We’re a long way past any effects of the post war baby boom. In general, birth rates in Western countries have been falling for decades. It has been observed that this correlates highly with the level of education in women. You may draw your own conclusions as to policies that might then reverse that trend…
Causes such as birth control, better education for women, more equality for women in society generally and the work place specifically.
Indeed. Falling birthrates are, in the long term, a good thing. There are very few upsides to a constantly increasing population - either for a single country or globally.
Indeed. All good things imho.
Well, given that world wide those are the major causes of declining birthrates, perhaps you'd be good enough to identify the ones you think need addressing.
Agreed.
This is not correct. In most of Europe the baby boom did not follow immediately after World War II, but came a long while after because of post-war austerity. In many European countries the baby boom starts midway through the 1950s and then extends through the 1960s. Nearly all of these people are still alive, though lots of them are already in or approaching retirement. They need a working population coming along behind them to keep them in the style to which they are accustomed.
Before the war started both Russia and Ukraine already had significant problems with low fertility rates and declining populations. These go back more than 30 years.
This applies to large parts of Asia too, where there are some very very low fertility rates, especially South Korea. The only continent where population is still rising rapidly is Africa.
Be careful what you wish for. Fertility rates are already dangerously low in many countries, and, if not addressed, will lead to rapidly declining populations. Russia and Ukraine are examples of that already happening. Global population is only rising because of what is happening in Africa, and it is only in Africa where reducing fertility rates is important. Once fertility rates in Africa decline, and the baby boomers die off, global population will go into decline. That will be some time in the later half of this century.
In the meantime, migration, especially from Africa, would help to smooth the geographic and age distributions. However this works much better for multicultural societies than for monocultural societies.
Hence why the "in the long term" is doing some heavy lifting. There's a demographic hump that the world needs to get past, but ideally the total human population will slowly decline to something like 5 billion or so at some point next century. It's worth keeping in mind that this isn't a crazy idea, that's approximately the size of the human population thirty years ago.
How far back are we going with those "family values"? Would that include things like stoning your daughter to death if she dares to have sex before marriage?
Elsewhere on this forum there is a discussion about location of new towns. In the UK the housing crisis is the most significant barrier to people starting a family.
No and a firm no from me!
I suppose, technically, we need each generation to be as productive as the previous rather than necessarily the same size. Continued advances in automation mean that should be possible. To be honest, it probably should have been the approach taken from the early 20th century since the massive increases in average productivity have been negated by substantial increase in populations (recent declines not withstanding).
I have two bothers who have seven between them, so my parent's genes have been successfully passed on. No need for me to get involved!
That's an interesting idea. But do they need to be more productive still, to meet the costs of ageing populations who remain alive as a result of steady medical advances? And in the case of medical care, for example, there must be a limit to how much human care which the (currently) increasing numbers of increasingly older people need can be provided by greater productivity alone. So we find ourselves coming back to the need for immigrant health professionals. Or perhaps apparently "human" care will instead be provided by artificial intelligence. Both of those approaches will encounter resistance from various quarters.
Doing the maths
We don't breathe in carbon(other than the small percentage already in air, and that comes straight back out). Any extra carbon we breathe out had to be ingested as food. To get into that food, the carbon was absorbed as CO2 through photosynthesis either by the plant we are eating or the unwilling protein donor that ate the plant first. This science might be absolute poop (which contains around 45 percent carbon by weight) but perhaps we, as an organism, are carbon neutral?The problem is that the age distribution of the population thirty years ago was very different. The problem with below-replacement birth rates isn't a decline in the total number of people, it's that there'll be more and more old people with less and less young people to look after them.
Wish I mean is that improvements in technology and automation mean that a worker today is easily twenty times more productive than they would have been in the 1800s.I'm not sure what you mean with the bit I've bolded. Total production = productivity per person * number of people working, so increases in population should be neutral as far as standard of living is concerned as long as productivity per person remains constant.
Besides, the actual standard of living has risen massively since the early 20th century, so it certainly doesn't seem that anything is negating the productivity improvements since then
