A world with declining population. Full of old people due to population pyramid inverted. Full of stupid, and impulsive, and likely religious zealots, as those are the only groups with fertility rates above replacement level.
No, but it is true that groups with higher birth rates in spite of having middle class lifestyle tend to be religious.
there are lots of stupid, impulsive religious zealots with quiverfuls. But also a lot of wonderful, loving religious folks with quiverfuls.
I wish there were more other types who had a birthrate above replacement, but outside of religious circles, having more than 2 kids is rare and even considered uncouth.
If lots of couples have 1 or no kids and lots of people aren't even in couples, then we're going to need a LOT of people having 3 or more kids. But we aren't. Especially among the non-religious.
It could be that in the future, religion is a social trait selected for because it leads to higher birth rates.
I haven't seen a lot of introspection on this idea that doesn't quickly verge into, um, questionable rhetoric, and I'd like to see a lot more of it.
>It could be that in the future, religion is a social trait selected for because it leads to higher birth rates.
Why could it not also have been the case in the past as well? Many religions have tenets about raising many children. Could it be that this is why religion is very highly ingrained in society to begin with?
Quiverfuls are quite rare even in religious families with multiple children. It takes extraordinary conviction to continue when you are already feeding 10 children on one income. Even if those children do some of work.
In some circles, surely. But I took quiverful literally as that sect where they don't use anticonception at all (including counting days) and accept as many kids whenever they come. E.g. no conscious birth control at all.
They move in similar circles, because it is ideology. But I don't think they are much sizeable even among religious.
> I wouldn't even agree with the point that religious people tend to have bigger families.
That would be pretty silly then. Most successful religions have two things, both of them based on growth. One is a means to capture people not in their religion by conversion. The other is by codifying good parenting and breeding habits. The biblical old testament is rife with teachings like this for example.
Population fade with success is not a modern problem, it is an ancient one. In the past if you didn't have a large enough population you were at risk of attack by stronger nations.
Most religions are not 'successful', they are probably declining in numbers because the religious people in those religions are not having big families.
> I wish there were more other types who had a birthrate above replacement, but outside of religious circles, having more than 2 kids is rare and even considered uncouth.
I’ve never heard people having more than two children being referred to as uncouth. Honestly that’s disgusting.
>Full of stupid, and impulsive, and likely religious zealots,
They are so stupid, yet everyone else let themselves be out-bred by them? I think if that happens in the long-term, it more or less suggests "religious zealots" have adapted better.
Pew's numbers [0] predict greater than normal increase in Muslims over the next 30 years, by percentage of the world population.
I'm not suggesting that all muslims are "religious zealots", but yes, growth of population sections by religion is a real thing. On the other hand atheists are expected to stay the same, or even decline. No one can say what percent of people are going to be "zealots", but you could say it's hard to be a "religious zealot" without a religion. So, it seems likely, all other things being equal, that yes, religious zealotry (and all religious activity) will increase.
It's not stupid to be "out-bred": you're enjoying your own personal life more by keeping more resources for yourself, rather than sacrificing your time and resources on kids with the goal of continuing your family line. Your kids, grandkids, and descendants aren't likely to be of much help after you're dead.
This is an individual vs. society issue: having few kids is better at the individual level, but for society it's not sustainable unless we can figure out how to significantly extend lifespans (i.e., reduce the death rate in-line with the reduction of the birthrate).
One may argue that if you expand "for society" to a worldwide "for humankind", it's perfectly sustainable not to have kids at the current population level.
I think it's a safe assumption that those with religious dogma and those in regions of high child mortality will continue to have many kids, one way or another. The "educated" non-religious class is probably the only one that has a real choice to make. If they keep up reproducing at 2.1x replacement level while everyone else exceeds that level, the worldwide population is just going to continue to grow and then we're in real trouble.
I'm perfectly happy to let "my society" be taken over by "the other kind" who out-reproduced me and my peers. One way or another, we'll have to stop growing as a species, and one group's excesses have to balanced out by another group's shortfalls.
The only problem with that (if you care about what happens to humanity after you die) is that it will likely result in a major collapse of society. The religious nuts and those in regions of high child mortality (which means they're all poor and uneducated) aren't going to be able to maintain or advance a technological society. They can breed, but that's not enough to know how to keep complex systems running, and things will collapse just like Ancient Rome, with technology being lost and everyone going back to being feudal serfs, or worse.
Personally, I just don't see a way to avoid some kind of major collapse of society due to one or more of the many factors facing us. For this issue, I think greatly improving human longevity is absolutely necessary, and if we don't do that, we're going to have another Dark Ages of some kind.
If your only goal is to have children that can be done easily. The hard part is raising it with someone you may find out later you don't really like, that leads to dysfunctional or unhappy family situations. And regardless whether you are happy or not, having children limits your options in where can you go and what you can do. The goals of blue and white collar workers are different, the former is looking to just make a living to get by and have a family and that's the best they can hope for and sometimes that's all they need. The latter is seeking a balance of lifestyles that settling down makes it impossible to continue to seek the place where they are content and not settle for the next opportunity.
As someone who is a practicing Catholic and therefore knows lots of people who are not family members who also regularly attend services, I can say at least anecdotally that tolerance and zeal for one's faith are not terribly correlated (as are intelligence and zeal, for that matter). I'm not sure about any studies, but the presence of counter-examples would make me look to confounding factors.
I’m not sure I’d call the people who successfully reproduce stupid. I wouldn’t call people that don't reproduce stupid either but there’s a case to be made around failing your primary objective as a living being not being a “smart” move.
