Apex Fallacy 1.0: Demographic Transition and the Continuing Decline
So, what has been happening?
If you want the shortest story possible, since 1960s, our people have gone !%&$!-ing mad and stopped having kids.
The longer story is much… ahem, longer: they had very good reasons.
Demographic Transition 101
There is a well-known problem of demographic transition: as countries get richer and, honestly, better to live in, their fertility decreases. It’s okay.
(1) Traditional societies have kids like crazy and die young. Basically, they need sheer numbers to maintain the population: an average couple in that hellhole must have a lot of kids so that at least some of them could live through the newborn infections, diseases, violence, occasional famine or war, and, finally, have some children of their own. On a rare occasion, some of the 16 kids a family has may become a President or get into the history books otherwise.
It’s important to remember that people don’t care that much about what society wants or needs. Families have a lot of kids not to maintain numbers of population in the country, they do it for themselves (because, ahem, you know, sex is fun) and the what laws, the cultures, and the institutions do is basically riding the coattails of this strong basic human drive. Moreover, in traditional societies, children provide strong financial benefit of their own: from a very young age, they help parents with housework, agriculture or the family businesses (yeah, terrible, but it’s a necessity), and the adult children are basically the only way for the increasingly frail parents to have a semi-comfortable elderly years — the institutions make sure of that.
(2) When these people discover (or, in the case of later adopters, stumble upon) modern technologies, their life changes. Less women die in childbirth, less infants die from infections, less kids die from hunger, less people die because of disease and epidemies, less people (mostly men) die in conflict and war. Population numbers explode, for a time. It is unable not to: the institutions, the culture, and the societies are still the same, and the people still have a lot of kids… but these kids tend to live and have their own children now, not die far too early. Some scientists see the infinite upward trend and call for governments to somehow stop the dreaded Population Bomb.
But then another funny thing happens.
(3) Rules of the old game change gradually just as its outcomes had changed before. Most importantly, people stop getting kids just as a side effect of sex: male and female contraception becomes readily available, and if it somehow fails, abortion is on the table. More than that, the planned parenthood decreases too: parents don’t benefit as much from kids until much later in their life because of compulsory education and child labor restrictions — and they actually don’t need that many children anymore (actually, they don’t need any if there is strong system of social security in the country).
In the rich modern societies, birth rate starts falling until the population growth stabilizes again: people have few kids, but almost all of them reach childbearing age. For quite a long time, we believed that the fertility stabilizes at about 2.1 newborn per female, the replacement rate — and as the whole world goes modern, the world population would stabilize too at 11 billion. Prof. Rosling, rest in peace, we remember your effort.
Basically, the population explosion was only a phase, a transition between two stable states: (1) stable traditional society with high birthrate and high mortality moved into(2) a transitionary high-birthrate — low mortality zone and then into (3) stable low birthrate — low mortality modern society. Fin.
That’s all fun and games, but why am I that concerned if there is a well-known scientific model?
The Continuing Decline
In practice, however, the birth rate falls far below that, much lower than necessary to replace the existing population. Most of the phase (1) and (2) developments in the West predate the modern statistics, but the transition between phase 2 an 3 occured fairly recently.
If you look into the fertility of the Western countries, you’ll notice that it literally crashed in the 60s and early 70s — and, strangely, went deep into the grey zone that represents future population decrease.
All the usual suspects for the demographic transition apply:
(1) In 1960, the first easy birth control option was finally available in the West. Condoms were introduced quite a few years earlier, but they are really a hassle compared to the pill and offered the same level of protection (sex-transmitted diseases weren’t that much of a concern before 1980s). Universal abortion was more or less allowed few years later, by the Abortion Act of 1967 in UK and after the landmark Roe v Wade case of 1973 in the USA.
(2) By the mid-20th century, all the monetary reasons to have children have been more or less depleted. Universal basic education was established in the beginning of 1900s, the first prohibitions of child labour were introduced by 1938, and the most basic social security was first adopted in 1935.
(3) Females, who have actually put most of the effort into both carrying and bringing up children, have suddenly become more and more active in the workplace and the politics. As their time has become more valuable, childbearing has slowly become less and less interesting. (That’s the mainstream explanation, but it works for now)
The demographic transition brought the fertility to 2.1, just as expected… and, strangely, continued pushing it further down. As if people don’t care that they need to procreate for the society to exist.
Funnily, if you ask around why people don’t have kids, the second most important reason is “it’s too damn expensive”: the constantly increasing standard of living should have allowed more adults to have as many children they want. In 2000s, it seemed so: as stable growth continued, fertility started climbing back up and it seemed that at last the potential parents felt confident enough in their future to ensure a decent birth rate. For a few years in 2000s, the steady state seemed possible and maybe even likely.
Apparently it was a temporary respite: high fertility didn’t last, and we have been reaching new lows ever since. Currently, none of the developed countries have replacement fertility — and given this downward trend none of them have any chance to bring it back if it continues.
Demographic transition model considers low birthrate — low mortality society a stable state. But we are anything but stable: we are in decline.
