Make sure that the Birthrates of these countries don't fall after WWII and how it affects things.
AHC/PC/WI: Prevent Birthrates From Collapsing in Europe, Japan and Korea Post-WWII
- Thread starter TickTock The Witch's Dead
- Start date
Roll back women's rights and education...that's considered the biggest contributor towards lower birthrates...
Actually, it isn't. The biggest influence on shrinking birthrates is higher standards of living. If you want them to stay high, the best way is to reduce standards of living. So, postwar, you want less economic growth & more poverty.oreocruncher said:
I'd rather have lower birthrates around the globe, given a choice.
Do you mean "prevent the fall in birthrate which occurred after the immediate post-war baby boom" or "prevent the fall in birthrates which occurred after the 1960s" ?
The lower in birthrates in the UK from the 1970s onwards are associated with 1) a big loss of economic confidence and stability 2) "feminism" 3) more widespread contraception 4) legal abortion
1 + 2 are motivating factors (I put feminism in "" marks because it's such a big topic, and it's relationship with birthrates is complex) 3 + 4 are tools used to express the choice to limit family size.
If there was somehow a good economy through the 1970s, and feminist demands around work and motherhood were answered, maybe there would be 60s style birthrates to this day...
Quick and dirty solution: Keep the countries involved in constant bloody wars and combine that with universal conscription. With every family being virtually certain that at least one of their sons will be either killed in battle or will run off to foreign lands to avoid the draft, they might be more tempted to have one more - just in case.
Prevent the sexual revolution. If the pill never gets invented than contraception is going to be not nearly as effective. It won't fix everything in of itself, but having traditional mores about sex and family would make the decline shallower.
The low Birthrate are due the higher education of women, better birth control, and more oppurtunities in the work force. I don't see how one can reduce these trends that lead to lower birth rates at all post ww2, barring massive wars and catastrophes.
The real reason is economic reasons. Women went into the workforce mainly to support their husbands whose wages were starting to be less and less reliable over time. Reverse that and we are good to go.
Doubtful. Many if not most women were working in the 19th century and earlier and the families were a lot bigger than they are now (and the wages a lot lower).
I don't think it's possible barring a general collapse of civilization due to say nuclear war. The trend to lower fertility is very long, deep, and wide.
For instance: the US Census published a table of "Children aged 0-4 per 1,000 women aged 20-44", covering the census years from 1800 to 1970.
Code:
1800 1,342
1810 1,358
1820 1,295
1830 1,145
1840 1,085
1840 1,085
1850 892
1860 905
1870 814
1880 780
1890 685
1900 666
1910 631
1920 604
1930 506
1940 419
1950 580
1960 717
1970 507
1980 385 **
1990 375 **
2000 370 **
2010 391 **From what I can tell, there have been similar declines elsewhere, except in some (not all) Middle Eastern and African countries. In 22 countries, fertility (children/woman) declined at least 30% from 1995 to 2010; in almost half of the 70 largest countries, it was 2.33 or less.
In addition, 2010 fertility was under 2.0 in 25 countries.
I don't understand what is driving this trend, except that it is common to countries as different South Korea (down to 1.22), Syria (down 54% to 3.02), South Africa (down 46% to 2.33), Canada (down to 1.58), and Peru (down 23% to 2.32).
Japan, Korea, and Europe are leading the charge, so to speak. (Japan is at 1.20; no European nation is above 2.0 and eight are below 1.5.) But most of the Arab and Moslem world, Latin America, the rest of Asia, and even much of Africa are on the same path.
Without knowing what the cause is, I can't hope to imagine anything that could change it.
This actually is a complex answer. Before the 1980s it was true, in that if a country had lower female work-force participation it had higher fertility. After the 1980s this flipped, so that countries with higher female work force participation rates have had higher fertility. Thus why most of Southern Europe/Eastern asian countries, and countries with poor workforce participation on the part of women have such low fertility rates while those with high work force participation rates on the part of women tend to have better fertility rates. It is counter-intuitive on the face of it, but the trend does exist and is real.
So reversing the trend might work for the first few decades(which mostly fall under the post-war baby boom anyway so yay?), but you might get even worse results by the present day.
Its all about making it easy and cheap to have kids. Halfway sexual equality tends to make this harder since women are expected to both work and provide the vast majority of childcare and house work. Full sexual equality, OTOH, makes it easier since men pick up an equal share of childcare and house work.
That is the best explanation for it, countries like Italy/Japan/South Korea/Taiwan/Spain/Portugal/even Germany(given their low fertility rate and apparently their policies have traditionally been rather unfriendly to working mothers, at least according to the Economist) ect. ect. managed to get to the modernity part of things, but don't have the social side of things developed quite as well as the Scandinavian countries/France/Netherlands ect. ect.. It is extremely difficult to combine the traditional female role which they must still do, and the working role which they must now undertake - or worse, they don't undertake the latter at all, and the economic burdens prevent (relatively) large families from being formed. The only way to correct this in the modern age is to get policies and culture intact that recognize the necessity of equality for appropriate fertility, and doing this in all of the countries that have low fertility rates is rather difficult. And even in the states of success fertility rates are still lower than 2.1.
Actually, to this day the use of oral contraception is much rarer in Japan than in, say, the US. Contraception is thus mainly provided by condoms and spermicide, which are extremely widespread and common. Given how low birth rates have fallen in Japan, I am not convinced that a total absence of such medication would in and of itself force people to have more unplanned pregnancies. At least, not enough to reverse the trend, not when other effective birth control methods are still available.
This same observation was a standard teaching point in Anthropology and Sociology classes back circa 1980 when I took those courses. Data & analysis from a wide variety of nations were presented in the assorted text books.
Common theory then related it to three items. First the movement of labor from manual agriculture to industrial & service work. Labor intensive agriculture enables large families as a survival technique for the larger group. Second, improved health raised the survival rate to reproduction age. Again this connects to group benefit. Third, the females are more economicaly productive in a urban industrial or post industrial culture when they are not busy doing child care. The ability of females to live independantly in the urban culture to a larger extent than in the agricultural society reduces bith rates
This trend is offset by cultural factors. One example would be the segregation of females or keeping them out of the industrial & service labor force. As in many Middle easter nations or cultures. There was at least one other good example presented earlier in this thread.
Have you not been paying attention? This has been going on since about 1850 (if not sooner). The standards of living are rising, & since it's now possible to survive with fewer children & have a better life after retirement/into old age with fewer, & since fewer kids split the pie fewer ways, fewer kids are conceived. Large numbers of kids used to be an economic asset. Now, they're a disaster.Anarch said:
This makes nonsense of the neo-Malthusian fantasies of the green zealots
(& with more than 200yr of data & experience to prove Malthus wrong, I really do wonder why they continue to believe him).Have you not been paying attention? This has been going on since about 1850 (if not sooner). The standards of living are rising, & since it's now possible to survive with fewer children & have a better life after retirement/into old age with fewer, & since fewer kids split the pie fewer ways, fewer kids are conceived. Large numbers of kids used to be an economic asset. Now, they're a disaster.
This makes nonsense of the neo-Malthusian fantasies of the green zealots
Selfishness. Most people want to keep what they have and more people means they lose what they have. Lost track of the number of people on the Internet and IRL who think there are "too many people". Combination of xenophobia, racism and laziness instead of willingness to solve real problems and admit that distribution, not quantity is the issue (hard to give people food when warlords or terrorists control transportation). This would lead to the uncomfortable conclusion that Pax Americania and interventionism not isolationism is necessary to rid the world of evil or at least check it, and that Bush was right (only did it wrong with the wrong messaging and no post-war plan etc). And I hated Bush.
The wrongness of isolationism is demonstrated again in current events where Myanmar refugees are swamping SE Asia and due to ASEAN's strict policy of non-interference, their response is to tow barely seaworthy boats out to sea. Give me a UN or EU or NATO response compared to that anyday at least temporary camps is better than having them die at sea. And towing refugees out to sea is illegal under international law; safe port and all. An EU and UN would impose sanctions on Myanmar too over this. However ineffective sanctions are it's better than doing nothing and towing people out to sea to die.
Even if one did accept the premise that there are "too many people" it would lead to the inevitable conclusion that quality not quantity matters. And if you can do better, you almost have an obligation to raise a child (I respect those who refuse however, knowing that you can't or don't want to is better than doing and failing).
That sounds very much like the greens.strangecircus said:
They want to keep theirs, take away everyone else's, & be in charge--just like every other revolutionary, from Washington to Mao.As for "interventionism" as an answer, I'm afraid there's too damn much of it already.
The NGOs sending better life-saving drugs on one hand & European & American governments blocking rises in standards of living on the other have turned Africa into the world's biggest clusterfuck. Is it any wonder things are going to hell there? And this is the model the greens endorse: lower standards of living for the rest of us as a solution. (Not to mention, lower standards of living in the developed world will not raise them or improve things elsewhere.)