and needn't bother the current generation at all.

[1] Of course most anti-contraception religions will see this as a false choice - the world will end before humanity saturates the available space, or something like that. Which I suppose is a bit less fruitcakeish... OTOH ISTR reading that Malthus himself held this view.
[2] Now at this point someone will rather predictably get annoyed at the idea of a "gene for religious fundamentalism" or somesuch, and set forth on applying violence to that strawman. A more sophisticated view would be: there are factors that influence (NOTE: not determine) whether you become a fundie or not, and factors that influence those factors, and so on... and some of the factors at several levels of remove will be genetic.

[conflux.livejournal.com]

In Singapore they do try and encourage people with degrees to have more children by offering tax breaks.

For and evolutionary perspective I think that reliable contraception and elective sterilisation will mean that we will ultimately bread for a population that actively wants children more and more. Some people already have this urge very strongly. I think not wanting an abortion is part of this. This as you say could cause problems in the future. Similarly I think that evolutionary pressures will mean that women will remain fertile for more years as so many of us now wait until we are older to have children (and have acquired the necessary resources). Other factors like being ditzy about contraception may also have an effect. Being a fundamentalist in a tolerant society is difficult to maintain over many generations so I don’t think this will be a factor as long as they are a small minority. My grandparents were fundamentalists and I am definitely not.

[damerell.livejournal.com]

I don't expect many of us will retire at 65; it's the inevitable result as we not only live longer, but remain healthy longer.

[zotz]

Having fewer people around would be no bad thing, as we're putting a horrible load on the natural environment. If we want our descendants to go on having access to a pleasantly unruined planet, then a decline would be good. On the other hand, too drastic a decline causes problems while it's happening - a top-heavy population structure means that there's a lot of geriatric care needing to be supported by a smaller number of workers. This places some sort of limit on how fast a decline is practical.

At the moment, things look OK. We (the rich west) have had our population explosion, and it's starting to look like the rest of the world have more or less had theirs, too. The most recent UN estimates I saw were that the world's population would peak this century without doubling again. This is good and encouraging. After that it's expected to go into gradual decline, which is even better.

As far as Britain's concerned, I don't see much reason to worry. We don't have a major demographic problem upcoming, and I'm still optimistic that the current obsession with migrants is the last blast - after all, racism plays worse with twentysomethings than with, as far as I can tell, any previous generation. So I'm fairly sanguine about immigration being accepted, and I don't see any particular need to encourage people to do the rabbit thing.

That may, of course, be hopelessly optimistic. It's odd, though - I've been getting more optimistic about it as I get older. The evidence seems to be that things genuinely don't look nearly as bad as people expected them to be by now. We're all still alive, for a start.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Immigration seems like an excellent medium-term solution at least for the immigrant and the receiving country. While there are poor countries with surplus population it's probably not too bad for them (though there's a risk that people they can ill afford to lose will leave) but if we suppose that the trends found in Western Europe are eventually replicated globally then obviously it's no good as a long term answer for the planet as a whole. But I hear that the birth rate is going up in the USA, so perhaps that'll turn out to be a bad supposition.

[vyvyan.livejournal.com]

Thanks for these comments. I'm particularly intrigued by the different attitudes to population reduction suggested by these statements:

[surje] if there was some kind of disease that killed 90% of the UK population ... you might argue that the country now has the same amount of resources to share between less people; that the same industrial capacity can produce the same amount of exports, whilst we require less imports; that we will gain benefits similar to other euro / scandinavian countries that have smaller population densities

[zotz] The most recent UN estimates I saw were that the world's population would peak this century without doubling again. This is good and encouraging. After that it's expected to go into gradual decline, which is even better.

[ewx] if we suppose that the trends found in Western Europe are eventually replicated globally then obviously it's no good as a long term answer for the planet as a whole

Personally I'm with the Greens in wanting this country's population reduced substantially (though ideally without social bias, coercion, untimely deaths, or unmanageable swiftness!) and I think the world as a whole would benefit from a much smaller population (though if individual resource consumption increased concomitantly, reduction wouldn't be that useful - we'd need to live more responsibly as well). Some social structures doubtless require a certain density of population - but couldn't we just confine human habitation to a smaller proportion of the planet? Is there actually any need for humans to live in every part of the world that they do currently?

The possibility of eventual human extinction through unwillingness to reproduce on a global scale seems so unlikely to me that I find it hard to worry about. Most people seem programmed to want to have babies, after all...

[damerell.livejournal.com]

"Unwillingness to reproduce" - anyway, with 6 billion people we'd have plenty of time to spot that one coming...

[mtbc100.livejournal.com]

Why would the falling population be a problem? The only reason I can think of off-hand is the idea of the working population's taxes paying the old age pension. In which case, encouraging immigration of young people who are likely to work and help the economy sounds like a good idea to me - not necessarily to completely balance the population drop, but enough to make sure that we can still take care of the old people.