[ExI] Birthrate falling worldwide - not just in the developed nations

[efc at disroot.org]

On Fri, 25 Oct 2024, BillK via extropy-chat wrote:

> On Fri, 25 Oct 2024 at 14:48, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat
> <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>> 2.5 children - in Canada's upper class.  1.5 children in the lower class
>> another statistic - 1.25 children per couple
>> Hard to reconcile these statistics, but in any case the upper classes
>> are having children above replacement rate and the lower classes are
>> far from it.  Yes, bring on the AI robots.   The overall intelligence
>> should rise, eh?   bill w
>> _______________________________________________
>
>
> Ir seems to me that at present there are two different pressures
> affecting the world population.
> As the article says, in the less-developed nations, where women get
> educated and have the rights to make their own decisions, they usually
> reduce the number of children that they have.
> For the developed nations, they have already gone through that phase
> and reduced their reproduction rate. But now they have been hit by
> inflation and large increases in the cost of living. They just can't
> afford to have children! Especially when there are many attractive
> alternatives to spend their heavily-taxed income on.

Based on what I have seen related to this problem in sweden, and very
subjectively thinking about acquaintances, old colleagues and others who
have 0 or 1 child, the reasons are:

* Falling biological fertility rates, general difficulty to actually
   have children.

* Too expensive and too much sacrifice of lifestyle. They prefer
   traveling enjoying life, not having to care for a child with all that
   means in terms of punishing your career at work.

* The wife forced one child into the world, with or without the will of
   the father, and after discovering the amount of screaming, sleepless
   nights etc. they both decided to never again go through that
   experience.

I think, those are the most common reasons when thinking back to people
I know with 0 or 1 child in a fairly rich country with social security
and day care services funded by the government.

I wonder if evolution, after a pause, will adjust for and naturally make
sure that the ones who do survive have a stronger sense of caring and a
need to procreate?

Best regards, 
Daniel


>
> BillK
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