Population
Jun. 2nd, 2025 09:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmithThis post is actually a mishmash of different quotes around the core theme.
byjove:
countries will be like “nooooo our birth rate is falling exponentially and it’s effecting our economy” and immigrants will be like “hey can you let us in so we can boost your economy and fill your empty jobs and raise our children here” and inevitably the country is like “the only thing worse than a large scale collapse of our population is letting foreigners live here”
So this is how the Rutledge thread started. In local-Vermont, Rutland proposed to take in Syrian refugees, which would have solved their population problem, but the town exploded with racism. I decided to explore how it would look if someone did it right, because immigrants DO solve population problems.
byjove:
America’s immigration policies are difficult enough but I read the immigration policies for some countries and it is batshit insane. they’re straight up like “we hate disabled people, we hate people who don’t speak our language, if you don’t have a $85k a year salary lined up for you, we don’t want you to move here. if by some miracle you jump through all the hoops and move here, it will take you 20 years to obtain citizenship and during that time we will not rent to you because you’re a foreigner.” damn bitch. fuck you.
This is vicious, and also common, and also really stupid.
The way to handle immigrants is to integrate them as fast and thoroughly as possible. Make sure their survival needs are met. Set them up with lessons in language and local culture. Lay out a clear path to citizenship. Since immigrants create small businesses much more often than natives do, offer entrepreneurship lessons so it'll happen faster and you can collect taxes from that business. If you want another advantage, list the top 10 or so fields with a critical shortage of workers, and offer free training in those fields.
For refugees in particular, it's also prudent to put extra effort into ensuring mental and physical health care, since they escaped from some desperate situation. Hopefully this will help them recover and become contributing citizens sooner.
The most clever solution I've seen is from one of the Scandinavian countries, which set up an apartment building with half locals and half refugees, all young single people. The locals got affordable housing, the refugees got a safe place to stay, and the building had common space to encourage making friends. It worked spectacularly.
lannamichaels:
I read foreign policy stuff and every few months, like clockwork, there’s an article about [insert country here] having demographic problems caused by not enough young people and What That Means.
And every single time, I have only two questions:
1. What is your immigration policy?
2. How much does it cost to have and raise a baby, both direct monetary and intangibles, such as does a woman destroy her entire professional career to do so?
Exactly. Those are great questions.
I would also ask about what other support there is for young families. Is childcare readily available? Is a 2-bedroom or 3-bedroom residence both available and affordable? Are there facilities such as schools and playgrounds? Because that says a lot about how feasible it is to have children and how well society integrates them.
Modern societies tend to be just terrible at this. The social isolation makes it hard to learn childcare growing up, and hard to find it as a new parent. It is actually not normal for humans to be ignorant of childcare when they become parents. Used to be, they would have lots of experience with younger siblings, cousins, neighbors, etc. That doesn't happen much anymore, and the results are bad.
>> Fixing both of those will fix every single falling population problem I have ever read about in those places. Because the answer is generally “both. both are bad.” And places where the second one is considered to be fine, the first one absolutely isn’t.<<
Yyyyeah.
On the bright side, Earth greatly benefits from population growth slowing and eventually falling. So I'm not upset to see it happening, even if humans are freaking out over it.
(I state these are the constant issues at play in foreign policy writings to contrast that with the stuff I’ve heard about from rural demographic problems where the issue is “we have young people, but they leave because there aren’t any jobs.” That is internal population shifting within a country and comes with other problems, ex: rent.)
This is also part of the Rutledge thread. Some states are losing population, others gaining population. So then you have to look at why, in order to fix that. If there are no jobs, people won't be able to live there even if they want to. That's less of a problem today, when there are so many jobs you can do from anywhere. If there is no housing or other infrastructure, that also pushes people out. But those are problems that can be solved. Some towns are doing better than others at analyzing what they need to fix and then fixing it. So that's something else I touch on in the Rutledge thread, the steps that the town takes to improve its situation.
It's an entire article about how Israel doesn't have this problem, because Jewish women tend to have lots of kids compared to the rest of the countries considered equivalent economically, and at NO POINT mentions the Holocaust.
How oh how do you have an article about how Jewish women have a culture where having a lot of kids is considered necessary and DO NOT MENTION THAT, I do not know. It probably gets included in, oh, it's a religious reason, but except not that much because it points out that secular Israelis also have more kids on average than the comparison population.
Indeed, most populations will have a boom after a bottleneck. You see it after most wars, in fact. That doesn't mean you should pick a fight to boost your population, though.
"Bulletproof" is one of my poems about Jewish repopulation efforts in Terramagne.
"A Matter of Breeding" touches on the issue of eugenics.
Daughters of the Apocalypse has a collapsed population followed by difficulty reproducing and a birthrate that skews toward female infants. "Rainbow Hills" touches on the shifting attitudes about queerfolk, particularly that lesbian pairings are approved or encouraged while gay pairings are seen as selfish.
Some other ideas I have in mind but haven't written out yet, like Josué finding a girlfriend who is a survivor of narcoleros wiping out her family. They both want to repopulate into a large family, with the intent to starting that promptly. It's a valid life choice in that situation, Saraphina is all for it, and Aidan understands once Josué explains it.
The author cannot be this clueless. Was it just that he felt it awkward to point out there is the actual need to repopulate????? Even I have heard from women dealing with infertility who feel like complete failures because they can't help poke Hitler in the eye.
Infertility sucks. However, if you have a burning desire to increase populations but cannot procreate, there are other options, including but not limited to:
* Adopt children and raise a big family that way.
* Pitch in raising kids produced by your relatives, neighbors, or whatever.
* Work in childcare or other family business.
* Donate money to a fertility clinic to help other folks have babies.
As a complete aside, though, since I'm on this subject, many things piss me off in Harry Potter and Harry Potter fandom but among the worst is the Weasleys. Molly and Arthur Weasley are the only characters in that entire backstory who understood the assignment.
Congratulations, you have just managed to survive a genocide that wiped out an entire generation! What do you do?
Every other character: uh, have one or two kids?
Arthur and Molly Weasley: hold our birth control.
Nailed it.
part of the reason it makes no sense is that your population size is too goddamn small. The magical world in Britain, if we take the numbers seriously, is actively in the process of dying out.
True. If you look at the demographics of wizarding Britain, the population is plummeting. Two rounds of ethnic cleansing followed by the impact of industrialization on birthrate and they are shrinking fast. Replacement rate is roughly 2.1 children per woman. The extra covers for people who don't reproduce or their children don't reach breeding age. If the wizarding families are only having 1-2 children each, they will die out quite fast. And what is Britain's birthrate? For 2022 it was 1.57 which exactly matches the 1-2 children per wizarding family.
I would bet you that the author simply mimicked what was happening around her without realizing what that demographic pattern meant. I've seen people make the exact same mistake for the same reason in a shared world, I pointed out the population issue -- it was meant to be shrinking slowly, not plummeting -- someone else worked the math, and we figured out how to fix it. Problem solved.
Seriously, pay attention to demographics and birthrate in worldbuilding. It matters.
byjove:
countries will be like “nooooo our birth rate is falling exponentially and it’s effecting our economy” and immigrants will be like “hey can you let us in so we can boost your economy and fill your empty jobs and raise our children here” and inevitably the country is like “the only thing worse than a large scale collapse of our population is letting foreigners live here”
So this is how the Rutledge thread started. In local-Vermont, Rutland proposed to take in Syrian refugees, which would have solved their population problem, but the town exploded with racism. I decided to explore how it would look if someone did it right, because immigrants DO solve population problems.
byjove:
America’s immigration policies are difficult enough but I read the immigration policies for some countries and it is batshit insane. they’re straight up like “we hate disabled people, we hate people who don’t speak our language, if you don’t have a $85k a year salary lined up for you, we don’t want you to move here. if by some miracle you jump through all the hoops and move here, it will take you 20 years to obtain citizenship and during that time we will not rent to you because you’re a foreigner.” damn bitch. fuck you.
This is vicious, and also common, and also really stupid.
The way to handle immigrants is to integrate them as fast and thoroughly as possible. Make sure their survival needs are met. Set them up with lessons in language and local culture. Lay out a clear path to citizenship. Since immigrants create small businesses much more often than natives do, offer entrepreneurship lessons so it'll happen faster and you can collect taxes from that business. If you want another advantage, list the top 10 or so fields with a critical shortage of workers, and offer free training in those fields.
For refugees in particular, it's also prudent to put extra effort into ensuring mental and physical health care, since they escaped from some desperate situation. Hopefully this will help them recover and become contributing citizens sooner.
The most clever solution I've seen is from one of the Scandinavian countries, which set up an apartment building with half locals and half refugees, all young single people. The locals got affordable housing, the refugees got a safe place to stay, and the building had common space to encourage making friends. It worked spectacularly.
lannamichaels:
I read foreign policy stuff and every few months, like clockwork, there’s an article about [insert country here] having demographic problems caused by not enough young people and What That Means.
And every single time, I have only two questions:
1. What is your immigration policy?
2. How much does it cost to have and raise a baby, both direct monetary and intangibles, such as does a woman destroy her entire professional career to do so?
Exactly. Those are great questions.
I would also ask about what other support there is for young families. Is childcare readily available? Is a 2-bedroom or 3-bedroom residence both available and affordable? Are there facilities such as schools and playgrounds? Because that says a lot about how feasible it is to have children and how well society integrates them.
Modern societies tend to be just terrible at this. The social isolation makes it hard to learn childcare growing up, and hard to find it as a new parent. It is actually not normal for humans to be ignorant of childcare when they become parents. Used to be, they would have lots of experience with younger siblings, cousins, neighbors, etc. That doesn't happen much anymore, and the results are bad.
>> Fixing both of those will fix every single falling population problem I have ever read about in those places. Because the answer is generally “both. both are bad.” And places where the second one is considered to be fine, the first one absolutely isn’t.<<
Yyyyeah.
On the bright side, Earth greatly benefits from population growth slowing and eventually falling. So I'm not upset to see it happening, even if humans are freaking out over it.
(I state these are the constant issues at play in foreign policy writings to contrast that with the stuff I’ve heard about from rural demographic problems where the issue is “we have young people, but they leave because there aren’t any jobs.” That is internal population shifting within a country and comes with other problems, ex: rent.)
This is also part of the Rutledge thread. Some states are losing population, others gaining population. So then you have to look at why, in order to fix that. If there are no jobs, people won't be able to live there even if they want to. That's less of a problem today, when there are so many jobs you can do from anywhere. If there is no housing or other infrastructure, that also pushes people out. But those are problems that can be solved. Some towns are doing better than others at analyzing what they need to fix and then fixing it. So that's something else I touch on in the Rutledge thread, the steps that the town takes to improve its situation.
It's an entire article about how Israel doesn't have this problem, because Jewish women tend to have lots of kids compared to the rest of the countries considered equivalent economically, and at NO POINT mentions the Holocaust.
How oh how do you have an article about how Jewish women have a culture where having a lot of kids is considered necessary and DO NOT MENTION THAT, I do not know. It probably gets included in, oh, it's a religious reason, but except not that much because it points out that secular Israelis also have more kids on average than the comparison population.
Indeed, most populations will have a boom after a bottleneck. You see it after most wars, in fact. That doesn't mean you should pick a fight to boost your population, though.
"Bulletproof" is one of my poems about Jewish repopulation efforts in Terramagne.
"A Matter of Breeding" touches on the issue of eugenics.
Daughters of the Apocalypse has a collapsed population followed by difficulty reproducing and a birthrate that skews toward female infants. "Rainbow Hills" touches on the shifting attitudes about queerfolk, particularly that lesbian pairings are approved or encouraged while gay pairings are seen as selfish.
Some other ideas I have in mind but haven't written out yet, like Josué finding a girlfriend who is a survivor of narcoleros wiping out her family. They both want to repopulate into a large family, with the intent to starting that promptly. It's a valid life choice in that situation, Saraphina is all for it, and Aidan understands once Josué explains it.
The author cannot be this clueless. Was it just that he felt it awkward to point out there is the actual need to repopulate????? Even I have heard from women dealing with infertility who feel like complete failures because they can't help poke Hitler in the eye.
Infertility sucks. However, if you have a burning desire to increase populations but cannot procreate, there are other options, including but not limited to:
* Adopt children and raise a big family that way.
* Pitch in raising kids produced by your relatives, neighbors, or whatever.
* Work in childcare or other family business.
* Donate money to a fertility clinic to help other folks have babies.
As a complete aside, though, since I'm on this subject, many things piss me off in Harry Potter and Harry Potter fandom but among the worst is the Weasleys. Molly and Arthur Weasley are the only characters in that entire backstory who understood the assignment.
Congratulations, you have just managed to survive a genocide that wiped out an entire generation! What do you do?
Every other character: uh, have one or two kids?
Arthur and Molly Weasley: hold our birth control.
Nailed it.
part of the reason it makes no sense is that your population size is too goddamn small. The magical world in Britain, if we take the numbers seriously, is actively in the process of dying out.
True. If you look at the demographics of wizarding Britain, the population is plummeting. Two rounds of ethnic cleansing followed by the impact of industrialization on birthrate and they are shrinking fast. Replacement rate is roughly 2.1 children per woman. The extra covers for people who don't reproduce or their children don't reach breeding age. If the wizarding families are only having 1-2 children each, they will die out quite fast. And what is Britain's birthrate? For 2022 it was 1.57 which exactly matches the 1-2 children per wizarding family.
I would bet you that the author simply mimicked what was happening around her without realizing what that demographic pattern meant. I've seen people make the exact same mistake for the same reason in a shared world, I pointed out the population issue -- it was meant to be shrinking slowly, not plummeting -- someone else worked the math, and we figured out how to fix it. Problem solved.
Seriously, pay attention to demographics and birthrate in worldbuilding. It matters.
(no subject)
Date: 2025-06-03 09:55 pm (UTC)Yes ...
Date: 2025-06-03 10:05 pm (UTC)