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First, I want to mention that almost all population projections I'm aware of completely ignore even the possibility of evolution and selection. Plenty of them are just simple regressions that implicitly assume a homogenous population. This is, of course, complete bunk. The number of (surviving & procreating) offspring is literally the thing evolution selects on, and no human population ever has been homogenous across traits. So this is almost guaranteed to be a transient phenomenon, unless you deny evolution in general. Given that at least in my home country of germany we're already at a TFR of 1.6 again, population differentials in family size and heritability estimates for most traits being in the ballpark of 50%, it's probably a matter of only a few generations until we worry about too high population growth again instead.
That means, aside from having to deal with short-term issues such as a terrible working vs dependent/unemployed ratio for the next decade, the primary question should be: Who do we currently select for and who ought we select for? And there is some negative, but also some positive views on this front. On the negative side, we definitely select for unemployed and low time preference people who fail to take the necessary precautions to not become pregnant. On the positive side, we select for people who want to have children and are as such likely to treat them better and likely to prepare themselves better in general. We select to some degree against both hedonism and doomerism, since both inclinitations straightforwardly lead towards being childless, and instead in favor of certain kinds of optimistic long-termism, which includes in particular religiosity. We select somewhat against education in general, but also more specifically for pragmatic people that don't waste an endless amount of time getting stuck in dead-end endeavours (which includes certain educations) throughout their early adulthood. And so on.
Overall, I'm not entirely sure whether we really need to change anything. There are a few horror stories such as drug addicts with almost one heavily disabled kid per year (a colleague of mine works with such cases in a non-profit), but these are basically rounding errors in practice. Poor/unemployed people have slightly more kids, but not by a crazy amount, and these are still mostly pretty normal people. Down syndrome is a good example of positive development: In theory, the modern world enables heavily disabled people to have arbitrary numbers of children whereas they couldn't provide for them before. In practice, not only do the great majority of people with Down's have no children at all, we also massively reduced the number of de novo cases by screening, since even the people who want to have children don't want a heavily disabled kid.
That said, I think the current issues boil down to a few factors:
We didn't evolve to actually want kids before we have them. We evolved to want partnership and sex, and then to nurture and protect any child that might arise from the union. Furthermore, men and women have very different want profiles on this topic. Unless we force people to have kids against their will, easily accessible, reliable contraceptives will always mean a substantially reduced TFR until we have had time to select in favor of wanting kids directly.
Culturally, we spend an inordinate amount of time and pressure teaching kids to not get pregnant too early, but there often is no conception of having them too late or having too few children. My parents always told me that I should wait (when they heard about our first, their first words were literally "so soon?" I was 27!). TV showed me unhappy teen pregnancies on one side, and endless fun adventure for the childless on the other. Even doctors will misinform women that they can have kids whenever they want, in spite of the data clearly showing that even at only 35 there already is a substantial chance for pregnancies to fail, and an even higher chance for disability. School and university made clear that I ought to postpone children until after I'm finished. And finally, friends and acquaintances treat having children as just one lifestyle choice among many.
We have seen an inversion in the economics of having children thanks to retirement. In the past, children were your retirement, the childless depending on the kindness of strangers or at best their neighbours and friends. Kids could help on the farm as early as the late single digits, and could be gainfully employed by 14. Today, having kids means earning much less money in the first place due to not being able to work as much and due to missing promotions, then of that reduced amount you have to spend substantial money to care for them, and then due to earning less you also have a reduced retirement. Child money across the west is peanuts compared to all this, in particular considering that all retirement systems absolutely require a sufficient number of new humans to function at all.
We can't do much about the first except wait, but for the second and third we can. We should inform people adequately about the biological risks of late pregnancies. Programs supporting grandparents to take time off work to help out with child rearing would also be quite positive, since they usually are in stable employment, will not miss promotions anymore and many have already passed their most productive years anyway. Education needs to be shortened and focus on things that are useful. Likewise wasting more than one or two years in early adulthood should be frowned upon much more. There should be less TV and media, and more activities like outdoors summer camps, since the former will always idealize childless adventuring, while the latter is almost intrinsically family-friendly. Retirement probably needs to be rehauled entirely so that that having kids - be it biologically or adopted - is similarly net-positive for your retirement prospects as earning decent money. We need to get rid of many "child protection" laws that sound good in theory but mean in practice that they can't do any paid work whatsoever. Lastly, I've found that a mentality of "hobbies and most fun activities are for kids" coupled with "adults are primarily allowed to engage in these as long as they do so for the benefit of kids" leads too a much more happy and family-oriented life, since on one side without this it's easy to oversaturate yourself with "fun" at the expense of long-term happiness, while on the other you look forward to having kids so that you can do these things more again. Doesn't mean that the childless aren't allowed to have any fun at all, but just that overindulgence in these things should be socially frowned upon.
When a trait is selected for for a long time, it's heritability ultimately drops to zero. If fertility has been strongly selected for, we should expect its heritability to be very low and, therefore, further selection should be very difficult. That said, heritability actually probably hasn't been selected for for very long because having as many children as possible doesn't make sense if you don't have the resources to support them all.
Judging by the behaviour of some of my ex-girlfriends, this is obviously false.
This is a popular myth, but it's false. Empirical evidence shows that children have always been net recipients of resources from their parents over the course of their lives. If you think about it, it's the only thing that makes any sense evolutionarily. Parents who don't invest as much as possible into their offspring are a disadvantage to those that do. It makes no sense for old parents who don't reproduce to take resources from their children instead of letting their children invest those resources in their grandchildren.
"Some" is the key word here. If this was strongly selected for, literally everyone would desperately want as many kids as possible and take whatever necessary actions to achieve that. But only some people want them, and even then "only" normal numbers. This is clear evidence that wanting kids was in the past at best weakly selected for. Compare that to sex or partnership - asexuality is extremely unusual among males, while almost all women generally hate loneliness.
I also want to note here that significant variability is actually a prerequisite for fast selection - if nobody wanted kids intrinsically we would be fucked, as we would have to rely on de-novo generation of mutations and/or wholly new attitudes which are unreliable and then take a long-ass time to fixate in a population. But it's more like a two-digit percentage of the population already wants kids seriously, which only requires a few generations to mostly fixate.
Retirement in most countries is also a net recipient of resources over the course of most people's live - here in germany it is said we get less than half of the money we put in back! Our arguments don't really disagree. The point is that the children will care for their parents in old age when they can't fully provide for themselves anymore, which for most of history was only a few years. We know they did because we have records of them doing so. Still of course if you look over the entire life, children will have received far more resources from their parents than vice versa.
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Is any of this based on data?
Okay, based on your model, how rapidly do you think you can select for this trait and how low do you think the world population would drop prior to leveling out? Why would you expect selection for 'wanting children' to be more robust than 'too irresponsible to use contraception?'
And most of all, given that you blame the precipitous drop in TFR on cultural factors, why would you focus so much on genetics when cultural shifts can obviously happen much more rapidly? By the same token that:
Your prediction relies on constant cultural conditions lasting ten? Twenty? Who knows how many generations it would take to select for fertility in the presence of contraception, modulo the kind of actual genetic engineering that today remains deep, deep science fiction.
To varying degrees. Some are easy to show and generally replicate well across countries (unemployed, religious & uneducated people have more kids, people who want kids have more of them than people who don't, if you explicitly ask people why they don't have children then (climate-)doomerism is among the top ideological reasons...). Some are difficult to conclusively prove but generally widely agreed upon - for example, that people who actually want kids are generally better prepared to have them, will be more patient with them, etc. is one of the few things conservatives, liberals and even those damn family therapists themselves all agree on. Some are my opinion - for example it's quite common for people to claim they can't afford kids, but then they go on 4 vacations per year, have 2 dogs and have multiple expensive hobbies they engage in. I view that as obvious hedonism.
On the first point: The heritability of fertility makes world population stabilization unlikely in the foreseeable future. For those who don't have access, this is a paper showing that incorporating the heritability of fertility into models will already have substantial impact on population trajectories in the year 2100 time frame. On the second point, it's mostly my interpretation of the current situation - The only people who really completely fail to take contraceptives AND then fail to abort AND do so for multiple kids are drug addicts blasted out of their mind who nevertheless manage to survive multiple years, which are quite rare and if you've seen their children you'll know they are unlikely to repeat this fecundity. Irresponsible "normal" people usually have one, maybe two kids and then learned their lesson, and often at least attempt to drill into their children to not have children too early (with admittedly varying success). People deliberately choosing to have, say, 3-5 kids, telling their kids how great it is to have lots of grandkids, supporting them, etc. just seems like a much more stable arrangement.
They hardly need to be perfectly constant along all axis, as long as contraceptives are widely available & used we will select for people who are fertile in spite of them. Also, note that selection/heritability does not need to be strictly genetic - my point is that even without deliberate state intervention, we're already selecting for people who have family-friendly traits on both the biological and cultural level. We don't necessarily need to force the "correct" attitudes on people (especially given that we might end up wrong).
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Is this number just for Germans or does it include immigrants too?
Afaik it include some immigrants that have a residential or citizen status, but not nearly all. The main origin countries are still poland (1.4), turkey (1.9) and russia (1.5), so the most recent waves from arab countries have not been (fully) incorporated as far as I can see. Also, the TFR of germans without migration background (which is not necessarily ethnic germans, though) has allegedly been increasing as well from the low of 1.4 to somewhere above 1.5.
Can you post a link to the data you're referencing? Overall TFR regardless of ethnic origin is down to 1.34 last year and the number of births so far projects out to a similar or lower figure for 2024. There was minimal upwards movement in the late 00s and early 10s, but this could plausibly be related to immigration, see the jump between 2014-2016. I don't see at all where you're getting the present upwards trend you've mentioned from.
Hmm, I was going by the numbers in the time frame 2016-2020 since I read an in-depth report which only included data up to 2020. I guess that means scratch the part about germany in particular, but the general argument primarily derived from The heritability of fertility makes world population stabilization unlikely in the foreseeable future, doesn't really depend on it.
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