[Entsurgeon]

Originally Posted by Traxxrc1

Last thing we indians need to be worried about. The main reason value of life in india is miniscule is because of this reason only. for nations like India and China its a step in the right direction. The fertility rate has to drop to atleast 2.1 or lesser for ensuring a better quality of life and judiciour resource distribution amongst all. Just my take, many might disagree.

It has already dropped below 2.1 the replacement level. Its at 1.9 now and may fall further to 1.04 by 2100.
https://www.indiatoday.in/india/stor...894-2021-11-25

Originally Posted by Fuldagap

Populations tend to reside at favourable spots in any given geography

People at the lowest rungs live even without normal drinking or bathing water in cities like Delhi. They are ok with having to live with toxic water instead of migrating or even having to think about it. Huge populations get stuck for generations at a single place even while facing adversity.



Countries in dire straits generally tend to have a much higher population growth rate compared to countries where economy is flourishing. African nations like Sudan sit at 4% per annum. Pakistan's population growth rate is double compared to ours.


.

The reason for pathetic living conditions in our tier 1 cities is economic. It sure will change with lesser population. At least in Mumbai, the civic body is providing much more than what is needed. Their water and electricity supply still supports an unnaturally high population.
The reason for having small families even among less educated or less financially fortunate is also economic. Its no more feasible nowadays to support a large number of kids at a level acceptable among peers.

Originally Posted by m8002?

For many reasons like political, cultural, etc, this is a non-starter. We have seen backlash against immigrants in countries that are seeing a declining population. No developed country is going to allow immigrants to flood in to compensate for their native population decline.

A lightening fast change in demographics gives rise to many practical problems of their own. Slow assimilation is a great way to go forward.

Whats in store for India
Indian population may shrink sooner than predicted. We didnt have full fledged census in 2021 but the governments have lots of statistics at their hand to give a fair idea. Nationwide polls and voter list updation being one of them.
The sources of India Today article I cited above are pretty reliable in that regard. A true decline in our population may still be a decade and a half away but the way Indian society has responded to changing socioeconomics, small families with just one kid would be most common a decade from now

[Jeroen]

Originally Posted by m8002?

For many reasons like political, cultural, etc, this is a non-starter. We have seen backlash against immigrants in countries that are seeing a declining population. No developed country is going to allow immigrants to flood in to compensate for their native population decline.

Just about all developed countries https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk...ings/cbp-7783/ do! Who do you think works in the NHS in the UK. See https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk...ings/cbp-7783/

Who do you think work in ultra high tech companies such as ASML in the Netherlands? The Netherlands passed special legislation offering tax advantages to immigrants!

Who do you think work out in the fields or inside logistics warehouses anywhere in Europe. Most of the farm hands in Europe come from outside Europe. Have you ever been to a cafe or restaurant in any major city anywhere in Europe. If you gehad you will know that you are most likely to be served by somebody with an immigrant background.

As it is many western countries rely heavily on immigrants to keep parts of their economy going.

All that backlash against immigrants tend to focus on illegal immigrants. As I have pointed out many times in several threads, that is a small minority of all immigrants. The vast majority of immigrants in Western Europe (EU and the UK) are completely legal and have a job! Politicians, mostly right and right wing extremist keep hammering on about immigrants. But their countries rely heavily on immigrants already and in most cases without any problems. The immigration problems are with illegal immigrants and the issues they cause.

Spain has announced last year to welcome additional immigrants, undocumented at that. Because they need them to keep their economy growing. (Spain is about to become the world fastest growing economy)

Madrid announced plans to offer visas to 300,000 undocumented migrants every year for the next three years, allowing them to remain in the country to study and find work.

Spain needs young workers’ taxes to fund the pensions and health care of its aging population, according to the minister for migration, Elma Saiz.

“Spain has to choose between being an open and prosperous country or being a closed and poor country. And we have chosen the former. That is why there are already 2.9 million foreigners paying monthly Social Security contributions [taxes],” Saiz announced at a press conference in Madrid on November 19.

Saiz said that the government plans to “cut red tape” to make it easier for migrants to enter the labor market.

“We want to make it easier for foreigners to get a job suited to their professional profile and, at the same time, for companies to find the professionals they need,” she said.

Source: https://www.voanews.com/a/spain-to-o...e/7885556.html

Also, within the EU anybody can move from one country to another country and work. Just like that.
You can check all the EU immigration statistics here

https://www.statista.com/topics/4046...#topicOverview


Jeroen

[SmartCat]

There is something called DEMOGRAPHIC ECONOMIC PARADOX.

As citizens of a country or an ethnic/religious/racial group within a country get more and more prosperous, average births per woman (aka total fertility rate) starts dropping. That's because women of such country/community are more aware of benefits of family planning, have access to higher education and hence job opportunities.



So "native" population of Europe/Japan/America declining is on expected lines. Now if global population is expected to decline over the next few decades, it simply implies that humans are making progress! You can read more about this paradox/phenomenon here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility

There is generally an inverse correlation between income and the total fertility rate within and between nations. The higher the degree of education and GDP per capita of a human population, subpopulation or social stratum, the fewer children are born

[Traxxrc1]

Originally Posted by Entsurgeon

It has already dropped below 2.1 the replacement level. Its at 1.9 now and may fall further to 1.04 by 2100.
https://www.indiatoday.in/india/stor...894-2021-11-25

National family heath survey-5 wanted it to be 2.1 or lesser. This was what i was meaning to say. As per that report review it was 2.0 for 2019-20.

[Fuldagap]

Originally Posted by Jeroen

As it is many western countries rely heavily on immigrants to keep parts of their economy going.

Jeroen

Even in Middle Eastern countries, a lot of Indians live and work. Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, UAE, Oman and Saudi each has an Indian population comprising 15-40%.
Even for labourers, living standard is generally better than at back home and they are able to send something home.

The local population of these countries is broadly miniscule compared to that of expats/immigrants.

[DCEite]

Originally Posted by SmartCat

That's because women of such country/community are more aware of benefits of family planning, have access to higher education and hence job opportunities.

That was very well articulated, but I have something more to add regarding this particular point about the reasons for lower birth rates.

While more job opportunities for women and family planning have contributed and will continue to contribute to lowering birth rates, there are some more important factors :

1. More and more people would get married later in their lives, implying low fertility rates as biological markers of fertility decrease with age.

2. Continued trend of increasing consumption of ultra-processed food and other environmental factors, which are known to cause hormonal disturbance (like PCOS/PCOD in women and Low testosterone in Men).

3. In the age of digitization and social media, fewer people are willing to make meaningful and long-term commitment-based relationships, so marriages in general will decline. Many more people will choose to remain single and instead opt to live more of a "virtual" life on social media.

[Utopian]

For Western economies, it is surely a cause of concern. Very tricky to say how it will fare for India. Here also, there is a huge disparity among the states with Southern states behaving similar to western economies (with low birth rates) while Central/Eastern states staying above the curve with high birth rates. I feel that it would be overall good in the short term since our average age would still be lower compared to the western world. By the time it goes to the zone of what prevails in Japan, we would have access to technology to mitigate the effect of fewer people in the working age group.

[Jeroen]

Originally Posted by DCEite

3. Fewer people are willing to make meaningful and long term commitment based relationships in the age of digitization and social media, so marriages in general will see a decline.

As usual it is a bit more complex than this, especially in relation to population growth and or decline

Whereas formal marriage have declined, other forms of cohabitation have gone up.

Also, marriage is no longer a prerequisite for having children either. Of course it never was, but I trust you get my meaning. Two of our three grandchildren were born with their parents not (yet) married.

Lots of interesting information here

https://ourworldindata.org/marriages...20cohabitation.

[theabstractmind]

At school, we were taught something like environmental balance. They taught us that Lions are needed so that they can hunt and keep the Deer population in check, if not the Deers will eat away all the vegetation. Using that logic, a human being is not exactly an Apex Predator, but the most uncontrolled species.

All other species just take how much they need. We humans take more than we ever need, we aim for profit, we exploit nature and other humans. So that way, our population also needs control, else we will exploit to an extent that we might only have each other's flesh to eat until either nature recovers, or we turn into a cannibal species and drive ourselves back to age of hunter gatherers.

Well, this is an apocalyptic view but really, anyone who says we need to produce more kids needs to go back to school. Many have already called out the economic impacts of population growth or degrowth. I only wanted to offer a more rudimentary explanation.

And to end it all, what economic imbalance can create due to sheer capitalism is very well depicted in the Batman Trilogy of Christopher Nolan. I hope people learn before it's too late.

A good topic, kudos to the OP for bringing it up.

[BullettuPaandi]

Originally Posted by SmartCat

DEMOGRAPHIC ECONOMIC PARADOX

Although an interesting read, I fail to understand what is paradoxical or counter-intuitive about it. Especially given that this page lists out all sorts of reasons other than the 'awareness, access and opportunities of women in a developed country' you mentioned.

Total Fertility Rate takes the unit of births per women, but the calculation of it is a bit different. Here's an excerpt from here:

The Total Fertility Rate (TFR) is not based on the actual fertility of a specific group of women, as that would require waiting until they have completed childbearing. It also does not involve counting the total number of children born over their lifetime. Instead, the TFR is based on the age-specific fertility rates of women in their "child-bearing years," typically considered to be ages 15–44 in international statistical usage. The TFR is a measure of the fertility of an imaginary woman who experiences the age-specific fertility rates for ages 15–49 that were recorded for a specific population in a given year. It represents the average number of children a woman would potentially have if she were to go through all her childbearing years in a single year, subject to the age-specific fertility rates for that year. In simpler terms, the TFR is the number of children a woman would have if she were to experience the prevailing fertility rates at all ages from a single given year and survived throughout her childbearing years.

I'm not so sure of how accurate of a representation this would provide. Same can be argued for GDP per capita measure to some extent, but that's beyond the scope of this thread.

Simply put, I don't believe we have quality data to make any meaningful measures. But in general, it actually makes perfect sense that families would have fewer children, when are capable of leading a better quality of life (also worth noting that this doesn't directly translate to 'decline in population').

My grandmother birthed eight; only five survived; and only the eldest got the best access to resources and opportunities, with each one that followed getting less and lesser. It was indeed a gruesome way of living, but it was the only one that ensured best chances of survival. My mother only birthed two, because it was simply enough with modern medicine ensuring better chances of survival for both, enabling her to choose to focus on providing a more fair share of resources. I'm sure this was and is the case in most families in developing-to-developed nations. This is just the way we were.

So, of course the birth rates are shrinking. The only thing that is paradoxical to me is how there appears to be alarmism about this!

[shankar.balan]

I truly believe that humans are a real scourge on this planet. And nature will always find a way to ‘regulate’ things. However, it will take aeons.

In my considered view, therefore, this ‘declining birth rate’ in the human race, is a blessing for the planet and for other species.

[SmartCat]

Originally Posted by BullettuPaandi

Although an interesting read, I fail to understand what is paradoxical or counter-intuitive about it.

It is a paradox when we compare humans with other animals. For eg:

If rabbits get access to plentiful resources (food!) and there are less predators, they will multiply like rabbits and we have a population explosion.

But if humans have access to plentiful resources (money/higher education/jobs) & better medical care, human population will start shrinking!

[Janus]

Even though India's population growth is reaching replacement level (TFR 2.1), we simply have too much people for the given land area.

Checkout the article from Hindu, its behind a subscription, but below explains the situation. We are not generating enough jobs leading to illegal migration and as the saying goes, too much of anything good is bad. The more Indians migrate to other countries, the more hate we start receiving.

Government should start looking at moving industries to Northern states or bring some sort of temporary population control measures. The longest pending Bill in Parliament is from 1992. Bills introduced in Rajya Sabha don't expire. This bill is for a constitution amendment to promote small family norms.

https://prsindia.org/billtrack/the-c...ment-bill-1992


https://www.thehindu.com/news/nation...le69220166.ece

However, Rajesh refuses to give up. “We were raised in the village. We don’t stop just because we failed once. The dream is alive,” he says.

Rajesh says he speaks not just for his family, but for most of his village. “It is not like our granaries are running empty,” he explains. “Even if we don’t do any work here in the village, we will survive; we have enough food. But is this enough? There are no jobs for us here and dreams are dreams.”

[PreludeSH]

In our country access to jobs that improves quality of life is less. People also think about the impact on quality of life if they have more children. After a low threshold, it doesnt matter how many children you have since it has no big impact on ones quality of life.

Is this the reason why we see poor people are happy with what they have irrespective of number of children ? I also think they don't need anything to improve including infrastructure, corruption etc. which middle class rants about.

[Jeroen]

Originally Posted by PreludeSH

Is this the reason why we see poor people are happy with what they have irrespective of number of children ? I also think they don't need anything to improve including infrastructure, corruption etc. which middle class rants about.

What are you,saying. These poor people are a happy lot and there is nothing that would improve their life? Are you kidding me?

Jeroen