Thursday, December 28, 2023

Fertility Decline

Preliminary data for 2023 shows that worldwide fertility continued its precipitous decline. The 2015 to 2023 period has probably seen the biggest change in human fertility in our history.

The UN is projecting that global fertility fell to 2.3 last year, which is one of the estimates for the replacement rate, so we may have achieved a stable human population.

But this is humanity we're talking about, and we don't do stability; instead we seem to be shooting past it toward very rapid population decline. I'm not as alarmed about this as some, because I remember the 1970s and the panic about rising population, and I can't take fifty-year projections of anything very seriously. But this is quite a remarkable thing to see.

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5 comments:

  1. ShadowDecember 28, 2023 at 1:47 PM

    Capitalism and shrinking markets. Bad times for someone.

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  2. G. VerlorenDecember 28, 2023 at 2:36 PM

    We could certainly stand to have a lot fewer people on the planet. Improve ecological health of the planet, and increase the global per capita resource cap by dividing our limited resources between fewer people.

    Once we drop a couple billion people over the course of a century or so, then we can bother about fertility rates. And by then the natural effects of a lower population will be creating inherent incentives to procreate again - with the average amount of resources per person higher, the costs of having children will be comparatively lesser.

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  3. karlGDecember 28, 2023 at 7:59 PM

    "Once we drop a couple billion people over the course of a century or so" -- and how, exactly, do we lose 25% of our population so quickly? Just asking.

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  4. G. VerlorenDecember 28, 2023 at 10:18 PM

    @karlG

    I suggest you Google a few key concepts: "doubling time", "halving time", and "world population over time".

    Then, please note that the global population was 4 billion in 1974, and reached 8 billion in 2022.

    A reduction of 25% over a century (or two) is comparably quite slow, and requires only relatively modest levels of fertility being under replacement rates.

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  5. karlGDecember 29, 2023 at 12:16 PM

    @G.Veloren
    Done. Looks like 2 billion over a century is a "high end" estimate -- but the mechanics of reproduction isn't all there is to it. Surely, you acknowledge the social and economic risks of substantial depopulation; I always take the "technology will save us" line about any change, but that's purely out of desperation.

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