Good presentation by the author that reaffirms my own opinions about the topic, specifically that while it sucks and cripples the social welfare programs our (deceased) elders built on the theory of continued population and productivity growth, it's also an issue we can fix with coordination between powers and workers. It's about building a new environment that puts families, rather than employers, first, and encouraging participation in the creation and maintenance of that environment by everyone regardless of age or demographic. The return of third places, social events, volunteerism, clubs, transit, public gatherings, stay-at-home parents, and more.
And as I've seen others point out in regard to the biological procreation imperative, we as a species are wired to breed. For all the whining from puritans about pornography, I'm of the opinion that its proliferation and normalization in fact reflects a deeply-held urge of humanity to have more time to have sex and live authentically again, whatever that may look like to the individual or family unit. Humans clearly want sex, and families, and time off, but the current global civilizational model is work > all, and thus families have taken a backseat to GDP growth at all costs.
I'm a single, gay man. During two of my last major existential crises, for about two weeks following, I noticed a marked turn of my thoughts and feelings towards having (biological) children. Stuff like, "If I'd had a kid at such-and-such age, how old would they be now?", "How would I manage if a child was suddenly in my life?", and "Oh god, my line stops with me panic". For a number of reasons, I am extremely unlikely to ever have kids; it would take a change in my prospects so massive that I can't really conceive of it. For this reason, I have come to feel that there may be a common (often irrational) biological impulse to procreate.
But now that I get to the bottom of my message, it occurs to me that it might be tangential, since you're talking about sex, which is related to but encompasses a far larger category of activity than just procreation. Speaking through my lgbt lens (and again, probably tangentially) this false conflation creates at least the dual issues of the incorrect ideas that sex should only be for procreation, as well as the the incorrect idea that queer people can't (or shouldn't) be parents. Here's hoping that both get nixed as we rethink the role of sex, and the importance of family, in society.
For what it's worth, I'm also a single gay man and think similarly at times about the path not taken, and why I chose not to adopt as I had originally planned in my 20s. It sucks, but I'm content with being the cool Uncle to my niblings and providing external support to my siblings as needed. Society needs more than just parents in order for children to thrive, and I believe queer folk are ideally suited to fill in a lot of those roles.
As for my comments on sex specifically, I'll admit I'm speaking through the perspective of someone who A) doesn't have it in order to procreate, and B) has a healthier relationship with it than many of my own peers might. It's not solely an act of procreation or hedonism, but it can fill both roles - though I will only ever know it from the perspective of pleasure alone.
I appreciate you sharing your thoughts like that. Thank you.
> During two of my last major existential crises, for about two weeks following, I noticed a marked turn of my thoughts and feelings towards having (biological) children.
I have thought about this a lot over the years and your comment only enforces my opinion: we think more about procreation and having children when we are in more survivally stressful situation. That's why developed societies have less children and poor people have more: rich people or people with enough wealth to live comfortably don't have a lot of children because they don't face death every day and don't feel the need to spread their genes.
Not minded at all - I thought that was an introspective and interesting comment; especially as someone who doesn’t really want kids, but also isn’t sure, but is also aging out of that period of his life.
Sex is for procreation; even when done for sport, the biological studies show that changes happen hormonally that increase the chances of reproduction. Ergo, even when you don’t think sex is for reproduction, nature made it so that it is.
The fertility rate is falling everywhere, even countries that have extensive childcare and maternity/paternity leave. Sweden grants 68 weeks of shared parental leave and their TFR is at 1.45.
There is nothing authentic about porn, what a strange comment. Sure, it hacks the reward system of the brain in the same way that a slot machine does, but this does absolutely nothing to promote families.
> There is nothing authentic about porn, what a strange comment. Sure, it hacks the reward system of the brain in the same way that a slot machine does, but this does absolutely nothing to promote families.
Disagree on both. Pornography, like any media, has a multitude of styles and types that can evoke different sets of emotions from the viewer. It's an art form that speaks uniquely to each individual, and I've found it to be a healthy way to explore my own interests as well as to connect with potential partners on shared interests. It's also seen plenty of use by married couples as inspiration or "mental lubricant", promoting intercourse (and raising the chances of procreation) in the process. While it's true that not everybody uses it in such healthy ways, and it's also true that some smut is incredibly toxic (particularly to the uneducated/ill-informed), on the whole it's an inseparable part of the human experience we'd do well to utilize for the art and tool it is instead of repressing it out of some misguided notion of subjective purity.
> Sweden grants 68 weeks of shared parental leave and their TFR is at 1.45.
I speculate that a different thing is happening in Europe. Every time I hear European takes on issues, it feels like Europe is post-religion, post-values, post-meaning. Everything is relative; pleasure is the only personal goal, and not harming others is the only external goal. Why even have kids? Why get married? It's a lot of work, plus there's a widely-held belief that Europeans/Westerners in general bear generational guilt because of what colonizers did in the 1500s anyway, so it feels virtuous to voluntarily decline as a civilization, freeing up more oil and resources for the developing world.
The US and Canada seem more traditional in that a lot of people would really like to have kids and don't think it's pointless, but it's just impractical for economic reasons, and they're choosing to allocate what little resources they have towards a more comfortable life (relatively!) instead of having an economic struggle -- OR they do have kids but because they wait for economic certainty first, they start much later and as a result have way fewer per couple.
Of course, North America has a very loud segment that agrees with the European degrowth narrative detailed above, and Europe has a loud segment which goes against it.
Wherever I look, if people want children, they fuck and have children. Single moms everywhere; no problem; most fathers are living up to the minimum of paying until the kid is old enough and the moms are fine with it. what else to live for than fun and parental purpose?
the fertility rate is falling because people care less because that's what comes across from top down everywhere.
it's too many lies covered up by people who are responsible for the opposite.
if the top does not care for the best, then my children are doomed to stay far below their potential and will experience at least some mental illness and health issues that will diminish the enjoyment of their life to a pointless minimum. local hierarchies and the particular competences and values and characters are just damn pathetic and the same is true in most other orbits. it's choice and POV. and just my observation, btw
then you look around, how others raise their kids and how all those people turn out. no thank you.
and if that's what the top wants, lol, ok, go ahead. we are fine with less kids, whenever we want, if we want.
on a side note: I do believe this is all implicit to how the colonies decided to progress. genetic algorithms don't care about reproduction. lessons learned and saved. the code can be reassembled at any time. if this time is BS and "ugly (sad)", then all that competition is a waste and too many lessons will go unlearned. thus, let the sabotaging elements win as easy as they designed it and watch them burn like they ("the minds running on/emerging from the genome") did so many times before.
porn can actually help in this regard. especially if your reward system is broken, you grew up way too conservative and in a web of engineered, beaten paths for exploration, "so you become like we want you".
This friend speaks my mind. Population decline is, on the whole, Good for humanity, in many, many ways. It's just bad for an economic system predicated on permanent growth, forever. That system was always doomed - if it weren't for demographic decline, it would just hit hard resource limits sooner. On the whole, I would much rather human population gradually decline through falling births, than precipitously crash through rising deaths.
I’ve noticed that, besides the magnetism and drive for sex (which would be sufficient for a species to propagate), many people also experience the biological imperative (wanting their genes replicated) as its own separate feeling.
This makes no sense to me – it’s not a feeling I can personally relate to. I’d like to raise kids because I’d enjoy getting to teach them and share things with them, but I don’t care whether they are my biological children or not.
So it’s something I’ve wondered about. The likely why makes sense, but I don’t really get the what.
For whatever it’s worth, I also believe the two are separate feelings that aren’t always in alignment. I have no desire to procreate (gay man), but following the birth of my first nibling I felt this profound swell of emotion and drive commanding me to nurture and support its growth into an adult. It’s likely why, in my teens and 20s before I understood the full impact of the 2008 crisis, I wanted to eventually adopt children myself.
Seems like an inevitable consequence of easy-to-use birth control will lead to an increase of the direct desire to have children, as those that don't have that desire get bred out of the pool. Of course, that may take many generations.
> it's also an issue we can fix with coordination between powers and workers
Which is severely lacking in the most powerful nation on Earth
> It's about building a new environment that puts families, rather than employers, first, and encouraging participation in the creation and maintenance of that environment by everyone regardless of age or demographic.
Again, never going to happen in the USA at least.
The current human model is work > all because we are a capitalist system, and we reward greed because it's the best economic system we put up so far. There will be powerful interests fighting this and pushing all the costs of this heavy system failure onto their workers and consumers etc. and that's the whole problem we are facing...
“the ruling classes chose to ignore its symptoms out of convenience until the problem became insurmountably difficult to solve”
Not only the elite, but all the voters who don’t care because the elite told them large populations were dangerous. I still meet so-called smart college educated people that think a large population crisis is coming.
Here is an uncomfortable truth: religious people produce more children, regardless of their income, social welfare status and living conditions. They are thought from birth that marriage, family and children are gifts from "God".
In fact, Christians make it a _requirement_ to be "open to life" (i.e have children) before they agree to marry you in Church (in addition to banning contraceptives, abortions and porn).
They also believe that pursuit of wealth, status and greed is a sin and one should focus his attention inward , towards "God", "Family", and "Charity".. disincentivizing people from dedicating their lives to their careers and missing their chances of having kids. is it no surprise then, that they ten to have larger families?
What I'm trying to highlight here, isn't a celebration of religious practices but the fact that we need a massive cultural shift, first and foremost to resolve this issue and if I'm being honest, I don't see this happening anytime soon.. at least not in our hyper capitalist society.
I'm not sure many people (especially women) are willing to sacrifice their lifestyles, career aspirations and goals to have children.
Unless people are taught from birth that having kids is their sole purpose in life and that family, motherhood and communities are deeply celebrated by society, they will opt out of having kids.
100%. The mindset is everything. 100 years ago, if you picked the happiest 18-year-old woman in town, someone from a great family who was cared for, and never victimized by anyone, and asked her “are you sure you would like to sacrifice your opportunity to spend 4 years in a very expensive school and go get a job and work 5 days a week for the next 40 years, in order to bear a few children?” She would look at you like you were from Mars.
Today, both sexes are, for good reason, afraid of sacrificing any “work years” just to have kids, largely since costs have now become so high that doing so on one income is punishing. Even if you make $250k, which would be enough to live a great lifestyle as a single person, if you have a family and only one parent working, you have to live a lifestyle that much more resembles someone who makes $90k. (Divide those numbers in half for non-high-cost areas, result is the same) It’s probably worse if you are truly saving up the absurd amount of money that college is going to cost in the future (I’m not).
Maybe expecting every single person to work and no one to homestead and care for the kids, within a system that explicitly does not support families, was a mistake. (Please note that I did not gender the roles. My best friend is a stay-at-home dad and he is amazing. They can afford to do this, though, because his wife's compensation is extremely high.)
Expectations are part of it, but regardless of compensation or lack thereof it turns out that a lot of adults simply prefer to work outside the home instead of caring for children. Child rearing is essential, and rewarding in many ways. But it's also exhausting, repetitive, and frustrating. It's not surprising that given the choice many adults would rather spend time around other adults instead of children. In the past most societies kind of "solved" this inherent problem by artificially restricting women's but obviously that's not acceptable or even feasible now.
No matter the gender of the one staying at home, it creates a problematic power imbalance between the two parts of the couple, where one depends on the other and may be left in trouble if ever the couple should find an end.
True, which was solved like 8,000 years ago by religion/culture, saying you have to marry and support the mother of your children.
It wasn’t perfect of course. Abuse has always been a problem.
Yes, everyone has greater absolute freedom now that we have divorce, and abuse victims are better off, but we have not developed a functioning cultural replacement for the previous cultural arrangement. So, now we have a smaller abuse problem and 2 new problems: both spouses having to maintain excellent careers just in case they get divorced (at the expense of their children and their relationship with their children), AND for those relationship relationships that do end, one or both are still in trouble, as now two households have to be supported with the same amount of income.
I’m not proposing a solution. It’s hard. But I’m just pointing out how we specifically ruined this by completely throwing away the idea of marriage for life and replacing it with “marriage until you’re tired of the person”
PS: I’m divorced (though no kids with that marriage) and remarried, so I’m not pretending to be a moral authority.
The future is probably a society with more robots than humans.
We can see this happening now at Amazon.
Amazon is a good case to watch, because their operations replace humans with robots on close to a one to one basis.
Right now, Amazon has about 1.5 million human employees, and 1 million robots.
Amazon reached peak humans in 2022, with around 1.6 million employees. Then human employees began to decline slightly. Robots continue to increase. Here's an old chart from 2017, when Amazon had increased all the way to 45,000 robots and some people were worried.[1] Now, it's 20x that.
How a society of mostly robots will work is not clear, but it's coming anyway.
The 1 million robot number that Amazon keeps on using is a quite nuanced. It includes more ~800K robots that simply just move stuff in a 2D plane. I think the number of robots that actually manipulate things is far far less (probably less than 500) (but really no human wants to just move things from A to B).
Also, I completely agree with what you said. Cars (w/ no self-driving) can be thought of as primitive robots (just like robots of today). For good or bad, we will move towards more and more automation.
The simple Kiva mobile platforms are most of the robot count, but they replaced large numbers of people who did walk around warehouses moving stuff from A to B.
Maybe that's what Skynet really was. Robots wanted vacation days and hourly pay, humans said no. Just the 21st century's version of the 19th century's labor wars.
The mid-century Baby Boom occurred after a surge in affordable home keeping technologies (vacuum cleaners, washing machines, refrigerators, etc). I think a rebound in fertility will have to come from technology. Specifically, robots to help with child care and new fertility treatments to allow women to have children later in their lives.
The mid-century Baby Boom came after WWII, and probably had very little to do with technology. The upswing started some time in late 1944 to mid 1945 as combat was winding down in Europe and a lot of young men were returning home. Otherwise fertility has been declining steadily since 1800 in western countries.
No, this is exactly the opposite of true: you need to do more reading about the baby boom. It happened across many countries, including ones which had little involvement in WWII, and in almost all cases it began in the 1930s, even with the Great Depression underway. It got supercharged by the end of the war because that's when the economic doldrums finally ended, but upward trend in fertility predated even the beginning of the war, never mind the end.
Late child birth is not about fertility but about risks for the child. The only woman I know (yeah, anecdotes) who attempted to delay getting a child until after her 40th birthday got a baby with down syndrome. I know what living with a disability in our world means, from personal experience. And given that experience, I have a hard time giving these women some slack. I think they are risking the well being of their children just for their own selfish reasons. We are humans, and there are limits to what we can do. We need to accept them, or we will make other people suffer.
There is screening for down's syndrome in the first trimester, but then it becomes a matter of whether they are comfortable with pregnancy termination in case of down syndrome detection (down's syndrome can't be treated).
It is definitely something that you need to think about if you will have kids later in life (in addition to mother safety).
Late first child seems to have some substantial risks, though (what they call) geriatric pregnancies in general may not be as risky.
But even starting in your 30s gives you a big disadvantage, toddlers are fast (the fastest land mammal is a toddler who’s just been asked what he has in his mouth!).
Im not sure it's got to do with death. Maybe all the would be parents were holding off having kids during war for obvious reasons. Once the war stops they can just continue with their prior plans. It's also the return of the men from war seeing their girlfriends/wives after a long while.
Tell me you don't have kids without telling me you don't have kids.
From an "efficiency" perspective, one can already eliminate 90% of the work of childcare by putting your kid in a sturdy playpen with a secure hard top and wearing noise canceling headphones. People don't really want to do this, for the most part.
The interactive learning is the entire point of childcare. Having machines raise your kids will make it so you end up with kids that were raised by machines. Is that what you want? It seems like this is basically already a thing, with the varying amounts of screen time that parents will allow kids.
My concern is the intersection of rightwing natalism with Silicon Valley ideology leading to technological “solutions” involving, essentially, test tube babies. Take women out of the picture entirely. I can especially see a dystopian dynamic involving the “we have to compete with China” or “they’re doing it / about to do it in China” narratives.
While I think such a society would end in a lot of bloodshed, it sounds like it would make for an entertaining sci-fi or anime. I assume the elites would try to condition most or all of these women to be lesbians, to keep them believing that this is about women’s empowerment and not develop ideas of women being unvalued concubines and entertainment for the few Y-chromosome-bearers that survive (who I imagine couldn’t help but develop enormous egos and senses of entitlement).
I'm probably going to get in trouble for this, but the population numbers and statistics for Africa are totally unreliable. Fertility and total population are all wrong.
The DRC is said to have 100M people, but check out satellite imaging. There's no chance -- and I mean none -- that it actually has 100M people. Unless 9-out-of-10 inhabitants live in the woods under tree cover, the actual population of the country is probably closer to 10M.
You don't have to take my word for it. Look for yourselves. And take an satellite shot of Kinshasa (reported population ~19M), rotate or mirror-image it, and then ask GPT-5 to estimate its population. Also, compare for yourself vs. a place like Shanghai. (Reportedly just 20% more populous, but also visibly denser and roughly an order of magnitude larger.)
Many other countries in the region, like Nigeria, are much the same way. The population numbers don't line up with satellite imaging.
Then there are obvious economic measures, etc.
The unavoidable conclusion is that the numbers for Africa are maximally unreliable. There are various reasons for this that we can speculate on (foreign aid dependent on population numbers, etc.), but, anyway, at least take 'em with a grain of salt.
Zoom in on Kinshasa though and you can see that it's almost entirely very densely-packed slums and shantytowns built up against each other, about 100 - 250 square meters in size, with no gardens or back yards. Slums can be very dense, Dharavi in Mumbai 2.3 square KM with a population of about a million. Manhattan has a much lower population density now than 100 years ago.
Also in all the street view pictures it looks absolutely packed - every road is gridlocked with people everywhere, but Shanghai has a lot of empty space for people despite its size. Roads have trees, they're much wider, there are a lot of open parks, office buildings etc that Kinshasa wouldn't have.
I drove right around Africa through 35 countries over three years. I drove across both Nigeria and the DRC.
There are dozens and dozens of massive cities that take hours to cross in Nigeria you’ve never heard of. Anecdotally, it’s way, way, way more populous than anything nearby. Ethiopia felt somewhat similar in parts, as did Egypt.
Can you name a few of them in Nigeria? On satellite imaging, from what I've seen, they're not so massive, and they're mostly comprised of a sprawl of 1-3 story buildings.
We can compare vs. cities that we have good numbers for. Or Chinese/Indian cities, for that matter. (After looking at Nigeria or the DRC, a quick glance at India via satellite imaging is shocking.)
That said, Egypt is very populous, there's no doubt about that one.
Thank you for this. Nigerian here, and I have to say that you hit the nail squarely on the head. Population counts in Nigeria are deeply political and essentially every region/state is motivated to fake/overestimate their headcount to get a bigger chunk of the oil revenue, which is pretty much the most significant slice of gov. revenue.
But, once you dig into the figures, you realize it'd be a miracle if Nigeria has up to half of the population it claims.
Every single census that's been conducted has been marred by controversy, with states trying to buff up their populations to make their ethnicity/region look bigger and more important.
But, proxies like registered BVN (like Social Security Number, but for bank accounts) are just under 70M. Registered phone lines (~240M; each person usually owns 3-5) are similarly lackluster. Domestic demand is nothing to write home about if you run a CPG business. Zoom into a satellite view of a city that's supposed to have ~700k to 1M people and it looks like a suburb - just scanty.
Nigeria's most populous city claims to have 20M people - 2* the population of Seoul, one of the most urbanized, dense, vertical cities in the world, meanwhile, Lagos is just a sprawling slum.
Personally, I feel population counts across Africa are grossly overestimated. A good estimate would be 600-800M, but where's the fun in that when we can fearmonger about overpopulation?
You estimate a factor of two for over estimate, believable, but higher than I would have thought. Makes sense with the context of getting more revenue. Thank you
I caution you against the "I looked at satellite image" nonsense. Your lived experience is very valuable. Looking at a satellite image is not
I just did what you suggested and looked at Kinshasa and it looks HUGE to me. Endless rows of streets. Reminded me of Mexico City (and I just compared satellite imagery and they seem similar in that respect - and they are similar in terms of population). Big cities with few skyscrapers and tons of low rise buildings are quite common. In the west, Paris is an example of a populous city without many tall buildings.
Kinshasa's urban area (not the entire province) is generously estimated at 600 square km.
Mexico City is 1485 square km.
Mexico City's population, within that 1485 km^2 envelope, is most commonly given as ~9.5M. (It's ~20M with satellite towns and regions.)
And then consider that most of Kinshasa is comprised of buildings that are very low to the ground -- far lower than in Paris -- whereas Mexico City is in places very dense.
The arrogance of a comment like this is staggering. So you looked at some satellite photos and talked to ChatGPT and now you’re an expert on the demographics of a city? Crazy.
It's quite possible that China's population has also been significantly exaggerated. One thing that the China actually does quite well is universal childhood vaccination for certain diseases. Independent researchers looked at the number of vaccine doses ordered and found that it's way lower than the official government birth statistics would suggest.
Now this is an unproven "conspiracy theory" but it's entirely plausible that corrupt local officials have inflated population numbers in order to be able to embezzle more of the funds that flow in from the central government. A lot of people might exist only on paper, but it's impossible for outsiders to precisely quantify.
Ironic as it may sound, coming from a childfree millennial, I'm kind of puzzled how the system will survive. Both my grandparents died in their 90s, and spent over 30 years are retirees - mainly living off their state pension.
As people become older, they'll either have to work longer, or the system will come crashing down. Especially with lower fertility rates. My generation should be birthing kids as the previous ones, but I think almost half of my peers are childfree, too. And we're in the age that we have maybe - if lucky - 6,7 more years to reproduce.
I can't imagine a population where 1/3 will be retired people. It is also a huge drain on the healthcare system.
A substantial realignment in the economy is what's coming. The charge will be when the rate of vacated homes starts to uptick as their aren't enough capable people to live in them: right now the major metros have a lot of pent up demand, but those retirement figures imply a different reality as time goes on: eventually those people start going into care facilities, but their won't be nearly enough people around to supply the demand for the properties they're finally moving out from.
The real markets are absolutely not ready for that reality.
> right now the major metros have a lot of pent up demand
The major metros have the least to worry about from this. Those cities have high housing costs because of demand, or to put it another way, those cities have high demand despite high housing costs, and the economic factors that cause people to be attracted to cities aren't going to go away; density is devastatingly efficient and it's cheaper and more convenient for people to be close to things. But what this means is that as the population falls, that latent demand causes the less dense, lower-priced areas to depopulate. See Japan's crisis of rural depopulation, and how Tokyo isn't the one feeling the pinch.
I often meditate on this - can even the concept of index fund retirement survive an actual depopulation scenario?
Of course, older forms of retirement can still work (have ten kids each of who have ten kids and you command an army in retirement; perhaps they’ll even call you King) - but aside from that where does the growth come from when not from population or immigration?
Index funds will survive anything short of a complete collapse of the financial system. Even if returns are low, they only have to be better than the alternatives (on a risk adjusted basis).
Hopefully the deflation scenario due to technology will help with this shift gracefully. Else, it will be extremely difficult.
But if we had deflation in the economy, how will the investment scenario will Peter out is anyone’s guess.
I wonder The people who invented this financial growth will, why they didn’t thought about this in the long term? I guess, I have asked a question which has quite a generic answer already…
The selection effects of this transition will be really fascinating to see after the fact. The species has spent a long time under selection pressure for "having more kids", but is being subjected for the first time to "having more kids while extreme prosperity and modern telecommunications exist" which is a very different thing.
I had an evolutionary bio professor in college say this: "you don't understand evolution until you understand how contraception could lead to overpopulation."
Anything placed in the path of reproduction is a barrier to be overcome.
If there is anything in the human genome that correlates with a positive desire to choose to have children, we are selecting hard for that right now. We may see a bottleneck this century and then a gigantic population explosion next century as a result, with a world full of people with very loud "biological clocks" who just adore and crave babies.
That is assuming this is genetically determined enough to be a target for selection. There are probably correlates that are, and I could speculate endlessly about what they are, but I also know that such speculations are likely to be wrong because these systems are complex and often counter-intuitive.
One I've speculated about recently is negativity bias. It seems to me that a lot of people choosing not to have kids right now are doing so because of negativity bias, because they see the world as a terrible place as a result of their consumption of negative media. Historically negativity bias may be something that's been selected for, but this may now have flipped. Optimists may have higher fitness now while pessimists did pre-industrialization and pre-modernity. But again, speculation.
What do you / your prof think about the timelines though? I always heard people shoot these kinds of arguments down by saying that evolution does not significantly operate on our accelerated timelines of human technology.
Human cultures are also subject to evolutionary pressures and it is likely that we will start seeing intense selection effects at that level much earlier.
> The species has spent a long time under selection pressure for "having more kids"
This needs to be carefully qualified. Infant mortality rates for the first 99% of human history were so shockingly, stupefyingly high, that a woman might only expect to have about three of her children survive to adulthood (and maternal mortality rates were also so high that a woman wouldn't expect to survive more childbirths than 5 or 6).
What this means is that the human population was only marginally above replacement for the majority of human history. Human population didn't explode until the medicinal revolution.
This article [1] claims that it's actually still quite higher than replacement, to make people around ancient Mediterranean have to resort to various kinds of birth control (be it violent or non violent). Medicinal revolution do lowers death rate significantly but I guess the reason why we haven't normalized late/late marriage pattern as birth control until recently is because of abundance of resource resulted by industrial and agricultural revolution.
Paul Ehrlich was almost exactly wrong about everything, but he continues to frame the discourse to a ridiculous degree. I'm not sure what the magic pixie dust is that allows people to be this wrong and still have credibility.
He came to the US Air Force Academy every year to give the incoming freshman class his lecture.
This was mandatory and went on for years.
I distinctly remember he sat in a folding chair next to an overhead projector and used what looked like 20 year old laminate slides (this was in the early 2000s) to go through his pitch.
Is he still doing that at other schools? He must be too old at this point.
Paul Ehrlich was the most visible figure in the midcentury fear of overpopulation. He claimed that by now we'd have seen starvation so profound around the world (100,000,000s dead of starvation) that large portions of the third world would collapse completely and that the only mechanism to prevent this starvation was extreme population control measures placed by the west on the rest of the world (including things like partitioning India and just letting some regions starve completely to death with no aid). He believed that the sustainable population for the planet was one billion.
He was completely wrong. I think it is a great example to use in these modern discussions. Just 50 years ago we were seeing highly influential people say "we are going to breed ourselves to death and the only solution is extreme curtailing of rights." Today, we are starting to see highly influential people say "we are going to not-breed ourselves to death and the only solution is extreme curtailing of rights."
Everything is hostile to having kids. High consumer prices and house rents, media and celebrities advertising short term pleasures, big city way of life in anonymity entertaining alone until death, latest social trends in gender roles, low state financial support to families.
There must take place fundamental social reforms in order to reverse this path. The most important is to create working mothers and not dynamic but single women.
I remember when I was younger being constantly told that the earth was destined for overpopulation. That if we didn't do things soon to curb fertility there was going to be mass starvation and death. That this was just an inevitability, a certainty unless something was done. There were so many visions of the future based on overpopulation and the problems it would bring. Now we've switched to the opposite side, I never even got to enjoy the apparently brief moment when things were exactly right.
I say all this not to say that this article and all the worries about demographic decline must be fake/overstated, but I don't like the certainty that we just switched our worries from one extreme to the opposite.
The thing is, the people who were saying that were wrong even at the time. Fertility was already declining in the late 60s when The Population Bomb was released, but population was still increasing from the earlier boom, in the same way your car will continue coasting up the hill for a little while even after you release the accelerator. People were freaking out about absolute numbers, instead of extrapolating trends for the data they already had, because they were being actively misled by folks like Ehrlich.
So this is less "we believed one wrong thing, are we now believing a second wrong thing?" than "we believed one wrong thing, and corrected it to what we should have known all along".
> I remember when I was younger being constantly told that the earth was destined for overpopulation. That if we didn't do things soon to curb fertility there was going to be mass starvation and death. That this was just an inevitability, a certainty unless something was done.
It is still true, but it was inaccurately presented as overpopulation, rather than excess resource consumption and entropy generation.
The mass starvation and death is not going to be a sudden nuclear bomb type event, it will be gradual decreases in quality of life due to changing environmental variables leading to changing political climates and eventually physical conflicts.
Bad for our present (grotesque?) ecology - not bad for the Earth, nor bad for her resident life.
(If humanity decimated itself via overpopulation, Earth & her life - likely even class Mammalia - would be rather better for it, by any metric besides net intelligence.)
Little mention of automation in the labor discussion. Also, no real discussion of the consumerism aspect of the economy when talking about worker productivity.
Depopulation shouldn't be a big deal when it's decades away and will be a slow decline.
Societies and states have been doing fine without medicines, without electricity and with slavery for centuries. Doesn't mean we need to get back there.
Social welfare state will still exist, it'll just be more costly as drag than it is today (in the US, ~$1.1T/year of uncompensated caregiving occurs, for example). Capitalism is more the challenge, it's built on squeezing the aggregate working age population for profits, and that cohort is in terminal decline over the long term. Between global sovereign debt load [1] and the demand for future profits (slides 31-33 of this PDF), there will be sadness as the future has less and less humans to saddle these economic burdens on. Such are the breaks when you predicate a socioeconomic system on never ending growth, and growth is over because humans globally (for various complex and interwoven issues) are choosing to have less children or no children.
A tfr of 1.7, the welfare state will be costly but exist. A tfr of .73 like korea has? Long term, that’s 1 20 year old and 3 45 year olds taking care of half a baby, 7 70 year olds and 10 95 year olds
That depends very much on how technology progresses during coming decades. If we get something like AGI, then having less working age people may be a good thing, because there will be much, much less demand for white collar workers at least.
In the mid 2000's when I was a kid, at school I was taught that there would be a HUGE labour shortage once certain large generations retire, as younger generations are much smaller. Guess what, they retired a decade ago, and yet my country has the second highest unemployment rate in EU, with a very weak job market for fresh graduates in particular. Increased efficiency & automation ate all those jobs, nobody was hired to replace many of the boomers who retired. I doubt the future will be any different.
The complaining about fertility rates, mostly done by the chunk of the population hoarding more and more of the wealth, will continue until people's ability to afford rent and children improves.
> will continue until people's ability to afford rent and children improves.
National fertility rates don’t correlate with any measure of average income. The only thing that does is the average number of years a woman spends being educated; this probably isn’t causal because the decline in fertility occurs across all income and education levels.
Rent is the bigger issue than affordability per se. My wife pointed out the other day that we had our second and third kids shortly after we stopped living in apartments and bought a house. We didn't plan to have a significant age gap between our first (who we had in law school) and our other kids, and we earned a lot of money the whole time, it just happened that way. She's convinced that having the extra space subconsciously encouraged us to have more kids.
I've been encouraging my cousin who desperately wants children to have them in her two bedroom apartment but she feels that she needs to have a house first and she and her husband can't afford one. They're in their late 30s. My partner and I are mid-30s planning to have young children in our 2 bedroom apartment, we'd prefer a 3 bedroom but they DO NOT EXIST in our Los Angeles neighborhood. More space means untenable commutes which brings more complicated childcare logistics (can't get to daycare before it closes, less time with kids etc).
Hmmm... What if a wide variety of economic actors have somehow managed to slurp up all the surplus that previously went to "paying it forward" in terms of raising children?
Rent is a common complaint, but consider the costs of childcare, needing two incomes to stay afloat, etc.
This totally ignores the fact that the decline in fertility is measurable across the globe in the poorest and wealthiest nations in the world. It's clearly not a simple matter of affordability...
While I generally agree with this and am angry at "the elites" who seem to both want increased fertility but also don't really target it in their companies ... I think the bigger unspoken issue is really the TFR skew. Global fertility can go down for a while and it isn't disastrous. TFR skew results in large problems if the least progressive and poorest groups systematically have much higher TFR over extended periods.
None of the solutions I can think of are very appealing or even tolerable. It really feels like it's a matter of carrying on and having hope. But perhaps we could start by merely describing the data and the situation.
The thing that collapses in a negative population growth environment is passive earnings from interest and asset appreciation, retirement, and to some extent social welfare states. The whole idea of things like social security is predicated on a growing population paying for the elderly. It's also very, very bearish for things like real estate long term. We are probably still in a real estate bubble.
I suppose I've never expected to ever be able to retire unless I get truly wealthy. It's not something I've ever included in my life plan because I've kinda seen the writing on the wall about this since I was in my twenties.
I don't think this crash in fertility is that unexpected, and it's not even all bad. It'll help us weather things like climate change and natural resource depletion.
Social security is solvent for at least the next 75 years if the US removes the payroll cap on contributions from wage income. We choose not to. The economic resources exist for these social programs, it will just diminish profits (the horror /s). It's a policy choice.
Every year total fertility rate remains lower than replacement rate further locks in the fertility curve, but there is no political will or desire to implement the fixes required. So, we keep kicking the can until we cannot anymore. It's unfortunate. Demographic destiny comes regardless, as each year total fertility rate continues to fall.
You can retire the other way around - since you need roughly $20 saved for every dollar you need in retirement, reducing expenses by a dollar is as good as saving $20.
Any data for this? I think this maybe the real answer because unlike other explanations, this one can actually acquire proof from before modern ages. Simply because it's known that cities fertility rates were always negative and have to constantly pull people from countryside.
This is probably a factor, but I think it’s a mistake to treat cities not being suited for raising children as a hard, immutable fact. They’re bad because rent continues to soar which clashes on two fronts (kids are expensive already and increase space requirements) and we as a society have decided to build our urban spaces (suburbs included) to be explicitly not friendly to children, families, or anybody not driving and to instead favor adults with money to spend. These are things we could change, should we want to.
The other thing to look at is why people have migrated into cities, and the answer is pretty simple: it’s where the good employment prospects are. The further yet get away from urban cores the worse those get: fewer jobs, worse compensation and benefits, greater risk of being stuck between jobs for long periods of time. Anybody worried about birthrates should be embracing remote work and making sure they compensate their employees well.
The tide is rising and most ships are sinking. Productivity in the last 40 years has skyrocketed. The gains have overwhelmingly gone to a tiny minority while everyone else has seen rent, food, education, and more go up dramatically faster than wages. This has accelerated in the last 15 years and has destroyed any faith in the social contract.
The pie isn't always growing and the pie isn't always static. There are times where either can happen. I think people are just feeling that we are entering a period where the pie will be stagnant for a while. In the short term the world might be a zero sum game.
Nice assertions, but where’s the content of your post? What’s your opinion here based on those two things? Those are just two statements, but do you believe things are different now than historically or are you arguing it’s the same as it ever was, or something else?
I’m probably not old enough yet to share my opinion on societal change across generations, I was a kid until recently.
Is there an upper bound to the creation of wealth? Is it infinite? Are there any limits to its creation? Is there any inherent value to it without being able to "transfer"?
I feel like slide 39 would have gotten you chased out of polite society 10 years ago.
A lot of western countries economies are built on sustained mass migration. Australia, Canada, New Zealand. Arguably the United States where both parties champion it (turn the other check to illegal migraiton of the democrats VS mass H1B visas of the republicans).
and haha on “The “rebound” in future fertility for low-fertility countries is consistent with an expectation of continued progress toward gender equality and women’s empowerment and improving social and economic opportunities for young people and families.”
Not "yes and no", the answer is simply yes. You cannot simply flood your country with unrestricted migration from lower GDP per capita countries and not expect overall growth to slow down.
> Yes, output per capita is the primary measure of individual welfare but...
> our ability to service debt and social security obligations depends on total output.
Our ability to service social obligations and debt entirely depends on GDP per capita. Whilst they are both paid on a GDP basis, they a generated as a multiplier of capita. If you have 1 million people, and add another million people (of the same distribution), social obligations are also doubled, as will debt, but both delayed. It's not that complicated.
> We live in a welfare state, and this is unlikely to change anytime soon.
It's about to change now, the time is up. Governments world wide are now struggling to issue bonds at reasonable rates, there are no known mechanisms to unwind. The likes of Japan, a large buyer of the foreign bond market, starting to bring down its bond purchases, indicates this.
> Most immigrants worsen the fiscal position of the government.
This is especially true whilst you have a system already setup making a loss, such as the UK's pension system.
> Each immigrant into a rich country makes the position of poor countries harder.
Every doctor, nurse, engineer, etc, that we import is one less for their original country. What do we think that does to the original country on scale? What do we think that does to their growth?
> Affordable housing:
Many animals will not breed, and some even miscarry, if they are not in a suitable environment. Giving birth and raising children makes the mother/family very vulnerable. It seems that for all of our sophistication, the human race is no different. What we're measuring world wide appears to be an enormous economic deficit.
The point on p. 39 about immigration is important for everyone to understand:
> Most immigrants worsen the fiscal position of the government.
According to an Economist article addressing data collected by Denmark, each non-western immigrants produce a negative financial benefit over their lifetimes, and immigrants from the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan, are a net cost on the government at every age: https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/the-effects-of-immigration-in-...
Progressive taxation will generally mean that anyone under the median income has a negative net impact on the government's finances. All this study is doing is reflecting the obvious fact that immigrants are by and large working class.
Yes, but the economic rationale of immigration is to have younger workers who can pay into the system to buffer the growing older population. That can’t happen if the immigrants never pay in more than they take out at any point in their life.
> each non-western immigrants produce a negative financial benefit over their lifetimes
I'm not familiar with the writer but their definition of "non-western" is a bit weird to me. I don't know what criteria were used or whether these are Denmark's classifications or the author's own.
The chart captioned "Violent crime conviction rates for immigrants in 2010–2021 by nation of origin expressed in multiples of the Danish conviction rate" says, for example, that Greece is Western but its neighbor North Macedonia is "other". Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania - all Western, but Czechoslovakia is "other". Croatia? Western, but curiously not Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro, or Yugoslavia. There's no rhyme or reason here.
People originating from these debatably Western (or non-Western, I literally don't know but it's inconsistent either way) countries all have conviction rates above the Danish rate. Which would muddle the narrative of that particular chart a fair bit. Maybe it makes no difference to the fiscal question though.
Why are the demographics of a small Nordic nation something "everyone" should understand? Whenever I've pointed to how well the social safety nets work in these countries and how they could be an example for the US, I've been told that the US is too different of a country to draw an analogy.
Denmark has been the most systematic about collecting this sort of data about immigrants from different places. I suspect you’d see similar results in the UK and Canada if those governments collected the data. Canada’s GDP per capita has actually started declining recently.
I think Denmark’s welfare system is a model, so whoever you’re arguing with, it’s not me. I will point out that, if Denmark with its robust welfare system can’t integrate MENAPT immigrants effectively, that doesn’t bode well for other countries with less efficient welfare states.
Over what timespan? This analysis isn't elaborated at all. Does it count the impact of companies being able to pay lower wages and paying more taxes? Does it account for the future generations? Etc.
Intuitvely, those opposing immigration have always known this. But tell that t someone from the left They will verbally kill you for stating obvious facts.
The left vs right theatre is really just two sides of the same coin.
By now every western democracy is being dragged along the same path with different stages of progression.
1. Move domestic production and jobs to lesser developed countries to increase profits.
2. Open the gates for mass immigration under the guise of openness and empathy to import wage slaves for the service sector and use every media channel to ostracize anyone who utters the slightest doubt about this policy.
3. Aggressively push DEI and gender ideology to alienate the social-democratic left from the academic left and drown out any other popular left topics like worker's rights or class warfare.
4. Amplify polarization on social media by creating as many conflicts as possible (left vs right, old vs young, men vs women, natives vs immigrants, ...).
5. Promote a right-wing populist party and trick enough people into voting for it.
6. Move the tax burden from the rich to the middle and lower class and remove regulations and restrictions on companies while ignoring all the other problems.
7. Establish surveillance and authoritarian rule under the guise of safety.
Everyone in this so-called culture war is being played, so maybe it's time to stop being smug about being smarter than the other side and start contemplating if there is any common idea that we can agree on that allows us to go forward.
In contrast to Sweden, which decided to simply stop collecting data on certain things whenever a given statistic began to become inconvenient with respect to asylum and immigration policies.
You realize different kinds of immigrants go to different places? Do you think that immigrants from Bangladesh are a net cost at every country they go to including Pakistan?
I'm quite tired of this topic being brought up all the time. What's the solution? We've seen that economic incentives won't do, so what? Force women to have children? Punish celibates? Let's not kid ourselves (pun intended), the "solutions" to this "crisis" are worse than the outcome.
Look on the bright side, a declining demography makes human activity that much more sustainable, and maybe our descendants won't even have to worry about restricting their carbon emissions to keep the planet inhabitable.
In the meantime, we'll have to take a cut to our way of life, which I can live with. We don't need to travel to the other side of the globe yearly, we don't need three cars per household, etc.
It's quite telling that the people most concerned with this usually self-label as "pro-markets libertarians". Is market health more important than bodily autonomy? What happened to freedom?
I think it's gonna be fine. The capital per person (capital deepening) will be great. Things that prove hard to automate will suffer — maybe elder care can't be automated and will go to shit — but a lot of stuff can be automated.
This is all well and good, but population dropping will only impact our civilization a little. I think this is an issue only because the "very rich" may actually see their standard of living fall. For the poor, it will have no real impact.
Plus it is probably a good thing population will start dropping.
The much larger worry should be Climate Change, a dropping population can only help Climate Change in the long run. But right now, due to how we all live, we are heading into a whole lot of hurt due to Climate Change. Far more "hurt" than the population falling.
Also, worried about population dropping ? Wait to see how fast it drops when Countries start massive wars due to dwindling resources.
EDIT: want an example of the Impact of population dripping ? Look at Europe during the Plague in the 1300s(?). What happened was the rich had a hard time finding labor, so they had to start paying people a lot more for their work. To me, that is the big fear, the rich may have to start paying more.
It will likely bring back the problem of old age destitution as rule, not exception. It's a previously common scourge that never went completely away[1][2], but went into the sidelines by early-mid XX century, and is set to coming back with a vengeance, by the time current people in their 20s-30s reach old age. It hits the poor hard.
The history of the world and economics is far more nuanced than rich people hoarding wealth. Wealth is the economy, it's created from systems. The feudal system in the medieval age was relatively poor at generating wealth. A series of technological and intellectual developments began to rapidly increase in the 1400s that culminated in the modern era, including especially the printing press.
But in the 1300s serfdom was still the norm in Europe. Serfs did not get paid and so the Plague made no difference except 2/3 of the population died. Serfdom would last another several hundred years after the plague, and in some countries all the way to the 20th century.
Financialization can also make it appear wealth has increased when really nothing has happened.
If all property is “owned” by the crown and people only have various “rights” to it that can be inherited but never encumbered or sold, then there’s really no point in “valuing” the land beyond simple comparisons.
Once land can be bought and sold value appears to track it; but the land was always there.
Funny, I just wrapped a blog post about this: https://green.spacedino.net/i-dont-worry-about-population-de...
Good presentation by the author that reaffirms my own opinions about the topic, specifically that while it sucks and cripples the social welfare programs our (deceased) elders built on the theory of continued population and productivity growth, it's also an issue we can fix with coordination between powers and workers. It's about building a new environment that puts families, rather than employers, first, and encouraging participation in the creation and maintenance of that environment by everyone regardless of age or demographic. The return of third places, social events, volunteerism, clubs, transit, public gatherings, stay-at-home parents, and more.
And as I've seen others point out in regard to the biological procreation imperative, we as a species are wired to breed. For all the whining from puritans about pornography, I'm of the opinion that its proliferation and normalization in fact reflects a deeply-held urge of humanity to have more time to have sex and live authentically again, whatever that may look like to the individual or family unit. Humans clearly want sex, and families, and time off, but the current global civilizational model is work > all, and thus families have taken a backseat to GDP growth at all costs.
I'm a single, gay man. During two of my last major existential crises, for about two weeks following, I noticed a marked turn of my thoughts and feelings towards having (biological) children. Stuff like, "If I'd had a kid at such-and-such age, how old would they be now?", "How would I manage if a child was suddenly in my life?", and "Oh god, my line stops with me panic". For a number of reasons, I am extremely unlikely to ever have kids; it would take a change in my prospects so massive that I can't really conceive of it. For this reason, I have come to feel that there may be a common (often irrational) biological impulse to procreate.
But now that I get to the bottom of my message, it occurs to me that it might be tangential, since you're talking about sex, which is related to but encompasses a far larger category of activity than just procreation. Speaking through my lgbt lens (and again, probably tangentially) this false conflation creates at least the dual issues of the incorrect ideas that sex should only be for procreation, as well as the the incorrect idea that queer people can't (or shouldn't) be parents. Here's hoping that both get nixed as we rethink the role of sex, and the importance of family, in society.
Just some rambling, don't mind me.
For what it's worth, I'm also a single gay man and think similarly at times about the path not taken, and why I chose not to adopt as I had originally planned in my 20s. It sucks, but I'm content with being the cool Uncle to my niblings and providing external support to my siblings as needed. Society needs more than just parents in order for children to thrive, and I believe queer folk are ideally suited to fill in a lot of those roles.
As for my comments on sex specifically, I'll admit I'm speaking through the perspective of someone who A) doesn't have it in order to procreate, and B) has a healthier relationship with it than many of my own peers might. It's not solely an act of procreation or hedonism, but it can fill both roles - though I will only ever know it from the perspective of pleasure alone.
I appreciate you sharing your thoughts like that. Thank you.
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> During two of my last major existential crises, for about two weeks following, I noticed a marked turn of my thoughts and feelings towards having (biological) children.
I have thought about this a lot over the years and your comment only enforces my opinion: we think more about procreation and having children when we are in more survivally stressful situation. That's why developed societies have less children and poor people have more: rich people or people with enough wealth to live comfortably don't have a lot of children because they don't face death every day and don't feel the need to spread their genes.
Not minded at all - I thought that was an introspective and interesting comment; especially as someone who doesn’t really want kids, but also isn’t sure, but is also aging out of that period of his life.
Sex is for procreation; even when done for sport, the biological studies show that changes happen hormonally that increase the chances of reproduction. Ergo, even when you don’t think sex is for reproduction, nature made it so that it is.
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The fertility rate is falling everywhere, even countries that have extensive childcare and maternity/paternity leave. Sweden grants 68 weeks of shared parental leave and their TFR is at 1.45.
There is nothing authentic about porn, what a strange comment. Sure, it hacks the reward system of the brain in the same way that a slot machine does, but this does absolutely nothing to promote families.
> There is nothing authentic about porn, what a strange comment. Sure, it hacks the reward system of the brain in the same way that a slot machine does, but this does absolutely nothing to promote families.
Disagree on both. Pornography, like any media, has a multitude of styles and types that can evoke different sets of emotions from the viewer. It's an art form that speaks uniquely to each individual, and I've found it to be a healthy way to explore my own interests as well as to connect with potential partners on shared interests. It's also seen plenty of use by married couples as inspiration or "mental lubricant", promoting intercourse (and raising the chances of procreation) in the process. While it's true that not everybody uses it in such healthy ways, and it's also true that some smut is incredibly toxic (particularly to the uneducated/ill-informed), on the whole it's an inseparable part of the human experience we'd do well to utilize for the art and tool it is instead of repressing it out of some misguided notion of subjective purity.
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> Sweden grants 68 weeks of shared parental leave and their TFR is at 1.45.
I speculate that a different thing is happening in Europe. Every time I hear European takes on issues, it feels like Europe is post-religion, post-values, post-meaning. Everything is relative; pleasure is the only personal goal, and not harming others is the only external goal. Why even have kids? Why get married? It's a lot of work, plus there's a widely-held belief that Europeans/Westerners in general bear generational guilt because of what colonizers did in the 1500s anyway, so it feels virtuous to voluntarily decline as a civilization, freeing up more oil and resources for the developing world.
The US and Canada seem more traditional in that a lot of people would really like to have kids and don't think it's pointless, but it's just impractical for economic reasons, and they're choosing to allocate what little resources they have towards a more comfortable life (relatively!) instead of having an economic struggle -- OR they do have kids but because they wait for economic certainty first, they start much later and as a result have way fewer per couple.
Of course, North America has a very loud segment that agrees with the European degrowth narrative detailed above, and Europe has a loud segment which goes against it.
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Wherever I look, if people want children, they fuck and have children. Single moms everywhere; no problem; most fathers are living up to the minimum of paying until the kid is old enough and the moms are fine with it. what else to live for than fun and parental purpose?
the fertility rate is falling because people care less because that's what comes across from top down everywhere.
it's too many lies covered up by people who are responsible for the opposite.
if the top does not care for the best, then my children are doomed to stay far below their potential and will experience at least some mental illness and health issues that will diminish the enjoyment of their life to a pointless minimum. local hierarchies and the particular competences and values and characters are just damn pathetic and the same is true in most other orbits. it's choice and POV. and just my observation, btw
then you look around, how others raise their kids and how all those people turn out. no thank you.
and if that's what the top wants, lol, ok, go ahead. we are fine with less kids, whenever we want, if we want.
on a side note: I do believe this is all implicit to how the colonies decided to progress. genetic algorithms don't care about reproduction. lessons learned and saved. the code can be reassembled at any time. if this time is BS and "ugly (sad)", then all that competition is a waste and too many lessons will go unlearned. thus, let the sabotaging elements win as easy as they designed it and watch them burn like they ("the minds running on/emerging from the genome") did so many times before.
porn can actually help in this regard. especially if your reward system is broken, you grew up way too conservative and in a web of engineered, beaten paths for exploration, "so you become like we want you".
This friend speaks my mind. Population decline is, on the whole, Good for humanity, in many, many ways. It's just bad for an economic system predicated on permanent growth, forever. That system was always doomed - if it weren't for demographic decline, it would just hit hard resource limits sooner. On the whole, I would much rather human population gradually decline through falling births, than precipitously crash through rising deaths.
Humans all across the developed world work 40% fewer hours than in 1900: https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever. Yet, in the U.S., TFR has consistently been dropping since 1800: https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever.
> Working hours for the average worker have decreased dramatically over the last 150 years.
note the “average worker”.
If women were staying at home with children, they were not counted as workers.
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I’ve noticed that, besides the magnetism and drive for sex (which would be sufficient for a species to propagate), many people also experience the biological imperative (wanting their genes replicated) as its own separate feeling.
This makes no sense to me – it’s not a feeling I can personally relate to. I’d like to raise kids because I’d enjoy getting to teach them and share things with them, but I don’t care whether they are my biological children or not.
So it’s something I’ve wondered about. The likely why makes sense, but I don’t really get the what.
For whatever it’s worth, I also believe the two are separate feelings that aren’t always in alignment. I have no desire to procreate (gay man), but following the birth of my first nibling I felt this profound swell of emotion and drive commanding me to nurture and support its growth into an adult. It’s likely why, in my teens and 20s before I understood the full impact of the 2008 crisis, I wanted to eventually adopt children myself.
Biology is weird.
I think your thinking also aligns with the ideas outlined in The Future is Degrowth (https://www.versobooks.com/products/2620-the-future-is-degro...). I found it to be a very approachable book, if you haven't read it yet.
> we as a species are wired to breed.
Wired to orgasm, maybe. Wired to breed, no. According to all the data.
Humans are very analytical and do tons of cost benefit analysis before breeding, and apparently, choose not to in many cases.
Seems like an inevitable consequence of easy-to-use birth control will lead to an increase of the direct desire to have children, as those that don't have that desire get bred out of the pool. Of course, that may take many generations.
> it's also an issue we can fix with coordination between powers and workers
Which is severely lacking in the most powerful nation on Earth
> It's about building a new environment that puts families, rather than employers, first, and encouraging participation in the creation and maintenance of that environment by everyone regardless of age or demographic.
Again, never going to happen in the USA at least.
The current human model is work > all because we are a capitalist system, and we reward greed because it's the best economic system we put up so far. There will be powerful interests fighting this and pushing all the costs of this heavy system failure onto their workers and consumers etc. and that's the whole problem we are facing...
“the ruling classes chose to ignore its symptoms out of convenience until the problem became insurmountably difficult to solve”
Not only the elite, but all the voters who don’t care because the elite told them large populations were dangerous. I still meet so-called smart college educated people that think a large population crisis is coming.
Here is an uncomfortable truth: religious people produce more children, regardless of their income, social welfare status and living conditions. They are thought from birth that marriage, family and children are gifts from "God".
In fact, Christians make it a _requirement_ to be "open to life" (i.e have children) before they agree to marry you in Church (in addition to banning contraceptives, abortions and porn).
They also believe that pursuit of wealth, status and greed is a sin and one should focus his attention inward , towards "God", "Family", and "Charity".. disincentivizing people from dedicating their lives to their careers and missing their chances of having kids. is it no surprise then, that they ten to have larger families?
What I'm trying to highlight here, isn't a celebration of religious practices but the fact that we need a massive cultural shift, first and foremost to resolve this issue and if I'm being honest, I don't see this happening anytime soon.. at least not in our hyper capitalist society.
I'm not sure many people (especially women) are willing to sacrifice their lifestyles, career aspirations and goals to have children.
Unless people are taught from birth that having kids is their sole purpose in life and that family, motherhood and communities are deeply celebrated by society, they will opt out of having kids.
100%. The mindset is everything. 100 years ago, if you picked the happiest 18-year-old woman in town, someone from a great family who was cared for, and never victimized by anyone, and asked her “are you sure you would like to sacrifice your opportunity to spend 4 years in a very expensive school and go get a job and work 5 days a week for the next 40 years, in order to bear a few children?” She would look at you like you were from Mars.
Today, both sexes are, for good reason, afraid of sacrificing any “work years” just to have kids, largely since costs have now become so high that doing so on one income is punishing. Even if you make $250k, which would be enough to live a great lifestyle as a single person, if you have a family and only one parent working, you have to live a lifestyle that much more resembles someone who makes $90k. (Divide those numbers in half for non-high-cost areas, result is the same) It’s probably worse if you are truly saving up the absurd amount of money that college is going to cost in the future (I’m not).
It’s crazy this was downvoted. This is basically a summary of all pew research on this topic - lol.
The last line of the slide reads "Once you start thinking about these issues, it is hard to think about anything else: demography is destiny."
Raoul Pal primary thesis about macroeconomics is that Demographics is everything. Here is a 54 second video of him highlighting that issue.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJm_zFbIqPE
GDP = people * productivity
I’m super interested on the economic modeling when every society is shrinking.
In that case, the best index fund will be the one that shrinks the slowest. This will happen about 10 years after the average reader here dies.
Maybe expecting every single person to work and no one to homestead and care for the kids, within a system that explicitly does not support families, was a mistake. (Please note that I did not gender the roles. My best friend is a stay-at-home dad and he is amazing. They can afford to do this, though, because his wife's compensation is extremely high.)
Expectations are part of it, but regardless of compensation or lack thereof it turns out that a lot of adults simply prefer to work outside the home instead of caring for children. Child rearing is essential, and rewarding in many ways. But it's also exhausting, repetitive, and frustrating. It's not surprising that given the choice many adults would rather spend time around other adults instead of children. In the past most societies kind of "solved" this inherent problem by artificially restricting women's but obviously that's not acceptable or even feasible now.
> a lot of adults simply prefer to work outside the home instead of caring for children
Or they think that they do, due to what the zeitgeist urges. We can never really know.
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No matter the gender of the one staying at home, it creates a problematic power imbalance between the two parts of the couple, where one depends on the other and may be left in trouble if ever the couple should find an end.
True, which was solved like 8,000 years ago by religion/culture, saying you have to marry and support the mother of your children.
It wasn’t perfect of course. Abuse has always been a problem.
Yes, everyone has greater absolute freedom now that we have divorce, and abuse victims are better off, but we have not developed a functioning cultural replacement for the previous cultural arrangement. So, now we have a smaller abuse problem and 2 new problems: both spouses having to maintain excellent careers just in case they get divorced (at the expense of their children and their relationship with their children), AND for those relationship relationships that do end, one or both are still in trouble, as now two households have to be supported with the same amount of income.
I’m not proposing a solution. It’s hard. But I’m just pointing out how we specifically ruined this by completely throwing away the idea of marriage for life and replacing it with “marriage until you’re tired of the person”
PS: I’m divorced (though no kids with that marriage) and remarried, so I’m not pretending to be a moral authority.
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The future is probably a society with more robots than humans.
We can see this happening now at Amazon. Amazon is a good case to watch, because their operations replace humans with robots on close to a one to one basis. Right now, Amazon has about 1.5 million human employees, and 1 million robots. Amazon reached peak humans in 2022, with around 1.6 million employees. Then human employees began to decline slightly. Robots continue to increase. Here's an old chart from 2017, when Amazon had increased all the way to 45,000 robots and some people were worried.[1] Now, it's 20x that.
How a society of mostly robots will work is not clear, but it's coming anyway.
[1] https://www.statista.com/chart/7428/45000-robots-form-part-o...
The 1 million robot number that Amazon keeps on using is a quite nuanced. It includes more ~800K robots that simply just move stuff in a 2D plane. I think the number of robots that actually manipulate things is far far less (probably less than 500) (but really no human wants to just move things from A to B).
Also, I completely agree with what you said. Cars (w/ no self-driving) can be thought of as primitive robots (just like robots of today). For good or bad, we will move towards more and more automation.
The simple Kiva mobile platforms are most of the robot count, but they replaced large numbers of people who did walk around warehouses moving stuff from A to B.
IIRC Amazon laid off the entire team that was working on manipulation research at the Boston area Amazon Robotics
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they should form a union
Maybe that's what Skynet really was. Robots wanted vacation days and hourly pay, humans said no. Just the 21st century's version of the 19th century's labor wars.
The people or the machines? Or both? :)
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The mid-century Baby Boom occurred after a surge in affordable home keeping technologies (vacuum cleaners, washing machines, refrigerators, etc). I think a rebound in fertility will have to come from technology. Specifically, robots to help with child care and new fertility treatments to allow women to have children later in their lives.
The mid-century Baby Boom came after WWII, and probably had very little to do with technology. The upswing started some time in late 1944 to mid 1945 as combat was winding down in Europe and a lot of young men were returning home. Otherwise fertility has been declining steadily since 1800 in western countries.
No, this is exactly the opposite of true: you need to do more reading about the baby boom. It happened across many countries, including ones which had little involvement in WWII, and in almost all cases it began in the 1930s, even with the Great Depression underway. It got supercharged by the end of the war because that's when the economic doldrums finally ended, but upward trend in fertility predated even the beginning of the war, never mind the end.
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See https://www.derekthompson.org/p/what-caused-the-baby-boom-wh...
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Late child birth is not about fertility but about risks for the child. The only woman I know (yeah, anecdotes) who attempted to delay getting a child until after her 40th birthday got a baby with down syndrome. I know what living with a disability in our world means, from personal experience. And given that experience, I have a hard time giving these women some slack. I think they are risking the well being of their children just for their own selfish reasons. We are humans, and there are limits to what we can do. We need to accept them, or we will make other people suffer.
There is screening for down's syndrome in the first trimester, but then it becomes a matter of whether they are comfortable with pregnancy termination in case of down syndrome detection (down's syndrome can't be treated).
It is definitely something that you need to think about if you will have kids later in life (in addition to mother safety).
Late first child seems to have some substantial risks, though (what they call) geriatric pregnancies in general may not be as risky.
But even starting in your 30s gives you a big disadvantage, toddlers are fast (the fastest land mammal is a toddler who’s just been asked what he has in his mouth!).
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While I wouldn’t like to place all my faith in that happening, that would certainly be a great development.
Baby booms normally happen after a big war. After all the death, people have a primal urge to procreate.
I read that people were copulating in the streets of London the day of the Armistice.
Im not sure it's got to do with death. Maybe all the would be parents were holding off having kids during war for obvious reasons. Once the war stops they can just continue with their prior plans. It's also the return of the men from war seeing their girlfriends/wives after a long while.
> robots to help with child care
Tell me you don't have kids without telling me you don't have kids.
From an "efficiency" perspective, one can already eliminate 90% of the work of childcare by putting your kid in a sturdy playpen with a secure hard top and wearing noise canceling headphones. People don't really want to do this, for the most part.
The interactive learning is the entire point of childcare. Having machines raise your kids will make it so you end up with kids that were raised by machines. Is that what you want? It seems like this is basically already a thing, with the varying amounts of screen time that parents will allow kids.
What if robots were to assist with other tasks while the parent was preoccupied with the child? Like cooking, cleaning up, laundry, shopping.
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My concern is the intersection of rightwing natalism with Silicon Valley ideology leading to technological “solutions” involving, essentially, test tube babies. Take women out of the picture entirely. I can especially see a dystopian dynamic involving the “we have to compete with China” or “they’re doing it / about to do it in China” narratives.
A "test tube baby" is simply an IVF pregnancy. What is the problem with parents using IVF to conceive?
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And this is bad why, exactly?
Women already don't want to be mothers--and everybody has pushed so hard that being a housewife is bad!--so what's the issue here?
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So the Axlotl tanks from Dune.
Nah, the right wing solution would be replacing prison with compulsory pregnancy. Sufficient numbers of convicts can be created by appropriate laws.
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I’d say artificial womb is a technocratic center-left solution. A right-wing solution would be a proverbial “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” for all women.
I, for one, would bet my firstborn that a solution to the demographic question such that fulfills modern sensibilities is to ever be found.
if we have all those robots doing everything for us, why do we need children?
If we have all those robots doing everything we are we needed?
We could just kill ourselves, since we don't seem to care much for life, reproduction, and all that.
For a technological solution, I've previously suggested changing the male/female ratio of new births. Filter out most of the Y bearing sperm cells.
In this new imbalanced society, a TFR well below 2 will still allow a stable, or even growing, population.
While I think such a society would end in a lot of bloodshed, it sounds like it would make for an entertaining sci-fi or anime. I assume the elites would try to condition most or all of these women to be lesbians, to keep them believing that this is about women’s empowerment and not develop ideas of women being unvalued concubines and entertainment for the few Y-chromosome-bearers that survive (who I imagine couldn’t help but develop enormous egos and senses of entitlement).
Who is going to fix things, then?
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I'm probably going to get in trouble for this, but the population numbers and statistics for Africa are totally unreliable. Fertility and total population are all wrong.
The DRC is said to have 100M people, but check out satellite imaging. There's no chance -- and I mean none -- that it actually has 100M people. Unless 9-out-of-10 inhabitants live in the woods under tree cover, the actual population of the country is probably closer to 10M.
You don't have to take my word for it. Look for yourselves. And take an satellite shot of Kinshasa (reported population ~19M), rotate or mirror-image it, and then ask GPT-5 to estimate its population. Also, compare for yourself vs. a place like Shanghai. (Reportedly just 20% more populous, but also visibly denser and roughly an order of magnitude larger.)
Many other countries in the region, like Nigeria, are much the same way. The population numbers don't line up with satellite imaging.
Then there are obvious economic measures, etc.
The unavoidable conclusion is that the numbers for Africa are maximally unreliable. There are various reasons for this that we can speculate on (foreign aid dependent on population numbers, etc.), but, anyway, at least take 'em with a grain of salt.
Zoom in on Kinshasa though and you can see that it's almost entirely very densely-packed slums and shantytowns built up against each other, about 100 - 250 square meters in size, with no gardens or back yards. Slums can be very dense, Dharavi in Mumbai 2.3 square KM with a population of about a million. Manhattan has a much lower population density now than 100 years ago.
Also in all the street view pictures it looks absolutely packed - every road is gridlocked with people everywhere, but Shanghai has a lot of empty space for people despite its size. Roads have trees, they're much wider, there are a lot of open parks, office buildings etc that Kinshasa wouldn't have.
I drove right around Africa through 35 countries over three years. I drove across both Nigeria and the DRC.
There are dozens and dozens of massive cities that take hours to cross in Nigeria you’ve never heard of. Anecdotally, it’s way, way, way more populous than anything nearby. Ethiopia felt somewhat similar in parts, as did Egypt.
Can you name a few of them in Nigeria? On satellite imaging, from what I've seen, they're not so massive, and they're mostly comprised of a sprawl of 1-3 story buildings.
We can compare vs. cities that we have good numbers for. Or Chinese/Indian cities, for that matter. (After looking at Nigeria or the DRC, a quick glance at India via satellite imaging is shocking.)
That said, Egypt is very populous, there's no doubt about that one.
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Thank you for this. Nigerian here, and I have to say that you hit the nail squarely on the head. Population counts in Nigeria are deeply political and essentially every region/state is motivated to fake/overestimate their headcount to get a bigger chunk of the oil revenue, which is pretty much the most significant slice of gov. revenue.
But, once you dig into the figures, you realize it'd be a miracle if Nigeria has up to half of the population it claims.
Every single census that's been conducted has been marred by controversy, with states trying to buff up their populations to make their ethnicity/region look bigger and more important.
But, proxies like registered BVN (like Social Security Number, but for bank accounts) are just under 70M. Registered phone lines (~240M; each person usually owns 3-5) are similarly lackluster. Domestic demand is nothing to write home about if you run a CPG business. Zoom into a satellite view of a city that's supposed to have ~700k to 1M people and it looks like a suburb - just scanty.
Nigeria's most populous city claims to have 20M people - 2* the population of Seoul, one of the most urbanized, dense, vertical cities in the world, meanwhile, Lagos is just a sprawling slum.
Personally, I feel population counts across Africa are grossly overestimated. A good estimate would be 600-800M, but where's the fun in that when we can fearmonger about overpopulation?
Are there any proxy for population count? Like may be mobile users, I understand people use more than one.
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Even better personal experience
You estimate a factor of two for over estimate, believable, but higher than I would have thought. Makes sense with the context of getting more revenue. Thank you
I caution you against the "I looked at satellite image" nonsense. Your lived experience is very valuable. Looking at a satellite image is not
I just did what you suggested and looked at Kinshasa and it looks HUGE to me. Endless rows of streets. Reminded me of Mexico City (and I just compared satellite imagery and they seem similar in that respect - and they are similar in terms of population). Big cities with few skyscrapers and tons of low rise buildings are quite common. In the west, Paris is an example of a populous city without many tall buildings.
Kinshasa's urban area (not the entire province) is generously estimated at 600 square km.
Mexico City is 1485 square km.
Mexico City's population, within that 1485 km^2 envelope, is most commonly given as ~9.5M. (It's ~20M with satellite towns and regions.)
And then consider that most of Kinshasa is comprised of buildings that are very low to the ground -- far lower than in Paris -- whereas Mexico City is in places very dense.
The arrogance of a comment like this is staggering. So you looked at some satellite photos and talked to ChatGPT and now you’re an expert on the demographics of a city? Crazy.
It's quite possible that China's population has also been significantly exaggerated. One thing that the China actually does quite well is universal childhood vaccination for certain diseases. Independent researchers looked at the number of vaccine doses ordered and found that it's way lower than the official government birth statistics would suggest.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/12/05/key-facts...
Now this is an unproven "conspiracy theory" but it's entirely plausible that corrupt local officials have inflated population numbers in order to be able to embezzle more of the funds that flow in from the central government. A lot of people might exist only on paper, but it's impossible for outsiders to precisely quantify.
Ironic as it may sound, coming from a childfree millennial, I'm kind of puzzled how the system will survive. Both my grandparents died in their 90s, and spent over 30 years are retirees - mainly living off their state pension.
As people become older, they'll either have to work longer, or the system will come crashing down. Especially with lower fertility rates. My generation should be birthing kids as the previous ones, but I think almost half of my peers are childfree, too. And we're in the age that we have maybe - if lucky - 6,7 more years to reproduce.
I can't imagine a population where 1/3 will be retired people. It is also a huge drain on the healthcare system.
A substantial realignment in the economy is what's coming. The charge will be when the rate of vacated homes starts to uptick as their aren't enough capable people to live in them: right now the major metros have a lot of pent up demand, but those retirement figures imply a different reality as time goes on: eventually those people start going into care facilities, but their won't be nearly enough people around to supply the demand for the properties they're finally moving out from.
The real markets are absolutely not ready for that reality.
> right now the major metros have a lot of pent up demand
The major metros have the least to worry about from this. Those cities have high housing costs because of demand, or to put it another way, those cities have high demand despite high housing costs, and the economic factors that cause people to be attracted to cities aren't going to go away; density is devastatingly efficient and it's cheaper and more convenient for people to be close to things. But what this means is that as the population falls, that latent demand causes the less dense, lower-priced areas to depopulate. See Japan's crisis of rural depopulation, and how Tokyo isn't the one feeling the pinch.
Case in point - Japan, with so many abandoned homes
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> can't imagine a population where 1/3 will be retired people.
We're currently trending towards a birth rate of 1 or less. This means 4/5 will be retirees in three generations.
Your 1/3 figure is wildly optimistic. Little chance it will be that good.
I often meditate on this - can even the concept of index fund retirement survive an actual depopulation scenario?
Of course, older forms of retirement can still work (have ten kids each of who have ten kids and you command an army in retirement; perhaps they’ll even call you King) - but aside from that where does the growth come from when not from population or immigration?
Index funds will survive anything short of a complete collapse of the financial system. Even if returns are low, they only have to be better than the alternatives (on a risk adjusted basis).
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Hopefully the deflation scenario due to technology will help with this shift gracefully. Else, it will be extremely difficult.
But if we had deflation in the economy, how will the investment scenario will Peter out is anyone’s guess.
I wonder The people who invented this financial growth will, why they didn’t thought about this in the long term? I guess, I have asked a question which has quite a generic answer already…
>I can't imagine a population where 1/3 will be retired people.
In South Florida it's always been like that or more.
No imagination required :)
The selection effects of this transition will be really fascinating to see after the fact. The species has spent a long time under selection pressure for "having more kids", but is being subjected for the first time to "having more kids while extreme prosperity and modern telecommunications exist" which is a very different thing.
I had an evolutionary bio professor in college say this: "you don't understand evolution until you understand how contraception could lead to overpopulation."
Anything placed in the path of reproduction is a barrier to be overcome.
If there is anything in the human genome that correlates with a positive desire to choose to have children, we are selecting hard for that right now. We may see a bottleneck this century and then a gigantic population explosion next century as a result, with a world full of people with very loud "biological clocks" who just adore and crave babies.
That is assuming this is genetically determined enough to be a target for selection. There are probably correlates that are, and I could speculate endlessly about what they are, but I also know that such speculations are likely to be wrong because these systems are complex and often counter-intuitive.
One I've speculated about recently is negativity bias. It seems to me that a lot of people choosing not to have kids right now are doing so because of negativity bias, because they see the world as a terrible place as a result of their consumption of negative media. Historically negativity bias may be something that's been selected for, but this may now have flipped. Optimists may have higher fitness now while pessimists did pre-industrialization and pre-modernity. But again, speculation.
Basically “if only the Amish have kids, in 200 years there’s going to be a large percentage of Amish”.
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What do you / your prof think about the timelines though? I always heard people shoot these kinds of arguments down by saying that evolution does not significantly operate on our accelerated timelines of human technology.
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Japan’s population dropped rapidly before contraception was allowed in due to abortion.
Abortion beats a strong selection pressure.
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Human cultures are also subject to evolutionary pressures and it is likely that we will start seeing intense selection effects at that level much earlier.
> The species has spent a long time under selection pressure for "having more kids"
This needs to be carefully qualified. Infant mortality rates for the first 99% of human history were so shockingly, stupefyingly high, that a woman might only expect to have about three of her children survive to adulthood (and maternal mortality rates were also so high that a woman wouldn't expect to survive more childbirths than 5 or 6).
What this means is that the human population was only marginally above replacement for the majority of human history. Human population didn't explode until the medicinal revolution.
This article [1] claims that it's actually still quite higher than replacement, to make people around ancient Mediterranean have to resort to various kinds of birth control (be it violent or non violent). Medicinal revolution do lowers death rate significantly but I guess the reason why we haven't normalized late/late marriage pattern as birth control until recently is because of abundance of resource resulted by industrial and agricultural revolution.
1. https://acoup.blog/2025/08/08/collections-life-work-death-an...
Paul Ehrlich was almost exactly wrong about everything, but he continues to frame the discourse to a ridiculous degree. I'm not sure what the magic pixie dust is that allows people to be this wrong and still have credibility.
He came to the US Air Force Academy every year to give the incoming freshman class his lecture.
This was mandatory and went on for years.
I distinctly remember he sat in a folding chair next to an overhead projector and used what looked like 20 year old laminate slides (this was in the early 2000s) to go through his pitch.
Is he still doing that at other schools? He must be too old at this point.
The modern-day Malthus, except so much worse, because he had the example of Malthus but chose to ignore the lesson there
how is Paul Ehrlich linked to the original post?
what is he wrong about?
Paul Ehrlich was the most visible figure in the midcentury fear of overpopulation. He claimed that by now we'd have seen starvation so profound around the world (100,000,000s dead of starvation) that large portions of the third world would collapse completely and that the only mechanism to prevent this starvation was extreme population control measures placed by the west on the rest of the world (including things like partitioning India and just letting some regions starve completely to death with no aid). He believed that the sustainable population for the planet was one billion.
He was completely wrong. I think it is a great example to use in these modern discussions. Just 50 years ago we were seeing highly influential people say "we are going to breed ourselves to death and the only solution is extreme curtailing of rights." Today, we are starting to see highly influential people say "we are going to not-breed ourselves to death and the only solution is extreme curtailing of rights."
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See also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager
Most never get held to account for their wrong predictions. But he seems a particularly egregious case.
Everything is hostile to having kids. High consumer prices and house rents, media and celebrities advertising short term pleasures, big city way of life in anonymity entertaining alone until death, latest social trends in gender roles, low state financial support to families.
There must take place fundamental social reforms in order to reverse this path. The most important is to create working mothers and not dynamic but single women.
I remember when I was younger being constantly told that the earth was destined for overpopulation. That if we didn't do things soon to curb fertility there was going to be mass starvation and death. That this was just an inevitability, a certainty unless something was done. There were so many visions of the future based on overpopulation and the problems it would bring. Now we've switched to the opposite side, I never even got to enjoy the apparently brief moment when things were exactly right.
I say all this not to say that this article and all the worries about demographic decline must be fake/overstated, but I don't like the certainty that we just switched our worries from one extreme to the opposite.
The thing is, the people who were saying that were wrong even at the time. Fertility was already declining in the late 60s when The Population Bomb was released, but population was still increasing from the earlier boom, in the same way your car will continue coasting up the hill for a little while even after you release the accelerator. People were freaking out about absolute numbers, instead of extrapolating trends for the data they already had, because they were being actively misled by folks like Ehrlich.
So this is less "we believed one wrong thing, are we now believing a second wrong thing?" than "we believed one wrong thing, and corrected it to what we should have known all along".
> I remember when I was younger being constantly told that the earth was destined for overpopulation. That if we didn't do things soon to curb fertility there was going to be mass starvation and death. That this was just an inevitability, a certainty unless something was done.
It is still true, but it was inaccurately presented as overpopulation, rather than excess resource consumption and entropy generation.
The mass starvation and death is not going to be a sudden nuclear bomb type event, it will be gradual decreases in quality of life due to changing environmental variables leading to changing political climates and eventually physical conflicts.
One is bad for the the earth, the other is bad for the economy.
Bad for our present (grotesque?) ecology - not bad for the Earth, nor bad for her resident life.
(If humanity decimated itself via overpopulation, Earth & her life - likely even class Mammalia - would be rather better for it, by any metric besides net intelligence.)
>I remember when I was younger being constantly told that the earth was destined for overpopulation.
Moral: Journalists are stupid and ignorant, and you should always keep in mind Gell-Mann amnesia, and go to the source papers.
Little mention of automation in the labor discussion. Also, no real discussion of the consumerism aspect of the economy when talking about worker productivity.
Depopulation shouldn't be a big deal when it's decades away and will be a slow decline.
Ugo Bardi has a post: https://senecaeffect.substack.com/p/what-if-malthus-was-righ...
This trend doesn't bode well for the long term survival of the social welfare state.
societies and states have been doing fine without welfare for centuries
"doing fine" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution
The sheer confidence with which someone working a white collar desk job posts this in the AI age is astounding.
Societies and states have been doing fine without medicines, without electricity and with slavery for centuries. Doesn't mean we need to get back there.
Social welfare state will still exist, it'll just be more costly as drag than it is today (in the US, ~$1.1T/year of uncompensated caregiving occurs, for example). Capitalism is more the challenge, it's built on squeezing the aggregate working age population for profits, and that cohort is in terminal decline over the long term. Between global sovereign debt load [1] and the demand for future profits (slides 31-33 of this PDF), there will be sadness as the future has less and less humans to saddle these economic burdens on. Such are the breaks when you predicate a socioeconomic system on never ending growth, and growth is over because humans globally (for various complex and interwoven issues) are choosing to have less children or no children.
[1] https://unctad.org/publication/world-of-debt ("Global public debt surpasses $100 trillion in 2024.")
A tfr of 1.7, the welfare state will be costly but exist. A tfr of .73 like korea has? Long term, that’s 1 20 year old and 3 45 year olds taking care of half a baby, 7 70 year olds and 10 95 year olds
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That depends very much on how technology progresses during coming decades. If we get something like AGI, then having less working age people may be a good thing, because there will be much, much less demand for white collar workers at least.
In the mid 2000's when I was a kid, at school I was taught that there would be a HUGE labour shortage once certain large generations retire, as younger generations are much smaller. Guess what, they retired a decade ago, and yet my country has the second highest unemployment rate in EU, with a very weak job market for fresh graduates in particular. Increased efficiency & automation ate all those jobs, nobody was hired to replace many of the boomers who retired. I doubt the future will be any different.
The complaining about fertility rates, mostly done by the chunk of the population hoarding more and more of the wealth, will continue until people's ability to afford rent and children improves.
> will continue until people's ability to afford rent and children improves.
National fertility rates don’t correlate with any measure of average income. The only thing that does is the average number of years a woman spends being educated; this probably isn’t causal because the decline in fertility occurs across all income and education levels.
> the average number of years a woman spends being educated;
Have you a recent reference for that? I think even that correlation has broken down, but I do not know
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Rent is the bigger issue than affordability per se. My wife pointed out the other day that we had our second and third kids shortly after we stopped living in apartments and bought a house. We didn't plan to have a significant age gap between our first (who we had in law school) and our other kids, and we earned a lot of money the whole time, it just happened that way. She's convinced that having the extra space subconsciously encouraged us to have more kids.
I've been encouraging my cousin who desperately wants children to have them in her two bedroom apartment but she feels that she needs to have a house first and she and her husband can't afford one. They're in their late 30s. My partner and I are mid-30s planning to have young children in our 2 bedroom apartment, we'd prefer a 3 bedroom but they DO NOT EXIST in our Los Angeles neighborhood. More space means untenable commutes which brings more complicated childcare logistics (can't get to daycare before it closes, less time with kids etc).
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Hmmm... What if a wide variety of economic actors have somehow managed to slurp up all the surplus that previously went to "paying it forward" in terms of raising children?
Rent is a common complaint, but consider the costs of childcare, needing two incomes to stay afloat, etc.
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This totally ignores the fact that the decline in fertility is measurable across the globe in the poorest and wealthiest nations in the world. It's clearly not a simple matter of affordability...
Poor countries reproduce more, it's not same everywhere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility
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While I generally agree with this and am angry at "the elites" who seem to both want increased fertility but also don't really target it in their companies ... I think the bigger unspoken issue is really the TFR skew. Global fertility can go down for a while and it isn't disastrous. TFR skew results in large problems if the least progressive and poorest groups systematically have much higher TFR over extended periods.
None of the solutions I can think of are very appealing or even tolerable. It really feels like it's a matter of carrying on and having hope. But perhaps we could start by merely describing the data and the situation.
The thing that collapses in a negative population growth environment is passive earnings from interest and asset appreciation, retirement, and to some extent social welfare states. The whole idea of things like social security is predicated on a growing population paying for the elderly. It's also very, very bearish for things like real estate long term. We are probably still in a real estate bubble.
I suppose I've never expected to ever be able to retire unless I get truly wealthy. It's not something I've ever included in my life plan because I've kinda seen the writing on the wall about this since I was in my twenties.
I don't think this crash in fertility is that unexpected, and it's not even all bad. It'll help us weather things like climate change and natural resource depletion.
Social security is solvent for at least the next 75 years if the US removes the payroll cap on contributions from wage income. We choose not to. The economic resources exist for these social programs, it will just diminish profits (the horror /s). It's a policy choice.
Every year total fertility rate remains lower than replacement rate further locks in the fertility curve, but there is no political will or desire to implement the fixes required. So, we keep kicking the can until we cannot anymore. It's unfortunate. Demographic destiny comes regardless, as each year total fertility rate continues to fall.
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-does-the-us-spend-on-...
https://www.pgpf.org/article/social-security-reform-options-...
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You can retire the other way around - since you need roughly $20 saved for every dollar you need in retirement, reducing expenses by a dollar is as good as saving $20.
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The drop in fertility rate is directly liked to migration into dense cities. They are just not a good place to have children.
The US resisted the fertility drop for much longer, because of higher suburban population.
> The US resisted the fertility drop for much longer, because of higher suburban population.
It was immigration, but next generation of all immigrants (native born) adopts host country total fertility rate in this context.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/08/08/hispanic-...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/10/26/5-facts-a...
https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/FT_19... visually nails this.
Now, would these people have had a higher birth rate if they remained in their LATAM countries? The data indicates no.
Latin America’s Baby Bust Is Arriving Early - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-05-22/latin-... | https://archive.today/EPMAU - May 22nd, 2025
Population Prospects and Rapid Demographic Changes in the First Quarter of the Twenty-first Century in Latin America and the Caribbean - https://repositorio.cepal.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/dc5... - 2024
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Any data for this? I think this maybe the real answer because unlike other explanations, this one can actually acquire proof from before modern ages. Simply because it's known that cities fertility rates were always negative and have to constantly pull people from countryside.
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This is probably a factor, but I think it’s a mistake to treat cities not being suited for raising children as a hard, immutable fact. They’re bad because rent continues to soar which clashes on two fronts (kids are expensive already and increase space requirements) and we as a society have decided to build our urban spaces (suburbs included) to be explicitly not friendly to children, families, or anybody not driving and to instead favor adults with money to spend. These are things we could change, should we want to.
The other thing to look at is why people have migrated into cities, and the answer is pretty simple: it’s where the good employment prospects are. The further yet get away from urban cores the worse those get: fewer jobs, worse compensation and benefits, greater risk of being stuck between jobs for long periods of time. Anybody worried about birthrates should be embracing remote work and making sure they compensate their employees well.
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I read some unsubstantiated claim about cities being bad for fertility because there’s an abundance of things to do that aren’t popping out children
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Rational millennials who will have to work until 75 at current rates may also complain :)
'hoarding more and more of the wealth'. Sounds very much like you believe in the pie fallacy. A zero sum game? Maybe that's not what you meant though.
The pie has nothing to do with it.
The tide is rising and most ships are sinking. Productivity in the last 40 years has skyrocketed. The gains have overwhelmingly gone to a tiny minority while everyone else has seen rent, food, education, and more go up dramatically faster than wages. This has accelerated in the last 15 years and has destroyed any faith in the social contract.
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The pie isn't always growing and the pie isn't always static. There are times where either can happen. I think people are just feeling that we are entering a period where the pie will be stagnant for a while. In the short term the world might be a zero sum game.
> will continue until people's ability to afford rent and children improves.
Historically that's never been a requirement for people to make children. Poor people have tended to be pretty prolific.
> hoarding more and more of the wealth
In a free market society, wealth is created, it is not "concentrated".
Nice assertions, but where’s the content of your post? What’s your opinion here based on those two things? Those are just two statements, but do you believe things are different now than historically or are you arguing it’s the same as it ever was, or something else?
I’m probably not old enough yet to share my opinion on societal change across generations, I was a kid until recently.
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> In a free market society, wealth is created, it is not "concentrated"
That is incorrect
In a free market wealth has a definite tendency to clump together, to concentrate.
A moment's thought will make clear why.
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'In a free market society, wealth is created, it is not "concentrated".'
That's a theory from economists. Economists have a lot of theories.
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Is there an upper bound to the creation of wealth? Is it infinite? Are there any limits to its creation? Is there any inherent value to it without being able to "transfer"?
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> In a free market society, wealth is created, it is not "concentrated".
The free market hasn't figured out how to create more land. Especially arable land.
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How do you define "free market"?
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I feel like slide 39 would have gotten you chased out of polite society 10 years ago.
A lot of western countries economies are built on sustained mass migration. Australia, Canada, New Zealand. Arguably the United States where both parties champion it (turn the other check to illegal migraiton of the democrats VS mass H1B visas of the republicans).
As this study points out, it's not sustainable.
Link to the keynote presentation, fills a lot of the gaps in the slides: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7_e_A_vFnk
When I posted the same result a few weeks ago, it got [flagged] in short order: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44520297
I'm sorry that happened to you, but the Atlantic is such a troll, I can understand why it was flagged.
The article was not a "troll".
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one small thing = https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/BFI_WP_2...
and haha on “The “rebound” in future fertility for low-fertility countries is consistent with an expectation of continued progress toward gender equality and women’s empowerment and improving social and economic opportunities for young people and families.”
if humans stop age and live for thousands years, then there is no need for specific replacement rate.
Alternative, make it possible to have kids without heavy burden on the woman body.
Alternative, make it possible to become pregnant at 50-60 years.
This is all research vectors that we should work on, and not doom on hypothetical what ifs in the future!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_horse_manure_crisis_of_1...
We must act IMMEDIATELY to secure london from this great tidal wave of horse manure.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7_e_A_vFnk
Recorded talk for the slides in this post.
> Don’t we care about output per capita?
Not "yes and no", the answer is simply yes. You cannot simply flood your country with unrestricted migration from lower GDP per capita countries and not expect overall growth to slow down.
> Yes, output per capita is the primary measure of individual welfare but...
> our ability to service debt and social security obligations depends on total output.
Our ability to service social obligations and debt entirely depends on GDP per capita. Whilst they are both paid on a GDP basis, they a generated as a multiplier of capita. If you have 1 million people, and add another million people (of the same distribution), social obligations are also doubled, as will debt, but both delayed. It's not that complicated.
> We live in a welfare state, and this is unlikely to change anytime soon.
It's about to change now, the time is up. Governments world wide are now struggling to issue bonds at reasonable rates, there are no known mechanisms to unwind. The likes of Japan, a large buyer of the foreign bond market, starting to bring down its bond purchases, indicates this.
> Most immigrants worsen the fiscal position of the government.
This is especially true whilst you have a system already setup making a loss, such as the UK's pension system.
> Each immigrant into a rich country makes the position of poor countries harder.
Every doctor, nurse, engineer, etc, that we import is one less for their original country. What do we think that does to the original country on scale? What do we think that does to their growth?
> Affordable housing:
Many animals will not breed, and some even miscarry, if they are not in a suitable environment. Giving birth and raising children makes the mother/family very vulnerable. It seems that for all of our sophistication, the human race is no different. What we're measuring world wide appears to be an enormous economic deficit.
[dead]
The point on p. 39 about immigration is important for everyone to understand:
> Most immigrants worsen the fiscal position of the government.
According to an Economist article addressing data collected by Denmark, each non-western immigrants produce a negative financial benefit over their lifetimes, and immigrants from the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan, are a net cost on the government at every age: https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/the-effects-of-immigration-in-...
Progressive taxation will generally mean that anyone under the median income has a negative net impact on the government's finances. All this study is doing is reflecting the obvious fact that immigrants are by and large working class.
Yes, but the economic rationale of immigration is to have younger workers who can pay into the system to buffer the growing older population. That can’t happen if the immigrants never pay in more than they take out at any point in their life.
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> each non-western immigrants produce a negative financial benefit over their lifetimes
I'm not familiar with the writer but their definition of "non-western" is a bit weird to me. I don't know what criteria were used or whether these are Denmark's classifications or the author's own.
The chart captioned "Violent crime conviction rates for immigrants in 2010–2021 by nation of origin expressed in multiples of the Danish conviction rate" says, for example, that Greece is Western but its neighbor North Macedonia is "other". Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania - all Western, but Czechoslovakia is "other". Croatia? Western, but curiously not Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro, or Yugoslavia. There's no rhyme or reason here.
People originating from these debatably Western (or non-Western, I literally don't know but it's inconsistent either way) countries all have conviction rates above the Danish rate. Which would muddle the narrative of that particular chart a fair bit. Maybe it makes no difference to the fiscal question though.
Why are the demographics of a small Nordic nation something "everyone" should understand? Whenever I've pointed to how well the social safety nets work in these countries and how they could be an example for the US, I've been told that the US is too different of a country to draw an analogy.
Denmark has been the most systematic about collecting this sort of data about immigrants from different places. I suspect you’d see similar results in the UK and Canada if those governments collected the data. Canada’s GDP per capita has actually started declining recently.
I think Denmark’s welfare system is a model, so whoever you’re arguing with, it’s not me. I will point out that, if Denmark with its robust welfare system can’t integrate MENAPT immigrants effectively, that doesn’t bode well for other countries with less efficient welfare states.
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Over what timespan? This analysis isn't elaborated at all. Does it count the impact of companies being able to pay lower wages and paying more taxes? Does it account for the future generations? Etc.
It’s explained in the link. Figure 2.7. It covers immigrants and their descendants across all ages. Here’s further analysis of the same data: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2022/01/immigration-economics-f...
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Intuitvely, those opposing immigration have always known this. But tell that t someone from the left They will verbally kill you for stating obvious facts.
The left vs right theatre is really just two sides of the same coin. By now every western democracy is being dragged along the same path with different stages of progression.
1. Move domestic production and jobs to lesser developed countries to increase profits.
2. Open the gates for mass immigration under the guise of openness and empathy to import wage slaves for the service sector and use every media channel to ostracize anyone who utters the slightest doubt about this policy.
3. Aggressively push DEI and gender ideology to alienate the social-democratic left from the academic left and drown out any other popular left topics like worker's rights or class warfare.
4. Amplify polarization on social media by creating as many conflicts as possible (left vs right, old vs young, men vs women, natives vs immigrants, ...).
5. Promote a right-wing populist party and trick enough people into voting for it.
6. Move the tax burden from the rich to the middle and lower class and remove regulations and restrictions on companies while ignoring all the other problems.
7. Establish surveillance and authoritarian rule under the guise of safety.
Everyone in this so-called culture war is being played, so maybe it's time to stop being smug about being smarter than the other side and start contemplating if there is any common idea that we can agree on that allows us to go forward.
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Intuition alone really isn't to be trusted with public policy decisions of this magnitude.
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Denmark has shown a rather pronounced distaste for integrating people into the workforce whose names signify non European origins.
In contrast to Sweden, which decided to simply stop collecting data on certain things whenever a given statistic began to become inconvenient with respect to asylum and immigration policies.
You realize different kinds of immigrants go to different places? Do you think that immigrants from Bangladesh are a net cost at every country they go to including Pakistan?
I'm quite tired of this topic being brought up all the time. What's the solution? We've seen that economic incentives won't do, so what? Force women to have children? Punish celibates? Let's not kid ourselves (pun intended), the "solutions" to this "crisis" are worse than the outcome.
Look on the bright side, a declining demography makes human activity that much more sustainable, and maybe our descendants won't even have to worry about restricting their carbon emissions to keep the planet inhabitable.
In the meantime, we'll have to take a cut to our way of life, which I can live with. We don't need to travel to the other side of the globe yearly, we don't need three cars per household, etc.
It's quite telling that the people most concerned with this usually self-label as "pro-markets libertarians". Is market health more important than bodily autonomy? What happened to freedom?
I think it's gonna be fine. The capital per person (capital deepening) will be great. Things that prove hard to automate will suffer — maybe elder care can't be automated and will go to shit — but a lot of stuff can be automated.
+100 climate change is the more immediate Big Global Problem. Let's fix that first then figure this one out.
This is all well and good, but population dropping will only impact our civilization a little. I think this is an issue only because the "very rich" may actually see their standard of living fall. For the poor, it will have no real impact.
Plus it is probably a good thing population will start dropping.
The much larger worry should be Climate Change, a dropping population can only help Climate Change in the long run. But right now, due to how we all live, we are heading into a whole lot of hurt due to Climate Change. Far more "hurt" than the population falling.
Also, worried about population dropping ? Wait to see how fast it drops when Countries start massive wars due to dwindling resources.
EDIT: want an example of the Impact of population dripping ? Look at Europe during the Plague in the 1300s(?). What happened was the rich had a hard time finding labor, so they had to start paying people a lot more for their work. To me, that is the big fear, the rich may have to start paying more.
> For the poor, it will have no real impact.
It will likely bring back the problem of old age destitution as rule, not exception. It's a previously common scourge that never went completely away[1][2], but went into the sidelines by early-mid XX century, and is set to coming back with a vengeance, by the time current people in their 20s-30s reach old age. It hits the poor hard.
[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/successful-educated-but-no...
[2] https://citizenmatters.in/mumbai-abandoned-destitute-elderly...
The history of the world and economics is far more nuanced than rich people hoarding wealth. Wealth is the economy, it's created from systems. The feudal system in the medieval age was relatively poor at generating wealth. A series of technological and intellectual developments began to rapidly increase in the 1400s that culminated in the modern era, including especially the printing press.
But in the 1300s serfdom was still the norm in Europe. Serfs did not get paid and so the Plague made no difference except 2/3 of the population died. Serfdom would last another several hundred years after the plague, and in some countries all the way to the 20th century.
Financialization can also make it appear wealth has increased when really nothing has happened.
If all property is “owned” by the crown and people only have various “rights” to it that can be inherited but never encumbered or sold, then there’s really no point in “valuing” the land beyond simple comparisons.
Once land can be bought and sold value appears to track it; but the land was always there.