Emeritus Prof Christopher May
Behind the world's falling birth rate(s) lies a fall in the number of people (seemingly) in relationships;
the retreat from coupledom has many causes (from social changes to social media) but looks to be (re)shaping the world.
The big Q. then becomes: if this continues, what does a world dominated by single people look like?
Or will this shift back as the young find the value of companionship again?
Much of our future may depend on these choices.
h/t John Burn-Murdoch/FT
Rich Felker
@ChrisMayLA6 Whole thing is a non-issue nazis want to make an issue when what they really care about is relative population of their in-groups, not any actual civilizational need.
Globally I'm highly doubtful that birth rates have even declined, but in a society with reproductive & gender justice, it's expected that they naturally decline A LOT, and that's perfectly fine.
Christine Burns MBE 🏳️⚧️📚⧖
@ChrisMayLA6 In a country where coupledom really doesn’t require marriage or civil partnership I’m not sure this claim can be reliably stood up. Yes, we know that the birth rate has declined (thank god) but to see that as a problem feeds a certain far right agenda. To associate it with an alleged decline in measurable coupledom (I.e. conventional hetero marriage) just dives in to the right’s obsession with ‘traditional families’ — an obsession really about the ‘right’ people reproducing
Rich Felker
@ChrisMayLA6 Do you mean social or economic? There is utterly no plausible *social* downside to reduced or even zero birthrate.
If you mean economic in the sense of aging population depending on economic activities of younger people, then as long as the decline is only local not global, it's trivially solved by lifting limits on immigration and making immigration attractive. If a country refuses to do that, the problem is not birthrate decline but their shit immigration policy.
Emeritus Prof Christopher May
Well, what the data show is that in most countries (outside Africa) rates have declined; and you're right this isn't too much of a problem in global environmental terms, but as we move to a rate that is below replacement there will be associated social shifts that may become quite problematic to navigate
GNU social JP is a social network, courtesy of GNU social JP管理人. It runs on GNU social, version 2.0.2-dev, available under the GNU Affero General Public License.
All GNU social JP content and data are available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.