It's true that birth control severing the connection between sex & children played a big role, but it's also the case that people are having less sex over time (linked to the decline in marriage, since married people have more sex).
It's true that birth control severing the connection between sex & children played a big role, but it's also the case that people are having less sex over time (linked to the decline in marriage, since married people have more sex).
They are probably having more sex then unmarried people had a long time ago.
But maybe sex isn't the metric. How many orgasms are they having? My guess is your average unmarried male is getting off way more in the age of pornography than he was before.
The idea that all of this is "self correcting" just doesn't jive for me. It's entirely possible to satisfy evolutionary programming with novel technology designed to do so, and entirely possible for demographics to enter a dependency death spiral from which they don't recover. If you want things to change, your going to have to actively change them, not hope they fix themselves.
I don't think there will be a global dependency death spiral -- the human race is too varied in its cultures and its genetics -- but there will probably be local ones. It will be an interesting, and grim, feature of the world of the future. I've only recently started thinking more about what this death spiral will look like. Of being a young person in a society where the median age is 60 and increasing a little bit every year. Until finally the lights go out and don't go back on again.
I wonder if the world will come to look like Middle Earth in the Third Age. Vast depopulated tracts of land, of empty ghost towns and ghost cities in places like the poorer parts of Europe, or less favored regions of China like Manchuria, or even the Korean Peninsula, as all the remaining working-age people huddle together in the places with still relatively vibrant economies.
One interesting question: would we, today, bother to settle a virgin new continent if we discovered one? Because this is related to the question of whether there is anything useful to do with a place like Ukraine after it is denuded of people.
If the US from the Pacific to the Appalachians suddenly popped into existence in the year 2024, would it make economic sense to go about settling and populating it? I'm not entirely sure, aside perhaps from rotating work camps of men (not families) established to exploit certain natural resources like oil and to build the relevant infrastructure. In that event it might be up to the Amish to settle the North American continent, out of motivations that are not entirely economic -- or at least operating out of cultural constraints that shape their economic considerations differently from the rest of us.
It's true that birth control severing the connection between sex & children played a big role, but it's also the case that people are having less sex over time (linked to the decline in marriage, since married people have more sex).
They are probably having more sex then unmarried people had a long time ago.
But maybe sex isn't the metric. How many orgasms are they having? My guess is your average unmarried male is getting off way more in the age of pornography than he was before.
The idea that all of this is "self correcting" just doesn't jive for me. It's entirely possible to satisfy evolutionary programming with novel technology designed to do so, and entirely possible for demographics to enter a dependency death spiral from which they don't recover. If you want things to change, your going to have to actively change them, not hope they fix themselves.
I don't think there will be a global dependency death spiral -- the human race is too varied in its cultures and its genetics -- but there will probably be local ones. It will be an interesting, and grim, feature of the world of the future. I've only recently started thinking more about what this death spiral will look like. Of being a young person in a society where the median age is 60 and increasing a little bit every year. Until finally the lights go out and don't go back on again.
I wonder if the world will come to look like Middle Earth in the Third Age. Vast depopulated tracts of land, of empty ghost towns and ghost cities in places like the poorer parts of Europe, or less favored regions of China like Manchuria, or even the Korean Peninsula, as all the remaining working-age people huddle together in the places with still relatively vibrant economies.
One interesting question: would we, today, bother to settle a virgin new continent if we discovered one? Because this is related to the question of whether there is anything useful to do with a place like Ukraine after it is denuded of people.
If the US from the Pacific to the Appalachians suddenly popped into existence in the year 2024, would it make economic sense to go about settling and populating it? I'm not entirely sure, aside perhaps from rotating work camps of men (not families) established to exploit certain natural resources like oil and to build the relevant infrastructure. In that event it might be up to the Amish to settle the North American continent, out of motivations that are not entirely economic -- or at least operating out of cultural constraints that shape their economic considerations differently from the rest of us.