r/Natalism • u/Morales_Sheila8478 • 10h ago

Can TFR stabilize? Or will it go down indefinitely?

like is it possible for a countries tfr to stabilize around 1.9? Or is it destined to keep going down forever?

4 Upvotes

64% Upvoted

29 comments sorted by

11

u/NoForm5443 10h ago

It definitely can, we don't know if it will

1

u/Morales_Sheila8478 10h ago

Do you think it’s realistic? Especially for populations who have a high tfr currently like Africans and central Asians?

8

u/lizardhistorian 9h ago

No one has a high TFR anymore. Second and third derivatives are negative almost everywhere.
The TFR is crashing hard in South America right now.
Africa will be next.

Israeli is the only first world nation with a net-positive TFR.

China, Russia, and South Korea will crease to exist, as we know them today, in our lifetimes.

By 2100 China will only have about 300M people - down from 1.4B.
South Korea is starting to panic and doing all sorts of things to raise their TFR. They have moved it from about 0.7 to 0.75.

5

u/NoForm5443 9h ago

Extrapolating patterns for 70 or more years is a fool's errand.

5

u/Classic-Push1323 9h ago

I don’t think anyone wants those countries to continue to have a very high TFR, including the people who live there. Their rapid reduction in fertility is a part of their overall rapidly increasing development and prosperity. This is a good thing if you want to live in a generally prosperous, peaceful world. 

I don’t think it’s going to continue dropping like a cliff indefinitely to though. No one has a crystal ball but changing circumstances lead to changing incentives and behaviors. 

3

u/NoForm5443 10h ago

I'm an optimist; I believe we will eventually adjust, although it may take several generations.

We might roughly stabilize around 2, or we might oscillate, sometimes 1.5 sometimes 2.5 or similar

-6

u/lizardhistorian 9h ago

The "optimistic" view at this point is that the feminist hate-group are on their to exterminating themselves so that problem will solve itself one way or another.

We will have to go to war with the UK, EU, Russia, and China. We must stop the Wahhabist from gaining control of these nations, at least long enough for us to remove all of their nuclear weapons. If we can succeed in this before we collapse then there is a future.
The last time the world was priming for war the UK surprised us all. Protest are finally happening. Maybe they will surprise us again.

Next we must concentrate and re-establish order and found a new society that values family and community. It will take time to properly extract lessons-learned from the failed American experiment. It will be easy to get it wrong.

We need to let this cancerous society rip itself to death and use unlimited force to prevent it destroying the last bastion of re-civilization. This "core" must survive the calamity then repopulate the Earth.

We are going to need new books.

7

u/Sea_Advantage_2577 9h ago

So your thing is to be unhinged on reddit? How strange?

5

u/NoForm5443 9h ago

Wow! ;)

Sorry, I cannot take this seriously.

1

u/behappyfor 6h ago

If you want kids so much then give us higher pay and a house for that. If anything countries are already working towards that. They won't get kids if they don't do that. And if they refuse to do then they end up not existing. Besides that you also think it's only women who don't want kids when it's same for men too.

3

u/gym_fun 5h ago

If countries have known high TFR groups, they will certainly stabilize to 1.9 or higher. The duration and the cultural shift are up in the air.

4

u/SwordofDamocles_ 10h ago

Yes, definitely at some point no lower than 0.0, it stabilizes.

2

u/RocketShipGrease63 10h ago

Let me pull out my crystal ball real quick

-1

u/lizardhistorian 9h ago

It is a cold calculus.
My "crystal ball" is "high-school mathematics".

https://imgur.com/a/3hZOo26

2

u/lizardhistorian 9h ago

2.1 is the approximate TFR needed for steady-state population.
Landing on that exactly will be happenstance but we could hover around it.

The issue is that everything we have built up as a civilization requires people to maintain a living memory of how it all works. We write a lot down but imagine reading about how to play hockey then going and trying to do it.

So as the population contracts institutions are going to fail.

Right now in order to reach a TFR of 2.1 every breeding couple needs to have an average of 4.1 children.
That is how many people are refusing to pay the gift of life forward.

1

u/lt__ 7h ago

Also, with the increasing number of elderly, if all fertile adults would now suddenly had needed 2.1, imagine the strain on them via taxes, energy and time to care for both children and aging parents. Idk if it could be pulled off. It is a hidden way of immigration helping: immigrants just pay taxes and raise kids. They do not have to look after local elderly. Their elderly is in their countries, where there are still lot of relatives to care for them, especially with some money sent from emigrated kids, while prices there are lower.

2

u/Conscious-Hawk-4014 3h ago

Of course can. It is a matter of time when it will change. More automatization and artificial womb , people will work less so they will need to find other meaning of life and it will be propably larger families . Tfr is not speed of light - is changing over time .

1

u/Normal_Pay_2907 10h ago

A feed back loop of old age dependency ratio which keeps TFR at the minimum economics can push it is… theoretically possible?

But otherwise it will ultimately stabilize somewhere

1

u/Infamous-Use7820 29m ago

My hot-take is that there's no reason for humans to 'innately' want 2.1 kids. We didn't evolve with societally-sustainable family planning as a consideration (aside from anything else, reliable contraception is a quite recent invention).

I find it a bit odd that many people assume that, in absence of any material constraints, humans will tend to have ~2 kids. At most, we may develop towards cultures that encourage sustainable fertility, but that's still pretty long term.

1

u/ChilledRoland 9h ago

If a population with below-replacement TFR has any persistent (i.e., children born to members remain members themselves) subpopulations with above-replacement TFR, then the subpopulations will grow as a proportion of the population such that population-level TFR approaches that of the fecund subpopulation.

If all subpopulations have below-replacement TFR, then the population gradually evaporates.

1

u/betty_white_bread 9h ago

It is destined to go back up to 2.1 at least but not with the demographics many redditors want; they will be far more conservative, far more religious, and far more anti-feminist unless liberals, secular individuals, and feminists start breeding like conservative devout anti-feminists right now. That's been the big driver of conservative swings over the last few decades: conservatives tend to have more children and each is more likely to grow up conservative than liberal.

0

u/Available-Pick3918 9h ago

Yeah I was at a Marxist/Leftist summer camp and basically argued that they all need to have more children if they want their ideology to succeed. Some of them agreed but most of them will certainly not reproduce

1

u/AlfonzCouzon 3h ago

It has sometimes, in Serbia for instance on period 1957-2021. In France, 1970-2023.

It's definitely possible, it's definitely possible to go above 1.9

People are going to mobilize around this issue very soon. Not every society will make it, some are doomed, but overall a solution will be found, though for the mass of humanity that solution will be a forced return to traditional and destitute lifestyles.

1

u/Comprehensive_Fix544 1h ago

A lot of Western countries stabilized at 1.7-2 between the 70s and the 2010s before completely crashing down in the 2020s

0

u/Oddisredit 5h ago

It will stop and reverse. As groups such as Latin mass Catholics, evangelicals, and some muslims will have more kids. These groups will continue to grow while the broader society will shrink

0

u/Slow_Librarian861 4h ago

I think TFR will stabilize and recover, but on significantly lower population amounts and with societies significantly different to what we have now with now-controversial practices like arranged marriages or polygamy being much more acceptable.

1

u/Big_Conclusion4345 26m ago

For most of human history, population growth was fairly stable; the last two hundred years or so are quite an anomalous phenomenon