Here we go again, confusing national wealth with personal wealth. The core problem is that wealthy nations have a dramatically increasing number of people just scraping by - such that they cannot afford kids and/or do not have the leftover time and effort available to raise them. Tack on the loss of tight communities (with collective childcare support) and you have a recipe for a lot of people saying "this isn't realistic for me/us".
Now, of course, we face great unknowns in how things will turn out in the future. So, living past 100 might be a moot point if society has broken down.
It's going well so far.
It seems obvious to me that the desire to have kids has at least SOME genetic component, it’s not purely instilled by society, and the “death” (refusal to procreate) of the ones with a weaker drive will mean that the only people left will have a stronger desire to procreate.
I’m not sure though, I would love to hear an argument against this idea from someone with a biology background.
I'm not saying only Dads should work. But what I'm saying is back in the day 1 person could work and still make ends meet and now 2 people work, we have more hectic lives and no time for kids, plus the cost and no real incentive for having kids. Back in the day societal pressures/religion would mean you would have kids.
Now I can see a lot of people around me asking the question, why bother for all that stress? I feel this is self inflicted in richer countries.
I think it would be a good solution if couples were to have children in their early 20s, and have those children raised primarily by their grandparents who at this point would be in their mid-40s and very much settled in life.
Here's an idea!
https://www.healthline.com/health/emergency-contraception/el...
And don't forget julie:
If those tendencies are based on heritable personality (or other) traits and not purely random or situational, they would be selected for in the current environment. Not sure how we'd determine if they are.
What we are learning so far is that genes tell an extremely complex and probabilistic story.
There is no way we have "evolved" through selection in many countries from 4+ kids to <2 kids per mother in a span of a 100 years, so while we could possibly see such a genetic effect over thousands (probably more) of years, there is no way we could see it in the span of a century.
I don’t know how many generations it would take, but ultimately it is a problem that might solve itself.
Basically, none of studies attempt to calculate fertility rates while we are in the middle of birthing age moving up. If looked simplistically, if people suddenly decided to have kids at 40 after they used to have them at 25, you get 15 years of significantly reduced fertility. It's not as clear cut today, but the figures are probably somewhere in between.
The main thing we should be focusing on is the quality of life for those who are born, primarily in terms of education and opportunity for development, ie fewer people leading more productive, creative, fulfilling lives, rather than billions of starving, uneducated, unwashed, etc, as is sadly the case today.
https://anabaptistworld.org/amish-population-growing-and-mov...
Dunno if Mars is far enough away for that, tho.
edit: Just imagine the first interplanetary war being fought to bring freedom to Musk's Martian baby factories, which use either artificial wombs or enslaved surrogates as you like.