{"id":3803,"date":"2010-02-13T15:25:53","date_gmt":"2010-02-13T23:25:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/wordpress\/?p=3803"},"modified":"2010-02-13T15:25:53","modified_gmt":"2010-02-13T23:25:53","slug":"no-need-for-natalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/no-need-for-natalism\/","title":{"rendered":"No Need for Natalism"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>John, your great-grandmother was a statistical outlier. By 1870 the average British woman was <a href=\"http:\/\/www.statistics.gov.uk\/downloads\/theme_compendia\/fom2005\/01_FOPM_Population.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">having around 5.5 children<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Britain did see a dramatic increase in population in the 19th century, but this was a consequence of technological innovation, improved agricultural productivity and the development of an international trading system that served Britain very well, not some expression of national \u2018vigor\u2019. The crowds were a symptom of Britain\u2019s success, not a cause of it.<\/p>\n<p>If we look at the period when Britain was at the peak of its self-confidence, the later Victorian and Edwardian eras, we see a rapid <em>decline<\/em> in the fertility rate. Between 1870 and 1920 the fertility level fell from that average of 5.5 to 2.4.<\/p>\n<p>Mind you, if the Malthusian bullet had (for now) been dodged, it didn\u2019t always feel like it. It is, I think, telling that the country lost more men to emigration in the decade before the outbreak of WWI than it did on the battlefields of 1914-18.<\/p>\n<p>My guess is that rooting through the past to try to find civilizations that have flourished with low reproduction rates is fruitless. It ignores the changes that technology has brought (we can do more now with far fewer people), but it also doesn\u2019t take account of the fact that those societies that did see sharp population decline normally did so as a result of devastating \u2018external\u2019 catastrophe, usually one or more of war, disease and famine. Their depopulation was the consequence, not the cause, of disaster.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>John, your great-grandmother was a statistical outlier. By 1870 the average British woman was having around 5.5 children. Britain did see a dramatic increase in population in the 19th century, but this was a consequence of technological innovation, improved agricultural &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/no-need-for-natalism\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[15],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3803"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/64"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3803"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3803\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3805,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3803\/revisions\/3805"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3803"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3803"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3803"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}