Coming: peak humanity

And what are the societal ramifications for nations of "only children" that tend to be overly ego-centric?

How do we convince educated, affluent people to have more children?

From my own experience, by convincing them of the truth of the Roman Catholic Church -- before which I was definitely in the DINK (Double Income No Kids) category.

We have four today and remain open and welcoming to as many as God wishes us to have.

The higher population, the worse the collapse. Too many trends-peak oil, depletion of fishing grounds, China and Africa and Australia losing ag land to desertification, etc. Cruelly, the best solution would be a worldwide aging population such as Europe is now, hit by a flu pandemic. FBC, have you no sense of stewardship?

You've been noticing that too, eh? I've also raised this question of "large families vs. era of limits" before, and, with one thoughtful exception, I don't seem to get much in the way of response.
Posted by: MI | August 22, 2008 10:19 AM

Perhaps they are all planning on moving out to their "Benedictine Option" Orthodox communes where their large, NFP guided families will spend their daylight hours tending their organic gardens and their evening hours offering Gregorian Chants by candlelight alongside their neighboring monks.

So what's the answer? How do we convince educated, affluent people to have more children?

The emperor Augustus tried a combination of incentives and punitive laws. It didn't work then, either.

Imagine, for whatever reason, that the population never exploded, even with some advances such as penicilin. We would still be a subsistence agriculture world, with almost no technology, because there would be no need for it. Necessity truly is the mother of invention.

Furthermore, a smaller population cannot build things like nuclear power plants because of the intense specialization required. More people = more specialties = more diverse economy. One can argue for or against the world we have made (or that was made for us), but any idea of a future with less people and more prosperity is bunk, unless we create artificial intelligence before we run out of engineers.

If we have "too many" people, resources will be scarce but many new innovations will find creative ways to do more with less. If we have "too few" people, clear cutting forests for firewood will be a logical solution, since there will be plenty of forest for everyone.

WRT population decline & economic growth:

IIRC, economic growth is a function not only of change in population size, but also change in productivity. If the increase in the latter outweighs the decrease in the former, you can still have economic growth even with shrinking population.

In China, for instance, one can divide the labor force (roughly) into high & low productivity segments. The former works in technology, export-oriented manufacturing, etc. The latter is mainly rural subsistence farming. China's economic growth strategy has been to shift millions of people annually from low-productivity to high productivity jobs (*).

Now, say China's population started decreasing tomorrow by 2 million/yr, evenly divided between the high & low productivity segments. If they were able to move people into high-productivity jobs faster than the high-productivity sector workforce shrank, said workforce would continue to grow, and with it China's economy.

Of course, there are limits to that; once everyone is in a high-productivity job, continued increases in productivity (e.g., via application of technology) would be needed in order to offset continued population shrinkage.

(*) delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/03/peering_into_th.html

Actually, it does.

Fewer people are fewer people to need things done. And if there were infinite jobs, there'd be almost no unemployment. And that counts the jobs that actually get paid for.

Society somehow managed to struggle on back in the 1800's DURING that Industrial Revolution, with less than 1 billion people.

Yes, that engineer needs a factory filled with people, but you only need so many factories churning out so much stuff WITHOUT so many people.

And if lowered resources, or tons of people were impetus for great strides, once again, the Industrial Revolution would've started in India, Africa, places like that. Where people are starving, and scrambling for resources, and also having huge families.

Odd how that didn't work out.

Again, otherwise we would've been in deep kimchee throughout history when we weren't doubling our population ever 35 YEARS.

Besides, none of this is about population reduction. It isn't even about population maintenance. It is simply not increasing at 'Baby Boom' levels.

Nobody is talking about going to tiny towns spread out over hundreds of miles.

We're just talking about maybe not being at 24 billion population by 2100.

So what's the answer? How do we convince educated, affluent people to have more children? Instead of saying "change the culture," give some concrete ideas on how to change the culture.

----

Well, I wouldn't go around asking or paying educated, affluent people to have more children, to start with. That would be eugenics, of a type. Instead, I'd simply try and educate and care for whatever children come my way, whether their parents were illiterate and poor, or not. And really, converting every heart to love God and His Son is the only way to go about it.

"Wow, just wow. What an amazing amount of snobbery and self assurance behind this statement. Two of the fallacies and/or unspoken thoughts behind this belief include:

1) Engineering is a "higher" goal than, say, cabinet making. This is not true, nor is it godly. The best thing for a child to become in his/her adult years is what his Maker designed him/her to be. Engineer? Great. Cabinet maker? Great. Missionary? Great. CEO? Great. *Sheesh*"

2) Large families produce dull, less useful children. No, just ... no. You have not researched this to see what the children of large families are doing and the ways that they are of benefit to society. Someone up above mentioned ego-centric children ... I see far more ego-centric behaviors in children from very small families than I do in children from large families. In addition, I know of children in large families who have gone to Harvard, have started their own successful businesses, have moved to Asia to teach English (having spent a couple of semesters at Oxford in the quest for their college degree), have been accepted to the Air Force Academy and more. I also know some who have become secretaries, who waffle around not knowing what they want to do, have become ski instructors, have traveled. Please don't promote (or even believe) such an inane thing.

Actually, you're mostly talking to the person I was disputing.

HIS assertion was that.. And I'll quote..

"Furthermore, a smaller population cannot build things like nuclear power plants because of the intense specialization required. More people = more specialties = more diverse economy. One can argue for or against the world we have made (or that was made for us), but any idea of a future with less people and more prosperity is bunk, unless we create artificial intelligence before we run out of engineers."

I wasn't stating that big families produced dull people. I was using an anecdote, my small family, vs. two large families, to show that the size of families doesn't change the possibility of having an engineer.

I'm sure there are huge families that could've produced a half dozen engineers. But you don't need to be IN one to produce one. And you can have dozens of babies born and not an engineer in the bunch.

Of course, this is assuming that the production of engineers (and, as I noted, my SON is one) is some kind of major goal of reproduction. Indeed, by the nature of the profession, you do NOT need hundreds of thousands of engineers.

If he's just saying we need lots of PEOPLE (regardless of family size) to have that many engineers (again, assuming that's some kind of goal), we had major innovation from inventors and such during the Industrial Revolution with a grand total of under a billion total people. I imagine we won't suffer a dearth of them because we don't get to 24 billion people fast enough.

Frankly, what fosters innovation is to nurture the children we have and to help them get to whatever potential they have. To not hold contempt for education, OR for experience. For scientific fields, artistic, academic OR for labor and trades.

We have six BILLION people on the planet now. If everyone capable of being an engineer (as an example, again, we can also say real cabinet maker, which is also an art, or mechanic, or any other field) were able to get the training and resources needed to get into that field, we have plenty of people to go around.

And they did note, some of the greatest innovations came from too FEW people, not too many. The loss of the manual labor of slavery spurred development of the cotton gin.

Most new innovations are about saving labor, or greater productivity from the labor you have. Something you don't need if you have tons of labor to go around.

Above post by me to Karen Brown.

Not directly "on topic" but related to the Netherlands tangent on the later thread re: college: take note of this candid article written by a young European man facing the narcissism of his controlling mother as she schedules her own euthanasia

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2008/aug/23/euthanasia.cancer

and manages her domestic affairs with the energy of a 40-yr old not a terminally-ill 65 year old, and choreographs the funeral arrangements as if she were a seasoned wedding planner, with narry a thought for the impact on the others in her 'sphere of influence.' IMHO = a metaphor for today's global malaise.

When women think their sphere of influence is "gatekeepers" of creation (the Wicca-Gaia fallacy of "mother earth") what we get is the grim reaper in drag: the evil one is full of empty promises, and feminism is surely one of his most hollow illusions, Eve was the first to succumb -- her salutory family history being the stuff of Holy Writ -- but why are so many men not willing or able to step up to the plate and do the heavy lifting of defending human dignity and the welfare of those God entrusts to them? Those born at the close of the 20th century will soon come to see so much of the shambles we are passing on to them was set in motion by the 'exhuberant irrationalism' of their grandparents in the 60s who jettisoned millenia's worth of virtues formed by traditionally held values for the fata morgana of a "Brave New World" ...

And kudos to the young author for publishing such a brutally honest account of the rot at the heart of families in the West and elsewhere.

Meanwhile high-birth Africa will remain stuck in a vicious circle unless it gets economic growth, agricultural reform, improved world trade terms, infrastructure investment, better health and education systems, more girls into school and a wider availability of family planning.

It's real simple: if Africa becomes "modern" with girls in school and family planning, they will just become like everyone else and start declining in population as well. It's the fact they don't have these lethal cultural traits that they are doing so well population-wise and spreading their seed far and wide, eating into the worldwide gene pool.

Writers should be ashamed to pick up a pen and write the word "demographic" without knowing even the basics about biology and Darwinian science. Fact: humans are animals, and breed as such, so there must always be more fit tribes demographically eroding the less fit ones. This erosion can be measured: the West is decreasing relative to other cultures every year (and has been for a long time now). There is no "steady state" in demographics like so many wish to believe; one race or culture always pushes against another, and superior human capital will eventually dominate (by superior, I mean those breeding the highest sustainable populations). But hey, it's very funny to watch the liberal West deny basic Darwinian science just because it doesn't fit our ideology. We simply can't accept that nature doesn't ask us to be happy, merely to survive. African culture gets this truth, and the blunt fact is that the world future is written by those who show up for it.