I don't see how huge drops over the course of a decade can be anything but smartphones. Gender attitudes, levels of environmental toxins, etc. couldn't change fast enough (and simultaneously across countries, no less) to produce that outcome.
Wouldn't it be useful to have more disaggregated data, like a time series for "annual birth rates in among 24-year-old women" in each Nigerian state? That would allow you to identify natural experiments (different timing of introduction to smartphones, based on where the networks rolled out and when) which could test the hypothesis more rigorously.
If you believe that we have far more people on this planet than is ecologically sustainable, then falling fertility rates is an unmitigated good, regardless of slower growth in per capita GDP. We have plenty of wealth, the problem is distribution. How you frame this development is as important as doing careful research. I’m totally in agreement that there’s a lot of unfounded speculation.
Well-said. GDP (God Damn Profits) is NOT the highest good, certainly not higher than a livable planet! Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell, which eventually kills its host, by the way.
I wonder how useful it is to speak of a "global collapse" when birthrates differ so much from nation to nation (there's the local variation you want theory to account for, I guess).
I mean, Italy and Nigeria have both seen declines in fertility, but Italy's (1.2 births per woman, below replacement rate of 2.1) has far different consequences than Nigeria's (4.38 per woman). Italy's median age is nearly 48. Nigeria's is about 18. So, in a bunch of African nations, birthrate decline is just a very different thing than it is in Asia or Europe. (According to at least one projection (Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation) Nigeria in 2100 will have a larger population than China.)
This suggests, as you imply, that a central problem for the rest of the century will be creating successful diverse societies in a time of mass migration from teeming nations to graying ones. A theory of how to do that would be very good to have. Especially if it was also a theory of how to make the achievement stick, as successful diverse societies have a way of suddenly not being so successful. (When I was a kid, then-Yugoslavia was held up as a model of inter-ethnic cooperation, intermarriage etc.)
Even if you exclude nations and regions with above replacement fertility rates (the African continent, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Arab World, Haiti, and Afghanistan) that's still a majority of the world with below replacement fertility. Even Indonesia is 2.1 right now and India, Vietnam & The Philippines are below 2.1.
I heard recently, Nigeria's birthrate numbers may be inflated. Nigeria gives out oil money dollars to different provinces based on their reported population and there's nobody overseeing the populations that the individual provinces are reporting. So there is always a huge incentive to lie"
Yes, it is for sure a global phenomenon. But the countries you mention, far above replacement, face different challenges than the majority of nations. (And most of those below replacement have not yet begun to actually shrink, ie, the problem isn't yet politically evident to all.) I didn't mean to suggest it's not global. Just that the problem has two facets.
personally as a woman living in the global south I apply a very simple rule : no rights ? no access to free, private no questions asked contraception, cervical screening, std tests, no protection against revenge porn etc. ? → 4B ! 4B.
1) infant mortality rates have collapsed. Because babies don’t die, families have few new babies.
2) People are living a lot longer. With better healthcare, nutrition and technology people are living longer. When family members don’t die, we don’t have as many kids to replace them.
3) In developed countries, we have cost disease socialism that spikes costs. Look at single-family zoning, which is basically population control that blocks new homes, raising rents, and making it harder for new families to get started. Some countries don’t have universal healthcare, which also makes it even more expensive for new families to get started.
I HATE it when recent fertility decline is blamed on women and feminism. Which rights did women acquire in 2015 that they didn't have before? It js definitely something else.
Careful of ageist assumptions based on past models of ageing.
The second billion of the world’s over-60s arriving by 2050 won’t age (or retire) like their predecessors. They may be powerful economic drivers - as women were over the last few decades.
As life expectancy rises across the globe (with the notable exception of the US/ UK), keep an eye on the older.
Might there be an evolutionary reason for longer lives, generationally-balanced demographic squares and the rise of AI?
And yes, agree that getting men and women reconnected is an essential priority. But skewing education female for decades hasn’t helped.
I think (1) and (2) are the result of the misdiagnosis to the problem and the subsequent authoritarian response we see everywhere in developed countries - in my opinion specifically the micro level. (3) is where the insight is and also the shadow no one really wants to address. Thanks for your hard work, you’ve opened my perspective to ideas I never could/would have considered previously!
The connection between smart phone use and birthrates across multiple countries and very different cultures is impressive! The supercomputing Swiss Army Knife (iPhone) that I carry in my pocket that lets me text or call any of my closest friends or family no matter where I am for almost free is in stark contrast to the days when I had to pay $1 a minute in 1987 to talk with my favorite sister when I lived on the island of Guam. The need to connect to another familiar voice over a phone line at a buck a minute is at best 20 years removed and is a skill (holding a conversation by phone) that has been lost! For example, my sister (age 64) and myself (age 61) can still talk for from 1 to 2 hours on the phone a few times a month. However, my 5 nieces are terrified of talking with me on the phone and very reluctivity,
As a single 40y old man, I'm not sure I agree that the culprit is technology. I believe that technology is developing in this way because the market of single people is growing, not IMO the other way around. I feel that the paradox of choice is the issue: most people (certainly most women and also myself) could have a relationship tomorrow if they wanted, but we keep waiting for that right person that never arrives.
I saw a study a few years ago that cast doubt on the "it's too expensive nowadays to raise kids" theory. I tried to dig it up again but failed. Basically they looked at people who had exogenous wealth shocks (winning the lottery, I think) to see if they actually went on to have more children once the cost constraints were relaxed/went away. Fertility barely budged.
And as just an amateur anecdotal level: millionaires aren't having noticeably more kids than hundred-thousandaires and billionares (other than Elon Musk) aren't having more kids than millionaires. Is there a single (non-geriatric) billionaire other than Musk with even 5 kids, I wonder? Warren Buffett and Bill Gates only have 3.0 children. Larry Ellison has 2, Mark Zuckerberg has 3. Jeff Bezos seems in the lead with 4.
And that's with nannies and all the help that money can buy.
If you find the Malthusian theory reasonably plausible then one could view the current fertility decline as a hopeful sign - i.e. that the current self-correcting demographic shift is relatively non-violent (that, of course, depends on what your definition of non-violence is) as opposed to what the Rev. Malthus saw as being the inevitable self-correcting mechanisms (war, famine, disease) and that humanity has learned to self-regulate its population in more peaceful ways than heretofore.
Is it really so bad? Exponential growth is not sustainable, though easy to manage at first (until it is too late and we need wars / civil wars to "regulate" the population). We'd better change our models and learn to live without growth.
Whatever one of those deep sounding quotes, never attribute to malice that which can sufficiently be explained by incompetence.
They didn't choose the toxoplasmosis life
the toxoplasmosis life chose them.
"The inability to naturally conceive is a common problem for many couples. Latent toxoplasmosis appears to be one of the causes of fertility disorders in humans. In a questionnaire study by Kaňková et al. [28], infected women reported that it took them significantly longer to conceive, to become pregnant at an older age, and experienced more fertility problems overall than uninfected women did. Toxoplasma-positive women are thus more likely to require artificial insemination than Toxoplasma-negative women. In fact, a higher prevalence of toxoplasmosis has been observed in infertile women than in healthy pregnant women [29,30], in infertile couples than in fertile ones [31], and in infertile men than in fertile ones [32]. Moreover, Toxoplasma-positive men had a higher level of anti-sperm antibodies than Toxoplasma-negative men did [31]. Hlaváčová et al. [33] found a significantly higher incidence of fertility problems in Toxoplasma-positive than in Toxoplasma-negative men. They also showed that latent toxoplasmosis negatively affects sperm count and motility.
Although the adverse effects of latent toxoplasmosis on human fertility and fertility problems related to depressive symptoms have been repeatedly observed, no study has ever tested the association between latent toxoplasmosis, fertility, and depression. The aim of this study is thus to analyze the effect of latent toxoplasmosis on depression in men and women in relation to their fertility.
Conclusions
Our results showed that the effect of toxoplasmosis on depression goes in the opposite direction in men and in fertile women. While toxoplasmosis seems to protect men from depression, it appears to increase the likelihood of depression in women."
I don't see how huge drops over the course of a decade can be anything but smartphones. Gender attitudes, levels of environmental toxins, etc. couldn't change fast enough (and simultaneously across countries, no less) to produce that outcome.
Wouldn't it be useful to have more disaggregated data, like a time series for "annual birth rates in among 24-year-old women" in each Nigerian state? That would allow you to identify natural experiments (different timing of introduction to smartphones, based on where the networks rolled out and when) which could test the hypothesis more rigorously.
If you believe that we have far more people on this planet than is ecologically sustainable, then falling fertility rates is an unmitigated good, regardless of slower growth in per capita GDP. We have plenty of wealth, the problem is distribution. How you frame this development is as important as doing careful research. I’m totally in agreement that there’s a lot of unfounded speculation.
Well-said. GDP (God Damn Profits) is NOT the highest good, certainly not higher than a livable planet! Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell, which eventually kills its host, by the way.
I wonder how useful it is to speak of a "global collapse" when birthrates differ so much from nation to nation (there's the local variation you want theory to account for, I guess).
I mean, Italy and Nigeria have both seen declines in fertility, but Italy's (1.2 births per woman, below replacement rate of 2.1) has far different consequences than Nigeria's (4.38 per woman). Italy's median age is nearly 48. Nigeria's is about 18. So, in a bunch of African nations, birthrate decline is just a very different thing than it is in Asia or Europe. (According to at least one projection (Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation) Nigeria in 2100 will have a larger population than China.)
This suggests, as you imply, that a central problem for the rest of the century will be creating successful diverse societies in a time of mass migration from teeming nations to graying ones. A theory of how to do that would be very good to have. Especially if it was also a theory of how to make the achievement stick, as successful diverse societies have a way of suddenly not being so successful. (When I was a kid, then-Yugoslavia was held up as a model of inter-ethnic cooperation, intermarriage etc.)
Even if you exclude nations and regions with above replacement fertility rates (the African continent, Indonesia, Pakistan, the Arab World, Haiti, and Afghanistan) that's still a majority of the world with below replacement fertility. Even Indonesia is 2.1 right now and India, Vietnam & The Philippines are below 2.1.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-un
I heard recently, Nigeria's birthrate numbers may be inflated. Nigeria gives out oil money dollars to different provinces based on their reported population and there's nobody overseeing the populations that the individual provinces are reporting. So there is always a huge incentive to lie"
Yes, it is for sure a global phenomenon. But the countries you mention, far above replacement, face different challenges than the majority of nations. (And most of those below replacement have not yet begun to actually shrink, ie, the problem isn't yet politically evident to all.) I didn't mean to suggest it's not global. Just that the problem has two facets.
personally as a woman living in the global south I apply a very simple rule : no rights ? no access to free, private no questions asked contraception, cervical screening, std tests, no protection against revenge porn etc. ? → 4B ! 4B.
Pollution is all-pervasive. It would be important to know the effect of pollution on such aspects as sperm viability and other pollution effects.
1) infant mortality rates have collapsed. Because babies don’t die, families have few new babies.
2) People are living a lot longer. With better healthcare, nutrition and technology people are living longer. When family members don’t die, we don’t have as many kids to replace them.
3) In developed countries, we have cost disease socialism that spikes costs. Look at single-family zoning, which is basically population control that blocks new homes, raising rents, and making it harder for new families to get started. Some countries don’t have universal healthcare, which also makes it even more expensive for new families to get started.
I HATE it when recent fertility decline is blamed on women and feminism. Which rights did women acquire in 2015 that they didn't have before? It js definitely something else.
It boils down to "do more research"
I don't know, I'm too busy having kids
Careful of ageist assumptions based on past models of ageing.
The second billion of the world’s over-60s arriving by 2050 won’t age (or retire) like their predecessors. They may be powerful economic drivers - as women were over the last few decades.
As life expectancy rises across the globe (with the notable exception of the US/ UK), keep an eye on the older.
Might there be an evolutionary reason for longer lives, generationally-balanced demographic squares and the rise of AI?
And yes, agree that getting men and women reconnected is an essential priority. But skewing education female for decades hasn’t helped.
I think (1) and (2) are the result of the misdiagnosis to the problem and the subsequent authoritarian response we see everywhere in developed countries - in my opinion specifically the micro level. (3) is where the insight is and also the shadow no one really wants to address. Thanks for your hard work, you’ve opened my perspective to ideas I never could/would have considered previously!
The connection between smart phone use and birthrates across multiple countries and very different cultures is impressive! The supercomputing Swiss Army Knife (iPhone) that I carry in my pocket that lets me text or call any of my closest friends or family no matter where I am for almost free is in stark contrast to the days when I had to pay $1 a minute in 1987 to talk with my favorite sister when I lived on the island of Guam. The need to connect to another familiar voice over a phone line at a buck a minute is at best 20 years removed and is a skill (holding a conversation by phone) that has been lost! For example, my sister (age 64) and myself (age 61) can still talk for from 1 to 2 hours on the phone a few times a month. However, my 5 nieces are terrified of talking with me on the phone and very reluctivity,
As a single 40y old man, I'm not sure I agree that the culprit is technology. I believe that technology is developing in this way because the market of single people is growing, not IMO the other way around. I feel that the paradox of choice is the issue: most people (certainly most women and also myself) could have a relationship tomorrow if they wanted, but we keep waiting for that right person that never arrives.
I saw a study a few years ago that cast doubt on the "it's too expensive nowadays to raise kids" theory. I tried to dig it up again but failed. Basically they looked at people who had exogenous wealth shocks (winning the lottery, I think) to see if they actually went on to have more children once the cost constraints were relaxed/went away. Fertility barely budged.
And as just an amateur anecdotal level: millionaires aren't having noticeably more kids than hundred-thousandaires and billionares (other than Elon Musk) aren't having more kids than millionaires. Is there a single (non-geriatric) billionaire other than Musk with even 5 kids, I wonder? Warren Buffett and Bill Gates only have 3.0 children. Larry Ellison has 2, Mark Zuckerberg has 3. Jeff Bezos seems in the lead with 4.
And that's with nannies and all the help that money can buy.
If you find the Malthusian theory reasonably plausible then one could view the current fertility decline as a hopeful sign - i.e. that the current self-correcting demographic shift is relatively non-violent (that, of course, depends on what your definition of non-violence is) as opposed to what the Rev. Malthus saw as being the inevitable self-correcting mechanisms (war, famine, disease) and that humanity has learned to self-regulate its population in more peaceful ways than heretofore.
Is it really so bad? Exponential growth is not sustainable, though easy to manage at first (until it is too late and we need wars / civil wars to "regulate" the population). We'd better change our models and learn to live without growth.
Whatever one of those deep sounding quotes, never attribute to malice that which can sufficiently be explained by incompetence.
They didn't choose the toxoplasmosis life
the toxoplasmosis life chose them.
"The inability to naturally conceive is a common problem for many couples. Latent toxoplasmosis appears to be one of the causes of fertility disorders in humans. In a questionnaire study by Kaňková et al. [28], infected women reported that it took them significantly longer to conceive, to become pregnant at an older age, and experienced more fertility problems overall than uninfected women did. Toxoplasma-positive women are thus more likely to require artificial insemination than Toxoplasma-negative women. In fact, a higher prevalence of toxoplasmosis has been observed in infertile women than in healthy pregnant women [29,30], in infertile couples than in fertile ones [31], and in infertile men than in fertile ones [32]. Moreover, Toxoplasma-positive men had a higher level of anti-sperm antibodies than Toxoplasma-negative men did [31]. Hlaváčová et al. [33] found a significantly higher incidence of fertility problems in Toxoplasma-positive than in Toxoplasma-negative men. They also showed that latent toxoplasmosis negatively affects sperm count and motility.
Although the adverse effects of latent toxoplasmosis on human fertility and fertility problems related to depressive symptoms have been repeatedly observed, no study has ever tested the association between latent toxoplasmosis, fertility, and depression. The aim of this study is thus to analyze the effect of latent toxoplasmosis on depression in men and women in relation to their fertility.
Conclusions
Our results showed that the effect of toxoplasmosis on depression goes in the opposite direction in men and in fertile women. While toxoplasmosis seems to protect men from depression, it appears to increase the likelihood of depression in women."
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8399658/#:~:text=%5B28%5D%2C%20infected%20women%20reported,in%20relation%20to%20their%20fertility.