7Wannabe5 wrote: ↑Thu Dec 19, 2019 12:48 pm
Since human female response to
affluent urban lifestyle is to have fewer children,...
All sorts of hidden assumptions in that term affluent. Hasidic Jews in New York City report poverty level incomes, so as to benefit from welfare programs for the poor, but their true standard of living (food, hours of leisure, medical care, etc) is as high as anyone's, unless you want to count pure waste (jetting around the world, leaving giant houses mostly unoccupied, throwing out most food, household servants, etc) as part of high standard of living. Clearly these Hasidic jews are urban. Are they affluent? If so, then your assertion above is false. If not, then what do you mean exactly by "affluent"?
I see no hard biological reason why urban living, affluence and/or education of girls should reduce birthrate. The correlation is common, but that may be because all developed world cultures tend to be similar, so that all reacted similarly to technologies of the late 20th century ( cheap and effective contraception, television, internet, automobiles, etc). But further technology changes could change everything on the opposite direction, or society might simply be drifting naturally to a situation where affluent educated urban women want as many children at possible.
My baseline assumption about culture is that if some belief system is possible, it will eventually arise. To predict the future, I combine that assumption with the mathematics of exponential growth/decrease plus the limitations imposed by physics, geology, biology and other natural sciences. Result is always the same: Malthusianism or worse.
To be specific. Cultures can conceivably exist wherein women want as many children as possible, regardless of how well educated or urban or affluent the women are, just as cultures can exist where highly intelligent, educated, affluent and urban women (and men) believe that the creator of this physical universe sent his son down to earth about 2000 years ago (why not sooner?) and the son was crucified and then rose from the dead, but instead of showing himself in a public place after rising from the dead, so as to eliminate all.possibility of doubt as to this miracle, he onstead skulked about in secret and only showed himself to a few poor fishermen acquaintances, so now everyone has to take their word for what happened (actually, since these fishermen died long ago, we have merely hearsay testimony at this point). Also, this creator of the Universe showed his left butt cheek to a guy named Moses about 1500 years prior, and that's the only time anyone has ever seen this so-called God in the flesh, since mostly God lives in a place called heaven whose whereabouts the astronomers don't discuss. You get the point right? Namely, no limit to the bullshit humans can and will believe. We are simply naked apes, and what's truly surprising is that we can reason coherently at all, not that we often reason very poorly.
Anyway, believing that having as many children as possible is the most important thing in life is far easier than believing the farrago of nonsense that constitutes the typical religion, so I assume subcultures will arise in the future, if they don't already exist, which have this procreation focus as their core belief. Given that all developed societies strongly subsidize poor mothers (this is a significant new development that didn't exist in the past, when runaway procreation would have soon resulted in starvation of the poor mother and most or all of her brood, stopping the process) these subcultures will quickly overwhelm surrounding cultures which promote sterility, especially the "Sex and the City" lifestyle you might be thinking of when you mentioned "affluent urban lifestyle" of modern educated women in developed societies. This is already happening in Israel, for example.
Tl;dr:, far more likely, IMO, that population growth stopped and maybe reversed by physical limits than by culture.
[Update:] Somewhere in comments to the Limits of Growth podcast, I found a link to the below graph, which shows birthrate exploding after decline. Unlike "urban, affluent, educated girls ==> lower birthrate", for which there is limited historical precedent and no examples for other mammal species, "population stress ==> increased birthrate" has plenty precedents and is common among mammals. Hunting wolves and wild boar, for example, is known to increase birth rate. Baby boom in all countries affected by WWII, after the war, including those which were still very affluent after the war, such as USA.
Many historical examples of urban, relatively affluent and educated girl populations with very high birthrates, such upper classes in England and Germany prior to modern times. JSBach had 7 children with first wife, 13 with the second. Both these wives educated. Collapse of existing economic system might easily shock young women in places like Japan, who currently haves little interest in children, to suddenly become fanatic about producing large numbers of children, similar to Japanese women in 1950.
Population still declines in graph, despite boom in birthrate, because death rate rises even faster. Bottom line is that physical limits controls population in graph, not culture, same as I predict using my model of "any culture that can exist, will eventually exist; culture embodying exponential growth dominates in the long run; physical limits are hard limits; everything points to Malthusianism.or worse (ruling class exterminates masses in favor of robots)".
https://www.imgur.com/PkHS05m