After watching this video I am left with this question.
The video ultimately claims that humans will not disappear, but doesn’t do a great job explaining why.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but for the (or a) population to be and remain stable, the total fertility rate needs to be equal to the global replacement rate (which recently was 2.3).
And since the total average fertility rate appears to be currently at this 2.3, any drop in the fertility rate in place A would have to be compensated with a rise in the fertility rate in place B (assuming that, at some point, we would like to stop population decline)?
I guess one way for a population to remain stable, while women are having fewer than 2.3 children, would be to have fewer men? If a population has 100 women and 10 men, each woman would only have to have on average (a bit more than) 1.1 child? (Which would of course also require a collective form of prenatal sex selection.)
I realize that would be bonkers and unethical. Just wondering out loud.
In poorer countries, the investment into each child is minimal. By the time they were 8 or 9 years old they were expected to contribute to the family. Higher child mortality rates also plays into this, as most families lose a few kids to disease etc. Children are seen as a commodity that they control to make the parents/grandparents lives better.
In industrialized societies the amount of resources dedicated to each child is more than the the resources dedicated to 5 or 6 families in poorer countries. Children are dependent on their parents well into adulthood. As the cost to raise the kids increase the average family size decreases because of limited resources.
Good points. Hard to cover everything on such a multi-faceted issue but those are all important factors as well.