Notes from the Future
But each part of these has its own nuance and complexity that affects demographics over decades:
- Birth rates have been falling in much of the world, sometimes due to policy but mostly due to the fact that women are better educated and mostly have a choice about it now, children are the new horses, and I guess people aren’t having sex anymore?
- Over the last 200 years we got really good at making people not die. This includes young children most notably, but also the rest of us former-young-children: sanitation, water treatment, vaccines, antibiotics, and other medical treatments have left big marks. We seem to have plateaued here: mostly people die now because their original factory parts get worn out and break, or their cells have copied too many times and get all fourth-Michael-Keaton.
- Also, sometimes lots of people die due to a big shock to the normal flow of life, mostly in the war/famine/disease families. We’ve built systems and institutions that do a good job of preventing most of these, but they require constant maintenance and some people don’t like them.
