What if there were far fewer people?

Well, at some point you don’t have enough people to support modernity. Markets, factories, supply chains all require a certain minimum number of producers and consumers in order to work. A world with 1/100th of the current population would not have iPhones, Airbus jets, or Baldur’s Gate; there simply wouldn’t be enough consumers to support the production of those things.

“Oh but I don’t care about — ” yes well, shrink the population enough, and at some point it won’t be able to produce things you do care about, like laptop computers and publishing houses and cancer medication. Or, if it shrinks down small enough, tractors and street lights and contact lenses and supermarkets. To take the extreme case, a human population of ten million people, spread across the planet, would be a human population living mostly at an Iron Age level of technology.

TBC, I don’t think this would be an issue at half or a quarter of our current population. But once you got below a couple of billion humans, yeah, some things would start to disappear. In order to support a world of humans living at a comfortable mid-21st century standard of living, you probably need at least several hundred million people.

Doug M.

My sense is like Steve’s that most of the concerns have to do with handling dramatic changes to demographics. The process of population decline involves a flipping of the demographic pyramid that modern societies were built on, i.e. lots of young people supporting fewer old people. The concern is that we don’t really know how to organise a society when the older are greater than the younger and the population is declining, especially if this is happening at a global level. Then there are the maximisers in economics and philosophy (with contrarian instincts) that the think the human population on earth should be 10X or more to maximise welfare.

… oh, wait, no I just came to say what Engels said. I was going to put it in prettier language, with mention of inflation and interest rates and that kind of thing. But on reflection, I like engels’ version better.
I think there might be another argument to make for having a big population. Even though small groups make the scientific breakthroughs and the amazing art, you need a receptive audience or market for what they make, and that requires a big population. Plus, you’re more likely to get a group of great inventors forming if you have lots of people.
A second reason might be insurance: in the event of something very deadly, it seems prima facie more likely that the human race will survive if there are lots of us than if there are few.
A third is straightforward utilitarianism: a future with lots of people experiencing great things is better than a future with few.
I’m not sure this is a trope, yet, nor why you’d want to dismiss the arguments as a trope. Isn’t this what newspapers are for, in part? Wringing our hands over unlikely possibilities? It seems like it would be OK just to accept these op ed arguments as part of a big, interesting discourse, even if the arguments aren’t very good.

“But on reflection, I like engels’ version better.”

Right, so countries with elderly and declining populations should see declining housing prices.

Okay, what’s a country with a very elderly and declining population? Japan! [googles] Huh — housing prices in Japan have been rising steadily for over a decade now.

Okay, how about Italy? [googles] Hmm — Italy’s housing prices declined until 2019, but have been rising ever since; they’re now back to the level they were in 2015 and still rising. What’s going on here?

Well, it turns out housing markets are very very very complicated! Who knew?

Here’s a single factor to consider: aging populations need different housing. Population has a lot of people in their 30s and 40s with three or more kids? They’ll want lots of single-family homes with yards or gardens. Lots of twentysomething DINKs? They’ll be more interested in townhouses and urban apartments. Lots of 65+ empty-nest old people? They’ll prefer little single-story ranch style houses and apartments in buildings with elevators.

Yes, that’s an oversimplification, but the underlying point is real: as the population ages, you need dramatically different housing stock. And that’s just one of a dozen or so different factors that affect housing /demand/, and that’s before we even talk about the madness that is housing /supply/.

So, a simplistic “fewer people, cheaper housing” model… no, that doesn’t actually work very well in reality.

Doug M.

One point I feel this analyses miss is that a world with very few children and lots of old people seems like a very sad, un-magical world. Most people will be single children, no brothers or uncles or cousins. Maybe we can compensate a bit by moving away from the bourgeois family model, but I feel the sociological implications from this radical shift are rarely mentioned.

“We’re also owed an account, of course, of why diminishing human well-being wouldn’t be more than compensated for by greater opportunities for animal flourishing.”

Not at all clear on who “we” is in this demand. There are two issues with this. First, the case for equality among humans is still bitterly contested, not just in practice but in the academy as well, I think. The presumption that animals are equals to human still needs more work, no matter what the demand assumes.

Second, even if someone were to temporarily wave away serious issues in favor of animal equality, why this discrimination in favor of animals? Plants and fungi deserve their rights too, but putting caterpillars on the same level as people is a bigoted attack on every leaf in the arboretum! Why, given that bacteria and protists compose a huge proportion of all life, why this fixation on animals, except you can draw cartoons of them with big eyes? All humor aside, the argument is actually incoherent I think.

Further given the importance of current economic arrangements in subsidizing arguments that the economy will suffer if there’s not enough cheap labor, the OP’s presumption that people are a Bad Thing for the animals who count just as much (if not more? because they unlike people are innocent?) is kind of irrelevant. The issue is questioning the current economic arrangements which are irrevocably committed to an insane notion of “growth.” Unlimited growth of profits and universal repayment of all debts with compound interest no matter what is the real problem I think. Attacking motherhood rather than the NIPA fetish finds more of an audience maybe but that doesn’t make it useful.

Worst of all, reducing populations without confronting the problem of, which populations is worse than useless. It is its own problem in itself.

{added: make that 230 years: sorry}

We’ve had more than 330 years to make more Mozarts and there’s still only ever been just one.

But there are lots of little Henry Fords, especially among NYT readers.

I think we’ve already detached “social” from biological parenting: it’s done by low-paid employees and childless relatives of the wealthy professionals who can afford the houses to have the kids in…

I think part of the issue here is trying to make consistent arguments across domains. In almost every discussion of immigration, the “_, we’re full” argument are disparaged more than argued with. You have immigration enthusiasts like Matt Yglesias, arguing that “1 Billion Americans” would be great.

If you start there, it’s hard to see why only the US and the UK should have an every-growing population.

The emergence of Mozarts does not depend on sheer numbers of individuals but on opportunities. This is why we have no great female or African Mozarts, philosophers, etc. Lower birthrates will actually increase the chances of more outstanding individuals, because women will be liberated from childcare and the planet will be less damaged and poverty-stricken.

My impression is that the arts today are increasingly dominated by the sons and daughters of the bourgeoisie, who have astronomically greatest opportunities than anyone before them in history, yet the results seem… less than impressive.

Some believe life is a good.

Political cultist Lyndon LaRouche believed that population growth would increase the number of geniuses who would create new technologies which would solve all of our problems (including those created by population growth.

This ignores the basic issue that technology’s benefits are not evenly distributed across humanity. Existing technology has created medical treatments unavailable to most of the world. Expecting additional growth to produce novel, presently unforeseeable technologies is a cargo cult which reinforces indifference to solving existing problems with existing technology.

As for the idea that more people equals more innovation, Stephen Jay Gould summed up the flaw in that notion: “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”

is that true?

I was referring to the artists themselves, not the execs, who’d I’d have assumed were always bougie. There was a lot of discussion of this in Britain re pop music and acting a few years ago but I believe the trend is more general.
https://www.vice.com/en/article/rzvag4/started-from-the-top-now-were-here-why-are-so-many-of-britains-top-popstars-posh
https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2012/mar/07/being-posh-helps-actors

For pop music specifically I think workfare bears a lot of the blame.

In a world where fewer and fewer people are needed to produce all the goods and services demanded by the population, it seems rather fortuitous that the employed population should decline to match.

Is there a lower limit to this? Asking for 8 billion friends.

I’m not the intellectual origin of anything, but I’ll put my hand up as a worrier about underpopulation. The problem is this. We had a long 20th century of continual radical change, driven by ever-increasing population plus ever more intensive resource extraction. At least five generations brought up on the manifest reality that nothing your parents know is worth anything. This is the foundation of our meta-culture of continuously reinvented culture, the tradition of ignoring tradition. Radicalism is conservatism to us, taught to us by our punk feminist parents. But if you believe you should be free to think your own thoughts, build your own life, question everything, then you are unique to this tiny unsustainable blip in history, a century and a half, where those things make sense. When that blip is over we will relapse to normality: obey your father, obey your priest, obey your king. Because that’s by definition sustainable.

It’s not that we need a minimum N Mozarts, but that we need an increasing population to give Mozart a reason to tear up the rule book. Simply, my fear is that the end of resource extraction and the end of population growth means freezing our entire culture in time, science and the arts and all, replaced by permanent reactionaryism. Worshipping at altars to Thomas Kuhn while human progress ceases.

That said, I exaggerate to make the point. I’m a hell of a lot more scared of the wet bulb temperature. On balance, maybe we’ve just got more urgent things to talk about than what other people are doing with their genitals.

I dunno. The flowering of European creativity and the rise in living standards after ½ of the population of Europe died of the plague implies that it is not a problem.

Of course, the rich and powerful will have to cede a bit of their wealth and power to get people to work for them, but that is a good thing, if you do not work for the New York Times.

One example of how the aftermath of the plague jump-started Europe, peasants became so well off that they could afford to wear underwear, and the bone man, who collected bones to make fertilizer, became the rag and bone man, and the (largely linen) rags were pulped and pressed and became paper, and then this chap named Gutenberg came up with movable type, and the rest is ……… An episode of James Burke’s Connections.

Why, then, would it matter if there were far fewer of us?

Because, although a larger population might produce more geniuses, our current population is overwhelming the planet.

Population control should be part of our resource-management toolkit. There is a 1999 Cornell University study that says: “Democratically determined population-control practices and sound resource-management policies could have the planet’s 2 billion people thriving in harmony with the environment. Lacking these approaches … 12 billion miserable humans will suffer a difficult life on Earth by the year 2100.” http://news.cornell.edu/stories/1999/09/miserable-life-overcrowded-earth-2100

As (hopefully) we move to non-toxic, non-catastrophic renewable energy, we tend to
focus on SUPPLY. We could address DEMAND for energy by paying a stipend to women for each year that they defer having their first child.

I’m working on a big project on all of this. The short answer is: below replacement fertility is both inevitable and desirable. But even at the low end of projections, we are still talking about a world population of billions well into the 22nd century.

In this blogpost I wonder about the lag between Malthus, in 1798, fretting about over-population and the glut of over-population science fiction scare-stories that started appearing in the 1960s and onwards (Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! (1966), John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968) and so on). Malthusianism was a big deal throughout the 19th-century, and lots of people wrote science-fiction in the 19th-century, but nobody wrote Malthusian science-fictional speculation until the 1960s. That seems to me odd. But, thinking about underpopulation, there’s a similar timeframe. Stories about population withering away were also a feature of Romanticism: Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville’s Le dernier homme (1805), Mary Shelley’s The Last Man and others; and then, after a similar lag, you get books like Brian Aldiss’s Greybeard (1964) or P D James’s Children of Men (1992). Maybe overpopulation and underpopulation are linked anxieties, two sides of the same coin.

More recently, Paul McAuley’s The Quiet War (2008) includes a future-earth with a much reduced population, where the global governments are rewilding all the open spaces according to an aggressive green agenda (though it also has widespread space colonisation for surplus population to expand into.

I don’t know how our future sparsely populated species will deal with the overabundance of cultural magnificence.

By burying it under a mountain of cultural mediocrity (the internet is very good for this…)

the idea that we will have less Mozarts… is like saying that we would have less olympic medalists

I don’t think so, because we don’t value Mozart primarily as an exemplar of the culture he came out of.

Btw I agree with Danby that the Mozart argument for population growth risible and it’s interesting to see it was made by LaRouche. The most straightforward argument is the standard utilitarian one: if happiness (or knowledge, aesthetic enjoyment, friendship, whatever) are good things to have in the world than more people = more of the good stuff.

The belief that population growth is a good thing – or even a necessity – even in a world that already has 8 billion people is breathtakingly irrational, and its popularity at least among the pundit class is testament to the power of the capitalist growth dogma.

The good news is that women everywhere tend not to accept the role of breeding machines. Wherever they have access to contraception, they opt for fewer children. Pro-natalist campaigns by autocratic governments are falling flat. The development in China is very interesting. Population has started declining and birth rates have been falling despite efforts to raise fertility, after the one child policy was abolished.

Examples of pro-Natalia’s punditry in the last part of
https://de.slideshare.net/amenning/the-human-population-challenge, which is already old but still quite up to date.

Given that population growth / societal momentum prevents decarbonisation and the protection of biodiversity, then “…population decline as a solution is to wait too long” might better be rendered as “population decline as a result is inevitable.”

Chris Armstrong@16 “… you just need to prove that a human is not more important than 500 fish.” No doubt CT would see the proposition I am not worth more than 500 fish as inarguable. That may be why no one has noted the proposition that follows from this, that a human is worth less than 1 000 fish. Or that if people really can be somehow proved to have a numerical value re fish, then it is equally probable some people can be claimed to worth more than others. And the ones worth less are the populations meant to improve the world by not existing. I do not think it is possible to advocate population decline without addressing the questions, which populations?

Overall I’m not at all clear on how this doesn’t posit an equality of people and fish in the example, even if the claim wasn’t explicitly made.

“When you add all of the other trillions of animals, the implication is that each human has to be worth more than many, many thousands of other animals. I don’t find that plausible.” There are two problems here, first the very notion of assigning numerical values, even mere ordinal “numbers,” to such groups. Inseparable from this, worth while to whom? To make any sense in this argument, it has to be, to themselves. I don’t know what that even means, though it may explain the fetishization of animals over plants and fungi and bacteria and protists.

Second all the animals and plants and fungi and bacteria and protists are collectively, Nature or the biosphere or the environment and it is entirely unclear to me how you can separate their value to themselves from their collective value as our home. We too are a part of Nature, which is not a helpless victim. Abolishing people is not even re-wilding, it is creating something new. In geological history, there are no pristine environments. The disappearance of species is the inevitable norm. Trying to preserve an imaginary geological past is another fundamentally reactionary utopia. That this one abolishes people is a trivial detail in some respects, because it’s a true utopia and pursuing the genuinely impossible is doomed to failure.

The notion that people are worth more to themselves than animals are, does not mean indifference to Nature. We can’t be indifferent. Some people have the expropriated parts of the world and its creatures as private property and are effectively looting it but opposing that is not the same thing as opposing people in general, not at all. In the end, I think, supporting removal of people is about reforming property rights, a way to minimize the damage without abolishing that kind of private property.

Your conclusion “…humans (in total) are actually quite a bit less important than other animals (in total)” fails I think.

Needless to add, but I’ll add it anyway, that in the 21st century, empirically, the correlation between population growth and economic prosperity is strongly negative. But that has never deterred a growth fetishist.

The Human Race is a disease organism.
We do little else but destroy.
We are not fallen Angels, but risen Apes, Killer Apes.
I’ll wager 500 fish that, before Mozart was mentioned in this piece,
that no one on this blog has listened to Mozart lately.

I have to admit I thought that NYT c column was the stupidest thing I ever read in the Times, at least not written by Brooks or Stephens.

The idea that we, sitting in 2023, have a clued about what life will be like in 2200, and what will motivate or not motivate people in various societies to have kids, is ridiculous. 2200 is 176 years from now. 176 years ago was 1848 — a time when electricity, medicine of any utility, and even indoor plumbing was years in the future.

So, I’m not particularly worried about a population crash in the year 2200. We have as much a clue about 2200 as people in 1848 had about what life here, with 8 billion people on Earth is like.

“Yes, but. We’ve had more than 330 years to make more Mozarts and there’s still only ever been just one.”

You missed Charlie Parker*. To say nothing of Coltrane, Metheny, Coleman, Meldau, and the rest of the jazzers. Heck, even the more inventive of the folkies and rockers, while not as harmonically sophisticated as Uncle Wolfie and the Jazzers, are way better musically and intellectually than the post-Dvorak classical world.

*: Seriously, the beboppers did the equivalent of classical harmony at insane tempos and in real time. Very much modern mozarts. And the more recent crop of jazzers do that with amazingly precise rhythm. Modern bebop is something else.

55:

Growth since industrialization is based on efficient extraction of resources and a growing market dependent on the systems that provide excess to increase the standard of living. But the extraction of non-renewable resources (or extraction at a rate which exceeds renewal rate) is theft from future generations—a tragedy of the commons taking place across time and generations. It is unsustainable.

engels — thanks for the articles. I believe it about actors, though its interesting that the Guardian article doesn’t make comparisons over time, and provides counter-evidence at the end. The pop star thing — again there’s comparison over time, and anecdotally when I think of the social origins of rock musicians in the past, I wonder what the truth is (and the ultimate lesson that chap draws is Thatcherite in the extreme!).

And this is more recent and rigorous:
https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2022/dec/10/huge-decline-working-class-people-arts-reflects-society

Re 68 From the Guardian article:

“This reflected a similar decline in the number of people with working-class origins, according to the paper in the journal Sociology by researchers from the universities of Edinburgh, Manchester and Sheffield. People whose parents had a working-class job accounted for about 37% of the workforce in 1981, but by 2011 that had fallen to about 21%.”

Am I reading this correctly that the Guardian is saying that whatever they define as the “working class” has shrunk to a small minority of the population? In that case, perhaps something is wrong with their definition?

Final addendum. These silly analyses are based on a selective and as I said anachronistic definition of the “working class” which excludes most service workers, the biggest chunk of the workforce, and also specifically excludes most working women.

But here’s another issue: who is typically overrepresented among manual laborers, especially those doing “dirty” work? Immigrants. They are certainly disadvantaged due to their economic class, but likely also due to nationality, immigration status and skin color.
But pointing that out is considered intersectional heresy by some Marxists…

I would argue that a larger population gives us fewer Mozarts and Newtons. Today we have lots of physicists as smart as Newton, and because of that each of them only manage to make a few discoveries, while a few hundred years ago a single genius could dominate a broad field. We may get more discoveries, more music, but never again individuals as famous as those two. Einstein may have been the last true science superstar everyone knows about, even those who understand little about what he did.

This also means that people may feel less and less significant in a larger population. Even if you are very smart, when you look back on your life you will have made little difference overall.

Engels, How does mentioning Biden refute my criticism?

Anyway what is interesting about these data is the finding that ONS classifications are making the working class statistically disappear. I would have expected Marxists to object but never mind.

How does mentioning Biden refute my criticism?

It doesn’t; it refutes your schtick of endlessly and angrily Marxplaining Marxism to me.

James Tilley’s recent book has a similar approach, and findings of numerical decline, but I don’t think it addressed the arts.
https://academic.oup.com/book/7696?login=true

Imho: Marxists should use different definitions but shouldn’t dismiss this (or interesting empirical work in general) for that reason.

IMHO, reading the OMS definitions, the problem is that they are classifying in C1 every office worker, and thus treating every office worker as a “manager”.

Rank-and-file office workers should constitute working class though (and perhaps very low level managers too, though this is more dubious).

The historian Geoffrey Parker noted that the two Eurasian states that best weathered the global crisis of the 17th century (the Little Ice Age with accompanying climate-related stresses, such as food shortages and migration) did so with programs of environmental restoration and population limitation (Japan and Iran). Both were brutal in their approaches, but they avoided collapse or prolonged civil war.

Are only 20% (and declining) of workers working class?

Sorry: to be clear, I was explaining Tilley’s view there; like MrMr I would use a broader definition.

84: Hear hear we do agree on something.
85: I have neither observations or opinions to add regarding the gentrification of British arts. I’m only pointing out that the data you cited do not support your thesis.

My thesis: music and acting have gotten posher
Study, as reported: fewer working class people in the arts
Ideologically correct Marxist interpretation of study thanks to Comrade TM: fewer people of manual working class origins in the arts

Still supports my thesis.

Just want to say on Harry’s point that declining representation reflects just numerical decline: the study’s authors see that as evidence of a long-term problem of low representation rather than a reason not to worry; also, demographic minority status is part of Tilley’s analysis of “exclusion” I believe.

Hmm. What happened in 17th century Japan that people are talking about???

Off hand, nothing. The year 1600 was, essentially, the start of a 250 year period of internal peace in Japan.

In particular, 1600 was the year of Sekigahara, the war that established the Tokugawa shogunate (which then moved to Edo in 1603, the official start of the period), which lasted until Perry lobbed cannonballs onto Tokyo (Oops, Edo, 1854 or so). Wealth during that period was measured in barrels of rice, and the game was the local warlords had wealth proportional to how much rice was produced in their feifdoms, all of which was brutally controlled by the Tokugawa military dictatorship. The period is largely seen as good news for everyone who managed to stay out of the Samurais’ way. Art, literature, theater flourished. Most of what we (and the Japanese themselves) think of as “traditional Japanese culture” (Noh, Kabuki, Sumo, Ukie, Hanga) is Edo period.

(I personally am a fan of the Meiji Restoration: the first written constitution in Asia, major langauge reforms that created universal literacy and modern Japanese literature, TRAINS!!!!, an awareness of and response to western literature and intellectual issues, and an excessive nationalism that led to obnoxious expansionism. Oops. Not all good. Sigh.)

But “attacking their own people”? Basically the internal wars (Sengoku Jidai, the warring states period) that broke out with the demise of the Muromachi period were over at the beginning of the 17th century and a 250 year period of internal peace started. So that’s an odd way to describe things.

Dunno much about Iran, though. I did play table tennis with the Iranian nuclear engineering students Cheney and Kissenger brought to MIT before the 1979 revolution.

re tm @ 87

Even capitalism cannot drive behaviour so narrowly that capitalists live frugal lives so that they may re-invest as much as possible. They spend big on mega-yachts, fifth mansions, vanity ‘think-tanks’, fantasy politics and much else. And attract and trail small hordes of social parasites and opportunists.

steven t johnson – given Japan’s topography and climate, unchecked land-clearing can have catastrophic impacts. The Tokugawa and their immediate predecessors imposed reforestation – with draconian penalties – which averted disaster (for the opposite, see the fate of the classic Maya).

On a small scale, this is still the case – Nepali villages have stringent rules about clearing key areas, again with drastic penalties, and Filipino villagers have been know to behead loggers. Their collective survival is at stake.

Peter T@94 The original comment was “… programs of environmental restoration and population limitation (Japan and Iran). Both were brutal in their approaches…” Draconian penalties to enforce reforestation is not the claim I thought I was questioning. I rather thoughtthis meant draconian penalties of some sort applied on a wide scale to the lower orders en masse to limit population, which strikes me as an attack on the population even if there are no pitched battles. Perhaps this is a model to emulate today, with “draconian penalties” for big landowners to enforce bioremediation? Or would what is admirable treatment of the people at large would be looked askance if applied to such in today’s democracy?

But I do think governments criminalizing whole portions of the population constitutes an attack on the people. Admittedly my belief the US is a police state by any objective measure is controversial.

David in Tokyo@92 doesn’t use the phrase “draconian penalties” of course. But the phrase about those who managed to stay out of the samurai’s way is suggestive. My personal impulse in thinking about such issues is that I would not be one of the lucky ones, not one of the winners, and certainly not one of the samurai, much less the daimios. And both shogun and emperor would be more like natural disasters, inexplicable and inhumanly remote. More or less like an ordinary person in today’s world.

The comment is informative enough but I’m still not clear on how the shogunate managed to limit population. The use of rice revenues as a sort of tax in kind/monetary system vaguely suggests a Malthusian restriction of population by impoverishing the teeming masses, to stop their teeming? Not at all clear on this. The overall argument does seem to be similar to the way all manner of golden ages have been found. Christians have often managed to find the Middle Ages inspirational for the way they formed so much of high Christian culture, similar to how the bakufu/Edo formed so much of high Japanese culture.

But harking back to a possibly less emotionally fraught example, the Good Emperors of ancient Rome? My belief is that beneath the high culture a persistent and radical impoverishment of the larger part of the population, overcrowded and undernourished, was the essential condition to the devastation of the Antonine plagues. That they were not a wholly exogenous catastrophe that ruined the Golden Age, not acts of God, but consequences of, well, an Age that was not really so Golden.

I too have more sympathy for the Meiji Restoration than is common, even if I believe that creating Japanese capitalism in lieu of the Japanese homologue of “feudalism” led inevitably in the end to Japanese imperialism/fascism. Another way of putting it, is, if the bakufu/Edo was so great, why did it go away?

The question of where is the minimum number of humans on the planet to maintain complex technology is related to my earlier comment about diminishing returns. A billion seems about right; certainly we are currently far beyond that. I am somewhat skeptical of the “BS jobs” narrative, but given how many of us globally struggle to get by with street trading, odd jobs, or get rich quick schemes, it seems obvious that only a tiny fraction of the current population actually builds and maintains our amazing infrastructure. Not a bad thing, mind, if we just redistributed our resources more equally, but the salient point is that one should easily be able to have fewer children for several generations without having to give up high speed trains or radiation therapy.

Must admit I am puzzled by the idea that England, Sweden, or the Ottoman Empire survived the 17th century less well than Iran or Japan, for some reason or other. Was the little ice age even actually very impactful? Best I can tell, the big collapses of that century were in the Americas, caused by introduced disease and colonial conquest, and the Holy Roman Empire, sparked by religious conflict and then really caused by the other European powers using Germany for a lengthy proxy war when Germans had already become war-weary. Those wouldn’t have been avoided by restricting population growth.

The problem with trying to see a country that limits population as wise is that the entire issue may be a collective action problem. If a nation limits its population while its neighbours don’t, it becomes less competitive against them (fewer soldiers, fewer workers). If it doesn’t limit its population, it will face a crisis further down the road. The solution has historically been to reduce the pressure locally by using some of its population surplus, in particular in the shape of young men on horses or longboats, to conquer others.

STJ wrote:
“I’m still not clear on how the shogunate managed to limit population.”

Wiki has a long article on pre-Edo and Edo period population* that is too detailed to figure out easily, but it indicated as an aside at one point that there were famines occassionally here and there and that folks moving to urban areas had even lower life expectancies (and children) than their rural brethren. I’d not heard that the shogunate had a population-limiting policy. Maybe they did. But a cursory look does seem to indicate that population did not increase greatly during the Edo period.

*: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_history_of_Japan_before_the_Meiji_Restoration

STJ also asks:
“Another way of putting it, is, if the bakufu/Edo was so great, why did it go away?”

Because people on the wrong end of repressive regimes tend to get tired of it and revolt. IMHO, Perry showed up at a convenient time for the anti-Bakufu types: European technology had run way ahead of Japanese, and Europeans were doing horrible things in Southeast Asia and China, and preventing that from happening to Japan wouldn’t have been possible under the Bakufu sakoku policy. So there was a need for Japan to change course.

(Did I get this idea across: the Japanese right really loves Edo and really hates the Meiji Restoration. Which is kind of odd, given that they also love the imperial system. Go figure. Also the Japanese write and consume an enormous amount of historical fiction, which I refuse to read because some of it is right-wing screed and much of it is telling people what they want to hear (i.e. lacking in intellectual challenge).
I suppose some of it is good stuff, but that of which I have read has been problematic: Shibue Chuusai (Mori Ogai’s last novel) is beyond hard, a Kikuchi Kan historical short story was easy reading but hard because I didn’t know what the presuppositions were. And all of it means I’d have to know not just the actual history but what the “what they want to hear” parts are as well.

There’s a really wonderful series currently being pulished in Gunzo about intellectual issues in Japan from mid-Meiji through the war. It’s on installment number 33 (of which I’ve made it through 3): it’s really hard going. I showed an interesting segment to my SO, and she said “Uh, guy, modern Japanese can’t read this stuff.” I said, “Just read it”, and she did, and was amused. (An American missionary crashed a college baseball game and got beat up by the student fans, causing an international hullaballoo**.)

Speaking of persuading my SO to read the stuff I do, there’s an absolutely insane off-the-wall over-the-top and fun short story by Yukio Mishima called “The Goddess”. To grok it, you have to understand that Mishima despised the Meiji-created aristocracy and the neauvous riche of the pre-WWII period. So I tell my SO that this story is great, she reads a page or two and says “I don’t have the time to read about people as obnoxious as that”.

**: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Imbrie

steven

re French bourgoisie – not a typo. Membership of the bourgoisie, which carried with it various privileges in terms of eligibility for civic office and, at the upper levels, access to the vast state patronage network (via purchase of office), depended on being able to maintain a certain level of income. More children than the family could afford threatened this, so farming infants out to rural wet-nurses was common. The wet-nurses were dubbed ‘angel-makers’ for their inability to keep their charges alive. So it was, in effect, out-sourced infanticide.

Another resource were the religious institutions where one could anonymously deposit an infant. Again, mortality rates were very high.

You are right that the limits are not universal, but imposed by class – with the lower classes hitting them while the upper escape. The counter to this is that a collapse hits everyone, and often the upper classes hardest (as elite competition intensifies it becomes bloodier).

French bourgoisie – not a typo

Are you sure? When I ask a Web search engine about ‘bourgoisie’, it assumes I mean ‘bourgeoisie’. Is there supposed to be a difference?

A typo is it is.

Peter T@102 appears to be more informed about the angel-making proclivities of bourgeois wealthy enough to buy office in pre-revolutionary France. It’s still hard to imagine such men and women depositing legitimate children in orphanages (which I thought were called angel-makers, reminding me my memory is good but not good enough.) The old joke is that the rich can afford sex and the poor can’t afford anything else, so it’s the middle classes which preach continence.

As to collapse hitting the upper classes hardest? That seems to be especially true of civil war within the nobility and socialist revolution. But as demonstrated perhaps I should re-read Walter Scheidel before continuing?

David in Tokyo@103 “Inversely, extreme economic uncertainty is said to result in people having larger numbers of kids in the hope they’ll have carers in their later years. Ironically, China seems to have knocked that mindset out of their population quite effectively. Noticing that the one-child policy had gone to far, they now find that people are happy having one or fewer kids. Oops.”

To be vain, I thought I had clearly said extreme economic uncertainty can cause rapid population decline, and even slow economic decline can cause slow population birth rate decline. (Examples referenced Yeltsin’s/capitalism’s counterrevolutionary assault on the Soviet people for a rapid decline, the so-called demographic transition for the slow.) I think that prospect of poor lifetime wages and property for most people’s children has rendered betting on them for social security is a bad bet. That’s why I’m inclined to believe scattered reports of birth rate declines in countries even poorer than the PRC. And I’m still very dubious of all interpretations of that as women liberated from sexual exploitation.

Being one of hoi polloi and a hopelessly ignorant vulgarian to boot, I have to ignore the question of more Miltons and Mozarts as hopelessly confused by the question of whether Milton and Mozart are objectively great in all senses but not partly selected as greatness as a class marker.

[The rest of this is about why birth rates in the PRC are dropping, but not an expert argument and not documented. Read at your own peril.] I’m not certain, since reporting on the PRC is so unreliable. The drop in birth rates in the PRC has an origin roughly like this: So far as I can tell, the Dengist liquidation of the Cultural Revolution involved returning land to long-term private use while raising rural private farmers’ income by lowering urban wages via inflation, the point of dropping price controls. (Yes, the process wasn’t a Big Bang as in the former USSR, which is why Deng wasn’t as catastrophic as Yeltsin, in my view.) And instead of providing for “excess” labor, they were exported into the cities/SEZs, suitably hampered by hukou to provide cheap labor for FDI.

Dengism didn’t provide enormously greater GDP growth rates, much less improving human welfare overall. The real boom didn’t come until various developments in world economy provided an opening. Despite the desperate devotion to the phrase, “reform and opening up,” most of the opening up was not in the power of the Party to provide.

Much of the pressure against one child was farmers wanting to breed farmhands, aka sons, as in the old days. (And much of the rest was a social inheritance that taught everyone sons were more profitable—aka desirable— in the long run than daughters, thus another child was needed in effort to get a boy.) Rapid concentration in semi-capitalist forms was also successful because the collectivization of the Fifties and especially the Cultural Revolution broke up old inefficient small acreage farms, fostering effective capital investment, higher cost seed and fertilizer, as well as the greater infrastructure and educational development of the countryside pioneered by the CR.

But in the longer term, treating land as a private resource has led to a vicious circle where local governments effectively sell land for revenue, leading to an inefficient (in human welfare terms! not in terms of profit!) development structure. That would be the ultimate cause of the real estate overhangs (not literally, there still aren’t enough homes for people, just too many for profit.) And the tendency towards deflation ultimately traces back there too I think. The burgeoning fiscal crisis of the state generates the intensifying pressures on the central government. The concentration of powers in Xi’s hands appears to me to be a routinist bureaucratic effort to deal with that.

The situation now appears to be, in most of the PRC which is still underdeveloped and rural and low income by wealthy country standards, is that many families cling to some scraps of land that can’t serve as farms, and send children to cities in hopes of some income. Even though the hukou system is something of a dead letter, this is more than compensated by the social brutality of private employers, domestic and foreign. By policy, state-owned enterprises, though not capable of liquidating all employees by selling themselves for cash and stocks and other financial instruments, still must trail the treatment of employees as prices and “competition” dictate. The weak social welfare system and given the general poverty of the PRC (much less poor than most of the world, yes, by the deceptively low World Bank standards, but still poor,) imply a debt system, where credit cards and other forms of finance extract massive profit would be difficult enought. (I think this is what’s called the middle income trap?) Even more, and decisively so I think, such fictitious capital would require a government far more committed to supporting capitalist methods of resolving economic crisis, with entail active attacks on living standards, not widespread raising. Higher education is no guarantee, nor is Party membership. The CPC is still a mass party with multifarious interlinks with wide strate of the population and simply cannot guarantee the children of even the greatest names (such as Bo) secure wealth. Thus, children are not a promising investment for retirement, thus the lowered birth rates.

India is the latest capitalist wonderland, but I think it is headed toward war, both with Pakistan and Bangla Desh and with massive numbers of internal forces.

Between India and the PRC, we have a significant portion of humanity, and thus it seems the anti-natalist program will triumph. All those end of the world scenarios and zombie attack scenarios where only man is the enemy but there is absolutely no material deprivation and people can luxuriate in the mansion of their choice are more about hostility to the masses than sound economic projections I think.