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I see no reason for that assumption, birth rates are dropping even in countries that have never tried outright population control measures, and in turn they do not respond to attempts to increase fertility.
This is still transitory, since it increases selection pressures on the remaining fertile till we reach new resource constraints. Even then, only the ignorant would think that we'd be anywhere close to reaching that limit in this century, or the next, unless we absolutely change or exceed the limits of our biology (which might happen).
When you say "never tried population control" do you mean things like the one child policy, and mandatory sterilization, or propaganda about sex being primarily for pleasure, contraceptives, abortion, "women's empowerment", deconstruction of the family, and deconstruction of various identities?
The former.
I dispute the latter matters all that much because "propaganda" in the other direction has been useless, leaving aside more concrete incentives.
No, propaganda in the other direction has not been useless- red tribe propaganda about how awesome having kids is is probably the main reason for their oddly high fertility rates, and non-haredi Jews in Israel are to my understanding under a very similar propaganda-fertility boost, albeit more about the duty of having children than the joys. Now if that propaganda is obvious lies, or drowned out by anti-natal propaganda, it’s useless. The key is to make good propaganda.
Fair point, but I would like to point out that as propaganda goes, the latter doesn't really scale.
No, Israel doesn’t scale. American country music about how awesome going to your kid’s sports matches is and how women smiling when they hold babies is the most attractive thing about them easily could, though. And it’s not as if eg Japan couldn’t have its own version of Israel’s natal propaganda.
I mean, we kinda know that a trend in American schools to try and dissuade teen pregnancy by giving girls dummy babies to look after (to show how stressful it is) had the opposite effect! More evidence, if it's even needed, that just because an idea sounds good doesn't mean it works out.
I mean Japan has the highest birthrate in the region- it’s very possible that a fairly minor campaign about the duty of having children is responsible and they just need to turn it up to 11. Or produce a bunch of pop music telling mid women they’ll be beautiful if they want to be moms. There seems like there’s a frustrating dearth of data on the subject of pro-natalist propaganda, but that it’s probably a fascinating topic. Agreed that things don’t always work out the way you expect them too(although I’d point out that your example just points at an obvious in retrospect mechanism of ‘teenaged girls are biologically wired to want to reproduce and reminding them is not going to dissuade them’, which progressive education bureaucrats ignored for biological reasons).
It really wasn't obvious to me, and that's even accounting for the hindsight bias! Parents regularly complain about how difficult handling small infants is, and since this one is a mere dummy with a speaker and other minor electronics, I would have expected it to not produce the same emotional attachment as a real child would.
If you thought that was obvious, kudos to you, and I mean it.
I'm not against more pro-natal propaganda myself, I just think that even in the worst case, technology will bail us out before most places experience dimished standards of living due to their aging populace, with the notable exceptions of Japan and maybe China, the former likely to suffer greatly within the decade, the latter the next.
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Well, it's something reasonable people can disagree on.
For my part I believe propaganda in the other direction has been essentially non-existent, and if you look at the sub-groups that do reproduce you'll find that they hold strong beliefs about all the issues I mentioned above, which go in the direction opposite to that promoted by the regime.
Sure, I can agree to disagree. I see it as being moot for most relevant time scales, be it because we're not going to expand beyond 11 billion in a "business as usual" world (itself extremely unlikely), or because of clear technological pathways that also raise the carrying capacity by OOMs.
But I will say that the evidence that strong pro-natal propaganda doesn't work is also evidence that anti-natal propaganda doesn't work, it seems that the a decreased urge to have or raise children is a consequence of modernity as a whole, not concerted action by any particular interest group, barring a weird definition of interest group that would include like 5-6 billion people.
This isn't a "if she floats she's a witch, and if she sinks she's a witch" deal either, because I am transferring the probability mass to a third outcome, that having 1.8 kids is what most people raised in modern culture want to do, at least from revealed preferences. I don't think that something as broad as widely-conserved aspects of global culture ought to be described as propaganda, not merely things like condom distribution or sex ed classes. The latter is not outright anti-natalist, it only seeks to shift the window of fertility to a more stable part of a woman's life, even if in terms of outcomes it does likely suppress total birth rates. The teachers conducting them or the bureaucrats endorsing them don't care if their kids go on to have 3 or 4 kids, as long as they don't do it while in school.
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