- Fewer deaths in childhood meaning women have fewer babies
- Greater access to contraception
- More women in education and work
In many ways, falling fertility rates are a success story.
There are too many people on the planet already, and most of them don't have a good quality of life. And more importantly, there isn't a way of significantly improving it (with today's technology and social/ethics understanding)
> And more importantly, there isn't a way of significantly improving it (with today's technology and social/ethics understanding) Sources? Read Factfulness; you’ll be surprised at just how far of reality your view is!
I feel the reaction many people have about population decline in NA and EU is understandable (one may or may not share the concern though, that's personal): your tribe is making less children, the others do no seem to care. And they will replace your tribe in the future if you don't make children, it's a game of numbers in the end.
NA and EU count very little in the great scheme of things from a population perspective [1] anyway - there are 5+ billion people in Asia and Africa (many in places that will be devastated by global warming), and those people aren't going to stop making babies any time soon. Are we going to force them to stop? How?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#/media/File:P...
Actually, in Asia they are mostly stopping https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate India is 2.5ish already, China is below 2
Yes, there is reason to worry about decline and population replacement, at the same time, numbers are not all there is (especially when people are unhappy).
Until they fall too low.
A century ago, the earth's population was two billion people.
If you really wanted to get to 2 billion people, better to do it over a thousand years than a hundred. But is that actually good for anything? Having a hundred billion people would probably be problematic, but we seem to be doing alright with 7.5 (once we stop burning oil).
So one way to keep or raise the standard of living for everyone is to have fewer people consuming resources for it. The most humane way is voluntarily not creating new kids and hoping that this helps quickly enough.
If you expect them all to be buying coffee pods every day and non-repairable epoxied electronics, sure. But is it really that much worse of a lifestyle if your coffee comes from a five pound bag instead of a half ounce pod and your computer comes with a battery that can be removed, recycled and replaced rather than having to buy a whole new computer every time?
> So one way to keep or raise the standard of living for everyone is to have fewer people consuming resources for it. The most humane way is voluntarily not creating new kids and hoping that this helps quickly enough.
It's a bad way for a number of reasons. It creates all the usual problems with population decline and a declining ratio of productive workers to retirees. It takes an entire generation to do anything at all which means it can't help any of the people who are currently alive (whereas things like repairability and renewable energy that can help us can equally help our children). It increases wealth inequality because without intervention the fertility rates are lower in wealthier regions, compounding their advantage by distributing their parents' affluence over a smaller number of children. Childless affluent people also have terrible incentives to mortgage the future of others' children for present-day benefits, and they have disproportionate resources and influence because they're not spending their wealth and time raising the next generation, so increasing the number of such people is quite problematic.
Adoption (providing care for children that are already there), education (providing a better future for children that are not your own), foreign aid (providing a future for children that live in poor regions) are all ways to raise the next generation without contributing to the population count.
The [optimal] population size is directly linked to the current level of technology. If it feels like humans would be better with fewer population it only means that our technology and resource utilization skills lag behind and the solution should be to advance in technology/management, not reduce population.