And yet another new thread for the third question that Pete Vincent replied to:
> Does the declining birth rate in advanced countries mean ultimate > extinction? I can answer that one easily: of course not. People are responding to the obvious overpopulation of their environment. There are clearly no rich frontiers available to exploit, no empty land rich with bounty. (There are those who might try to mount arguments against this assessment, but they won't gain traction with the perception of the average individual). When populations decline to the point where sufficient resources are clearly available for offspring to thrive comfortably, higher rates of breeding will resume. The more interesting question is, will a steady state be rapidly achieved, or will there be ongoing oscillations. That will be great data for computing overall behaviour of large population systems - an underdamped feedback system.
I suggest that this isn't quite right. Parents won't have more than replacement numbers of children for the latter's sake, but only for their own sake in old age. It is in those countries (most of Western Europe) in which the state has assumed responsibility for looking after dependent old people that parents have had fewer and fewer children. But as these governments are already showing that they'll be unable to do this in future years then, well within the coming generation, parents will start saving a great deal more than now for their old age (and not buy consumer goods as governments want them to) and have even fewer children than now. Increasingly deprived of their tax base, what will governments do then? Almost certainly they will accelerate what's already going on (in England anyway) in state-run nursing homes (that is, treating old people badly) and in state-run hospitals (that is, starving old people). Until the culture changes, and for a long time to come, governments won't have the courage to carry out mass euthanasia in a kindly way. But when they do, and the prevailing culture supports it, it's only then that I can envisage parents in the Western world resuming their role of having two or more children again on average.
Keith Keith Hudson, Saltford, England
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