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Bob English's avatar

Many of these examples seem to correlate with resource limitations. In an agrarian society, if the amount of land is limited, increasing population leads to privation. This may be expressed in terms of not wanting to divide land to maintain status, but if there are more people on the same amount of land, with static technology, they will all be poorer and eventually starve. Describing this as a fundamentally social process rather than a social response to resource constraints seems like a reach.

Modern technological societies are built on childhood education. This puts economic stress on parents, both because education itself is expensive and because children are no longer a source of income. Such societies also use the production of women, reducing the amount of time women can devote to childrearing, further increasing the downward pressure on fertility. All of this would be true, regardless of social norms, so it seems odd to claim that social norms drive this, in preference to this being the social response to changing conditions.

Beyond that, at least some of the concern over this trend comes from a belief that unless the workforce keeps growing, technology will stagnate and progress will cease. If that is the case, however, removing women from the workforce in order to increase fertility would have the same effect.

My own expectation is that we will find a series of technological improvements (increased longevity, more efficient fertility and childrearing, improved allocation of resources) that will stabilize the population and maintain technological (defined broadly) progress. Whether population increases at that point will probably depend on how well we have addressed the other needs (land, waste, and energy) that constrain human population.

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Dominic Tarro's avatar

You should take a look at Augustus’s Moral Laws (Lex Julia). He’s often described as a devout social conservative (aristocratic, traditional Roman virtue and family structure), and the laws lend credence to that. They offer a glimpse of what Augustus thought had changed amongst his peers. They don’t seem to have worked in the long run (which is informative if we’re thinking about where to make the changes), and many were repealed soon after his death.

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