Where Did All the Children Go?

Ryan James Girdusky article, "Where Did all the Children Go?", is linked here:

(19) Where Did All the Children Go? - by Ryan James Girdusky (substack.com)

The article discusses declining birth rates in western countries and speculates about the implication of population decline. I circulated the article, sans comment, to a forum group. The group received an email response from Phil reacting to the Girdusky piece:

For thousands of years those that were the most successful could afford more children and did with the enhanced ability to nourish them until adulthood.
More recently (less than a 100 years), the most successful and best
educated have the lowest fertility rate and come nowhere close to replacing themselves.
If you believe that cognitive abilities are largely inherited (I do) then this suggests that the trend of increasing global average cognitive skills for thousands of years is being reversed as the least successful/educated substantially out propagate the best & brightest cohort-----perhaps artificial intelligence is arriving just in time.

Phil

Phil's note reminded me of a discussion from Nicholas Wade's fabulous book, "A Troublesome Inheritance," about how in England, unique among all nations, broke away from the Malthusian Trap, which breakaway laid the groundwork for the industrial revolution. The breakaway was caused, according to Wade, by the English rich increasing their birth rates. Here is a link to my book review of "A Troublesome Inheritance," along with an excerpt from that review about England's staggering breakaway from the Malthusian Trap:

 "A Troublesome Inheritance." Nicholas Wade | Stephen DeWitt Taylor

Wade notes than from the end of the dark ages in circa 1200 AD to 1600 AD most of Europe was in a "Malthusian Trap." That is, as the impoverished agrarian economies started to be more productive, families had more children. The larger population ate up the surpluses and the cultures reverted back, in the continuation of a vicious cycle, to poverty.

England, alone among European cultures, broke away from the vicious cycle of the Malthusian Trap. In the 14th century, the English rich started having more children than the poor. This led to the phenomenon of social descent. Most children of the rich had to sink in the social scale, given that there were too many of them to remain in the upper class. The "social descenders" carried with them inheritance for the same behaviors that had made their parents rich. The values of the upper middle class - nonviolence, literacy, thrift and patience - were thus infused into lower economic classes throughout society Generation after generation they gradually became the values of the society as a whole. Moreover, their behaviors emerged gradually over several centuries, a time course more typical of an evolutionary change than a cultural change.

The evolution driven social change in England... rendering a more intelligent and more orderly culture, was a new and unique fertile field for the industrial revolution to be nurtured.

So... with the western rich, as Phil notes, in recent decades choosing to have fewer children, are we headed back to the world of the Malthusian Trap as average intelligence levels in the west decline?

SDT