Why is the population decreasing so much in some countries?

[Holly3278]

Hi everyone. Why is the population decreasing so much in some countries? I think I read that in France or maybe it was somewhere else, the population rate is below the replacement level which basically means that the only way to keep the population numbers from decreasing over time is to allow more and more people to immigrate to the country.

So, what is the cause of the population rate in some countries going below the replacement level? Is it because of contraception, sterilization, or abortion or is it something else?

 

[Zenkai]

Probably a combination of the three, along with people moving away because of a bad economy.

 

[Trebor135]

The country you’re thinking of may be Germany, where a woman has 1.3 to 1.4 children on average. France has among the highest such rates in Europe, around 1.9 to 2.0.

I would agree with the poster above who said that the causes are likely all of the factors you mentioned.

 

[ricofall]

When it comes to population, it seems that there are various issues.
First, you can look at birth control and abortion. Children used to be considered a blessing. Now we look at it as a burden. So we have less of them because we can. Then we look at poorer countries and see that they have lots of children and say '“if they can have less children, than they can be happier.” (news story). Has anyone really asked people in Africa if that is what they need? Less kids? How ignorant are we when we assume we know what another country across an ocean, needs to be happy. If she was really concerned about those people, she should travel over there and ask. I do not mean ask a vacation town, but do into the Sahara (or where ever she wants to help) and ask those people what do they really need.

Second: Does less children mean you are happier? If that is the case, than China must be a theme park. But wait you say, “China forces abortions”. Well in that case, Japan must be a water park in the summer since they have had a low population replacement rate for years (source). However, you can see there is a real concerned and they need to raise the birth rate. Are they any happier? It seems like they are not making any of the list that I see ((http://www.washingtonpost.com/busin...s/2012/03/29/gIQA6ZIFkS_gallery.html#photo=15))
But it seems that many on that list are capitalist or socialist countries. Maybe we should change their government instead of handing out ABC. If fact I am sure we will do that as soon as the whole Iraq and Afghanistan government change is complete and fully functioning.

Here is something to think about. Has access to birth control helped or hindered the US? The argument can go either way but remember that as a country, we did not have an approved ABC until the 60’s. Are we any more happier since then?

Back to the OP questions. One of the most famous societies that vanished because of low birth rates were the Spartans. They only had a few children and practice infanticed (as we practice abortion). Once they figured out what was happening, they even passed laws to force married people to have kids. But it was too late, the culture already was set in and they faded as they lost population from war with little replacements (info). They are not the only ones however. After all, married couples are the foundation for a nation. They can create the next generation of workers and leaders with God.

 

[Holly3278]

Is it true that once a population’s growth goes below the replacement rate that it is irreversible?

 

[Trebor135]

Is it true that once a population’s growth goes below the replacement rate that it is irreversible?

I’ve read that if the fertility rate is about 1.8-2.0, the population decrease will be manageable, but if it dips as low as 1.3-1.4, the tide will be impossible to turn.

For most Western countries to keep chugging along, they’re going to have to periodically import a lot of immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa and various parts of Asia.

 

[Catya]

I read in MacLean’s Magazine (a Canadian news magazine) roughly five years ago that the French managaed to increase their birth rate. This is largely a response to the French government excusing families with three or more children from paying income tax! I believe large families receive other perks, as well.

 

[Trebor135]

I read in MacLean’s Magazine (a Canadian news magazine) roughly five years ago that the French managaed to increase their birth rate. This is largely a response to the French government excusing families with three or more children from paying income tax! I believe large families receive other perks, as well.

Very cool! Canada should definitely adopt that measure–we’re far below replacement rate, at 1.5-1.6…

 

[Kaninchen]

You have to take account of the economic changes that have taken place over the last few decades, including things like women’s education (levels of education have a strong effect on fertility in both the developed and non-developed worlds), women’s involvement in the workforce, the decline in the kinds of work once considered ‘men’s work’ (typically involvement in heavy industry) that supported the ‘1950’s family’, changes in the housing market (for example the need for both husbands and wives to work to support house purchase, rents and so forth). Recession can also have depressive effects on fertility.

Deciding on whether/when to have children isn’t just a matter of contraception, before contraception things like age of marriage determined fertility rates and do so so today. Recession, for example, delays the age at which young people form households.

So, while one, obviously can’t deny the effects of contraception, there are other major factors at play in decisions on having a family and the size of that family. Contraception isn’t going to go away, old-fashioned ‘men’s jobs’ are not coming back.

If fertility rates are to rise, then, I’d suggest, public policy has to be aimed at being more ‘family-friendly’, enabling situations where people can decide to have two children rather than one, three children rather than two . . . .

 

[thistle]

Hi everyone. Why is the population decreasing so much in some countries? I think I read that in France or maybe it was somewhere else, the population rate is below the replacement level which basically means that the only way to keep the population numbers from decreasing over time is to allow more and more people to immigrate to the country.

So, what is the cause of the population rate in some countries going below the replacement level? Is it because of contraception, sterilization, or abortion or is it something else?

Population decreases when less children are born - in short birth control.
Couples postpone having children until they are older and restrict the number of children they want.

 

[Deo_Gratias42]

That’s the situation in Canada. The birth rates are down because people are aborting and contracepting themselves out of existence, while the mortality rate remains higher than the birth rate. As a result, Immigration Canada has opened the floodgates to allow immigrants into the country.

 

[Credo_ergo_sum]

So, what is the cause of the population rate in some countries going below the replacement level? Is it because of contraception, sterilization, or abortion or is it something else?

Spot on.

 

[sw85]

Hi everyone. Why is the population decreasing so much in some countries? I think I read that in France or maybe it was somewhere else, the population rate is below the replacement level which basically means that the only way to keep the population numbers from decreasing over time is to allow more and more people to immigrate to the country.

So, what is the cause of the population rate in some countries going below the replacement level? Is it because of contraception, sterilization, or abortion or is it something else?

Contraception, sterilization, and abortion are proximal causes of the drop in fertility. They are not distal causes. In other words, these three things tell us “how” people aren’t being fertile. They don’t tell us “why.” Why are people aborting, contracepting, and sterilizing themselves?

The answer is liberalism. When you tell people that God is dead, life is primarily about pleasure (not duty), motherhood sucks, etc., of course people aren’t going to have kids. Kids take work. They restrict your freedom (which liberalism holds is supreme). They are an obligation. Worse of all, they cost money, and money = freedom and pleasure. QED.

Is it true that once a population’s growth goes below the replacement rate that it is irreversible?

No, that occurs at “lowest-low fertility,” which I believe is 1.1 to 1.3 children per couple. It’s not so much that it’s “irreversible” (it will reverse at some point, since the low fertility people will be dying instead of reproducing). At that point, what’s irreversible is the inevitability of population collapse. Some European nations are already at that point.

The situation is actually a good deal worse than it seems, because the fertility rates are not evenly distributed. By and large the “dominant ethnicities” in those countries have wretched fertility rates, and the average fertility rate in that nation is attributable to hostile minorities, e.g., Muslims in France. I’ve read that Muslims will account for the majority of children in France by 2050. Assuming a present representation of Muslims in the population of about 10% now (that’s the highest end of the estimated representation), a little back-of-the-envelope exponential growth math suggests they’re increasing their share in the population representation by, on average, 4.24% every year. If we take the lower end estimate of 5% of the population, it works out to 6.06%. Either way, pretty massive.

 

[JimG]

It seems that many developed nations are depopulating themselves out of existence. The decline in fertility rates across the developed world is on the verge of becoming a real crisis, especially when coupled with the unsustainable debt many nations have: They don’t plan on having enough children in future generations to ever repay that debt.

Extinction by depopulation.

Here are a few articles:

washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/23/AR2006052301529.html

acton.org/pub/commentary/2011/03/30/debt-birth-dearth

economist.com/node/17492838

blogs.rep-am.com/worth_reading/2012/07/13/the-birth-dearth/

 

[Crescentinus]

Here in the Philippines, children are still seen as a blessing. As for Japan and South Korea, not so much. It is the latter which needs to re-evaluate their perception on children.

 

[manualman]

This is actually a hobby horse of mine. It’s not a matter of remembering WHICH industrialized nation has a below-replacement total fertility rate. It’s realizing that ALL stable, industrialized nations now have a below-replacement total fertility rate. And most of them have been that way for decades.

I find it sadly ironic that most of the semi-educated world still sees “overpopulation” as the crisis man faces on earth. But in actuality, we’ve passed the inflection point (look up the definition before disputing me) of the population trend on this planet and the mechanisms of calamitous population decline are already firmly in place. Our population is still rising rapidly, but only on the basis of momentum: increased lifespan in wealthy countries and remaining high fertility in the dwindling number of poor, agrarian nations. Once those nations complete the urbanization cycle and populations adjust to the somewhat longer lifespan of good nutrition and basic medicine, we will begin actual global population decline.

Even the UN recognizes this to a certain extent. If you go to their population projection website and spend some hours reading (a LOT in my case), you eventually learn that underneath their detailed and complicated computer modeling is the bald ASSUMPTION that fertility rates will rebound from subreplacement levels in wealthy countries and return to a long term average of replacement rate (2.1). This is a pretty ambitious assumption given that it occurs NOWHERE so far. Their “low range” estimate is based on the assumption of a general curve from high fertility in poor agrarian societies, to sub-replacement for a period in wealthy, urban societies to a gradual return to 2.1 over time. But that assumption of a return to 2.1 is not well founded at all. It seems totally irresponsible to me that the UN, for all their complex calculations, models and fat budget hasn’t adequately considered what would happen if the total fertility rate of modern culture flatlines at its current 1.6-1.7 or so long term.

Given that modern culture is based on the assumption that people will extend their education and early career until their late 20’s to the exclusion of starting a family, that marriage appears doomed to being redefined as a contract of convenience instead of a sacred covenant, materialism shows no sign of waning in its appeal, and people generally have adopted the notion that sex is totally unrelated to making babies unless you WILL it to be related, I don’t find the assumption that people will, on average, soon start having 50% more kids than they do now all that plausible.

 

[JimG]

In addition to what manualman has outlined, it’s also worth noting that at just the time when depopulation is becoming a huge problem, the institution of marriage is under increasing attack. When marriage declines and family structure crumbles, chaos eventually ensues, and that, combined with depopulation, does not spell prosperity for the future.

 

[Kaninchen]

One is rather left with the question of what sets of policies should be in place to reverse the decline and at what might be regarded as the balance point for those policies (ie how far should ‘pro-fertility’ go? Until the fertility rate reaches replacement point or where?).

It would be important that those policies had a survival rate greater than that of the legendary cat in hell. Saying it’s ‘the fault of materialism’ or ‘it’s the fault of contraception’ is a bit pointless without policies that are in the realm of the politically possible and personally feasible.

 

[manualman]

Kaninchen, No doubt it is a LOT harder to identify and articulate a problem than it is to propose a workable solution. Still, it IS rather helpful to be working on the ACTUAL problem instead of working to worsen it, no? I’m not sure about your side of the pond, but around here, I hear an awful lot of alarmism about the crisis of overpopulation and what the ‘global community’ needs to do to reduce global reproduction rates. I find it more than a little suspicious that all that concern centers on the high reproduction rates that just happen to occur only in rather darker skinned countries anymore…

For starters, I think there are some easy tax policy adjustments that should be made. In the USA, we currently enjoy a $3,000 per child tax credit on income taxes (though it is unclear to me if this is included in what Obama calls “the Bush tax cuts for the rich” set to expire at the end of this year. Anybody who knows, please chime in). Countries with below-replacement fertility should look at similar ways to alleviate the way in which larger families bear the financial burden for the mutual benefit that sufficient following generations provide to society overall. Those who choose ‘childfree’ lifestyles will expect social services and benefits in their old age that can only be provided if other people have the kids who will grow up to provide and pay for those services (taxpayers). It’s just policy to tax those people more during their wealthy years ( us ‘breeders’ call them DINKs) to offset this disparity in lifetime consumption versus contribution.

Public funding of education is good policy, though it should be assigned to the child and parents provided the right to select the form of education the child will receive (secular or religious - gasp). Merit based higher education grants should be funded at least enough so that the best and most disciplined of each generation has the opportunity to lift the entire civilization higher.

Property taxation should be graduated such that a basic level of land/home ownership is taxed at a lower level and more extravagant ownership is taxed at higher percentages. As I understand it, this is particularly problematic in Europe where home ownership costs are beyond the reach of many families.

Also on the public policy side, I think serious academic study of the sociological effects of contraceptives IS warranted. To date, I’m not aware of any serious inquiry on the secular side into the ways in which this technology fundamentally changes attitudes and whole cultures. Isn’t that sort of thing what the fields of anthropology and sociology are for?

On the religious side, we already are confident of the answer. When you create a cultural attitude that sex and babies are unrelated unless you WANT them to be related, drastically fewer people ‘choose’ to have them be related. Duh, humans are good, but fallen. Same reason we’d eat nothing but junk food if we could survive it (and seem to be doing even though we CAN’T survive it indefinately! ). Religious groups need to redicover our joint heritage of understanding children as a blessing from God, not a burden on our wallets.

 

[Regular_Atheist]

With the amount of people there are in the world, the population decreasing slightly won’t mean much. The global population is really expected to rise, so there’s nothing to worry about.