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I feel that demographic collapse is the single biggest crisis facing the developed world now. In this regard US is actually doing better than East Asia countrie

I feel that demographic collapse is the single biggest crisis facing the developed world now. In this regard US is actually doing better than East Asia countries and Europe, but still, the trend is unmistakable -- modern, affluent states are commiting voluntarily suicide because their citizens are not too willing in giving birth. All the climate change problems, wars, pandemics and natural disasters won't devastate human simply because we been through all those and we recovered. But demographic collapse because of high living standard? It's uncharted territory here and I am really, really worry.

Arainach 1y ago
> modern, affluent states are commiting voluntarily suicide because their citizens are not too willing in giving birth Phrase things with the blame assigned accordingly. Your phrasing blames people for not becoming parents. A more accurate phrasing is '....because their wealthy elites are so greedy they make having children unaffordable' "Demographic collapse" is because people can't afford rent, can't afford food, can't afford healthcare - childbirth is ABSURDLY expensive in the US, can't afford childcare, and so many other things. Why is that? Because of greed. More and more of everything is swallowed up by private equity and corporate management who have no empathy, no flexibility, only a demand for eternal growth. The human piece is irrelevant and actively undesirable. Far simpler to just pay for some GPUs and write articles blaming ordinary people for having no more options.
- agsqwe 1y ago
  Then countries with even more greedy elites would have even lower rates, which is not the case. A few examples of fertility rates (higher is better, 2023 data): Sweden: 1.45 US: 1.62 Kenya: 3.21
  - aaomidi 1y ago
    You’re not making the point you think you’re making
- zeroonetwothree 1y ago
  US real household income is probably 3x higher than during the baby boom. How could they have afford to have had kids back then? Moreover, people have always been greedy. Yet birth rates have only started dropping more recently. I would surmise it’s the opposite cause, people are wealthier now and so kids are less desirable because the opportunity cost is higher.
  - Arainach 1y ago
    >How could they have afford to have had kids back then? Most families had only one person working, and one available for childcare. Housing was dramatically cheaper. So was a university education. So was food. And no - unregulated capitalistic greed has dramatically accelerated in the last few decades. It hasn't always been this way. Corporations are buying up everything so they can extract rent and using algorithms and regulatory control to extract every possible dime. Where before you might rent a small home from a landlord who would understand if you were laid off and had to skip a month or two (and who might not raise rents every year) now you have an apartment owned by equity using software to talk to all the other landlords and fix prices as high as possible who will file eviction if you're a minute late.
  - sigwinch 1y ago
    Only in the middle classes does opportunity cost come in. Today, the wealthiest and the poorest have beyond-replacement fertility. Race becomes a factor in America, but the only group of women with higher fertility in the middle class are foreign-born.
- Glawen 1y ago
  Then why more affluent younger people have no plan to have kids? The under 35 who have a partner at my work are just planning their next trip. They don't want to hear anything about kids and their constraints. They will give you reasons like over population, environnemental collapse etc... I think they are very self centered and don't want to make sacrifices
  - Arainach 1y ago
    Costs are out of control. I know families where both parents were big tech SWEs and one quit their job because losing that huge salary was about the same cost as childcare.
    - oompydoompy74 1y ago
      Exactly. How do we expect parents with multiple lower income jobs to manage this at all. We don’t have universal childcare and Reaganites fucked us with the nuclear family bullshit.
  - Arainach 1y ago
    > think they are very self centered and don't want to make sacrifices How dare they not want to spend decades doing something they don't want at enormous personal and financial cost just to keep your favorite economic pyramid scheme running. So selfish. Here's an idea: if you want kids so much, pay for them. Provide universal healthcare, childcare, education. Provide food stamps for everyone under 18. Put your money where your mouth is.
    - Eddy_Viscosity2 1y ago
      If those people expect to continue to live on after they retire, then all the products and services they rely on in that stage of life will be performed by the children of their peers, the ones who had them at enormous personal and financial cost. They are externalizing the costs of there being people to make the economy work in their old age to others so they can take more trips. In fairness, if you don't have kids you should have to pay higher taxes (enormously higher in fact to get close to making up the difference). Those taxes get re-directed to childcare for those that need it. Fair?
- dariosalvi78 1y ago
  That's part of the problem, but the trend is universal, so it's not only that. I think that reduction of human population is good, but we need to rethink our economic models entirely, which nobody is doing, at least not seriously enough
- txrx0000 1y ago
  > Phrase things with the blame assigned accordingly. Your phrasing blames people for not becoming parents. A more accurate phrasing is '....because their wealthy elites are so greedy they make having children unaffordable' OP has identified the problem more accurately than you have, though. AI is a symptom, not a cause. We have to fill the labor gap with immigrants and AI because people are having fewer children. Do you think modern institutions are less efficient at suppressing human greed than medieval ones? Obviously they are more efficient. The problem you mention is not the wealthy elite, but rather the unproductive parasites, rich and poor. And this is a somewhat separate problem from the birth rate collapse. Indeed, it doesn't help the birth rate, but it's also not the main reason people aren't having children. The main reason is people wanting to have sex without having children, and we've given everyone the ability to do so with the birth control pill.
  - Arainach 1y ago
    Technology has enabled greed and exploitation to increase exponentially. The ability to regulate it has been slashed at every opportunity - such as cutting funding to the IRS.
- C6JEsQeQa5fCjE 1y ago
  Scandinavian countries are commonly listed as a counter-example to what you say. Those countries have strong social safety nets for everyone, and their citizens' basic needs are covered. Child care costs are not an issue for them. Yet, their fertility rates are also too low. Thus, to the extent that costs and money play a role, it does not seem to be a decisive one. There is something else going on.
  - card_zero 1y ago
    Does that include housing? I went and read the Swedish Wikipedia birth rate article (Födelsetal), but couldn't find any clues. Social norms, that's about all. Presumably the worrying thing here is a possible boom-and-bust cycle. In the long view it should be self-limiting, if a small population with lots of space tends to fill it with a larger future population that then reproduces less. It's just unpleasant to be caught at the declining stage of that cycle, with abundant old people.
adverbly 1y ago
I sort of agree with you. To get some sober second thought though, you could watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIDnr646tLA&t=1452s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIDnr646tLA&t=1452s It tears down the strawman case of demographic collapse, but I'm with you that its still pretty scary looking and quite unprecedented.
TFYS 1y ago
Natural selection will fix this in no time, as the genes and cultures that lead to people not making kids die off. Widespread availability of contraceptives and abortion is recent enough that we just haven't had the time to adapt yet. The desire to have sex has been enough to keep birth rate high for most of human history. Now evolution is strongly selecting for cultures and genes that lead to more kids even in the presence of birth control. In a few of generations we'll start seeing birth rates recover.
- nsoonhui 1y ago
  I am not sure will all culture remain immune to the "curse" of modern comfortable lives that lead to low birthrates. This remains unproven. And based on current trend it seems that it's the most religious group ( Islamists, Orthodox Jews) who props up the birthrates. But they are also economically most unproductive and most anti-science ones, so I really unsure where this will lead us.
- dariosalvi78 1y ago
  Except religious fanatics, the trend is universal and driven by other factors than abortion or contraception
  - TFYS 1y ago
    The trend is universal because birth control is becoming universal. The only places that still have high birth rates are places where birth control isn't easily available (and religious cultures). It could be driven by other factors as well, but I'm betting it's mostly just birth control. We don't have a very strong innate desire to have kids, it is the desire for sex that human reproduction has mostly relied on. We're only a couple of generations into birth control, so we're only now starting to feel the effect.
    - sigwinch 1y ago
      I think you’d lose that bet. Women die in childbirth regularly. And it’s not birth control but our stratospheric advances against infant mortality that most strongly influence population dynamics.
txrx0000 1y ago
It's a problem we chose to create for ourselves by inventing and socially normalizing 99% effective birth control. We've given ourselves the freedom to make the choice to have children consciously, but not without consequences, some of which have already caught up to us. In the past, natural selection had no reason to distinguish between the drive to have sex and the drive to have children because they have the same effect. If we abruptly take away the former as a reliable enough mechanism to propagate the species, we should expect much fewer children. And that is exactly what happened when the pill was introduced a few decades ago: it cut the birth rate in half in developed countries almost instantly. If we wanted to ameliorate the demographic issues caused by this, we just have to restrict the supply and availability of birth control pills and similar surefire methods like IUDs, just enough such that the birth rate is pegged at 2.1 children per woman. But this is difficult to achieve in democratic societies because the people that want sex without reproduction make up a significant portion of the population. But we have to fill the labor gap somehow. The solutions we've come up with are mass immigration, and soon, AI. Of course, these solutions create new problems that we'll have to deal with later, but such is life.
rufus_foreman 1y ago
>> I feel that demographic collapse is the single biggest crisis facing the developed world now This is similar in some ways to the situation when I was young where population growth was the single biggest crisis facing the developed world. Either way, we're doomed.
rainsford 1y ago
What's fascinating to me about this shift is that I've yet to see a clearly identified root cause. Some people on the left identify cost of living and things like that, but we're generally richer and better off than ever and still having fewer kids. In fact higher standards of living seem generally negatively correlated with number of children. Some people on the right blame birth control or women not knowing their place or whatever, but it seems odd that propagation of a species would rely on essentially forced participation of prospective parents. Given those things, I wonder if there is an actual problem here or we just don't have the experience to see how it resolves. It's hard to see the side effects of increased standards and living or more choice and equality for women as inherently bad or something we need to fight against, especially when there seem to be few effective solutions that are compatible with a free and modern society.
- bentcorner 1y ago
  > Some people on the right blame birth control or women not knowing their place or whatever, but it seems odd that propagation of a species would rely on essentially forced participation of prospective parents. The simple explanation is that there is no local "cost" to doubling your household's income. The only thing you "pay" is to have fewer children. As smaller households become more competitive, average costs rise and the only way to stay competitive is for other households to also stay small. Looking at world-wide graphs and it's extremely worrying - many countries are completely upside-down and over the next 25-50 years as the elderly die, these populations will crash. IMO governments should have started doing something about 20 years ago if they wanted to keep things on-track, I suspect the children of today are just going to have to suffer the consequences of a large population decrease. It's certainly plausible that this is all for the best for Earth's sustainability, but I expect the coming years to be turbulent nonetheless.
  - rainsford 1y ago
    > IMO governments should have started doing something about 20 years ago if they wanted to keep things on-track... I guess my thought is that it's non-obvious what "doing something" would have looked like. The seemingly inevitable outcome of economic, social, and technological progress has been declining birthrates, and many proposed solutions would effectively involve reversing one of those three things. I'm honestly not sure that would be a better outcome. I'd welcome a more palatable alternative, but it's not clear one will be forthcoming.

Arainach 1y ago

> modern, affluent states are commiting voluntarily suicide because their citizens are not too willing in giving birth Phrase things with the blame assigned accordingly. Your phrasing blames people for not becoming parents. A more accurate phrasing is '....because their wealthy elites are so greedy they make having children unaffordable' "Demographic collapse" is because people can't afford rent, can't afford food, can't afford healthcare - childbirth is ABSURDLY expensive in the US, can't afford childcare, and so many other things. Why is that? Because of greed. More and more of everything is swallowed up by private equity and corporate management who have no empathy, no flexibility, only a demand for eternal growth. The human piece is irrelevant and actively undesirable. Far simpler to just pay for some GPUs and write articles blaming ordinary people for having no more options.

agsqwe 1y ago
Then countries with even more greedy elites would have even lower rates, which is not the case. A few examples of fertility rates (higher is better, 2023 data): Sweden: 1.45 US: 1.62 Kenya: 3.21
- aaomidi 1y ago
  You’re not making the point you think you’re making
zeroonetwothree 1y ago
US real household income is probably 3x higher than during the baby boom. How could they have afford to have had kids back then? Moreover, people have always been greedy. Yet birth rates have only started dropping more recently. I would surmise it’s the opposite cause, people are wealthier now and so kids are less desirable because the opportunity cost is higher.
- Arainach 1y ago
  >How could they have afford to have had kids back then? Most families had only one person working, and one available for childcare. Housing was dramatically cheaper. So was a university education. So was food. And no - unregulated capitalistic greed has dramatically accelerated in the last few decades. It hasn't always been this way. Corporations are buying up everything so they can extract rent and using algorithms and regulatory control to extract every possible dime. Where before you might rent a small home from a landlord who would understand if you were laid off and had to skip a month or two (and who might not raise rents every year) now you have an apartment owned by equity using software to talk to all the other landlords and fix prices as high as possible who will file eviction if you're a minute late.
- sigwinch 1y ago
  Only in the middle classes does opportunity cost come in. Today, the wealthiest and the poorest have beyond-replacement fertility. Race becomes a factor in America, but the only group of women with higher fertility in the middle class are foreign-born.
Glawen 1y ago
Then why more affluent younger people have no plan to have kids? The under 35 who have a partner at my work are just planning their next trip. They don't want to hear anything about kids and their constraints. They will give you reasons like over population, environnemental collapse etc... I think they are very self centered and don't want to make sacrifices
- Arainach 1y ago
  Costs are out of control. I know families where both parents were big tech SWEs and one quit their job because losing that huge salary was about the same cost as childcare.
  - oompydoompy74 1y ago
    Exactly. How do we expect parents with multiple lower income jobs to manage this at all. We don’t have universal childcare and Reaganites fucked us with the nuclear family bullshit.
- Arainach 1y ago
  > think they are very self centered and don't want to make sacrifices How dare they not want to spend decades doing something they don't want at enormous personal and financial cost just to keep your favorite economic pyramid scheme running. So selfish. Here's an idea: if you want kids so much, pay for them. Provide universal healthcare, childcare, education. Provide food stamps for everyone under 18. Put your money where your mouth is.
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 1y ago
    If those people expect to continue to live on after they retire, then all the products and services they rely on in that stage of life will be performed by the children of their peers, the ones who had them at enormous personal and financial cost. They are externalizing the costs of there being people to make the economy work in their old age to others so they can take more trips. In fairness, if you don't have kids you should have to pay higher taxes (enormously higher in fact to get close to making up the difference). Those taxes get re-directed to childcare for those that need it. Fair?
dariosalvi78 1y ago
That's part of the problem, but the trend is universal, so it's not only that. I think that reduction of human population is good, but we need to rethink our economic models entirely, which nobody is doing, at least not seriously enough
txrx0000 1y ago
> Phrase things with the blame assigned accordingly. Your phrasing blames people for not becoming parents. A more accurate phrasing is '....because their wealthy elites are so greedy they make having children unaffordable' OP has identified the problem more accurately than you have, though. AI is a symptom, not a cause. We have to fill the labor gap with immigrants and AI because people are having fewer children. Do you think modern institutions are less efficient at suppressing human greed than medieval ones? Obviously they are more efficient. The problem you mention is not the wealthy elite, but rather the unproductive parasites, rich and poor. And this is a somewhat separate problem from the birth rate collapse. Indeed, it doesn't help the birth rate, but it's also not the main reason people aren't having children. The main reason is people wanting to have sex without having children, and we've given everyone the ability to do so with the birth control pill.
- Arainach 1y ago
  Technology has enabled greed and exploitation to increase exponentially. The ability to regulate it has been slashed at every opportunity - such as cutting funding to the IRS.
C6JEsQeQa5fCjE 1y ago
Scandinavian countries are commonly listed as a counter-example to what you say. Those countries have strong social safety nets for everyone, and their citizens' basic needs are covered. Child care costs are not an issue for them. Yet, their fertility rates are also too low. Thus, to the extent that costs and money play a role, it does not seem to be a decisive one. There is something else going on.
- card_zero 1y ago
  Does that include housing? I went and read the Swedish Wikipedia birth rate article (Födelsetal), but couldn't find any clues. Social norms, that's about all. Presumably the worrying thing here is a possible boom-and-bust cycle. In the long view it should be self-limiting, if a small population with lots of space tends to fill it with a larger future population that then reproduces less. It's just unpleasant to be caught at the declining stage of that cycle, with abundant old people.

adverbly 1y ago

I sort of agree with you. To get some sober second thought though, you could watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIDnr646tLA&t=1452s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIDnr646tLA&t=1452s It tears down the strawman case of demographic collapse, but I'm with you that its still pretty scary looking and quite unprecedented.

TFYS 1y ago

Natural selection will fix this in no time, as the genes and cultures that lead to people not making kids die off. Widespread availability of contraceptives and abortion is recent enough that we just haven't had the time to adapt yet. The desire to have sex has been enough to keep birth rate high for most of human history. Now evolution is strongly selecting for cultures and genes that lead to more kids even in the presence of birth control. In a few of generations we'll start seeing birth rates recover.

nsoonhui 1y ago
I am not sure will all culture remain immune to the "curse" of modern comfortable lives that lead to low birthrates. This remains unproven. And based on current trend it seems that it's the most religious group ( Islamists, Orthodox Jews) who props up the birthrates. But they are also economically most unproductive and most anti-science ones, so I really unsure where this will lead us.
dariosalvi78 1y ago
Except religious fanatics, the trend is universal and driven by other factors than abortion or contraception
- TFYS 1y ago
  The trend is universal because birth control is becoming universal. The only places that still have high birth rates are places where birth control isn't easily available (and religious cultures). It could be driven by other factors as well, but I'm betting it's mostly just birth control. We don't have a very strong innate desire to have kids, it is the desire for sex that human reproduction has mostly relied on. We're only a couple of generations into birth control, so we're only now starting to feel the effect.
  - sigwinch 1y ago
    I think you’d lose that bet. Women die in childbirth regularly. And it’s not birth control but our stratospheric advances against infant mortality that most strongly influence population dynamics.

txrx0000 1y ago

It's a problem we chose to create for ourselves by inventing and socially normalizing 99% effective birth control. We've given ourselves the freedom to make the choice to have children consciously, but not without consequences, some of which have already caught up to us. In the past, natural selection had no reason to distinguish between the drive to have sex and the drive to have children because they have the same effect. If we abruptly take away the former as a reliable enough mechanism to propagate the species, we should expect much fewer children. And that is exactly what happened when the pill was introduced a few decades ago: it cut the birth rate in half in developed countries almost instantly. If we wanted to ameliorate the demographic issues caused by this, we just have to restrict the supply and availability of birth control pills and similar surefire methods like IUDs, just enough such that the birth rate is pegged at 2.1 children per woman. But this is difficult to achieve in democratic societies because the people that want sex without reproduction make up a significant portion of the population. But we have to fill the labor gap somehow. The solutions we've come up with are mass immigration, and soon, AI. Of course, these solutions create new problems that we'll have to deal with later, but such is life.

rufus_foreman 1y ago

>> I feel that demographic collapse is the single biggest crisis facing the developed world now This is similar in some ways to the situation when I was young where population growth was the single biggest crisis facing the developed world. Either way, we're doomed.

rainsford 1y ago

What's fascinating to me about this shift is that I've yet to see a clearly identified root cause. Some people on the left identify cost of living and things like that, but we're generally richer and better off than ever and still having fewer kids. In fact higher standards of living seem generally negatively correlated with number of children. Some people on the right blame birth control or women not knowing their place or whatever, but it seems odd that propagation of a species would rely on essentially forced participation of prospective parents. Given those things, I wonder if there is an actual problem here or we just don't have the experience to see how it resolves. It's hard to see the side effects of increased standards and living or more choice and equality for women as inherently bad or something we need to fight against, especially when there seem to be few effective solutions that are compatible with a free and modern society.

bentcorner 1y ago
> Some people on the right blame birth control or women not knowing their place or whatever, but it seems odd that propagation of a species would rely on essentially forced participation of prospective parents. The simple explanation is that there is no local "cost" to doubling your household's income. The only thing you "pay" is to have fewer children. As smaller households become more competitive, average costs rise and the only way to stay competitive is for other households to also stay small. Looking at world-wide graphs and it's extremely worrying - many countries are completely upside-down and over the next 25-50 years as the elderly die, these populations will crash. IMO governments should have started doing something about 20 years ago if they wanted to keep things on-track, I suspect the children of today are just going to have to suffer the consequences of a large population decrease. It's certainly plausible that this is all for the best for Earth's sustainability, but I expect the coming years to be turbulent nonetheless.
- rainsford 1y ago
  > IMO governments should have started doing something about 20 years ago if they wanted to keep things on-track... I guess my thought is that it's non-obvious what "doing something" would have looked like. The seemingly inevitable outcome of economic, social, and technological progress has been declining birthrates, and many proposed solutions would effectively involve reversing one of those three things. I'm honestly not sure that would be a better outcome. I'd welcome a more palatable alternative, but it's not clear one will be forthcoming.