> I believe that centuries from now, Earth will be a garden of Eden again, as the surplus resources get turned to making it beautiful, rather than just fending off starvation.
All of human history up until the middle 1800s was spent at the malthusian limit: barely enough food to feed all the people. We are living through an aberration at the moment caused by a drastic increase in food production combined with a decline in birth rates. What I am saying is that birth rates will bounce back.
My family tree looks a lot like yours: lots of dead ends. My father has 6 siblings and my mother has 3, for a total of 11 siblings (including my parents). Collectively, all of those siblings would have to produce 20 offspring to maintain 0 population growth. But there are only 7 offspring in my generation. That represents a huge pruning of my lineage.
But.
All of the children in my generation are the offspring of parents who decided to have children in the age of birth control, women in the workforce, etc. And all of the children in the next generation will have gone through another round of intense selection. If you just play that out for a few generations, you're left with a population that has a really strong pedigree for fertility in the face of Modern Life.
You might think this is no big deal, but I can tell you that there are people out there who have a really strong innate drive to have children. I am one of them. So is my wife. We'll start working on our 4th child next year. All of the other people we know with 3+ children have markedly different personalities from the people we know with 2 or less.
Once resistance to modern life starts to gain prevalence in the population, it will spread incredibly rapidly. Take a look at the Haredi Jews in Israel. In 1990, they represented 5% of the Jewish population in Israel. Now, 30 years later, they account for roughly 30% of the Jewish population under 20. What happens when you play that process out for another 30 years? I'll tell you: what happens is that the Haredi are the Jews in Israel.
The same thing will happen with high fertility people in the rest of the developed world. You're just not seeing it because your vantage point is from a part of the tree of life that is being pruned. But there are parts of the population that you're not exposed to. They're religious and conservative and hard to notice because they're too busy raising children to be visible on social media and in high culture. But they're there.
> They're religious and conservative and hard to notice because they're too busy raising children to be visible on social media and in high culture. But
The thing is that they are quite visible, and quite a fair share of the people that are now in the group choosing to reproduce at or below replacement rates, either strategically or just by deprioritized reproduction cookies to career, etc, so that it is delayed come from those backgrounds. Biological decent doesn't dictate personal choice.
Or to put this another way... I think it's far more likely that modernism will doom high birth rate, impoverished religious cults, than it is that high birth rate impoverished religious cults will doom modernity.
I see what you're saying, but that only works if the process is continuous - if the religious culture that values high birth rates continues for several generations. For a counterexample, look at Saudi Arabia, another religion-driven state. In 1960, the birth rate was 7.22. Today, it is 2.58. So religious parents have 8 children, and all 8 survive, because it's the 21st century and they're getting vaccinated and not drinking their neighbors' poo anymore. Will all 8 of those children go on to have big families of their own, in keeping with their religious sect's values? Or will they move to town, get better jobs, and start using family planning to have a family they can afford, knowing their children aren't going to die of cholera or smallpox or simple starvation?
Interestingly, I did some googling on the Haredim. As of 2010, the poverty rate for the Haredim in Israel was 60%, far higher than the rest of Israel's Jewish population (probably more in line with the occupied Palestinians, who also have a very high birth rate). Population size or not, this is extremely limiting for their political power. Money counts for a great deal. If they can't afford to expand their communities, and refuse to participate in the broader economy, they'll necessarily be limited in their growth.
So no, I'm not concerned about this problem. Religious groups that refuse to participate in mainstream society may have high birth rates, but will also have high poverty rates. And I see no evidence at all of this behavior in American society, outside of tiny cults. Even the Mormons, probably the best and largest analogy, have seen their birth rate drop drastically, falling 18% from 2007 to 2014 alone. I'm not expecting the LDS church to overrun the nation anytime soon.
All of human history up until the middle 1800s was spent at the malthusian limit: barely enough food to feed all the people. We are living through an aberration at the moment caused by a drastic increase in food production combined with a decline in birth rates. What I am saying is that birth rates will bounce back.
My family tree looks a lot like yours: lots of dead ends. My father has 6 siblings and my mother has 3, for a total of 11 siblings (including my parents). Collectively, all of those siblings would have to produce 20 offspring to maintain 0 population growth. But there are only 7 offspring in my generation. That represents a huge pruning of my lineage.
But.
All of the children in my generation are the offspring of parents who decided to have children in the age of birth control, women in the workforce, etc. And all of the children in the next generation will have gone through another round of intense selection. If you just play that out for a few generations, you're left with a population that has a really strong pedigree for fertility in the face of Modern Life.
You might think this is no big deal, but I can tell you that there are people out there who have a really strong innate drive to have children. I am one of them. So is my wife. We'll start working on our 4th child next year. All of the other people we know with 3+ children have markedly different personalities from the people we know with 2 or less.
Once resistance to modern life starts to gain prevalence in the population, it will spread incredibly rapidly. Take a look at the Haredi Jews in Israel. In 1990, they represented 5% of the Jewish population in Israel. Now, 30 years later, they account for roughly 30% of the Jewish population under 20. What happens when you play that process out for another 30 years? I'll tell you: what happens is that the Haredi are the Jews in Israel.
The same thing will happen with high fertility people in the rest of the developed world. You're just not seeing it because your vantage point is from a part of the tree of life that is being pruned. But there are parts of the population that you're not exposed to. They're religious and conservative and hard to notice because they're too busy raising children to be visible on social media and in high culture. But they're there.