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I've sometimes wondered about this myself. Let's be optimistic and imagine a world, perhaps a hundred years from now, when every nation has been brought up to OECD standards of living. We can already see trends, even in Sub-Saharan Africa, where the fertility rate is converging on something at or below the replacement rate. That means, in the world where every nation is rich like Europe, there will be negative population growth. What will happen if all else remains equal? In many respects, this experiment is already in progress in Japan. Absent of any radical sea-change in the methods of production, distribution or social organization, it's reasonable to expect that transfer payments to retired individuals will increase, while net productivity generated by the working population will decrease. This will shrink the economy, and result in steadily degrading standards of living (again, absent of any other influences, in our thought experiment). Once the economy has shrunk below a certain threshold, it is possible that the number of young will again exceed the number of old, and that the situation will become so dire that people will find it acceptable to have many children in hope that at least one will survive. Therefore in our thought experiment, the conclusion is that society will peak at a certain point, undergo steady decline, until the system reaches a breaking-point and the economy drops to a place where infant mortality rate is high enough to justify 4-6 children per woman again. It's something like the inverse of the Malthusian catastrophe. Obviously there is no guarantee that this is what will happen, it's just what might happen if things were simply left to continue without any interference.
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Dec 7, 2014 17:09
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| # ¿ May 15, 2024 13:02 |
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