[Natales]

My biggest concern is the direct correlation to the reproductive rates and lower education in virtually every culture. More than specific concerns about particular religions or ethnic origins, I fear for a world where the uneducated rules.

[toasterlovin]

Then you should have lots of kids! And encourage your intelligent friends to do the same.

[ginko]

Well, it's not as if you can just choose to have kids.

[toasterlovin]

True in the technical sense that a person cannot just unilaterally decide to have children RIGHT NOW. But most people, over the course of their life, have the opportunity to have children. In the developed world, a huge portion of these people decide to have 0 or 1 child.

[sdfin]

Ha, that's the starting premise of Idiocracy http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/

[88e282102ae2e5b]

Consider that many countries have made the transition from high birth rates and low literacy to the opposite. There's no reason to think the remaining ones will never change.

[Snargorf]

It's not in every culture, it's between cultures as well.

Africa adds 30 millions people every year. Pretty much everywhere outside of Africa is below replacement fertility.

In the 20th century, Africans were 10-15% of the world population; by the end of the 21st the could be >50%.

[int_19h]

The same problem was posited for China. Yet, as their quality of life improved, the problem had, essentially, resolved itself.

Similar trends have been observed elsewhere.

There's no reason to believe that Africa will be an exception from that rule.

[lmz]

Forgetting the One Child Policy, are we?

[int_19h]

You mean, the one that they have terminated last year because they now have an aging population problem?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/oct/29/china-abandons...

[lmz]

You claimed:

> The same problem was posited for China. Yet, as their quality of life improved, the problem had, essentially, resolved itself.

It does not make sense to say the problem "resolved itself" when there was a 35 year period where the One Child Policy was in effect.

[int_19h]

OCP did not resolve the problem, per se. OCP bought them more time to allow the (delayed) effects of the increased standard of living to manifest themselves fully. They didn't really _need_ OCP - they would have ended up in the same place either way, OCP just made it a bit shorter, and reduced the strain on economy (and hence decrease in the standard of living) on the way there.

[Snargorf]

There are reasons.

China has a long history of advanced (for the time) civilization and a high-IQ population (~105). They were backward for just a few centuries because of a series of bad ideologies - isolationism, followed by communism. For most of history China was the highest-tech civilization on Earth. All they had to do to achieve demographic transition was get back to their historical norm.

Africa has no history of advanced civilization and a low-IQ population (~75). There's reason to think they'll sustain higher birthrates than everyone else, indefinitely. To achieve demographic transition they'll have to do something they've never done before.

[int_19h]

Given that IQ scores correlate pretty well with things like child nutrition, I'd wager that if you could actually go back and measure them for China back when they were "backward", you'd probably get similar results.

Not to mention that IQ is not an absolute metric - it's the median score of the entire population, and we're getting smarter as a whole, so 100 points today is "worth" more 100 years ago. Indeed, if you use the modern metrics, and apply them to the population of US - a well-developed industrialized country at the forefront of economic, scientific and technological advance - back in 1920, the average IQ would have been 80. So, if, as you claim, ~75 is such a low IQ that it would preclude these developments, then US should not exist as it is today.