I want my articles to be written by a professional calligrapher on handcrafted paper with gold ink. If my university or funder refuse to pay for this, they are infringing my academic freedom.

We are working on it for SocArXiv. Some servers, like biorxiv and medrxiv, already prohibit review and theory papers, partly for this reason. Harder in social science, where theory is an important category of research. But still

Love that episode

Their book is After the Spike.
Their 2024 paper is here: journals.plos.org/plosone/arti....
Their 2023 op-ed is here: www.nytimes.com/interactive/...
Their code and model output (for one iteration or another) is here: github.com/gagemweston/...
/6

My real argument is that "birth rate boosting now" (as if that were possible, which I doubt), would work *against* the good things we have to accomplish in the next 100 years. Do the good things now -- taking advantage of the low and/or falling number of births we benefit from today.
/5

I see no problem here that requires birth-rate boosting now, or any time this century. Instead it's all about making life better, and solving our many gigantic problems, in the next hundred years. That would be awesome. Maybe the people of the future will want to have more kids then. OK with me!
/4

I like this scenario a lot. Global birth rates converge at about the current U.S. rate sometime after the end of this century, and population peaks around 10 billion. Then by 175 years later people want more births, or produce babies some other way, and they end up at 6 billion.
/3

These are the rebound scenarios, where global total fertility rate converges to 1.66 (PLOS One, right) and something else (1.6?) in the book (left), and then rises back to 2.1 starting in 2125, 2150, or 2175. In the worst (2175) case, we're stabilize at ~6 billion by ~2300 (round numbers).
/2

per 1000

😂

OK, ChatGPT 5.2 on cue. My prompt: "write a 200-word abstract for a paper that proposes a new theory to explain modern fertility trends in post-industrial societies, using [random theories] Marxist feminism, Jungian psychology, Second Demographic Transition theory, and neoclassical economics." Bingo

Not preregistered, but I only checked this term, because in moderating hundreds of papers a month on SocArXiv, I saw the phrase "proposed framework" appearing in a lot of AI slop, short, data-free, superficially written papers with dramatic claims to originality and importance. Voila.

My review article talks about how to tweak Becker's model to include unintended pregnancy and the transition to lower fertility levels. Recent research in economics is about how modern contraception and legal abortion led to a reduction in unintended pregnancy: www.annualreviews.org/content/jour...

Nice! Thank you

Thanks! This helps me a lot