Below is a glossary of terms for demography and economic collapse, in alphabetical order. This list
includes both generally accepted terms and ones that I have invented myself (as noted below term). All definitions are my own and may include an element of opinion that
others may not agree with.
Where an Instagram link is given, this is a video of less than one
minute on the
Demographic Doom Instagram feed, usually excerpted from a
third-party video.
If a YouTube link is given, this is usually a short third-party video explaining the
term and its implications.
THIS PAGE IS NO LONGER MAINTAINED. It was active between March and April 2019. As the number of terms
grew,
putting them all on a single page became awkward. Instead, I am now adding new definitions to the
DD Blog. As each new term is added, it is announced
with a Twitter
post, you can see all of these new posts via the Twitter hashtags
#ddoom_definition for any term appropriate for
this glossary and
#ddoom_mynewterm for my own original
terms.
Glossary terms below will not be revised, but the definitions on the blog can be.
—Glenn Campbell
antinatalism
A philosophy asserting that bringing children into the world is morally wrong.
There are many arguments in support of this philosophy, but the most interesting{my opinion}
is the idea that in producing a child, you are creating a world of potential
suffering that did not have to happen. For example, if you make a child and they
suffer from a debilitating and painful disease, you are responsible for that
misfortune in the same way that you are responsible for injuries if you drive
drunk and cause an accident. If your child turns out fine, it does not absolve you
of the enormous risks you took in having them.
If antinatalists had their way, no one would have children ever again and
humanity would eventually vanish. To counter this position, you need to believe
that humanity has some intrinsic value that is worth preserving in spite of
the risks.
The process of integrating new immigrants into a country's existing culture.
If immigrants are not assimilated, they tend to form isolated enclaves of their
home culture (say, in the suburbs of Paris) where they
interact only with other ex-patriots.
These enclaves are generally more impoverished than the country at large and
may import the problems of the old country into the new one.
They may also generate tensions with the native population, which
sees their country being "overrun" by people who are not like them.
While a country in need of workers can theoretically open its gates to
immigration and admit large numbers of new citizens, assimilation is slow
process and places practical limits to how many immigrants can be admitted.
If immigration happens too fast, there is a risk that voters may become frustrated
and elect politicians who want to ban all immigration. See immigrant phobia.
A monetary incentive offered by a government to try to induce its citizens
to have more babies. For example, the Russian government offers US$9000 to couples
for each child after the first. Such a reward can take the form of cash payments
or tax breaks, like a lifetime tax amnesty offered by Hungary's government.
A baby bonus is different than pro-natalist
services like subsidized child care and free health insurance,
which are not
paid directly to the parents.
Cash-strapped governments like Russia prefer baby bonuses because they are less
expensive than government-sponsored family services.
These governments typically claim their program is
successful, but it is impossible to judge this claim scientifically because
there is no control group (parents not offered the bonus). Parents who would have
a second child anyway are happy to collect the money, but it isn't clear that the
offer changed their minds. If a cash reward like this did change someone's mind,
one would wonder if they are having another child for the right reasons.
For example, a drug addict might have another child just for the $9000 bonus and
neglect the child thereafter.
Such inducements are destined to fail because no cash reward the government can offer
can compensate for the huge costs and risks of child rearing. Even in Russia,
a one-time $9000 payment
is trivial compared to the 20-year cost of raising a child.
A temporary period of high birth rates (lowercase), or specifically the post-war Baby Boom
in the United States (uppercase).
The U.S. Baby Boom has a clear start date—1946—since it began as
young males returned home from World War II in mid-1945. They married their sweethearts,
and nine month later babies started popping out.
The end date is less clear, but it roughly coincides with the legalization of the
birth control pill in the early 1960s. The generally-accepted final year of the boom is 1964.
Usage Notes:{my opinion}
In this project, "baby boom" in lowercase refers to a birth spurt in any country
while "Baby Boom" in uppercase usually refers to the U.S. post-war Baby Boom from
1946 to roughly 1964.
To qualify as a (lowercase) baby boom, the high-birth period must be preceded by a low birth period.
For example, we wouldn't normally say
Niger is experiencing a baby boom, because its birth rates have been high for decades
and haven't fallen. Instead, it is experiencing an ongoing population explosion.
The United States, however, experienced low fertility during the Great Depression
and WWII
A period in the 1970s and 1980s when the total number of births in the USA
was relatively high.
This was not due to high fertility, which had already fallen to around
replacement fertility, but because there were so many women in their
childbearing years, thanks to the Baby Boom.
Any of many deliberate methods intended to prevent human procreation.
These methods can include abstinence, condoms, the birth control pill,
and natural birth control. While most birth control methods allow people
to have sex without producing babies, the term can also encompass not having
sex at all (abstinence) or timing sex to minimize the chance of conception.
A statistical measure of how many babies are born in a community in a given year.
Usually expressed in births per 1000 people. For example, if 1000 babies are born each
year in a city of 50,000, the birth rate is 20 per 1000.
{my opinion}Birth rate is subtly different than fertility,
which is expressed as the number of
babies borne by the average woman in her lifetime.
Birth rate is more precise, since
it can be directly calculated from hospital and census records,
but it is also more
opaque. Is "20 per 1000" a good number or a bad one? It is hard to
tell without more information. Fertility, on the other hand, is more speculative.
It takes into account the proportion of females in the community
and the age at which they give birth. As long as census and hospital records are
correct, birth rate is never wrong, but fertility can be, since it makes assumptions about
the future and requires a complex
methodology to calculate.Birth rate can be expressed with great precision, like
22.32 per 1000, but I regard it as false precision
to express fertility with more than one
decimal place. In this project, I may refer to "birth rate" as a shorthand for fertility,
but I never give a number, because none of my readers will know what it means.
While I do give numbers for fertility, I try to qualify them as approximate. I say that Japan has a fertility rate of "roughly 1.3", because various sources list it as
anywhere from 1.2 to 1.4. The only important thing is that Japan's fertility
is "substantially below replacement fertility" and has been so for
many decades.
The ratio of children to adult caregivers in a family, school or daycare.
For example, in a household with 3 children and two parents where only one parent works, the parenting ratio is 3 during the day when only one parent is on duty and 1.5 at night when both are on duty. A classroom with 10-30 children and one teach has a
very high child-parent ratio, at least while class is in session. This is a more
efficient use of adult resources, even if it means each child gets less attention.
The evolutionary theory espoused by Charles Darwin.
Some would argue that humanity is getting "dumber" because in the modern world, the
least intelligent are most likely to reproduce.
While this may in fact be true, strict Darwinism does not apply.{my opinion}
To change the genetic make-up of humanity, there would have to be a near-extinction
event in which all the smart people were killed off.
As it stands, the smart people are still alive and breeding with other smart people,
just not at the same rate as dumb people.
A better concept is trait dilution: The traits that make people more successful
in society are being diluted by less-functional traits.
See demographic-economic paradox
democratic age distortion (my term) or age polarization
A fundamental flaw in democracy that allocates more power to the elderly, who will
soon be leaving the world, than to children, who will be occupying it for much longer.
One problem is that the elderly can vote, right up until the time of death, while
children under 18 cannot. Retired people are also more likely to vote than younger adults, having more time
to get to the polls. This distortion means that old people will invariably vote to
preserve their pensions and other benefits at the expense of education and
the health of future generations.
The accepted observation by demographers that in the modern world
economic success is inversely related to fertility.
In short, the wealthier you are compared to the rest of your society, the fewer
children you are likely to have. This is a reversal of the condition during
most of human history when the wealthy tended to be more successful in
producing surviving offspring, since they could offer better resources like
more nutritious food and better physical protection.
The observation, in virtually all cultures, that fertility tends to be inversely
related to the years of formal education experiences by the mother.
For example, a woman with little or no formal education is likely to bear more
children than a woman who has learned to read and write. Likewise, a woman with
advanced degrees and training, like a PhD or medical license, is likely to have
fewer children than one with only a college diploma.
While this seems like a paradox at first, it makes practical sense,
because when a woman is in school, she inclined to put off childbirth until
after her studies are completed. Delaying childbirth has the net effect of
reducing fertility, since by the time an educated woman is ready to have
children, her remaining reproductive years may be limited.
The broad observation that the more successful a person is—by whatever criteria
you measure "success"—the less likely they are to have children.
"Success" can be any measurable quality with positive and negative poles, including
intelligence (as measured by standardized tests), education (as measured by years
of schooling), income (in comparison to other members of ones society), artistic
accomplishment (as rated by critics), scientific accomplishment (as measured by the
number of papers published), etc. No matter what the field may be, if a person
is rated as "successful", they will probably have fewer children than those
who are "unsuccessful".
Part of the explanation for this observed phenomenon is that people who have
devoted themselves intensely to one field tend to have less time for children.
The multi-decade period after a country's birth rate falls from high to low, when
there are a large number of active workers and relatively few dependents (children and
old people). Since there are many taxpayers and consumers and relatively few people using government
services, the society may experience temporary prosperity. The prosperity ends when
the workers from the early high-birth period finally retire, when they shift from
being taxpayers to tax consumers.
For example, the children of the Baby Boom began joining the workforce in large numbers around the mid-1967 (when the first of them turned 21). The period from 1967 to 2011, when the first Baby Boomers retired, could be called America's demographic dividend.
Since birth rates fell after the mid-1960s, there weren't many children to support,
and because the Great Depression and WWII were low-birth periods, there weren't many
seniors. Economically, it was the best of all possible worlds.
Other countries experienced their dividend at different times. For example, China's birth rate did not fall until the early 1980s. Thanks to its One-Child Policy following a
high-birth period, China had a huge workforce and relatively few children and old people.
This gave China its main advantage in the world economy: a vast and cheap labor force.
That benefit is ending around the present day (2019) as the workers from the high-birth
period prior to the One-Child Policy begin to withdraw from the workforce. With a looming shortage of workers and growing demands of seniors, the "China Economic Miracle" may be coming to an end.
Demographers naively talk about "harnessing" the demographic dividend.{my opinion} They see it as an opportunity for a society
to use its extra resources to invest in its future. Unfortunately, the dividend is
more likely to generate a temporary spurt of superfluous wealth, where both governments
and individuals spend their extra income on unnecessary luxuries. During the dividend,
everything seems to be growing, and most people caught up in it believe the prosperity
will go on forever. This leads them to incur huge debts on the assumption that
growth will continue. When economic growth inevitable slows and reverses due to
a shrinking workforce and growing number of seniors, these debts
become unpayable.
The decades-long delay between a change in birth rates and a corresponding change in total population.
Most commonly refers to the case where national fertility falls below
replacement fertility
but does not result in an immediate loss of population, but it can also work in the
other direction: If population is falling but birth rates rise above replacement level,
it may take decades before total population starts to climb again.
Example: Japan's fertility has been below replacement since the 1970s, but the
population did not peak until 2010.
Excluding migration, two things can account for a growing population while birth rates
are below replacement: (1) Greater longevity of old people (which was the major factor in
Japan), and (2) an excess of fertile women from an earlier high-birth period.
Although their individual fertility may be low, the number of mothers is high, so there
are a lot of infants. The latter occurred in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s
during the Baby Boom echo. Fertility was low, but there were a lot of mothers
from the Baby Boom.
A largely discredited theory that suggests high population growth can be
self-reinforcing and remain high indefinitely. Used to justify continued belief
in a population explosion.
Not to be confused with a fertility trap, which asserts the opposite, that
low fertility is self-reinforcing.
Title of a 2008 2-part video series on falling fertility.
I wish I had thought of the term "demographic winter" first, since it
nicely describes the coming demographic Dark Age. Although I highly recommend the videos, I feel like there is a hidden
religious agenda. The only reason you would want babies, the video seems to suggest,
is because God commands you to.
The statistical study of populations. Demography
is mainly concerned with human populations,
but it can also be applied to populations of any living thing or inanimate
objects with a limited
lifespan.
Demography is the most predictable of the social sciences because it is
dealing mainly with human bodies and is making only a few basic assumptions about their
behavior. While much about the future is unknowable, demography can predict with
great precision how many people will be entering or leaving the workforce two decades
from now, because those people are already alive and countable.
If two countries go to war a decade from now,
demography can at least predict the maximum number of young
men will be available for military duty.
The ratio of dependents to the working-age population.
Dependents include both children and the elderly, who either can't work or aren't
expected to. Dependents are consumers of government services while paying little in
taxes. If either group becomes too large, the working-age population may have difficulty
supporting them.
A person who can't take care of themselves and who relies on others for support.
Includes children, the elderly and the disabled.
depopulation conspiracy theory
One of numerous theories espoused by conspiracy believers suggesting that
fertility is being deliberately suppressed in certain nations and communities
by an elite controlling group.
One theory, for example, insists that the elites are trying to annihilate the
White race.
(2019.04.21)
The inherent assumption of infinite growth in many business models, as defined by economist Eric Weinstein:
"If it doesn't grow at this rate, it's going to turn pathological."
The attempt to improve the genetic quality of a human population through
selective breeding or direction genetic manipulation.
Eugenics has a sordid history, since those who practiced it tended to equate
genetic quality with racial purity. Eugenics programs in the past have focused
on eliminating "inferior" groups rather than breeding better ones.
The condition where a change in a system is routed back to
form an input into the same system. There are two kinds of feedback loops:
positive feedback loop
and negative feedback loop
fertility or total fertility rate or fertility rate
The average number of children borne by the average woman in a given community over
course of her life. Fertility is specified by a decimal number, like 1.3 for a
nation like Japan that isn't producing enough babies to 7.2 for a nation like Niger
that is producing far too many.
The total fertility rate is a snapshot of a past period of time—the previous year at best. It is calculated by adding up all the births of women at each age during that
period. It doesn't take into the account the possibility that young women today may behave differently in the future than older women do today. Since
there are many subtleties and uncertainties in measuring fertility, it is senseless to
attempt additional precision beyond a single decimal place (1.4 but not 1.437).
Note: In this project, all fertility rates are approximate. Japan, for example, has
been variously estimated to have a fertility rate anywhere between 1.2 and 1.4, depending on the source.
What is most important for our purposes is whether the fertility of a community
is above or below replacement fertility (2.1) — by how much and for how long. Regardless of the exact number, no one would dispute that Japan has had substantially below-replacement
fertility for many decades, which is sufficient for our analysis.
Fertility rate is subtly different than birth rate. See that entry for discussion.
The idea that once fertility falls below a certain level, it is difficult or
impossible to reverse.
Not to be confused with a demographic trap, which asserts the opposite,
that high fertility is likely to persist.
The annual gap between the amount of money a government collects in taxes and the
money it spends on programs. A consistent budget deficit leads to growing
sovereign debt.
A phenomenon where elite cities within a country continue to grow even as the
total population of the country stabilizes and falls,
like a failing hotel that keeps its most profitable wings open while
closing off the less popular ones. The Grand Hotel Syndrome
can give its residents and visitors the illusion that the whole country is still
growing, but the remaining citizens and activity are increasingly concentrated in a small area.
Imagine a grand hotel of a bygone era. It has 500 rooms, and in its heyday, it filled
every one of them. As the hotel loses popularity and the number of guests dwindles,
the hotel's management closes off the least population floors and wings of the hotel.
The hotel once had three restaurants, but now it has only two.
If you check into the hotel today, it still seems crowded, but this is only because
your wing and the restaurants you visit remain well-patronized.
You don't see the wings and restaurant that have been closed,
because you have no reason to go there.
You don't miss these regions, because they were never very popular anyway.
The same thing happens when a country loses total population. The
remaining young people move to one or two big cities where the opportunities are
best. This is how greater Tokyo can still be growing even as the total population
of Japan is shrinking.
The only problem with the Grand Hotel is that whole hotel still exists and
still has to be maintained so it doesn't fall to ruin. Over time, it is
less efficient than a new hotel built to house only the actual number of guests.
the Great Reversal (my term)
A massive economic worldwide collapse caused by the end of the demographic dividend.
Governments, corporations and individuals
with unsustainable debts will be forced to default on them, leading to widespread
financial failure. It is impossible to say exactly when the collapse will happen,
where it will start or how it will unfold. The only sure thing is that government
debt cannot grow indefinitely. Sooner or later, some event must occur to neutralize it.
The Great Reversal is a delayed consequence of the post-war Baby Boom, the high birth period from 1946 to roughly 1964. Although birth rates came down in the 1960s and 1970s,
the "Boomers" continued to power economic activity for the rest of the 20th Century and
into the 21st. During this period, the U.S. had a big workforce and few dependents.
Beginning in 2011, this happy circumstance started to wane, as the Boomers began retiring. Now, the U.S. government is facing huge costs in servicing the Baby Boomers,
even as they stop paying taxes.
During the demographic dividend, politicians and average citizens came to assume that
economic growth would go on forever, and they borrowed money based on this assumption.
Now that the workforce is on the verge of shrinking, the debt can never be repaid and
will eventually end in default. The Great Reversal is the mechanism by which the debt
is wiped out. Unfortunately, governments and financial institutions may be wiped out as
well.
Idiocracy
A 2005 comedy movie expressing the idea that humans are becoming genetically stupid.
A man of "average" intelligence in the present day is placed in suspended animation.
When he awakes up 500 years from now,
he finds he is the smartest human in the world.
Search YouTube for clips and full movie.
A backlash by native-born citizens against the arrival of new immigrants, who
are seen as corrupting their culture and taking their jobs.
Under ideal circumstances, a government will admit only immigrants with job skills
the country needs who can go to work immediately and generate tax revenue.
Unfortunately, natives see immigrants doing better than they are and accuse them
of stealing their jobs. At election time, these natives are likely to vote against
immigration, even if the country needs it to survive.
Good examples are Hungary under Victor Orban or the United States under Donald Trump.
The voluntary acceptance by a country of new permanent citizens born in other countries.
(Guest workers and temporary refugees do not count.)
If a country's fertility has fallen
below replacement fertility for an extended period, immigration is the only way for the country to maintain its population in the
long run.
The term "immigration" is migration seen from the receiving country's perspective,
but there is another side of the equation: For every immigrant moving to a new
country, a home country is losing a piece of its human capital. The home
country has paid for part of the individual's upbringing and education, but it can
no long recoup its investment through taxes on the adult. While immigration is
generally good for the receiving country, it can be seen as a theft of talent from
the donor.
Term used by Robert Reich to refer to the flight of talent out of rural areas in USA to
large cities on the East and West coasts.
little emperor or little emperor syndrome or snowflake
Phenomenon of the spoiled only child resulting from China's One-Child Policy. When
one child becomes the focus of both his parents' and grandparents' attention,
he or she may have an unreasonable sense of entitlement that the real world
can never fulfill.
More broadly, little emperors suffer from overparenting, where parents
overprotect and over-manage their children's lives, leading to the children being
unprepared for independence when they reach adulthood.
Theory proposed by Thomas Malthus that population will always grow to absorb all
of the food resources available. According to this theory, it is useless to feed the
hungry, because they will only increase in numbers and eventually outstrip the
additional food supply.
While this theory is fairly accurate for animals—say, pigeons—it utterly
fails for humans who have access to birth control.
In the human world, an abundance of resources seems to have the
opposite effect, reducing the desire to produce children.
(2019.04.21)
In economics, the marginal cost is the cost of producing a single unit of a product
after fixed costs have been covered. For example if you build a factory to produced
widgets, the fixed cost is the cost of the factory and its basic operating expenses.
The marginal cost is how much each widget costs thereafter (for the raw materials,
labor, energy, packaging and other requirements for each widget).
One of the main goals of industry is to reduce the marginal cost whenever possible.
In the software industry, the marginal cost is very low, since it costs little to
copy and distribute a computer file.
In the auto industry, the marginal cost is high, since so many raw materials and
outside parts are going into it.
The concept of marginal cost can be applied to the family.
In the traditional nuclear family, the marginal cost—or the cost of raising each child—tends
to be very high for the first child and lower for subsequent children.
For the first baby, you have to buy all the baby clothes and equipment new,
while subsequent children can use hand-me-downs.
For the first child, you also have to create a suitable home for raising a child,
while for subsequent children, the home already exists.
Marginal cost also applies to the knowledge and effort of raising a child.
For the first child, parents are obsessed about doing things right, and there's a risk
that they could overdo it. With subsequent children, the parents are more
relaxed, and their parenting activities are more efficient.
The trouble with the nuclear family is that when the marginal costs drop to their
lowest level, say with the 3rd child, the parents quit having children and their
gains in marginal cost are lost.
An emotional, legal and economic contract joining two people together, ostensibly for life.
In modern legal systems, marriage is not a parenting contract, since it does not affect parental rights or obligations. If you produced the gametes that made the child, you are
bear the same responsibility for their upbringing regardless of your marital status.
A government-run health insurance program in the United States that provides
free health care to all U.S. citizens over the age of 65. Although the U.S. does
not provide free health insurance for all, as most developed countries do, it does
provide free health care during the single most expensive part of life: the dying phase.
Medicare faces the same financial stresses as Social Security: as more workers retire
and start drawing on these benefits, there are not enough active workers to support
them.
Medicare should not be confused with Medicaid, which is a government insurance program
for low-income people below the age of 65.
Medicare pays only about 80% of the costs of medical care, which can still leave
ruinous hospital bills. To cover the other 20%, retirees often buy "gap insurance" from
private insurers, which addressed the medical bills not paid by Medicare.
As new lifesaving medicines and medical techniques are invented, lives will be
extended, but greater cost to the Medicare system. If medical advances keep
people alive for five years longer, this means five more years of medical
expenses billed to Medicare.
Like Social Security, Medicare is effectively a pay-as-you go system. As the
Baby Boomers retire and the workforce shrinks, the Medicare system will become insolvent.
The movement of people across borders and with the internal regions of single countries.
The flow tends to go in one direction only: from the poorer and less stable areas
to better ones. This makes the poor regions poorer and the rich regions richer.
Within a country, people tend to move from rural areas to the city, making
rural areas the first places to empty out during a population implosion.
See the Grand Hotel Syndrome.
I interpret "migration" to include refugees, illegal immigrants and guest workers
not granted permanent citizenship, in contrast to immigration, which implies
the receiving country's permission.
According to demographers,
migration is motivated by two factors: "push" and "pull". Pull is when
people are drawn to a new region by better opportunities. Even though their life
back home was good, they believe their life in the new region will be even better.
Push is when people are forced out of their home region by intolerable conditions,
including war, famine, corruption and political
persecution. People motivated by pull tend to be talented and ambitious{my opinion}, while
those driven by pull would have preferred to stay at home if they could.
A vaguely defined generational term referring to those who came of age around the
turn of the 21st Century. Generally refers to anyone born in the 1980s and 1990s.
Contrast with the U.S. Baby Boom generation, which has a clearly defined start date,
1946, and an end date roughly coinciding with the public adoption of the birth
control pill in the mid-1960s. For the Millennial generation, there is no clear
markers.
A theory that "Deficits don't matter." The government can spend as much as it wants, the
thinking goes, because it can print more money to pay its bills and can carry debts
indefinitely. The theory is supported by some politicians but is generally dismissed
by economists and experienced investors.
A deliberately created family unit consisting of approximately 20 children of mixed ages and parentage living under one roof. The modular unit is supported by a wide network of adults, but only one on-duty adult is required to directly supervise the group.
The aim is to raise a large number of children in a healthy emotional environment while making optimal use of adult resources.
Compare to the nuclear family, where 1-4 children are raised by 1-2 adults.
The practical benefit of
modular families is that the child-parent ratio is high:
Only one adult needs to be on duty at any time.
With 20 children in the family, older children care for younger
one and teach them basic skills.
A large family like this may be healthier for the children than a nuclear family,
since they have a rich
variety of relationships and must learn from their earliest years
to work within a group and
negotiate with others. They are also less likely to experience the
crippling effects of overparenting.
"Modular parenting" is my own original term, invented on 9 March 2019. It could be
replaced by a different term if I find a better one.
I have chosen 18-20 as the optimal number of children in the modular family
because it allows for one child
at each age, from infants to 18-year-olds, while at the same time
achieving an economy of scale where one on-duty adult can supervise all of them.
Having only one child at each age means
there is a clear hierarchy, with older children having greater status and responsibility.
If there were more than one child at each age, I suspect
there would be too much competition
between them, and one of them would invariably monopolize most of the attention
of older and younger children.
In the modular family, the children themselves are a captive labor force. Every
child who is old enough to do so is caring for younger children. Collectively,
they are changing diapers, bathing babies, cleaning house and preparing meals,
with only management supervision from the one on-duty adult. Being the adult
parent is a professional responsibility, rewarded by the community like any other
job. The group needs an adult to provide a stable leadership presence, but when
things are running well, the children are doing most of the work of maintaining
the household.
The children themselves don't see it as work because they have been
indoctrinated into this culture from birth. They understand that their job is
caring for the group, especially those who are younger than them. Talking baby-talk
to a baby is essential for their language development, but you don't need to be
an adult to do it; any 8-year-old can do it just as effectively. The modular family
harnesses the natural inclination of older kids to supervise younger kids.
It gives them a feeling of power, so it doesn't seem like work at all.
Furthermore, by teaching basic skills to a younger child, the older child is
consolidating his or her own knowledge. Maybe someone else teaches you the ABC's,
but what really reinforces them is you teaching them to someone else.
The modular family occupies a single stable location—a "house" with a name
that the children take as a badge of identity. (Think of Gryffindor and Slytherin in the
Harry Potter series, but in this house every age is represented.) The relationships
formed in this house are permanent. The people you grew up with will always be your
brothers and sisters, and you know you can always go to them for help and support.
The modular family is a permanent institution with a stable population.
As older children age out
of the house and move into the larger community, new infants are brought in.
It is in some sense a "child factory", but potentially a warm, healthy and enjoyable
one.
There are many questions raised by this structure, to be addressed elsewhere in this
project. Questions include:
Where do the babies come from?
Who provides the family's financial support?
What is the structure of the community that supports this family?
Is there a place for traditional classroom learning?
This entry was replaced on 9 July 20019 by a Revised Version
on the blog.
natural birth control or the rhythm method or natural family planning
Method of birth control in which sex takes place only during the phase in a
woman's menstrual cycle when conception is least likely to occur.
Tends to be promoted by religious organizations that
oppose artificial methods of birth control.
Has a high failure rate compared to other forms.
Advocated by pro-life groups like the
Population Research Institute and the Catholic Church.
Traditionally, this is the only birth control method approved by the
Catholic Church.
The human transition from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to settled agriculture. In the Western world, this transition took place about 10,000 years ago and set the stage
for modern civilizations.
The traditional child-rearing unit of a mother, a father and one or more children.
Recent modifications in progressive societies have allowed parents of the same
gender, but two parents is still considered "normal".
The nuclear family is not the only way to raise children. In pre-agricultural societies,
the basic "family" unit was a band or tribe. (See tribal parenting.)
Children were raised more communally, with female members of a tribe taking
responsibility for the tribe's children as others collected food.
In other words, a tribe can probably take responsibility for its children as well
as two adults can, as long as the tribe isn't too large.
A past government policy in China in which urban couples were limited to
one child between them. In effect 1978 through 2016. Although now abandoned, the One-Child
Policy has effectively trained parents to want only one, since this is the way
they were raised.
The idea that once fertility starts to fall, it can never be reversed.
My term based on a 2015 lecture by Professor Chris Whitty, excerpted in the Instagram link below.
He mentions it only in passing, but I have seized it as a useful label for the
essential problem of fertility. Sometime in the future, some group of humans is
going to go back through the one-way door, or humanity will vanish.
overparenting or helicopter parents or cosseting or snowplow parenting
The phenomenon in the modern world of children receiving too much attention and
protection from their parents, leading to their difficulty standing on their own
later in life. The natural result of overparenting is a little emperor.
Overparenting tends to take place when there is a low child-parent ratio, as
with an only child.
It is not usually a risk in large families, where parental attention
is limited and the siblings must learn to share, negotiate and
manage their own activities.
The rise in the average age of members of a nation or community, usually due to
low birth rates. Population ageing is not subject to the delays of demographic momentum.
In any year when birth rates are below replacement fertility, the population will age, even
if the total population is not yet shrinking.
A condition where birth rates are consistently high over multiple generations and where total
population is consistently expanding.
Not to be confused with a baby boom, where the high-birth period was followed by a
low-birth period. The term was popularized in the late 1960s by Paul Ehrlich's book
The Population Bomb. Today, only a handful of countries can still be said to
be "exploding", mainly in equatorial Africa.
Many countries that were experiencing an explosion in the 1960s have since
fallen below replacement fertility, including China, Iran, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.
Other once-exploding countries are close behind, including India and Egypt.
population implosion (my term) or population decline
The accelerating loss of population due to persistently low birth rates.
The population loss feeds on itself because low birth rates lead to a shortage
of reproductive-age women decades later. The best current example of
population implosion is Japan, where the population is already falling by hundreds of
thousands every year. More importantly, there are relatively few women of
childbearing age in Japan, so the loss can only accelerate.
The fact that implosion is a slow-moving disaster playing out over decades
doesn't make it any less devastating, especially in countries like Japan that
are traditionally closed to immigration. Japan's national debt has become the
highest in the world in relation to GDP, and it can only get worse as its
population ages.
A common graphical representation of the population of a nation or community.
The graph consists of a series of bars representing the population over a five-year
age span. At the bottom are infants, age 0-4, and at the top are elderly people, eventually dwindling to negligible around age 100. Males are on the left and females are
on the right. See these videos for discussion...
A pro-life advocacy group masquerading as a research organization. I found it amusing to go through their
YouTube videos to find the obvious
linguistic bias.
Not to be confused with the Population Reference Bureau.
An academic think-tank dedicated to distributing academically sound information on population.
Not to be confused with Population Research Institute.
YouTube
A condition where a change in a system is routed back in such a way as
to accelerate those changes. In spite of its name, a positive feedback loop is
rarely "positive". Instead it causes systems to collapse.
People forced out of their home countries or regions by intolerable conditions,
including war, poverty and persecution.
Countries that accept refugees tend to distinguish "economic refugees" fleeing poverty
from "political"
ones fleeing war or persecution. In practice, however, there is little
difference between the two.{my opinion} All refugees are making the
same calculation: "If I stay here, I'll die. If I go somewhere else, at least I have a
chance."
The number of babies an average woman in a community must produce
(fertility)
to assure a
stable population. In the developed world, this number is in the ballpark of 2.1 —
one baby to replace the mother, one to replace the father and 0.1 to cover situations
where the child doesn't live to maturity or the mother doesn't live to the normal
end of her reproductive life. Replacement fertility can vary
by location. In poor countries with poor health care, replacement
fertility can be higher, like 2.5, due to high infant mortality.
A mandatory government pension system in the United States.
Payments are automatically deducted from a worker's paycheck, and monthly
payments are made back to them once they reach age 65.
The payouts are dependent on the amount the worker pays in over the course of his
career. Social security payments alone are not considered enough to live on,
so most{?} U.S. workers also have independent pension plans.
In theory, Social Security is a "trust fund" independent of the rest of the
U.S. government, but the only way the fund is allowed to invest its money is
buying U.S. government securities. In effect, the Social Security system has loaned
all of its money to the government, which has spent it as though it was tax income.
This means that Social Security is essentially a pay-as-you-go system, where
payouts to seniors are funded by taxes on current workers.
This system worked during the demographic dividend era when there were
plenty of workers and few retirees, but it is scheduled to become insolvent as
the bulk of Baby Boomers retire.
In recent reports that the U.S. government has $22 trillion in debt (early 2019),
roughly $2.7 trillion of the total is money the government owes the Social
Security Trust Fund.
Other countries have similar government-sponsored pension systems and face
similar financial stresses as their workforces shrink and growing numbers
of people retire.
Debt incurred by a nation, usually through the sale of bonds.
Sovereign debt tends to increase over time if there is a persistant
government budget deficit.
A 1973 movie that depicted the overpopulated world of 2022, when people were so
desperate for food that they turned to institutionalized cannibalism. Apparently
based on the hysteria created by Paul Ehrlich. Needless to say, 2022 won't be quite
like that. Dystopia is still possible, but not the overpopulated kind.
My term for a method of child-rearing in which members of a tribe or kinship
group care for children communally. This was presumably the method of child
care in hunter-gatherer societies that preceded the Agricultural Revolution.
The equivalent in modern societies might be daycare or kindergarten. Alternative to
the nuclear family.
(2019.04.18)
A national economy based primarily on the buying of discretionary products and services,
not substantially connected to survival, health or productivity. Such an
economy indicatedgreat societal wealth, but it is also highly vulnerable in
a downturn. If people lose their jobs or feel at risk of it, they can quickly
curtail their nonessential purchases, leading to a worsening feedback loop.
When people stop buying nonessential things, it leads to more layoffs and less spending,
which in turn leads to more layoffs.
"Nonessential" products
and services can includes fashion, restaurant meals, luxury cars, leisure travel, etc. "Essential"
products and services include basic food, shelter and clothing, as well as medical services
and a few productivity tolls like smartphones and computers.
A philosophy asserting that bringing children into the world is morally wrong.
There are many arguments in support of this philosophy, but the most interesting
A monetary incentive offered by a government to try to induce its citizens
to have more babies. For example, the Russian government offers US$9000 to couples
for each child after the first. Such a reward can take the form of cash payments
or tax breaks, like a lifetime tax amnesty offered by Hungary's government.
A baby bonus is different than pro-natalist
services like subsidized child care and free health insurance,
which are not
paid directly to the parents.
The evolutionary theory espoused by Charles Darwin.
The average number of children borne by the average woman in a given community over
course of her life. Fertility is specified by a decimal number, like 1.3 for a
nation like Japan that isn't producing enough babies to 7.2 for a nation like Niger
that is producing far too many. 
A 2005 comedy movie expressing the idea that humans are becoming genetically stupid.
A man of "average" intelligence in the present day is placed in suspended animation.
When he awakes up 500 years from now,
he finds he is the smartest human in the world.
Phenomenon of the spoiled only child resulting from China's 
The traditional child-rearing unit of a mother, a father and one or more children.
Recent modifications in progressive societies have allowed parents of the same
gender, but two parents is still considered "normal".
A past government policy in China in which urban couples were limited to
one child between them. In effect 1978 through 2016. Although now abandoned, the One-Child
Policy has effectively trained parents to want only one, since this is the way
they were raised.
The phenomenon in the modern world of children receiving too much attention and
protection from their parents, leading to their difficulty standing on their own
later in life. The natural result of overparenting is a 
The rise in the average age of members of a nation or community, usually due to
low birth rates. Population ageing is not subject to the delays of 
A 1968 book by 
An academic think-tank dedicated to distributing academically sound information on population.
Not to be confused with 
A mandatory government pension system in the United States.
Payments are automatically deducted from a worker's paycheck, and monthly
payments are made back to them once they reach age 65.
The payouts are dependent on the amount the worker pays in over the course of his
career. Social security payments alone are not considered enough to live on,
so most{?} U.S. workers also have independent pension plans.
A 1973 movie that depicted the overpopulated world of 2022, when people were so
desperate for food that they turned to institutionalized cannibalism. Apparently
based on the hysteria created by 
A theoretical group of humans launched into space in the hope of settling on a
new planet.