6 ms·

We may have swung the pendulum a little too far towards deliberate, though. The birthrate right now is below replacement rate, meaning that if we keep going lik

by dcow 1y ago

We may have swung the pendulum a little too far towards deliberate, though. The birthrate right now is below replacement rate, meaning that if we keep going like this (even if the birthrate doesn't keep trending down and holds steady) that society will die off. We need to figure out how to build an economy and society that can facilitate deliberate responsible parentage younger and more often. Luckily we have generations to solve the problem, but it’s there looming.

TrueTom 1y ago
This is not going to happen when you can just import people from other countries.
- ipdashc 1y ago
  ... until, obviously, those countries' populations start declining as well?
- forgotoldacc 1y ago
  Every country on earth is trending downwards. A lot of currently immigrant-exporting countries (e.g. Vietnam, India, Mexico) have sub-replacement levels of birth. They're going to have absolutely massive problems in a few decades when a lot of their youth have left and they're stuck with an inverted population pyramid. There's a tendency for people in developed (particularly western) countries to feel entitled to immigrants. It's weird to think you'll not only have people changing your diapers when you're 90, but that your country should actively bring in people and deprive poorer countries of similar care, then leave those poor working class immigrants to fend for themselves once they're old. It's the same mindset that drove society since the 1950s: it makes my life convenient, who cares if it makes life harder for people far from me or after I'm dead? And now we're all living with the accumulated consequences of all that (depleted ozone, climate change, ocean acidification, microplastics, oceans stripped of life, teflon pollution, deforestation, CO2 rising rapidly). The world needs better solutions.
- palmotea 1y ago
  > This is not going to happen when you can just import people from other countries. That's basically the same solution as dumping toxic waste overseas: you're just shifting the problem (depopulation) to someplace poorer and probably less able to deal with it. Birthrates are declining everywhere, and the current global fertility rate is at replacement (so don't expect it to stay that high). In the future, there's going to be no magical place from which you can "import" all the people you need, because you chose not to make them yourself.
quantified 1y ago
A plane at 75,000 feet can descend for a long time and then level off without crashing. Eventually population will stop declining. Everyone needs to just chill about a declined birthrate.
- b112 1y ago
  What is your proof that it will not decline further? If you have no proof, then at the very least the cause must be investigated. After all, the concern is that the current rate of declining birth rate, means extinction in a few centuries. You don't just shrug that off and say "oh well, it'll probably be just fine."
  - wredcoll 1y ago
    We don't just shrug off the fantasy that there will be zero children born in "a couple of centuries"?? What on earth am I reading?
    - palmotea 1y ago
      > We don't just shrug off the fantasy that there will be zero children born in "a couple of centuries"?? That's not a fantasy, it's the inevitable outcome of sub-replacement fertility, which is the state we find ourselves in (though my intuition says it will take longer than "a couple of centuries" to get to zero).
      - quantified 1y ago
        It's the inevitable outcome of everybody continuing it for all the generations that remain. As soon as there aren't enough people to manufacture contraceptives, it will of course grow. But after a few generations, there will be more land, water, animal and plant life, copper, cobalt, gold and such per person, and people can easily say "that shrinkage sucked, let's grow". You assume that things will always be the way they are now, which is of course false.
        1y ago
b112 1y ago
Too far is an understatement. People keep poking at the wrong reasons, but in some societies it is quite dire. South Korea with this year of 1, when 2.1 means 'static', means more than halving the population every 30 years or so. For a reverse comparison, if you take a penny and double it every day, you end up with > $5M in 30 days. And yet this birthrate issue doesn't take into account plague, war, natural disasters, and potential issues with lack of food(starvation). And the worst of it? Is that I believe it is 100% environmental. People think "having children" is a conscious choice. And sure, there is some of that. But at the same time, it is the very point of existence for an organism. Actually producing children (not just performing the sex act) is an evolutionary requirement. It is literally the primary drive of existence. Risky behaviour is ingrained into us, if it enables the possibility of reproduction. The drives and energy we place into everything we do, has a background drive that is sexual in nature. We seek to excel, to impress the opposite sex. Like it or not (I'm not like that, I decide, not my hormones!), this is effectively an accepted fact of animal psychology. It's a part of who we are, our culture is designed around it, and every aspect of our lives is ruled by it. Why am I on about this?? Well, my point is that this is a primary drive, interlaced so deeply that it affects every aspect of who we are. Reproduction, the production and raising of offspring is an act we are, naturally, compelled to. Forced to. Need to do. Unless of course specific chemicals, maybe microplastics or all of the "forever chemicals" in our blood, are blocking that process. Again, people will chime in with the popular "But it's expensive". No. Just no. Nope! My point above is that this is primal drive. People have had children in the depression, on purpose. Historically people, even with contraceptives, have had children regardless. If it's about money, why is the birth rate declining in countries with free daycare, universal health care, and immensely strong support for parents post birth? Mandated career protection for mothers, months and months of time off after birth all paid. Immense tax breaks making children almost a profitable enterprise. In fact, in some European countries, it is more affordable to have kids than at any time in human history... and the birth rate still declines. It's just not about money. It just is not. Why I think this is immensely important, is because we aren't seeing a rate, but an ongoing declining rate. The rate isn't just the lowest in human history, but the rate continues to decline. It's not '1' for South Korea, it's 1 right now, and will be 0.5 eventually. What happens when no one can have children? I further ask this, because the entire future of the species is at risk. People get all "who cares about going on", but wars do happen, plagues do happen, and I assure you I'm happy to be here, regardless of what the survivors of the bubonic plague thought at the time. Yet if we see a plague that kills 1/2 the population, where does that leave this equation? And what happens if we see a war that kills mostly those of child bearing age? What then? My secondary concern in all of this is, we have very specialized roles these days. There was a time where a person could be a "a physicist", yet now there are 1000s of sub-specialties in such fields. And not everyone in the population is capable of expanding science. Of discovering 'new'. My thoughts here are that we require a certain base number of humans to continue to expand science. If we have 100M humans world wide, I do not believe we'll be capable of expanding our current knowledge base, instead, I think we'll regress. There simply will not be enough people intelligent in a way functional to, say, physics, to expand that field. So if our population decreases too far, we may not be able to resolve issues with, say, forever chemicals. Or with microplastics. Our capacity to do research and resolve such issues may vanish. Couple that with a graph that is constantly declining, and a simple 50% death rate in a plague, could mean the extinction of the human race. So my real concern here is, we aren't swinging the pendulum on purpose. It's happening to us. We're in the middle of an extinction event. And it's only going to get far, far worse.
fulafel 1y ago
Not too far at all considering the level of overpopulation and resulting environmental crisis we're in.
bevr1337 1y ago
> The birthrate right now is below replacement rate, meaning that if we keep going like this (even if the birthrate doesn't keep trending down and holds steady) that society will die off. Why? Why are we sure that the population will not settle? Or that our increased productivity won't offset a change in labor? I do worry societies will fail to handle side effects like the temporary increased demand for elder care, but no real fear of total societal collapse.
solatic 1y ago
Or, you continue to grow the population through immigration. The US is unique (or maybe there are a handful of others, I don't know) in its ability to welcome immigrants who, within two generations, largely see themselves as Americans first and not as the identity of their grandparents. American identity politics has eroded this somewhat but it is still largely true, for example, that grandchildren of immigrants will usually have a very poor grasp of their grandparents' native languages.
- kfajdsl 1y ago
  This doesn't work forever. The birth rates in developing countries are also falling.
- achillesheels 1y ago
  I disagree. Immigration suppresses wages. Which suppresses native born childmaking, which fuels more government charity, erm, welfare, which dampens productivity, which erodes civil liberties. American is not seen as promoting human rights, and to infer all immigrants are good is naive, hate to get off my porch about this. sits back down on rocking chair whistling “I Wish I was In Dixie” and widdling a hangman with the noose almost finished, just a few more threads
  - hylaride 1y ago
    > Immigration suppresses wages. Which suppresses native born childmaking, which fuels more government charity, erm, welfare, which dampens productivity, which erodes civil liberties. Japan and Korea have almost no immigration and abysmally low birth rates. Your arguments don't really hold water. Having children is actually more of a burden on the state, as those kids need schools, (in most western countries publicly funded) healthcare, etc. Taking in a healthy immigrant at 20 is better almost all round from a purely economic point of view. And immigration doesn't suppress wages any more or less than having tons of kids would over the long term. A person "taking" a job is still a taking a person whether they were born or immigrated. This is ignoring the fact that more people over time enlarge the economy and opportunity in it. Would the United States be a better country today if it didn't accept the mass immigration from Italy, Ireland, and Eastern Europe between 1850-1914 and had 1/4 the population?
motorest 1y ago
> We may have swung the pendulum a little too far towards deliberate, though. The birthrate right now is below replacement rate, meaning that if we keep going like this (even if the birthrate doesn't keep trending down and holds steady) that society will die off. The US alone doubled it's population since the 1950s. Enough scaremongering.
- sethammons 1y ago
  So we need a Thanos snap and go to half the population to recreate the 1950s growth economy?
snowwrestler 1y ago
Birth rates won’t “hold steady” because people don’t die at equal rates. If birth rate is below replacement, old people die off first, the population’s average age goes down every year, and birth rate increases. A society that is producing children will not die off. The U.S. saw over 3.6 millions births in 2024.
- dcow 1y ago
  > A society that is producing children will not die off. This isn’t true. Right now each woman has to produce ~2.3 children for a population with no immigration to replace itself every year. This rate changes but can never fall below two, naïvely. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate#Replacement_rates https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate#Replace...
itslennysfault 1y ago
> ...society will die off. *capitalist society will die off. ( ) See also: automation, ai, robots.... we probably don't need as many people / are headed for work shortages anyway.
- dcow 1y ago
  And that may well be the ultimate resolution (that individual-liberty-preserving capitalist societies with unrestricted access to contraception die off). However, if we like how life works right now then we’ll have to work to sustain it. There’s probably a capitalism-preserving way to incentivize children…

by dcow 1y ago

TrueTom 1y ago

This is not going to happen when you can just import people from other countries.

ipdashc 1y ago
... until, obviously, those countries' populations start declining as well?
forgotoldacc 1y ago
Every country on earth is trending downwards. A lot of currently immigrant-exporting countries (e.g. Vietnam, India, Mexico) have sub-replacement levels of birth. They're going to have absolutely massive problems in a few decades when a lot of their youth have left and they're stuck with an inverted population pyramid. There's a tendency for people in developed (particularly western) countries to feel entitled to immigrants. It's weird to think you'll not only have people changing your diapers when you're 90, but that your country should actively bring in people and deprive poorer countries of similar care, then leave those poor working class immigrants to fend for themselves once they're old. It's the same mindset that drove society since the 1950s: it makes my life convenient, who cares if it makes life harder for people far from me or after I'm dead? And now we're all living with the accumulated consequences of all that (depleted ozone, climate change, ocean acidification, microplastics, oceans stripped of life, teflon pollution, deforestation, CO2 rising rapidly). The world needs better solutions.
palmotea 1y ago
> This is not going to happen when you can just import people from other countries. That's basically the same solution as dumping toxic waste overseas: you're just shifting the problem (depopulation) to someplace poorer and probably less able to deal with it. Birthrates are declining everywhere, and the current global fertility rate is at replacement (so don't expect it to stay that high). In the future, there's going to be no magical place from which you can "import" all the people you need, because you chose not to make them yourself.

quantified 1y ago

A plane at 75,000 feet can descend for a long time and then level off without crashing. Eventually population will stop declining. Everyone needs to just chill about a declined birthrate.

b112 1y ago
What is your proof that it will not decline further? If you have no proof, then at the very least the cause must be investigated. After all, the concern is that the current rate of declining birth rate, means extinction in a few centuries. You don't just shrug that off and say "oh well, it'll probably be just fine."
- wredcoll 1y ago
  We don't just shrug off the fantasy that there will be zero children born in "a couple of centuries"?? What on earth am I reading?
  - palmotea 1y ago
    > We don't just shrug off the fantasy that there will be zero children born in "a couple of centuries"?? That's not a fantasy, it's the inevitable outcome of sub-replacement fertility, which is the state we find ourselves in (though my intuition says it will take longer than "a couple of centuries" to get to zero).
    - quantified 1y ago
      It's the inevitable outcome of everybody continuing it for all the generations that remain. As soon as there aren't enough people to manufacture contraceptives, it will of course grow. But after a few generations, there will be more land, water, animal and plant life, copper, cobalt, gold and such per person, and people can easily say "that shrinkage sucked, let's grow". You assume that things will always be the way they are now, which is of course false.
      - 1y ago

b112 1y ago

Too far is an understatement. People keep poking at the wrong reasons, but in some societies it is quite dire. South Korea with this year of 1, when 2.1 means 'static', means more than halving the population every 30 years or so. For a reverse comparison, if you take a penny and double it every day, you end up with > $5M in 30 days. And yet this birthrate issue doesn't take into account plague, war, natural disasters, and potential issues with lack of food(starvation). And the worst of it? Is that I believe it is 100% environmental. People think "having children" is a conscious choice. And sure, there is some of that. But at the same time, it is the very point of existence for an organism. Actually producing children (not just performing the sex act) is an evolutionary requirement. It is literally the primary drive of existence. Risky behaviour is ingrained into us, if it enables the possibility of reproduction. The drives and energy we place into everything we do, has a background drive that is sexual in nature. We seek to excel, to impress the opposite sex. Like it or not (I'm not like that, I decide, not my hormones!), this is effectively an accepted fact of animal psychology. It's a part of who we are, our culture is designed around it, and every aspect of our lives is ruled by it. Why am I on about this?? Well, my point is that this is a primary drive, interlaced so deeply that it affects every aspect of who we are. Reproduction, the production and raising of offspring is an act we are, naturally, compelled to. Forced to. Need to do. Unless of course specific chemicals, maybe microplastics or all of the "forever chemicals" in our blood, are blocking that process. Again, people will chime in with the popular "But it's expensive". No. Just no. Nope! My point above is that this is primal drive. People have had children in the depression, on purpose. Historically people, even with contraceptives, have had children regardless. If it's about money, why is the birth rate declining in countries with free daycare, universal health care, and immensely strong support for parents post birth? Mandated career protection for mothers, months and months of time off after birth all paid. Immense tax breaks making children almost a profitable enterprise. In fact, in some European countries, it is more affordable to have kids than at any time in human history... and the birth rate still declines. It's just not about money. It just is not. Why I think this is immensely important, is because we aren't seeing a rate, but an ongoing declining rate. The rate isn't just the lowest in human history, but the rate continues to decline. It's not '1' for South Korea, it's 1 right now, and will be 0.5 eventually. What happens when no one can have children? I further ask this, because the entire future of the species is at risk. People get all "who cares about going on", but wars do happen, plagues do happen, and I assure you I'm happy to be here, regardless of what the survivors of the bubonic plague thought at the time. Yet if we see a plague that kills 1/2 the population, where does that leave this equation? And what happens if we see a war that kills mostly those of child bearing age? What then? My secondary concern in all of this is, we have very specialized roles these days. There was a time where a person could be a "a physicist", yet now there are 1000s of sub-specialties in such fields. And not everyone in the population is capable of expanding science. Of discovering 'new'. My thoughts here are that we require a certain base number of humans to continue to expand science. If we have 100M humans world wide, I do not believe we'll be capable of expanding our current knowledge base, instead, I think we'll regress. There simply will not be enough people intelligent in a way functional to, say, physics, to expand that field. So if our population decreases too far, we may not be able to resolve issues with, say, forever chemicals. Or with microplastics. Our capacity to do research and resolve such issues may vanish. Couple that with a graph that is constantly declining, and a simple 50% death rate in a plague, could mean the extinction of the human race. So my real concern here is, we aren't swinging the pendulum on purpose. It's happening to us. We're in the middle of an extinction event. And it's only going to get far, far worse.

fulafel 1y ago

Not too far at all considering the level of overpopulation and resulting environmental crisis we're in.

bevr1337 1y ago

> The birthrate right now is below replacement rate, meaning that if we keep going like this (even if the birthrate doesn't keep trending down and holds steady) that society will die off. Why? Why are we sure that the population will not settle? Or that our increased productivity won't offset a change in labor? I do worry societies will fail to handle side effects like the temporary increased demand for elder care, but no real fear of total societal collapse.

solatic 1y ago

Or, you continue to grow the population through immigration. The US is unique (or maybe there are a handful of others, I don't know) in its ability to welcome immigrants who, within two generations, largely see themselves as Americans first and not as the identity of their grandparents. American identity politics has eroded this somewhat but it is still largely true, for example, that grandchildren of immigrants will usually have a very poor grasp of their grandparents' native languages.

kfajdsl 1y ago
This doesn't work forever. The birth rates in developing countries are also falling.
achillesheels 1y ago
I disagree. Immigration suppresses wages. Which suppresses native born childmaking, which fuels more government charity, erm, welfare, which dampens productivity, which erodes civil liberties. American is not seen as promoting human rights, and to infer all immigrants are good is naive, hate to get off my porch about this. sits back down on rocking chair whistling “I Wish I was In Dixie” and widdling a hangman with the noose almost finished, just a few more threads
- hylaride 1y ago
  > Immigration suppresses wages. Which suppresses native born childmaking, which fuels more government charity, erm, welfare, which dampens productivity, which erodes civil liberties. Japan and Korea have almost no immigration and abysmally low birth rates. Your arguments don't really hold water. Having children is actually more of a burden on the state, as those kids need schools, (in most western countries publicly funded) healthcare, etc. Taking in a healthy immigrant at 20 is better almost all round from a purely economic point of view. And immigration doesn't suppress wages any more or less than having tons of kids would over the long term. A person "taking" a job is still a taking a person whether they were born or immigrated. This is ignoring the fact that more people over time enlarge the economy and opportunity in it. Would the United States be a better country today if it didn't accept the mass immigration from Italy, Ireland, and Eastern Europe between 1850-1914 and had 1/4 the population?

motorest 1y ago

> We may have swung the pendulum a little too far towards deliberate, though. The birthrate right now is below replacement rate, meaning that if we keep going like this (even if the birthrate doesn't keep trending down and holds steady) that society will die off. The US alone doubled it's population since the 1950s. Enough scaremongering.

sethammons 1y ago
So we need a Thanos snap and go to half the population to recreate the 1950s growth economy?

snowwrestler 1y ago

Birth rates won’t “hold steady” because people don’t die at equal rates. If birth rate is below replacement, old people die off first, the population’s average age goes down every year, and birth rate increases. A society that is producing children will not die off. The U.S. saw over 3.6 millions births in 2024.

dcow 1y ago
> A society that is producing children will not die off. This isn’t true. Right now each woman has to produce ~2.3 children for a population with no immigration to replace itself every year. This rate changes but can never fall below two, naïvely. See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate#Replacement_rates https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_fertility_rate#Replace...

itslennysfault 1y ago

> ...society will die off. *capitalist society will die off. ( ) See also: automation, ai, robots.... we probably don't need as many people / are headed for work shortages anyway.

dcow 1y ago
And that may well be the ultimate resolution (that individual-liberty-preserving capitalist societies with unrestricted access to contraception die off). However, if we like how life works right now then we’ll have to work to sustain it. There’s probably a capitalism-preserving way to incentivize children…