Quote:
Originally Posted by Twoller
That's not true, and it is a commonly held myth that industrial societies are not sustaining their populations. You completely ignore the labor demands of industrial societies. But the labor demands of industrial societies is decresing as technology increases. Robots have largely replace human labor in just about every level of productivity and in just about every economic sector.
... We don't need people who reproduce over one child per family. The truth is, we never did. The whole notion that agricultural families have to be large to sustain themselves is a myth. Large agricultural families have only ever served empires and emperial belief systems. Their children were born to be serfs with the bulk of their productivity going somewhere else.
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I can see that a couple of you are unconvinced by what I stated (regarding the large-scale flow of the impoverished and undereducated into prosperous countries largely b/c of the native population's failure to adequately reproduce in sufficient numbers). The only thing I'll say in response is that you might want to check out two books that cover the subject in pretty good detail:
The Pentagon's New Map - Thomas P.M. Barnett
The Death Of The West - Pat Buchanan
Insofar as what is asserted above by Twoller, dude, you're just flat-out wrong.
A reproduction level of 1.0 children per couple would be a disaster for any first world society. To the extent that the nation or area would be unrecognizable and/or gone in a matter of decades.
Reasons: The population would have a much higher average age than most other nations and there would be an imbalance among the age groups. The two biggest problems are that 1) in a relatively short period of time, there wouldn't be enough workers to fill necessary jobs, and 2) the people young enough to work would be drowned in tax burden to support the giant pool of retirees.
1.0 would be a first magnitude catastrophe in any modernized nation. Even Japan is not close to being that low and that country is already undergoing serious hardship resulting from an aging population and low reproduction numbers ... to the extent that the Japanese are going to have to do what most of them consider to be the near unthinkable - allow in a lot of immigrants.