Newfie wrote:But really, do we need to take this tone?
Just giving you a razz Newf,
Reading through some of the earlier post in this thread, lots of attention was paid to population and "demographic transition' - the idea that only through FF industrialization would birth rates fall - hence without FF they wouldn't.
The idea of DT was thunk up at the end of the 1920's, which was a pretty unique time in world history. The US was rapidly industrializing, urbanizing, mechanizing and discovering. The originator was not thinking of a post-peak world, but trying to explain the world as it was at that time, no surprise he attributed falling birth rates to the current conditions. Of course most everyone else who has thought about it since is not thinking about a post-peak world either, they are thinking about continued industrialization. So simply taking the idea as universal gospel and especially for a De-Industrializing world is probably a mistake.
But then so would be simply running the narrative in reverse, I'm pretty sure we aren't going to retrace our way back down the knowledge timeline to the dark ages and certainly not the stone age. We won't conveniently forget the things we have discovered along the way - you know, germ theory, hybrid genetics, sanitation, that stuff. So examining DT in the light of PO the first thing I see is mortality and birth rate do not fall in "developed economies" they fall in stage two, and three, "development."
[Stage one and four are when the birth/death rate is in balance, before and after transition.]
In stage two, that of a developing country, the death rates drop rapidly due to improvements in food supply and sanitation, which increase life spans and reduce disease. The improvements specific to food supply typically include selective breeding and crop rotation and farming techniques.[6] Other improvements generally include access to technology, basic healthcare, and education. For example, numerous improvements in public health reduce mortality, especially childhood mortality.[6] Prior to the mid-20th century, these improvements in public health were primarily in the areas of food handling, water supply, sewage, and personal hygiene.[6]
In stage three, birth rates fall due to access to contraception, increases in wages, urbanization, a reduction in subsistence agriculture, an increase in the status and education of women, a reduction in the value of children's work, an increase in parental investment in the education of children and other social changes.
So if I step back and imagine the early condition of post peak society, the first thing I see is lower surpluses of all types, so of course fewer jobs and much lower wages. But I don't see:
• Falling availability of contraception (unless someone like Huck is POTUS, LOL)
• A significant increase in subsistence agriculture (we've gone over the "problem" transitioning from a highly efficient industrial ag to a much less efficient subsistence model many, many times)
• An increase in the value of child labor (kids are an asset as in a subsistence farming culture, in a crowded apartment in the city , they are a liability. Ditto child labor in industrializing factories, there won't be enough work for adults post-peak as it is, child labor is only required when there is not enough adult labor (aside from simple exploitation of course))
One idea that seems especially strange to me is that increased "standard of living" would cause birth rates to fall. In the animal world, plenty means plenty of babies. In the US, it looks like recessions cause the birth rate to fall and prosperity cause the rates to rise:
*Remember that the Roaring Twenties was a great time to be rich and a pretty good time to be middle class, but that half the population was still rural and the twenties was one long post-war recession for farmers - "It is no great exaggeration to say that for rural America, the Great Depression began not in 1929 but in 1920, and it continued for an entire generation."
http://www.shmoop.com/1920s/economy.htmlThat last example is not necessarily proof, either, it could be that kids are just postponing until they pay off the mortgage to Phoenix University but it does follow previous examples, more babies in good time and less in recession.
But a big part of the problem in making any kind of prediction is so many things are going on and change has happened so fast the last couple hundred years that cause and effect are hard to establish - even more so than the guy who came up with the DT theory back in the '20s. It's not just technology itself but the resultant "independence" from old social structures, the fact that a FFed society as a whole is incredibly mobile and that causes many of the old mores to be forgotten, that we just have a whole lot of freedom that was never dreamt of before and also that so many of us reading here are so removed from any contact with the real world, i.e., production and use of actual things.
The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves -- in their separate, and individual capacities.
-- Abraham Lincoln, Fragment on Government (July 1, 1854)