I’m sure you may have done some thinking on this yourself, but it seems that remote work might be part of that societal evolution that allows for a “work from home” lifestyle — like agricultural societies — while not letting up on the status == productivity game that has made industrial and post-industrial societies rich.
There are arguments to be made (and that have been made, successfully even) that remote work reduces efficiency. Thus a macro shift to a remote work society could give up some efficiency in the short term for a higher TFR, which may increase GDP (if not immediately per capita) in the long run.
Yes! I was thinking of remote work. Both on a general level and on a personal level. It would really have been great if parents could also contribute some brain power to society without giving up on family for ten hours a day. As things are, people can't afford children because housing costs are too high where the interesting jobs are.
Did you watch the birth gap documentary? Apparently fertility goes down not as much because people who have kids have less kids but because more people have zero kids. The distribution of number of kids is more or less the same for all numbers except for zero. Or that's what I think I remember from watching part 1 of that documentary. I hope they release the other parts soon, it was very interesting.
Wasn’t it the norm for most of our species’s being that most men died without ever having a chance to reproduce? It seems women are becoming more like men in this regard, though at least they probably still have a choice.
No, I didn't know about that documentary. But I have read that thing about Finland. In Finland birth rates have decreased more than in the other Nordic countries, because more Finns have zero children compared to before. As prejudiced Swedes, we assume that it is because a certain share of Finns entirely fail to speak with each other and thus get no opportunity to make children.
The Israeli model involves pro social, pronatal propaganda. At a time when every other educated person on earth is being encouraged to have few or no children, Jewish people of all education levels are told that it is vital and heroic thing to have babies.
Fertility sinks even in unsuccessful command economies. In fact in many East European countries the soviets turned communist after WW2 the TFR immediately declined and kept declining until 2000. There was no baby boom and no discernible effect of the pill.
So your connection with urbanization is correct and so is the ubiquity of the 2 incomes family which is now turning into DINK.
Many women would rather make money by working than lose money raising kids and yes that increases prosperity for family and country at least in the short term.
I don't think you can hold this argument and any kind of Mathus position at the same time. You have just described families stop having kids when they don't feel they can afford them. (Not necessarily in exactly those terms). Malthus holds people are dumb and keep having children they can't afford.
-sorry to keep harping on about him. I have just decided he is just plane wrong instead of incomplete and am still working through it.
Hm. I think the only way to deal with Malthus is to consider him right for some societies and completely wrong for others. For modern Western society, he is dead wrong, because just as you say, people in general are very concerned not to have more children than they can afford (without intolerable loss of status).
However, in previous, Malthusian societies, the upper class was not low-fertility. Instead it had more children than lower classes. Then the lower classes imitated the upper class through having as many children as possible, until arable land got increasingly scarce.
I think Malthus is always wrong for every human everywhere for all time. As far back as we were human. I have a more full rebuttal I am working on.
But a big part of it is "... not to have more children than they can afford (with out intolerable loss of status.)" Is a strange way of saying "with out the intolerable misery of breaking your back in the fields skipping meals going into debt and still watching your children starve to death."
Also if you have good example of a classic Malthus collapse could you link it please.
>>"with out the intolerable misery of breaking your back in the fields skipping meals going into debt and still watching your children starve to death."
Wasn't that what people did before contraception got fashionable? That's why they gave up their children to orphanages where the vast majority of them died.
>>Also if you have good example of a classic Malthus collapse could you link it please.
I don't think there are many classic Malthusian collapses for one reason: People don't like to starve to death. Before they do that, they will start killing each other in order to prevent that outlook. Pathogens will also start killing weakened people before pure starvation. I would say the Black Death and the 14th century unrest was a Malthusian collapse: High population numbers led to an epidemic and social unrest.
Contraception has always been practiced. Sometimes by way of infanticide but it is not a new thing.
As for an example of Malthusian collapse I will accept any societal collapse. It doesn't have to be starvation. But I do think it would have to be caused by too many poor people and a least a few generations of increased population and decreased wealth. Or more and more poor people getting poorer and poorer because there are more of them.
As for the Black death. That ranged from China to England. If that is a Malthusian collapse wouldn't that have to mean that all of Europe was at a high population low health point in their Malthusian cycle at roughly the same time? That doesn't seem likely to me.
Would the devastation of the Americas by disease also be a Malthusian collapse?
>>Contraception has always been practiced. Sometimes by way of infanticide but it is not a new thing.
The only new thing is that contraception is socially encouraged and easy to use. When infanticide was the most widespread form of contraception, people tended to use it "too little", for understandable reasons.
>>As for an example of Malthusian collapse I will accept any societal collapse.
I think the Malthusian condition has to be conceived of as such: Children can't do what their parents did because of lack of land. Grandchildren can't do what their grandparents did because an even more severe lack of land. So people start doing things that their ancestors didn't do because they are pressed by a lack of resources. People aren't so stupid that they only divide their land into smaller and smaller plots until everyone starves. Instead they will make risker moves in order to be among those who do not have to half-starve. In a Malthusian society, this will continue until social order breaks down so much that a significant proportion of the population dies off and land isn't that scarce anymore.
>>As for the Black death. That ranged from China to England. If that is a Malthusian collapse wouldn't that have to mean that all of Europe was at a high population low health point in their Malthusian cycle at roughly the same time? That doesn't seem likely to me.
I know far too little about Chinese history. But Europe was tightly populated at that point. If most of Europe was on the same military and social level, that is not strange at all: A backward kingdom with few subjects would have been attacked and absorbed by stronger neighbors. Feudalism was a competition between lords who could extract the most military power from every plot of land. Those who couldn't use the technology of the day to make the most of the land were eliminated in favor of those who could.
>>Would the devastation of the Americas by disease also be a Malthusian collapse?
No, it was a mismatch between pathogens and people's evolved immune responses. That being said, the Aztecs clearly had developed methods to deal with excess population in their vicinity.
There is a better correlation between city-dwelling and low fertility, I guess. When you're working the traditional agricultural lifestyle, children are an asset : they work on many chores, pick up eggs, bring the sheep to the meadow, pick up potatoes with the family, etc.
As soon as you move to the city, children become a liability. They don't bring any value until they end up having a job at 18 to 25 years of age. So logically as countries urbanised, the number of children declined precipitously.
Anders made correlation analyses also of educational levels and fertility and life expectancy and fertility. Education and fertility was a stronger inverse correlation than percent agricultural workers and fertility, but the data we had was bad because it didn't include China. The strongest (inverse) correlation we found was between life expectancy and fertility.
I'm sure countryside living has a positive impact on fertility. But still there is a population like the Ultra-orthodox Jews, who are both highly fertile and urbanized to the bone (I wouldn't recommend anyone to farm in that attire!)
Yes that's at this intersection between cultural effects (family system, etc) and material conditions that the theories of Emmanuel Todd shine. Unfortunately his theories are hugely successful in Japan but rejected in the West (particularly in English-speaking countries) because he theorises that individuals don't count, and are entirely shaped first by material conditions, second by extremely long-lasting cultural norms and mores (like family system, then religion).
His most important discovery is that the nuclear family which characterises Western culture, isn't "modern" at all, but on the contrary the most primitive form of family, and is essential as a driver of liberal democracy and capitalism. On the contrary, extremely evolved systems like "house societies" are essential to allow development of socialist societies.
That's precisely that discovery that makes him hated in the West, and absolutely essential in Japan (where the idea that the individual is nothing and that the family, and larger community is everything is completely normal and admitted).
This is the cause of misunderstanding between generations. In my family, each succeeding generation is richer and more educated, and the amount of children had is lower.
I remember that Emmanuel Todd made a similar observation about the link between declining literacy rate and declining birth rate in his book After the Empire:
I’m sure you may have done some thinking on this yourself, but it seems that remote work might be part of that societal evolution that allows for a “work from home” lifestyle — like agricultural societies — while not letting up on the status == productivity game that has made industrial and post-industrial societies rich.
It's an interesting phenomenon supported by some economists' research. One I found: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w30569/w30569.pdf
There are arguments to be made (and that have been made, successfully even) that remote work reduces efficiency. Thus a macro shift to a remote work society could give up some efficiency in the short term for a higher TFR, which may increase GDP (if not immediately per capita) in the long run.
Yes! I was thinking of remote work. Both on a general level and on a personal level. It would really have been great if parents could also contribute some brain power to society without giving up on family for ten hours a day. As things are, people can't afford children because housing costs are too high where the interesting jobs are.
Did you watch the birth gap documentary? Apparently fertility goes down not as much because people who have kids have less kids but because more people have zero kids. The distribution of number of kids is more or less the same for all numbers except for zero. Or that's what I think I remember from watching part 1 of that documentary. I hope they release the other parts soon, it was very interesting.
Wasn’t it the norm for most of our species’s being that most men died without ever having a chance to reproduce? It seems women are becoming more like men in this regard, though at least they probably still have a choice.
That's interesting. What does the data say about the relative distribution of zero kid-people vs at-least-one-kid-people, over time?
Better late than never. And also not quite the question you were asking. But have a look at https://www.allendowney.com/blog/2020/10/21/millennials-are-not-getting-married/ , particularly the "New Projections" section.
There probably is a correlation between marriage and childbearing, so this may help to give you an idea of things.
No, I didn't know about that documentary. But I have read that thing about Finland. In Finland birth rates have decreased more than in the other Nordic countries, because more Finns have zero children compared to before. As prejudiced Swedes, we assume that it is because a certain share of Finns entirely fail to speak with each other and thus get no opportunity to make children.
Haha, as a Swede, I concur with this prejudice against Finns! xD
The Israeli model involves pro social, pronatal propaganda. At a time when every other educated person on earth is being encouraged to have few or no children, Jewish people of all education levels are told that it is vital and heroic thing to have babies.
This is another very good piece.
I have thought about this often, as a dual professional family with three kids. There are two policy levers I can think of:
1. Increase the feasibility and prestige of part-time work (gender-neutral, naturally).
2. Increase the amount of school, both the length of the day and weeks per year. The random breaks and holidays are killer for working parents.
Fertility sinks even in unsuccessful command economies. In fact in many East European countries the soviets turned communist after WW2 the TFR immediately declined and kept declining until 2000. There was no baby boom and no discernible effect of the pill.
So your connection with urbanization is correct and so is the ubiquity of the 2 incomes family which is now turning into DINK.
Many women would rather make money by working than lose money raising kids and yes that increases prosperity for family and country at least in the short term.
Thanks. This was good I have shared it.
I don't think you can hold this argument and any kind of Mathus position at the same time. You have just described families stop having kids when they don't feel they can afford them. (Not necessarily in exactly those terms). Malthus holds people are dumb and keep having children they can't afford.
-sorry to keep harping on about him. I have just decided he is just plane wrong instead of incomplete and am still working through it.
Hm. I think the only way to deal with Malthus is to consider him right for some societies and completely wrong for others. For modern Western society, he is dead wrong, because just as you say, people in general are very concerned not to have more children than they can afford (without intolerable loss of status).
However, in previous, Malthusian societies, the upper class was not low-fertility. Instead it had more children than lower classes. Then the lower classes imitated the upper class through having as many children as possible, until arable land got increasingly scarce.
I think Malthus is always wrong for every human everywhere for all time. As far back as we were human. I have a more full rebuttal I am working on.
But a big part of it is "... not to have more children than they can afford (with out intolerable loss of status.)" Is a strange way of saying "with out the intolerable misery of breaking your back in the fields skipping meals going into debt and still watching your children starve to death."
Also if you have good example of a classic Malthus collapse could you link it please.
>>"with out the intolerable misery of breaking your back in the fields skipping meals going into debt and still watching your children starve to death."
Wasn't that what people did before contraception got fashionable? That's why they gave up their children to orphanages where the vast majority of them died.
>>Also if you have good example of a classic Malthus collapse could you link it please.
I don't think there are many classic Malthusian collapses for one reason: People don't like to starve to death. Before they do that, they will start killing each other in order to prevent that outlook. Pathogens will also start killing weakened people before pure starvation. I would say the Black Death and the 14th century unrest was a Malthusian collapse: High population numbers led to an epidemic and social unrest.
Contraception has always been practiced. Sometimes by way of infanticide but it is not a new thing.
As for an example of Malthusian collapse I will accept any societal collapse. It doesn't have to be starvation. But I do think it would have to be caused by too many poor people and a least a few generations of increased population and decreased wealth. Or more and more poor people getting poorer and poorer because there are more of them.
As for the Black death. That ranged from China to England. If that is a Malthusian collapse wouldn't that have to mean that all of Europe was at a high population low health point in their Malthusian cycle at roughly the same time? That doesn't seem likely to me.
Would the devastation of the Americas by disease also be a Malthusian collapse?
>>Contraception has always been practiced. Sometimes by way of infanticide but it is not a new thing.
The only new thing is that contraception is socially encouraged and easy to use. When infanticide was the most widespread form of contraception, people tended to use it "too little", for understandable reasons.
>>As for an example of Malthusian collapse I will accept any societal collapse.
I think the Malthusian condition has to be conceived of as such: Children can't do what their parents did because of lack of land. Grandchildren can't do what their grandparents did because an even more severe lack of land. So people start doing things that their ancestors didn't do because they are pressed by a lack of resources. People aren't so stupid that they only divide their land into smaller and smaller plots until everyone starves. Instead they will make risker moves in order to be among those who do not have to half-starve. In a Malthusian society, this will continue until social order breaks down so much that a significant proportion of the population dies off and land isn't that scarce anymore.
>>As for the Black death. That ranged from China to England. If that is a Malthusian collapse wouldn't that have to mean that all of Europe was at a high population low health point in their Malthusian cycle at roughly the same time? That doesn't seem likely to me.
I know far too little about Chinese history. But Europe was tightly populated at that point. If most of Europe was on the same military and social level, that is not strange at all: A backward kingdom with few subjects would have been attacked and absorbed by stronger neighbors. Feudalism was a competition between lords who could extract the most military power from every plot of land. Those who couldn't use the technology of the day to make the most of the land were eliminated in favor of those who could.
>>Would the devastation of the Americas by disease also be a Malthusian collapse?
No, it was a mismatch between pathogens and people's evolved immune responses. That being said, the Aztecs clearly had developed methods to deal with excess population in their vicinity.
There is a better correlation between city-dwelling and low fertility, I guess. When you're working the traditional agricultural lifestyle, children are an asset : they work on many chores, pick up eggs, bring the sheep to the meadow, pick up potatoes with the family, etc.
As soon as you move to the city, children become a liability. They don't bring any value until they end up having a job at 18 to 25 years of age. So logically as countries urbanised, the number of children declined precipitously.
Anders made correlation analyses also of educational levels and fertility and life expectancy and fertility. Education and fertility was a stronger inverse correlation than percent agricultural workers and fertility, but the data we had was bad because it didn't include China. The strongest (inverse) correlation we found was between life expectancy and fertility.
I'm sure countryside living has a positive impact on fertility. But still there is a population like the Ultra-orthodox Jews, who are both highly fertile and urbanized to the bone (I wouldn't recommend anyone to farm in that attire!)
Yes that's at this intersection between cultural effects (family system, etc) and material conditions that the theories of Emmanuel Todd shine. Unfortunately his theories are hugely successful in Japan but rejected in the West (particularly in English-speaking countries) because he theorises that individuals don't count, and are entirely shaped first by material conditions, second by extremely long-lasting cultural norms and mores (like family system, then religion).
His most important discovery is that the nuclear family which characterises Western culture, isn't "modern" at all, but on the contrary the most primitive form of family, and is essential as a driver of liberal democracy and capitalism. On the contrary, extremely evolved systems like "house societies" are essential to allow development of socialist societies.
That's precisely that discovery that makes him hated in the West, and absolutely essential in Japan (where the idea that the individual is nothing and that the family, and larger community is everything is completely normal and admitted).
This is the cause of misunderstanding between generations. In my family, each succeeding generation is richer and more educated, and the amount of children had is lower.
I remember that Emmanuel Todd made a similar observation about the link between declining literacy rate and declining birth rate in his book After the Empire:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmanuel_Todd
Interesting! Despite being both slightly French-speaking and slightly Francophile, I never heard of Emmanuel Todd. Thanks!