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You can’t even pay people to have more kids (www.vox.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

371 comments fedilink hide all child comments

These countries tried everything from cash to patriotic calls to duty to reverse drastically declining birth rates. It didn’t work.

…

If history is any guide, none of this will work: No matter what governments do to convince them to procreate, people around the world are having fewer and fewer kids.

In the US, the birth rate has been falling since the Great Recession, dropping almost 23 percent between 2007 and 2022. Today, the average American woman has about 1.6 children, down from three in 1950, and significantly below the “replacement rate” of 2.1 children needed to sustain a stable population. In Italy, 12 people now die for every seven babies born. In South Korea, the birth rate is down to 0.81 children per woman. In China, after decades of a strictly enforced one-child policy, the population is shrinking for the first time since the 1960s. In Taiwan, the birth rate stands at 0.87.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

as do trees and rabbits and beetles.

Trees, rabbits and beetles are not experiencing long-term population growth. Their populations are long-term stable.

Scientists have been studying wolves and moose on Isle Royale for more than 60 years. It's an isolated island where the wolves are the predator and the moose make up 90% of their diet. When the wolf population gets too high, the moose population drops. When the moose population drops, there isn't enough food, so the wolf population drops. Without a lot of predators, that allows the moose population to rise. That then provides food for a lot of wolves, but means that there aren't enough trees to feed the moose, who start having diet issues.

The number of wolves on the island has gone as high as 50 and as low as 2. The moose population has gone as high as 2400 and as low as 385. The important thing to sustain these populations isn't "growth", it's stability. Bad things happen when the populations get either too big or too small.

Only one creature has had exponential growth for centuries, and it's destroying the ecosystem in the process. Nature likes steady state solutions, not growth.