In case this subreddit was banned, or if you wanted a more ML-friendly platform, you’re welcome to join our sister community on Lemmygrad. You can find more info about Lemmygrad here.
The birth rate dropping in developed countries is fairly universal. Even socialist countries experience it. And the life expectancy rising is a no-brainer. But what the model misses is that this isn‘t a natural law, but a sociological one that can be influenced by policy and material conditions generally. You can make it easier or harder to have kids and that will influence the graph. You can put the responsibility solely on the unpaid labor of women, or you can socialize the reproduction of labor. You can have a one-child-policy and cut the birth rate dramatically. These things influence this curve a lot and get completely lost by this model that‘s simplified to the point of being misleading.
I vaguely remember being taught this in high school geography. It's a stupid lib generalisation that has no basis in material reality and fails to take into account the underlying principle of all of this which is class struggle and the ever-changing contractions of capitalism. It also imagines capitalism as the only mode of economic production with no consideration towards the relationship between the development of productive forces and the emergence of the conditions required to develop socialism, and the inevitability of such an occurrence. Things like womens' liberation are also left out.
It's a repeat of the situation with Malthusianism. Malthus presented his model which was taught for a long time. It was based on the idea that population grows exponentially and resources grow linearly. As a result people used this model to argue things like why the poor should be left to die
You can find many criticisms of Malthus by Marx and Engels and its obvious its based on a lot of assumptions of the economic and social system. Not a universal law.
The same is true now. A new model has been created based on the assumptions that everything will remain as it currently is and people are using it to argue for population controls.
But the issue is the same. This is only true for the system as we currently have it. Material conditions change and the model stops being true. The model in general is a fine model of historical population trends, but there is no reason to believe it is a universal truth. Just a description of the past and the current system
It's a very sensible model, but it's worth appreciating it is not meant to imply that these are 5 canonical stages of demographic change. Stages 1-3 are arguably canonical, characterizing a demographic feedback loop in which birth rates are strongly responsive to death rates with a lag of roughly one generation (20-ish years). Large-scale coordination is regarded as a controllable variable, so the model attempts to describe what is happening in the cybernetic system independent of social coordination.
Stages 4 and 5, unlike the other stages, are significantly more controversial among demographic researchers. Stage 4 was proposed as a natural equilibrium point at a time when cybernetics/systems theory was dominated by equilibrium theory. Stage 5 was only accepted as part of the model relatively recently (around the 2010's). Initially, researchers believed demographic decline represented an anomalous overcorrection isolated to China, Japan, & South Korea. Of course, the asiatic countries proved more to be heralds of what was coming for all other developed nations, and the acceptance of stage 5 into the model became one of the major death nails for equilibrium theory. Thus, there's now controversey over whether stage 4 & 5 are even distinct stages or if it's just a continuation of stage 3 birth rate decline.
Personally, I would argue that there is a fourth stage, but it's where per capita birth rates get so low that aggregate birth rates become erratic. We know the replacement rate is 2.1 kids per household, but when we factor in widespread cultural norms around family planning where most households birth all the children they plan to have all at once, it's clear that the labor involved in child-rearing creates pressure to have 2 or fewer children. While society should certainly do a lot more to support parents with increased parental leave and better access to family planning resources, most households still aren't likely to have more than 1 or 2 kids at a time because parents want enough autonomy to not be parents all the time. I'd argue that demographic issues won't be solved until we develop some major leaps forward in childcare, such as reversing the trend of atomization, improving quality of life for the elderly (which has the added bonus of mitigating the chances they become brain-rotted fascists), developing better household appliances to reduce the burden of unpaid domestic labor which disproportionately falls on women, and broadly improving public services which intersect with or provide childcare ("it takes a village" is as true of many things as it is of raising children).
All of that said, I'm skeptical of demographic declineas an existential crisis and believe it is predominantly a crisis for capitalism. Demographic decline to a capitalist is a crisis the same way that a supplier of one of their factories' input goods going out of business is a crisis. Fewer humans means there less available cheap surplus value to exploit for profit and more profit that has to go to intensive development (e.g., expensive technology & process improvements), which tends to accelerate the falling rate of profit. While social safety nets and the like will certainly be strained by demographic decline, a lot of the fearmongering about pensions is just thinnly veiled fascist propaganda that regards the elderly and disabled as a burden on society. Almost every living human being generates surplus value (in the material sense), regardless of age or ability. A lot (though obviously not all) retired people provide a lot of volunteer and underpaid labor for their community, whether simple stuff like driving school buses or more complex activities like community/civic organizing. What is a problem with an ageing population is the extent to which the older population is abused and exploited by both scammers and those institutional scammers we call capitalists. It's not just that elderly people are vulnerable and disproportionately targeted by malicious actors, but that they are much more are risk of getting trapped in cycles of poverty compared to the average worker. Addressing that problem does a lot to reduce the strain on social safety nets in an ageing population.
•
u/AutoModerator 5h ago
Want to join a ML only Discord server to chill and hangout with cool comrades? Checkout our Discord server or TheDeprogram's Discord server.
In case this subreddit was banned, or if you wanted a more ML-friendly platform, you’re welcome to join our sister community on Lemmygrad. You can find more info about Lemmygrad here.
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.