“It also means that the ancient monument, near Salisbury in south-west England, was built with stones from all parts of Great Britain.”

Gotta catch ‘em al.

Spot on. This lack of secure employment (and yes, also probably lack of sense of purpose) also undermines the social relationships necessary to collectively bargain (with a union or not) for better working conditions. When workers don’t feel they have each other’s back, they are less likely to pressure an employer for better pay and conditions.

That’s why I said:

Which would of course also require a collective form of prenatal sex selection

If the goal would be to have a stable population size but with fewer births per woman, I think a collective form of prenatal sex selection (of the kind I describe above) would work.

What this sex selection would look like would be another issue. Whether externally fertilized embryos are selected before they are placed in a womb, or whether it would involve forms of abortion (or even infanticide): it’s up to your imagination.

But there are no lies, nor any misapplied statistics?

Thanks all for your replies. Interesting.

I’m a bit surprised that nobody comments on the matriarchal speculation at the end. You’re all fine with that?

Expressed as “the average number of babies that an individual woman needs to have for a certain population to stay the same size”, the replacement rate should not depend on population size, right?

If you express it as an absolute number (e.g. number of babies per year) than obviously it will depend on population size.

From what I understand, the replacement rate (expressed as the average number of babies that an individual woman needs to have for a certain population to stay the same size), depends mostly on what percentage of people die before they (can) have babies.

In that story, sometimes the moon would be so close, that if you would jump on the right moment you would be taken up by its field gravity.

There is a great story about that by the great writer Italo Calvino called ‘the distance of the moon’: https://irenebrination.typepad.com/files/calvino-italo-cosmicomics.pdf