“Notably, Chang’s report claims that biological females develop earlier than males do, so requiring girls to enter school at younger ages will create classes in which the two sexes are of more equal maturity as they age. This, the author posits, makes it more likely that those classmates will be attracted to each other, and marry and have children further down the line.”
(…)
“The report does not include evidence of any correlation between female students’ early enrollment and the success rate of their romantic relationships with men. The author also does not detail specific mechanisms by which his proposed policy would increase romantic attraction or birthrates.”
Medium term, yeah. After a few centuries you’re reaching dangerously small levels, though, assuming normal mortality. Maybe you’re onboard with extinction, but for a couple reasons I’m not, even as shit as we are.
Ok, so the only way to reverse it is to reduce access to birth control and go back on women rights.
There’s a whole lot of stuff that people in this discussion are blaming for birthrate going down but if you look at historical data it was going down even before these things were issues, just because people are more educated, have access to birth control and women have rights over their body. You’re not moving back above 2.1 without getting rid of these things.
Have you ever read A Brave New World? If we can get artificial wombs going - in a few centuries, which is a reasonable timeframe, I think - we could do it that way.
Yes, I know, it wasn’t supposed to be a society to emulate, but that part at least seems fine to me. Getting rid of birth control would be dumb, absolutely agreed.
One is science fiction, the other is the reality we live in.
Which thing is the reality we live in?
The trajectory of the human population is intrinsically a far-future question, of course I’m bringing science fiction into it.
Artificial wombs are science fiction, the reality we live in is that babies need a mother and women don’t want enough kids to renew our population when they’re actually given the choice.
It’s nice to dream, but let’s face the fact that we’re probably heading in a direction where human population will eventually be going down and is predicted to peak at this end of this century.
Like I said, in the medium term, sure. We’ll still have billions for many decades after that, and then we have to start thinking about a solution.