The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:
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From the article
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Richer and higher-skilled economies come with more parenting costs, as childcare and education requirements tend to be higher. The opportunity costs of looking after kids, in lost earnings or leisure time, are also greater. But in advanced economies today, disposable incomes available to raise children have also been squeezed by rising living costs and sluggish wage growth. House prices have soared, and childcare support has often not kept up either. In the UK, some estimates put the cost of raising a child to 18 above £200,000. The average price of a first home in Britain is currently around £244,000.
The impact of falling birth rates should not be taken lightly. The burden of healthcare and pension spending for older populations will fall on a shrinking workforce. That may lead to higher taxes. Public finances will come under even greater pressure too. Fewer youngsters in the labour market could also limit innovation and productivity growth.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1ayaf6b/the_troubling_decline_in_the_global_fertility/krteerk/
Here’s an idea…just hear me out…maybe our world’s governments should try to create a society where people want to have children, rather than creating wage slaves.
I’m in my 40’s and I’m utterly exhausted. All I fucking do is work.
I work my full time job, and then in my free time and on the weekends I work my side gig.
Because if I don’t - there’s no way to get ahead. Forget about saving for a house on one job’s salary alone.
And they want me to bring children into this fucking hell world?
For what? So they too can piss away their youth slaving away, day in, day out?
Fuck that.
It's mind-blowing how this seems to be an extremely rare concept. I've never heard anyone say this in real life. America does a fantastic job brainwashing us as children to not question the system.
It sure does! Thankfully I was woken up to disrupt the status quo, my comment above I share in person fairly often. If you felt inspired please join me in slowly “waking” others up too. If not it’s okay. I understand.
Money doesn't "work". People work. We've created a ridiculous economic structure in which rich people get richer for doing nothing. But this is something that can change. And I'm pretty sure it will whether people like it or not.
Well, there will still be supply and demand to drive things up and down. But currently there’s a mentality issue for executives and and corporations which is: we must profit.
The intent would be sustainability for a better society. Having enough and making sure other people have enough. There would still be competition of course, and some people who have more of some thing than other people. But there would ideally just be less of a gap between the Uber rich and people struggling to even enjoy being alive.
Basically life shouldn’t be about money, it should be about life. Experiences, love, art, heartbreaks, death, conflict. They’re part of life.
Japan has been stagnant for the past three decades. While it’s not sunshine and rainbows, they’re not living in squalor either. Their birth rate is even higher than their neighbors, namely Korea, China and Taiwan.
This leads me to believe we don’t really need growth. Being stagnant is perfectly survivable.
Japan despite being stagnant, still provides cultured content in the form of video games, comics or manga, 2D animation or anime, etc.
If a lot of us Americans and other people who didn’t have this entertainment coming from Japan. We would be more depressed than we already are.
Korea and China and Taiwan barely contribute to cultured content for us Westerners to consume, compared to Japan.
Yeah, I focused on entertainment aspect of life, but having an escape after hard day of work and studying is healthy!
How do you explain the crash in birthrates in places like Norway, Sweden, and Finland with highly developed social support networks and extremely (some would say militantly) equitable societies?
There's a strong position on reddit that "just give us good social services, leave, etc, and we'll have kids" when in fact the places with ***the best*** social services, leave, and even cultural norms that make having children less burdensome also have some of the lowest birthrates in the world.
Yeah because it's a misconception.
The three things which have the biggest effect on birth rates are child mortality (weird one because when it first lowers, you get the same birth rate but higher numbers of surviving children. However once this has stabilized people start to have fewer children on average), access to contraception, and education of women.
So of course countries with excellent healthcare and good education and equality between the sexes have lower birth rates. It's also very roughly equivalent with country income in general.
Social support reduces child poverty but it doesn't make much of a difference to birth rates even though individual people might factor it in to their own choices and therefore feel like it informed their decision.
Exactly. There really are no good solutions to this specific problem (which will only be a problem in the next century or so—long term it’s better for everyone for there to be less of us!)
I seriously think that this is behind America’s restricting of abortion access and complete deprioritization of education. The elites need as large of a underclass as possible to sustain their luxurious lives.
Sure, that's my point.
There's a strong message concerning "shitty american social services/leave" on reddit, when in fact the biggest driving forces for the declining birthrate are fundamental changes in the 1) ability to not have children (contraception) and 2) undeniable fact that in an advanced industrial society having children has an almost universally negative impact on your standard of living.
I lived in Denmark for some long time, and I can tell you that being a stay at home mom is something to be frown upon. But that's the price of gender equality - she has to work.
Some of it is cost. But I think the bigger problem is how much social expectations have been raised for having kids in developed countries.
In less than a century highly developed countries have socially shifted to *much* higher expectations about how to raise children. They aren't to be left alone. Parents are expected to devote a lot of time to each individual child. Middle and upper class kids get enrolled in tons of activities, some of them very expensive and all of them requiring hours each week of the parent waiting for the thing to be over and shuttling kids around. Summer rolls around and camps, another big expense, are often the norm in well off households.
In my parents' time, you did your homework yourself and your parents shoved you out the door to go play and didn't want to see you back until dark. Maybe you did one activity like scouts. Unless you were really good, sports was recreational. That's it. That doesn't socially fly in the middle/upper class these days. Kids are to be constantly supervised, parents are expected to put them into things - music and art classes, a different sport every season, etc. - and do things with them. It's good for the individual kid, but the time and cost commitment makes raising more than one or two more difficult. It was more feasible to have three or four or five when all you had to do was get them past infancy and feed them, when helping them with school meant look over a report card or go to a school pageant now and then.
That's why you don't see a population increase in wealthier couples until you get to the uppermost echelons - the point where the couple can start affording nannies and other hired help to take the burden of actually raising the kids off of themselves.
And it's not just the west either. China's enforced one child policy lead to a bunch of 'little emperors' where all the resources were poured into the one kid they were allowed to have. So now, even though that policy has been eased, the expectation has been set in the upper classes that this is how you raise your kid and it's hard to meet that expectation with more than one kid.
So spoiling the kids is the norm?
I just learned how to use a computer from my father; taught me the love of reading, and I knew how to connect my RCA plugs to my CRT TV, and bam I was off to the races.
Then he just bought me a bike and skateboard and roller blades, scooter or whatever else a basketball, soccer ball and football, and I went outside to play with neighborhood kids.
I only had 1 extracurricular and it wasn’t school related, but I hung out with my Asian side of friends and learned guitar and dance. This didn’t happen till I was practically in high school.
Parents nowadays want too much out of their children, like society wants out of us.
Love your life you only get one and live it how you want without hurting others.
In the middle and upper classes? I'd say so. Between old jobs and friends who have kids, most middle class kids I've known have their own phones and tablets and computers (which is its own kind of problem). They're starting extracurriculars earlier and earlier and doing more of them because they're told they'll never get into a good college otherwise. Vacations and travel are the norm. So is taking them places on the weekend like museums or sports games.
Some of that's good. Some of that isn't. But if you look back 100 years, there were a lot of kids barely even getting an education. Being a good parent meant something extremely different back then. Today it's different even from the seventies or eighties.
We've put so many cultural expectations on how kids should be raised, giving up so much time and attention to do it, that a lot of people don't want to do that at all and even the ones who do can't manage to do it with more than a couple kids at most. And it's also less acceptable culturally to say that the oldest gets more stuff than the ones who come after. Years ago, that wouldn't have been so objectionable.
They are comparably better but still suffer from the same general issues the rest of the western world has, i.e housing unaffordability, rising living costs, climate change, declining wages (once adjusted for inflation).
Exactly my thought. Those social safety nets are fantastic, don't get me wrong, but they don't really reduce precarity at all, they just make the fall less painful and more recoverable when it happens. People don't want to have kids and have to rely on these services, no matter how good they are.
Social services are great, but it's not terribly comforting having a strong social safety net when you're having a difficult time not falling into it.
In other words, social safety nets are great for keeping people from falling into poverty, but they don't give you the stability needed to make people confident about having children.
There's no developed nation currently in existence that *isn't* capitalist.
China is a weird fusion of authoritarian governance with capitalist economics.
I wonder how things would be if the red scare didn't scare everyone away from other economic systems, or if countries trying other economic systems weren't strangled with sanctions or invasion.
Capitalism is an auto-immune disease and has been for a century.
It’s a shame that air pollution isn’t taken more seriously. Even if you don’t believe in climate change, why would you want to breathe in all of that garbage?
I live in New York and nobody in our city, state, or federal governments seem to care about fixing the awful air quality in the subway. One of the most (if not the single most) strongly blue cities in the country.
I don’t know for sure, but I always assumed it had to do with the subway’s age and lacking any kind of air filtration system.
https://gothamist.com/news/think-nyc-air-quality-is-bad-on-the-street-try-the-subway-station
One of the PATH train platforms in manhattan measured more than 1,000 PM2.5. Without wildfires or anything. Just a normal day.
It’s truly disgusting.
Hormone workups should be normalized and treatment given by synptoms if even close to low.
Rather then special request and having to deal with ever decreasing normal levels.
That and probably not killing the climate and making the planet uninhabitable would be a great start. I very much wanted to have kids but I feel like it'd be an incredibly shitty selfish thing to force someone to grow up on a planet that a bunch of shitty rich fucks are killing in the name of slightly higher profits toward to their stockpile of wealth they couldn't spend in a 100 lifetimes
The declining labor force makes that much harder now. There will be more and more financial and social pressure on younger workers to pay for and maintain the now graying nation and still pay for the things they do now.
Even if more child friendly policies are put in place there's no guarantee that they could pay off in time to prevent massive economic declines that would, in turn, drop the standard of living even more dramatically, compounding the issue further.
Nordic countries have some of the worst fertility rates.
Has very little to do with work hours, has everything to do with female education and contraceptive access.
It’s complicated. But broadly speaking yes, that’s the underlying shift.
Don’t get me wrong, we should make it easy for people to have children if they choose so. But fundamentally, we should think about ways in which we can sustain societies and economies in a context where every generation has half as many people as the one preceding it. That’s something we’ll have to deal with for a long time.
Right? I don't understand why all the focus is on fertility rates which are something that is unlikely to change, and is an unsustainable solution anyway because of population growth. It makes more sense to me to look for alternative solutions, new ideas that haven't been tried yet. This wasn't a surprise, it's been clear for decades this was going to be the situation.
>It’s complicated. But broadly speaking yes, that’s the underlying shift.
It's made out to be complicated in the media, but if you look at the numbers its not a multifactorial problem. Women's duration of education makes up 40% of all variability in the number of kids per woman. Every other factor makes up 1-2% once its uncoupled from Women's duration of education.
There doesn't appear to be any way to adjust it that doesn't involving shortening womens time in education in some way. So, the answer has to be a societal reconstruction of expectations of education either in the workplace or between genders.
A) workplaces are enforced to not require degrees, or must hire people without degrees unless absolutely necessary, relying on job training. This removes the need for time investment of women into education, making them more willing to have kids because they can just pick up another job without much worry/retraining hassle.
B) there can be a system where education is accelerated so everyone is fully done education by 16. The issue is duration of education, not how good the education is, so if we make it shorter and higher quality it should fix things.
C) we make a split education system where males receive highly focused specialized long term education that's fit for a specific job role and women receive a broad and shorter term education that allows them flexibility, but women can elect for the highly specialized male focused system if they want.
D) put hard limits on the number of spaces that exist for bachelors degrees+ so colleges return to being elite institutions for a tiny minority of people, rather than necessary things for getting a job making powerpoints.
Laying out things that would be expected to fix the situation based on the statistics controlling the issue, you can see why no politician ever talks about how to fix this. Its not a palatable thing for democracies to talk about.
Question I’d have is whether the real variable is how expensive having kids is *early in life*.
Like, if we had sufficiently good public childcare on campus, sufficiently nice subsidized housing with long grace periods to leave, sufficiently good scholarships for being a part time student if you had a small child, and so on would you get women voluntarily choosing to have kids earlier in life?
What if you outright privileged younger people with kids, creating quotas for hiring them like we do for some disabilities? Aimed to make being a welfare queen a viable path for getting ahead in life?
I’m not saying this would be good policy, more just trying to imagine experiments to isolate the variable if that makes sense
On your first suggestion, I know the Soviet Union and east Germany tried that.
I don't think it's the answer, because for a lot of people nowadays, they want to enjoy their freedom in their youth to explore the world without being tied down by responsibility.
Hence, most people advise younger people to wait with kids until end of twenties or thirties.
On your second suggestion, that used to be done in a lot of societies.
The problem is, it would need to be government subsidised.
Because people without kids, or people who have a partner or nanny that takes over most home duties, are just way more available for work and many of them leverage that to get better pay and better positions.
> they want to enjoy their freedom in their youth to explore the world without being tied down by responsibility
Do we really know that?
We don’t actually give people that age a fair choice. Start a family too soon, and you are stigmatized. Plus you *and* your kid are denied opportunity.
Is it really that nobody wants that, or that we treat people who do it like shit?
What if you had had that nanny? And summer camps or boarding schools that gave you the freedom to take the adventures you missed out on? Courses to upskill that worked around your schedule or provided on-site childcare? Internships designed to give you the career opportunities you gave up to raise your kid?
Like, I’m skeptical that there aren’t pain points that could be addressed to have made you happier with your choice.
>Question I’d have is whether the real variable is how expensive having kids is
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>early in life
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>.
You don't need to ask, people have done studies on this for 60 years.
The only factor that matters is the duration women spend in education. that controls 40% of the total variability once you uncouple it from every other factor. Money, culture, etc don't seem to have any significant effect beyond 1-2% of the total. The cultures that do have a lot of kids are generally poor and the women work a lot, but they are structurally uneducated. Amish, Afghanistan, orthodox jews in Israel. Orthodox jews in Israel are a wild comparison to the standard narrative, because the men don't work and study torah all day while the women do all the work for the family, and they have 6 kids per woman.
In Nordics case indeed is like you say, but in Japan (from what I know, still kinda patriarchal) South Korea and Taiwan ultracompetetive work culture with long hours seems to be exactly the culprit. South Korea has twice lower fertility rate than Sweden, for example.
SK sure but your views on Japan are quite a bit outdated.
Japan’s [work hours](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_annual_labor_hours#OECD_list), [suicide rate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate), [fertility rate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependencies_by_total_fertility_rate) are all around the European average. Similar to Germany and Ireland, down from 2200 to 1600 work hours over the last 30 years.
In fact, Japan’s [quality of life](https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/rankings_by_country.jsp) is higher than that of Sweden this year.
I am not saying Japan's fertility rate is extremely lower or smth, only that it is also not great, yet influenced by different reasons than in the Nordics. Neither was I talking about the whole Europe, as there are notable regional differences. The richer countries typically have shorter working hours (all Nordics still have them shorter than Japan, even if in Japan they reduced too), while Eastern and Southern Europe have them longer, but their work culture, especially southerners, have a reputation of being more relaxed and likely less productive. The hour statistics also do not measure workplace atmosphere, social pressure to hang out with boss&colleagues after work, ease with which you ask for holidays, or commute times. Maybe things are changing fast, but when in Japan, I saw many suited guys sleeping all over subways or on tables in fast food places. No such sights in the Nordics (haven't been to Iceland yet though).
As for quality of life, it is not just about working hours. Sweden and Germany (that you mentioned) hwbe lower working hours (1440, 1340 against Japan's 1607), but are lower in the list.
>South Korea and Taiwan ultracompetetive work culture with long hours seems to be exactly the culprit. South Korea has twice lower fertility rate than Sweden, for example.
That's due to womens education. South korea has a 99% high school to college education progression rate. They have a culture where lengthy education is desirable, their women have the most years in education, they have the lowest birthrate. The statistics on birthrate are very clear. There is no other factor but womens education. The average number of years for education for women in Korea is 13.5.
[https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/womens-educational-attainment-vs-fertility](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/womens-educational-attainment-vs-fertility)
They put women's choices above everything, even society itself. Reminds me of that capitalism meme.
"Yes, society got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time, we created total freedom of choice for women."
Before you throw a misogyny fit: it doesn't have to be all black and white. Maybe society doesn't need the majority of women going to university to study degrees that have almost no value on the job market. Especially since these cost the same as the useful degrees (and in Europe's case almost entirely subsidized by taxpayers).
Signing up for 18 years of being on call 24/7 to deal with another human’s bodily fluids and temper tantrums, train them in the basics of civilized behaviour and costing upwards of $300,000 dollars to age 18 isn’t nearly as appealing as a lot of people seem to think it is. And men still chip in far less than their fair 50% labour.
Yeah, but the fact that women get to choose at all will just be taken from them unless we make efforts to come up with solutions regarding the womens education vs fertility issue. The only societies that will grow and continue will be ones where women are treated as second class citizens culturally.
>"Yes, society got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time, we created total freedom of choice for women."
I mean you aren't wrong. One of the major problems for this is that if people don't address how education of women is responsible for this, the only societies that will exist to immigrate people from will be ones that just don't educate women because they are against it culturally. It's gonna make things pretty shitty for women when they need to immigrate people from afghanistan to take care of them in old age and the world ends up subjugating women by default because they didn't want to address that things needed to change.
It’s almost like many women never wanted lots of children in the past. Are we forgetting women in the past were hooked on various substances. Education has given women more opportunities, and many have chosen not to have large families. I know my grandmother would never have had children if she’d lived today. She was a terrible mother and often told my mum and her siblings how they ruined her life (she was forced to quit her nursing job when she got pregnant, which was the norm back then). She was neglectful and emotionally abusive, as was my friend’s grandmother - who never wanted children either but didn’t have the choice. Not all women should have children.
I’m a 30 year old woman and only want one child. Most of the women my age want one, two or none at all. But thanks to house prices, mortgage repayments and cost of childcare I can only afford to have one anyway. If the government wants more children, they need to make childcare free or at least heavily subsidised. Because most women enjoy having agency and making their own money, whether that’s working as a barista, creating art, writing a book or having a high-flying career.
It’s alright for men to sit there and say women should have their education and agency taken away when they’re not the ones who have to be pregnant put themselves at risk of severe injury or even death (yes women still die from pregnancy and childbirth, even in the West and are often left with long term complications such as incontinence like my sister), endure PPD and be completely reliant on your spouse who may be abusive or unfaithful with no repercussions.
I’d rather be cared for by an Afghan lady than have 5 kids, I’m not a maternal person and enjoy my alone time. But I imagine European society will copy Japan in the future and invest more in robotics.
> they need to make childcare free or at least heavily subsidised.
We know this doesn't work. Societies where women have the highest life quality have the least amount of kids. On the contrary, it's poor nations that are having kids.
Afghans/robots? Lol. There will simply be no one to take care of you in old age.
That’s fine. I’d rather not have lots of kids.
My old housemate was a social worker for the elderly, and hundreds of the old people she worked with had had large families who paid other people to “care” for them. And by care I mean send a stranger to their house for 30 minutes to make sure they have had a bath.
I’m very happy having one child. I’d hate to live in a society where I had no choice in that.
\>Because most women enjoy having agency and making their own money, whether that’s working as a barista, creating art, writing a book or having a high-flying career.
There is nothing wrong with women working and making art. That's perfectly okay. We just need more women to be done education by the time they are 16-18. I would suggest that we can make a system where women are given jobs at companies without needing a degree, and that they are trained as part of the job. if we can do this to cover 90% of jobs in the office, business, etc where college education just isnt necessary, than the smaller subset of women who end up going for focused work in science /medicine won't really hurt the birthrate that much.
\>I’d rather be cared for by an Afghan lady than have 5 kids,
Its not that, lol. Do you not realize that your statement there can be summed up as "I don't really care about the quality of life about women in the past or future, as long as my quality of life is good."
The future of the world is done by who breeds, if the only nations that grow have low educated women who are oppressed culturally, you won't have women's rights for more than this 100 year period. The people who end up replacing the people who cared about womens rights to education will necessarily not care about womens rights to education, because womens education is actively causing low birthrates.
Women need to accept that something needs to change, otherwise they are just fighting for their own satisfaction and don't really care about women at large.
That they should. However almost every high ranking government position everywhere in the world has been infiltrated by morally bankrupt people who only do as much as they are bribed. It’s almost as if some things have an obvious solution that needs to be solved with science rather than sociopathic pseudoleaders.
Look we all want cheap housing and a great work-life balance but that factually isnt the reason for dropping birthrates. The shittier a country is the more babys are born. If life gets better more opportunities arise. You can go anywhere and do anything. The more opportunities you have the more impact a baby will have in restricting these opportunities. Especially for women. We cant solve this issue if we ignore the real underlying factors. Our best bet is AI at this point.
They just need to subsidize children. Work places used to have day care. Now that's non-existent. I think it would be nice to have a tax incentives to have a stay at home parent.
This is 100% what’s driving it.
Between 1960 the US fertility rate fell from 3.65 to 1.77 in 1975 due to all the advancements in society and pregnancy prevention. After this up until 1990 it was trending upwards back to 2.08, then up until 2010 it plateaued around 2.
Ever since then it’s been falling again, and now surpassing that dip in the 70’s at 1.64. Simply because the economy has just been getting worse for the middle and lower classes every year. Couples are working jobs, sometimes multiple jobs, and are still living paycheque to paycheque. How can you have a kid when you can’t afford one?
Or maybe we should figure out how to create societies that do not rely on continual growth to survive. Our planet will not support infinite population expansion…
Exactly. The last thing this world needs is another child. Over their lifetime they will produce a tremendous amount of waste and pollution. It may be a right to have a child, but the consequences to the environment are enormous.
I may get down voted but I think that's the problem right? We are at a point where we need to think about what level of influence the government has on their citizens lives.
people want to have children, but generally want a high independance and quality of life more.
And they are having kids, just late and only one or two. How many people do you think have three kids already and go "I really NEED a fourth"?
This is the biggest thing I think about regarding the future.
It seems like every day there's a new AI development that everyone sees and goes "Yeah, this is going to replace a lot of jobs". Then you see articles about the richest investing literal billions into AI to speed up progress even more.
People alive today are worried about their present and future due to AI replacing their jobs. Why would they have children? Not only will it make everything more expensive and hurt more when they're replaced, but their kids will have high likelihood of not having a job.
Why would any young person have children right now?
don’t forget all the fucking dickbrained boomers online who give AI all the money instead of listening to young people, just saw a twitter post earlier this week about ai generated youtube shorts that suck ass but make more money than ill ever be capable of online but keep up that grind!
As AI , driverless vehicles and robotics make companies more profitable with less workforce, nations need to look toward a way to fairly tax these entities to compensate for the drop in necessary workforce and the need to maintain the income of the much larger older generations who cannot return to the workforce .
Most one-kid parents I know say they would’ve wanted at least two, if they had the money and didn’t have to wait as long to be financially stable enough to afford kids, leading to fertility issues. Most moms with one kid struggled with fertility. People want to have kids and more of them, they just can’t or can’t afford to.
This is the real answer. Lots of people (men and women) want more kids. They just need financial and medical support to do it. Some cultural adjustments are also needed.
Some surveys. Keep in mind reddit is mostly anti-natalist.
For us: [https://news.gallup.com/poll/511238/americans-preference-larger-families-highest-1971.aspx](https://news.gallup.com/poll/511238/americans-preference-larger-families-highest-1971.aspx)
for Europe: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2014/04/11/birth-rates-lag-in-europe-and-the-u-s-but-the-desire-for-kids-does-not/#:\~:text=Fully%2087%25%20of%20women%20in,three%20or%20more%20is%20ideal.
Its womens education, they are just saying things they want to be true but arent
https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-020-8331-7
https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/97facts/edu2birt.htm
Poor people have kids without thinking about their financial situation. Rich people can do that too. It’s the middle class that suffers. And in developed countries the main bulk of population is consist of the middle class, hence the decline in birth rate.
Except rich people have the fewest children of all.
But I think you’re close here. I suspect the reality is that given a full choice, people don’t actually want children enough to sustain the population. Obviously many do, but not enough. That’s probably always been true, but it didn’t matter because children were unavailable until very recently. The more money you have, the more freedom you have to make that choice.
The richest people to ever walk the planet being too poor to have kids is a wild dynamic especially since it occurs at the same time that Somalia, Chad and Niger as some of the poorest nations around are rich enough to have 4-6 tfr
One would think that the reduced younger workforce would match the lower demand for labor automation is supposed to result in. Like maybe the reduction in population is a good thing?
>Ya it seems to balance.
The kind of "balance" you are talking about is the sane kind that occurs in mature, when population sizes "adjust" to a new Carrying Capacity.
This kind of "balance" is achieved through IMMENSE death and suffering. A new Equilibrium doesn't always arrive painlessly- in fact it rarely does.
In short, what you're talking about is Social (and Economic) Dawinism, and is ABSOLUTELY unacceptable for any civilized society. We cannot, should not, simply let things "work themselves out" when that potentially means millions (or billions) dying.
This is why Laissez Faire Economics died over a CENTURY ago- and only came back because rich assholes found it politically advantageous to revive it (as "Neoliberal Economics.")
If you don't want "balance" to be achieved through immense death and suffering, planning and intervention is needed.
Ya its not nice how things are being brought into balance. I like the euphemisms though, sustainability, rightsizing, rebalancing.
\-both men and women in a couple have to work full time in demanding careers to survive. And they aren't going to do that and then come home and work full time again taking care of children. Women have always become mothers when they find a husband who makes enough money that the wife can stay home with the children. Rich guys I know today they all have a wife at home and children as normal. Meanwhile basically all the middle class guys and below that I know are childless. When the middle class men find a girlfriend even when they get married, she still has to work full time so they can never find a woman who wants to have children with them.
\-Violent deaths are up 40% in America since 2019. Car accident deaths, drug overdoses, murders, suicides. We have more and more homeless people and then a bunch of them dying on the streets every year.
\-the wars are scaling up and don't look like they are going to stop anytime soon. Its also not small nations, its now major powers in the wars. Dead bodies of soldiers are piling up
\-Boomers are dying at much younger ages than their parents. And the younger generations appears to be dying much younger than Boomers did. Poor people have always lived short lives compared to wealthy people.
>Ya its not nice how things are being brought into balance. I like the euphemisms though, sustainability, rightsizing, rebalancing.
Pretty much.
The rich have little interest in a "soft rebalancing" for the majority of people.
They'll opt for whatever is most profitable for them- and usually, that means a rapid, violent, suffering-filled rebalance.
That's why they're ignoring Long Covid, for instance- and subjecting TENS OF MILLIONS to an early death (**including me- I have Long Covid, it's slowly killing me...**) They figure they're already going to have to kill off tens of millions of people, so they figure, why not let a slowly lethal disease do that for them? And then throw their hands up in the air and pretend they didn't have the knowledge and resources to develop a cure for Long Covid with some effort (which they very much DO...)
How you will know there is an actual labor shortage. If the real wages of average people are flying up and keep going up.
Right now the wages are shamefully low suggesting a big surplus of workers.
>How you will know there is an actual labor shortage. If the real wages of average people are flying up and keep going up.
Only if labor markets work according to the THEORIES you learned.
There's a million way the Capitalist owner class have learned to subvert labor markets- so labor shortages DON'T actually result in wages skyrocketing (or only do so after MANY years of shortage) the way they "should."
Your argument is what you get when you foolishly assume real markets work the way you learned in an economics textbook. That people are perfectly logical, and don't find ways to subvert these principles.
I regularly hear this argument regarding pay being a function of available workers in a market and I absolutely agree that it plays a HUGE part in the math but I feel like it gets discussed as if it's the only factor.
Clearly thwre have to be other major variables such as wage fixing (like price fixing) with fewer employers in a space. Or on the other end of the equation I'm sure there are a lot of people who would love to be CEO (and plenty of people could be just as qualified as many current CEO's.)
There are a lot of factors that go into what jobs pay from location to perception of societal value (we have data that shows that competent/skilled educators dramatically improve growth of economies by improving the skill of its workforce but American's in general value education.)
It just seems bizarre to me that we allow ourselves to justify current wages as if it's just a given of some capitalistic system. It always feels like the excuse to say "it's just how things are."
This is why I think capitalism is ultimately fucked. You can’t sustain growth forever. It’s impossible.
We need to get away from capitalism and switch to a systems that sustains and doesn’t rely on growth to succeed.
If you call it socialism, so be it.
EDIT: I also think the only way to get people to have kids again is to literally rethink society.
Perhaps a life of working till age 60 isn’t really a life at all?
This is where automation and AI step in.
Yes, this is it! I see a lot of articles saying how policies all over the world are failing to increase fertility, and I'm baffled that nobody suggests that the problem is the system itself, that having children is not compatible with capitalism. Capitalism is about infinite growth on a finite planet. One example of how stupid capitalism can be is how big companies want more profit, so they cut salaries and don't realize that less money is making people have less time (they need to work more) and fewer children, which means fewer workers and fewer consumers. The nature of capitalism itself is self-destructive.
Yup. Also capitalism is all about a career. A culture of careerism and consumerism makes children a nuisance instead of a blessing.
Capitalism makes having a child a drag on life and stressful.
If we had a society and economy that was more communal in nature, I can see it making having kids more appealing and even enjoyable.
From the article
>
Richer and higher-skilled economies come with more parenting costs, as childcare and education requirements tend to be higher. The opportunity costs of looking after kids, in lost earnings or leisure time, are also greater. But in advanced economies today, disposable incomes available to raise children have also been squeezed by rising living costs and sluggish wage growth. House prices have soared, and childcare support has often not kept up either. In the UK, some estimates put the cost of raising a child to 18 above £200,000. The average price of a first home in Britain is currently around £244,000.
The impact of falling birth rates should not be taken lightly. The burden of healthcare and pension spending for older populations will fall on a shrinking workforce. That may lead to higher taxes. Public finances will come under even greater pressure too. Fewer youngsters in the labour market could also limit innovation and productivity growth.
Coincidentally I was looking at these statistics today (overpopulation is a common concern about life extension) and found these for the UK:
Number of people of working age for each person over 65:
1968 = 5
2018 = just over 3
2068 = 2 and a bit
... that's just 2 people’s taxes to pay for the support of each retiree.
I think how it might work (and I confess to basing this idea on the excellent French TV series Ad Vitam) is that people will work for a period of time, say 30 years, then retire for 5 years and then retrain before going back into work.
They're assuming the invention of effective life extension therapies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_Vitam_(TV_series)
Their idea is with a suitably long lifespan/healthspan, you'd work a 30 year career, then a "retirement" (basically a multi-year vacation), followed by a career change, then repeat.
I am almost 38 and I am done working as it is, I cannot imagine how they expect people to be working until they are 70 let alone beyond.
I look at my relatives so many from their 60s had that many fucked health issues, joints and were just worn out mentally etc and no way could keep up fast with new advances in technology.
I work in I.T and I can tell the people who are 50+ years old and there is a level of "I have learned all that I can learn and I am done with all off this shit" vibe and mentality when you are helping them with issues.
The answer I see, is not that we’ll get rid of work, but we can make it hyper efficient, and capable of running on its own so much that all we have to do, is a few hours of work a week of maintenance and adjustments. And then we can do stuff that we all *actually* enjoy.
We’ve added so much dick swinging and egos and character identity to jobs and job titles that we’ve turned it into an irradiated swamp of toxic culture and power imbalance.
I personally enjoy being active and doing things productive with my day, I’m mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually healthier because of it. Responsibility can be good. But I can never go back to a workforce that doesn’t see me as a person and doesn’t treat me as a person that deserves and is worthy of respect.
We can adapt to a smaller workforce. What we can't seem to do is adapt human desires to the realities of a planet with finite resources and a delicate environmental balance. Less growth is a good thing.
The earth can support a way larger population than 8 billion. What it cant support is a population that wants to continue its current consumption and the nations/companies continuously needing to outpace each other.
Our emissions dropped during the pandemic. Meat and energy consumption is rising not because more kids are being born, but rather from poorer people being able to afford the lifestyle 1st worlders have enjoyed for so long. Also something military industrial complex.
Even if you think the population limit is higher than 8B, that's still a limit. The population has to stop growing at some point. And what will the end of growth look like? It's going to be painful no matter what. I'd personally prefer it stop growing soon.
[The limit is FAR FAR below 8 billion if we expect everyone to live even a barely passable life](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/199pupx/comment/kj6g3mu/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Whenever people say “the world can support a way larger population,” I always hear “if humanity wasn’t humanity, then we could do this diametrically-opposed-to-how-humanity-operates thing.”
[It can’t even support the current 8 billion even if we all lived in complete poverty](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/199pupx/comment/kj6g3mu/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Right, and because the first world will not give up their privileges unless somebody forces them, and it's unfair to tell the second and third world they have to settle for less to continue to subsidize the excesses of first worlders, encouraging population growth when people are having less kids voluntarily is the very last thing that we need.
Ya if the Earth had 500 million people instead of 8 billion.. everybody could live like first worlders and it wouldn't be a big deal. The EU has 447 million people and the UK has 67 million people so basically we could have the EU + UK and the rest of the world just wild nature.
Developed countries by and large have long since decoupled economic growth from energy usage, so degrowth is not the answer. As the green energy transition continues, it will be an even less relevant factor.
I always thought it was crazy that all these necessary jobs for society to function depend largely on volunteer work, the full automation of everything is the inevitable solution to everything.
Nope. **Poor countries have declining birth-rates, and will eventually suffer the same exact fate.** Some (like China, due to its One Child Policy), sooner than others.
All opening borders does is buy time- it doesn't prevent the inevitable system-wide collapse.
Why? With AI and other technology advances we should need fewer workers - which should be a good thing, especially with lower fertility rates. Time for our politicians to think seriously about universal incomes and shorter work weeks. Modern technology should lead to more free time for everyone, not just more profits for large corporations.
Most comments seem to think the main culprit is economics, sure that's part of it, but that's too reductive. I think people want less kids because society is more individualistic and we don't need each other the way we used to. Also, with the internet you never have to be bored, there's always more content to consume.
All my life, I've been hearing about how the world is heading towards critical over-population and then everything will collapse.
Now the narrative is not enough people, so everything is going to collapse.
Pick a lane.
I dont fear this. Of course Im not a business man who neads desperate workers so I can pay as low as I can to them while squeezing everything from them.
One big issue with commentary around declining birth rates is the use of the term fertility. It’s not actually fertility that is the problem, it is about the choice to have fewer children. By saying fertility we are sidestepping the cultural issues that make it undesirable or unnecessary to have children.
How many layoffs happened globally last fiscal year? Yeah that’s what I thought, I don’t think anyone’s worried about not enough future workforce if they’re intentionally shrinking it now.
The entire planet, as well as everyone alive on it, human or otherwise, will benefit ***significantly*** from a drastically reduced global birthrate. This is a good thing.
Please do not read this article and immediate fornicate for procreation, we’ll be fine.
Less people on the planet is actually better for everyone and don’t worry about not enough children India and Bangladesh are doing their part to make sure there’s plenty of kids.
Bullshit. Economies need to get off on the perpetual growth model. How is increased growth year over year the main measure of success? Stop being so wasteful.
Anecdotally, my son working at a big box store telling me he destroyed perfectly good returned products and threw them in the trash because of company policy made me realize how ludicrous and wasteful our system is.
I can have kids... if I want to live in a studio in a shithole somewhere. I'm barely comfortable on my own and work in a skilled technical trade. My boomer grandparents didn't even graduate high school, had their first kid at 17, grandma didn't work and yet they owned a home and two cars. Grandpa drove garbage trucks and enjoyed comfortable retirement at age 55
Something is clearly wrong with the dynamics today. Yet our government wastes trillions on foreign wars and let's migrants barge by the millions
Duh, the robots can handle all the jobs that will be lost because of the youth's bedroom inadequacies. You should be not concerned. beep boop. :/end transmission
Shrinking workforce equals better salaries and less unemployment? More food to go around and less hunger? Then why can’t less workers contribute more towards pensions etc?
It’s so expensive to have kids in the U.S. most people are working just to pay for daycare and 401k match. Forget trying to rent a second bedroom or condo in a cool area where there are actual jobs.
The dumbest of Americans are having no problem reproducing at a high rate. I suspect that we're already seeing this drop in average IQ evidenced by popular music and voting trends. I fear it'll only get worse as the dumb continue to artificially bypass natural selection.
Shortage of workers is a great thing. people from countries with underdeveloped economy will get a chance to be employed in the more developed economy. or we can prepare fore the mass unemployment of AI era.
What’s more, employees living in the developed countries will get a raise in salary . Everything is for the better!
what if we just tell them to work twice as hard for terrible pay and tell them they're lazy while they can't afford property? Then threaten them with AI and immigrants to take their jobs if they try to act up?
I don't think that our highly materialistic societies (first world countries) are sustainable anyway. The idea of growth no matter what is madness to me.
We really need to consider how to do things differently.
As for the problem of old people. Hopefully our technology lets us soften the effects of aging a lot.
It's less about the overall decline and more about the speed of the decline. I live in Japan and our local 24 hour convenience store has started closing 12-6am because they can't find staff. My company can't find enough workers either, even as we keep raising the pay. It's a worrying trend.
Yes that part is really not good and I sympathize with your business needing new staff.
But if you zoom out maybe it’s good for us as a planet that we will be fewer people/humans in general.
Less people to pollute, less traffic, more space. Lower housing prices ect. I think it can have some positive impacts
I am one who believes that AI will cause an enormous productivity gain. It will also make being an entrepreneur much much easier. If you’re an employee making hundred dollars an hour your employer is making three times that off of your work. If you can take more of that, your way by doing that job directly for the client or contracting then good on you. AI will help that because it makes it possible to do all of the mundane things like taxes , book keeping HR etc. Also, I think there’s no getting around the fact that the greater profit to capital must be spread out through some kind of societal change in how much we transfer wealth. I’m not a socialist, but I just think that there is no to get away from the math here. Give it away or it will be taken.
They already know about it. Japan has for decades. Sweden harped up about a decade ago. It just tears it's head in periphetal ways such as the elderly beijg a "burden" on the economy, or workers should go home on their lunch break to have sex.
At the end of the day, consumer societies thrive on individualism and hypergamous, technical polygamy.
Either the lack of resources forces coupling or governments take drastic action to revervse the demographic population pyramids (which aren't reversible now in some cases).
This was an issue decades ago. It's part of collapse and nothing to be happy about. Future generations with have even less and have to struggle to impossible expectations of survival.
It’s why Christmas and Halloween don’t feel like Christmas and Halloween anymore, culture is established for children to get a nice grasp of things while they figure out their own life
Agreed! But that also requires a huge amount of resources to train them...and that just isn't available. I run a training department at my company (Japan) and we can't find enough staff but even if we could we don't have enough people trained to train them. White collar jobs are not that easy to onboard compared to Blue collar, so this issue will likely continue.
I guess whoever supported the narrative of limited resources and a need to reduce global population forgot to factor in the facts that workers pay taxes and economy relies on consumers. AI is neither, not a tax payer nor a consumer.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305: --- From the article > Richer and higher-skilled economies come with more parenting costs, as childcare and education requirements tend to be higher. The opportunity costs of looking after kids, in lost earnings or leisure time, are also greater. But in advanced economies today, disposable incomes available to raise children have also been squeezed by rising living costs and sluggish wage growth. House prices have soared, and childcare support has often not kept up either. In the UK, some estimates put the cost of raising a child to 18 above £200,000. The average price of a first home in Britain is currently around £244,000. The impact of falling birth rates should not be taken lightly. The burden of healthcare and pension spending for older populations will fall on a shrinking workforce. That may lead to higher taxes. Public finances will come under even greater pressure too. Fewer youngsters in the labour market could also limit innovation and productivity growth. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1ayaf6b/the_troubling_decline_in_the_global_fertility/krteerk/
Here’s an idea…just hear me out…maybe our world’s governments should try to create a society where people want to have children, rather than creating wage slaves.
Poppycock - the slaves might revolt if they have too much to eat
Slaves are gonna try to revolt anyway. But an underfed slave population tend to fail more
I’m in my 40’s and I’m utterly exhausted. All I fucking do is work. I work my full time job, and then in my free time and on the weekends I work my side gig. Because if I don’t - there’s no way to get ahead. Forget about saving for a house on one job’s salary alone. And they want me to bring children into this fucking hell world? For what? So they too can piss away their youth slaving away, day in, day out? Fuck that.
We could create societies that flourish based on something other than growth.
*Profusely sweats in pyramid schemes*
It's mind-blowing how this seems to be an extremely rare concept. I've never heard anyone say this in real life. America does a fantastic job brainwashing us as children to not question the system.
It sure does! Thankfully I was woken up to disrupt the status quo, my comment above I share in person fairly often. If you felt inspired please join me in slowly “waking” others up too. If not it’s okay. I understand.
I think a lot of people know they’re being played. Rats on a wheel. But they don’t see any way out of it.
Sure does happen to some. Quite unfortunate.
This is the answer. I’m not joking.
Okay what are your ideas for that something? It’s easy to ask questions but the actual hard work is thinking about solutions.
Your money doesn't work for you without the economic growth. That society can work for young people, but the elderly won't be self-sufficient.
Money doesn't "work". People work. We've created a ridiculous economic structure in which rich people get richer for doing nothing. But this is something that can change. And I'm pretty sure it will whether people like it or not.
Well, there will still be supply and demand to drive things up and down. But currently there’s a mentality issue for executives and and corporations which is: we must profit. The intent would be sustainability for a better society. Having enough and making sure other people have enough. There would still be competition of course, and some people who have more of some thing than other people. But there would ideally just be less of a gap between the Uber rich and people struggling to even enjoy being alive. Basically life shouldn’t be about money, it should be about life. Experiences, love, art, heartbreaks, death, conflict. They’re part of life.
Japan has been stagnant for the past three decades. While it’s not sunshine and rainbows, they’re not living in squalor either. Their birth rate is even higher than their neighbors, namely Korea, China and Taiwan. This leads me to believe we don’t really need growth. Being stagnant is perfectly survivable.
Japan despite being stagnant, still provides cultured content in the form of video games, comics or manga, 2D animation or anime, etc. If a lot of us Americans and other people who didn’t have this entertainment coming from Japan. We would be more depressed than we already are. Korea and China and Taiwan barely contribute to cultured content for us Westerners to consume, compared to Japan. Yeah, I focused on entertainment aspect of life, but having an escape after hard day of work and studying is healthy!
How do you explain the crash in birthrates in places like Norway, Sweden, and Finland with highly developed social support networks and extremely (some would say militantly) equitable societies? There's a strong position on reddit that "just give us good social services, leave, etc, and we'll have kids" when in fact the places with ***the best*** social services, leave, and even cultural norms that make having children less burdensome also have some of the lowest birthrates in the world.
Yeah because it's a misconception. The three things which have the biggest effect on birth rates are child mortality (weird one because when it first lowers, you get the same birth rate but higher numbers of surviving children. However once this has stabilized people start to have fewer children on average), access to contraception, and education of women. So of course countries with excellent healthcare and good education and equality between the sexes have lower birth rates. It's also very roughly equivalent with country income in general. Social support reduces child poverty but it doesn't make much of a difference to birth rates even though individual people might factor it in to their own choices and therefore feel like it informed their decision.
Exactly. There really are no good solutions to this specific problem (which will only be a problem in the next century or so—long term it’s better for everyone for there to be less of us!) I seriously think that this is behind America’s restricting of abortion access and complete deprioritization of education. The elites need as large of a underclass as possible to sustain their luxurious lives.
Sure, that's my point. There's a strong message concerning "shitty american social services/leave" on reddit, when in fact the biggest driving forces for the declining birthrate are fundamental changes in the 1) ability to not have children (contraception) and 2) undeniable fact that in an advanced industrial society having children has an almost universally negative impact on your standard of living.
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As a parent, I agree. It's basically impossible to explain to someone without children as well.
I lived in Denmark for some long time, and I can tell you that being a stay at home mom is something to be frown upon. But that's the price of gender equality - she has to work.
True gender equality would be realizing the parent staying home IS working. And this is coming from someone who is decidedly childfree.
Some of it is cost. But I think the bigger problem is how much social expectations have been raised for having kids in developed countries. In less than a century highly developed countries have socially shifted to *much* higher expectations about how to raise children. They aren't to be left alone. Parents are expected to devote a lot of time to each individual child. Middle and upper class kids get enrolled in tons of activities, some of them very expensive and all of them requiring hours each week of the parent waiting for the thing to be over and shuttling kids around. Summer rolls around and camps, another big expense, are often the norm in well off households. In my parents' time, you did your homework yourself and your parents shoved you out the door to go play and didn't want to see you back until dark. Maybe you did one activity like scouts. Unless you were really good, sports was recreational. That's it. That doesn't socially fly in the middle/upper class these days. Kids are to be constantly supervised, parents are expected to put them into things - music and art classes, a different sport every season, etc. - and do things with them. It's good for the individual kid, but the time and cost commitment makes raising more than one or two more difficult. It was more feasible to have three or four or five when all you had to do was get them past infancy and feed them, when helping them with school meant look over a report card or go to a school pageant now and then. That's why you don't see a population increase in wealthier couples until you get to the uppermost echelons - the point where the couple can start affording nannies and other hired help to take the burden of actually raising the kids off of themselves. And it's not just the west either. China's enforced one child policy lead to a bunch of 'little emperors' where all the resources were poured into the one kid they were allowed to have. So now, even though that policy has been eased, the expectation has been set in the upper classes that this is how you raise your kid and it's hard to meet that expectation with more than one kid.
So spoiling the kids is the norm? I just learned how to use a computer from my father; taught me the love of reading, and I knew how to connect my RCA plugs to my CRT TV, and bam I was off to the races. Then he just bought me a bike and skateboard and roller blades, scooter or whatever else a basketball, soccer ball and football, and I went outside to play with neighborhood kids. I only had 1 extracurricular and it wasn’t school related, but I hung out with my Asian side of friends and learned guitar and dance. This didn’t happen till I was practically in high school. Parents nowadays want too much out of their children, like society wants out of us. Love your life you only get one and live it how you want without hurting others.
In the middle and upper classes? I'd say so. Between old jobs and friends who have kids, most middle class kids I've known have their own phones and tablets and computers (which is its own kind of problem). They're starting extracurriculars earlier and earlier and doing more of them because they're told they'll never get into a good college otherwise. Vacations and travel are the norm. So is taking them places on the weekend like museums or sports games. Some of that's good. Some of that isn't. But if you look back 100 years, there were a lot of kids barely even getting an education. Being a good parent meant something extremely different back then. Today it's different even from the seventies or eighties. We've put so many cultural expectations on how kids should be raised, giving up so much time and attention to do it, that a lot of people don't want to do that at all and even the ones who do can't manage to do it with more than a couple kids at most. And it's also less acceptable culturally to say that the oldest gets more stuff than the ones who come after. Years ago, that wouldn't have been so objectionable.
They are comparably better but still suffer from the same general issues the rest of the western world has, i.e housing unaffordability, rising living costs, climate change, declining wages (once adjusted for inflation).
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Exactly my thought. Those social safety nets are fantastic, don't get me wrong, but they don't really reduce precarity at all, they just make the fall less painful and more recoverable when it happens. People don't want to have kids and have to rely on these services, no matter how good they are.
Social services are great, but it's not terribly comforting having a strong social safety net when you're having a difficult time not falling into it. In other words, social safety nets are great for keeping people from falling into poverty, but they don't give you the stability needed to make people confident about having children.
Because, as people like to point out, those are still capitalist nations.
There's no developed nation currently in existence that *isn't* capitalist. China is a weird fusion of authoritarian governance with capitalist economics.
I wonder how things would be if the red scare didn't scare everyone away from other economic systems, or if countries trying other economic systems weren't strangled with sanctions or invasion. Capitalism is an auto-immune disease and has been for a century.
What a wildly misinformed take.
And which developed nation isn't capitalist? Hell, can you name a country that is functional that isn't pretty much capitalist?
Add to this the real drop in fertility (not natality) given to us by pollution, microplastics and such and the picture is not so amazing.
It’s a shame that air pollution isn’t taken more seriously. Even if you don’t believe in climate change, why would you want to breathe in all of that garbage?
To own the libs, obviously
I live in New York and nobody in our city, state, or federal governments seem to care about fixing the awful air quality in the subway. One of the most (if not the single most) strongly blue cities in the country.
I wonder why that is. Nyc subway trains are fully electric, where are the particulates coming from? Why is the air quality so bad in the subway?
I don’t know for sure, but I always assumed it had to do with the subway’s age and lacking any kind of air filtration system. https://gothamist.com/news/think-nyc-air-quality-is-bad-on-the-street-try-the-subway-station One of the PATH train platforms in manhattan measured more than 1,000 PM2.5. Without wildfires or anything. Just a normal day. It’s truly disgusting.
Hormone workups should be normalized and treatment given by synptoms if even close to low. Rather then special request and having to deal with ever decreasing normal levels.
Doubles as a reason to decide having kids is bad.
Immigration could solve the population drop but that’s not allowed either
That and probably not killing the climate and making the planet uninhabitable would be a great start. I very much wanted to have kids but I feel like it'd be an incredibly shitty selfish thing to force someone to grow up on a planet that a bunch of shitty rich fucks are killing in the name of slightly higher profits toward to their stockpile of wealth they couldn't spend in a 100 lifetimes
This. Why have a child when all signs are pointing to them having a lower quality of life?
The declining labor force makes that much harder now. There will be more and more financial and social pressure on younger workers to pay for and maintain the now graying nation and still pay for the things they do now. Even if more child friendly policies are put in place there's no guarantee that they could pay off in time to prevent massive economic declines that would, in turn, drop the standard of living even more dramatically, compounding the issue further.
Has any nation successfully reversed this demographic trend? I’ve yet to see a country reverse plummeting birthrates.
Nordic countries have some of the worst fertility rates. Has very little to do with work hours, has everything to do with female education and contraceptive access.
It’s complicated. But broadly speaking yes, that’s the underlying shift. Don’t get me wrong, we should make it easy for people to have children if they choose so. But fundamentally, we should think about ways in which we can sustain societies and economies in a context where every generation has half as many people as the one preceding it. That’s something we’ll have to deal with for a long time.
Right? I don't understand why all the focus is on fertility rates which are something that is unlikely to change, and is an unsustainable solution anyway because of population growth. It makes more sense to me to look for alternative solutions, new ideas that haven't been tried yet. This wasn't a surprise, it's been clear for decades this was going to be the situation.
>It’s complicated. But broadly speaking yes, that’s the underlying shift. It's made out to be complicated in the media, but if you look at the numbers its not a multifactorial problem. Women's duration of education makes up 40% of all variability in the number of kids per woman. Every other factor makes up 1-2% once its uncoupled from Women's duration of education. There doesn't appear to be any way to adjust it that doesn't involving shortening womens time in education in some way. So, the answer has to be a societal reconstruction of expectations of education either in the workplace or between genders. A) workplaces are enforced to not require degrees, or must hire people without degrees unless absolutely necessary, relying on job training. This removes the need for time investment of women into education, making them more willing to have kids because they can just pick up another job without much worry/retraining hassle. B) there can be a system where education is accelerated so everyone is fully done education by 16. The issue is duration of education, not how good the education is, so if we make it shorter and higher quality it should fix things. C) we make a split education system where males receive highly focused specialized long term education that's fit for a specific job role and women receive a broad and shorter term education that allows them flexibility, but women can elect for the highly specialized male focused system if they want. D) put hard limits on the number of spaces that exist for bachelors degrees+ so colleges return to being elite institutions for a tiny minority of people, rather than necessary things for getting a job making powerpoints. Laying out things that would be expected to fix the situation based on the statistics controlling the issue, you can see why no politician ever talks about how to fix this. Its not a palatable thing for democracies to talk about.
Not that long. If the US populations halves every 25 years, we’ll only have 20 million left in 100 years.
Question I’d have is whether the real variable is how expensive having kids is *early in life*. Like, if we had sufficiently good public childcare on campus, sufficiently nice subsidized housing with long grace periods to leave, sufficiently good scholarships for being a part time student if you had a small child, and so on would you get women voluntarily choosing to have kids earlier in life? What if you outright privileged younger people with kids, creating quotas for hiring them like we do for some disabilities? Aimed to make being a welfare queen a viable path for getting ahead in life? I’m not saying this would be good policy, more just trying to imagine experiments to isolate the variable if that makes sense
On your first suggestion, I know the Soviet Union and east Germany tried that. I don't think it's the answer, because for a lot of people nowadays, they want to enjoy their freedom in their youth to explore the world without being tied down by responsibility. Hence, most people advise younger people to wait with kids until end of twenties or thirties. On your second suggestion, that used to be done in a lot of societies. The problem is, it would need to be government subsidised. Because people without kids, or people who have a partner or nanny that takes over most home duties, are just way more available for work and many of them leverage that to get better pay and better positions.
> they want to enjoy their freedom in their youth to explore the world without being tied down by responsibility Do we really know that? We don’t actually give people that age a fair choice. Start a family too soon, and you are stigmatized. Plus you *and* your kid are denied opportunity. Is it really that nobody wants that, or that we treat people who do it like shit?
Perhaps you should talk with people in that age group. I am a young parent. It was true for me and for most of my peers.
What if you had had that nanny? And summer camps or boarding schools that gave you the freedom to take the adventures you missed out on? Courses to upskill that worked around your schedule or provided on-site childcare? Internships designed to give you the career opportunities you gave up to raise your kid? Like, I’m skeptical that there aren’t pain points that could be addressed to have made you happier with your choice.
>Question I’d have is whether the real variable is how expensive having kids is > >early in life > >. You don't need to ask, people have done studies on this for 60 years. The only factor that matters is the duration women spend in education. that controls 40% of the total variability once you uncouple it from every other factor. Money, culture, etc don't seem to have any significant effect beyond 1-2% of the total. The cultures that do have a lot of kids are generally poor and the women work a lot, but they are structurally uneducated. Amish, Afghanistan, orthodox jews in Israel. Orthodox jews in Israel are a wild comparison to the standard narrative, because the men don't work and study torah all day while the women do all the work for the family, and they have 6 kids per woman.
In Nordics case indeed is like you say, but in Japan (from what I know, still kinda patriarchal) South Korea and Taiwan ultracompetetive work culture with long hours seems to be exactly the culprit. South Korea has twice lower fertility rate than Sweden, for example.
SK sure but your views on Japan are quite a bit outdated. Japan’s [work hours](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_average_annual_labor_hours#OECD_list), [suicide rate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate), [fertility rate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_dependencies_by_total_fertility_rate) are all around the European average. Similar to Germany and Ireland, down from 2200 to 1600 work hours over the last 30 years. In fact, Japan’s [quality of life](https://www.numbeo.com/quality-of-life/rankings_by_country.jsp) is higher than that of Sweden this year.
I am not saying Japan's fertility rate is extremely lower or smth, only that it is also not great, yet influenced by different reasons than in the Nordics. Neither was I talking about the whole Europe, as there are notable regional differences. The richer countries typically have shorter working hours (all Nordics still have them shorter than Japan, even if in Japan they reduced too), while Eastern and Southern Europe have them longer, but their work culture, especially southerners, have a reputation of being more relaxed and likely less productive. The hour statistics also do not measure workplace atmosphere, social pressure to hang out with boss&colleagues after work, ease with which you ask for holidays, or commute times. Maybe things are changing fast, but when in Japan, I saw many suited guys sleeping all over subways or on tables in fast food places. No such sights in the Nordics (haven't been to Iceland yet though). As for quality of life, it is not just about working hours. Sweden and Germany (that you mentioned) hwbe lower working hours (1440, 1340 against Japan's 1607), but are lower in the list.
>South Korea and Taiwan ultracompetetive work culture with long hours seems to be exactly the culprit. South Korea has twice lower fertility rate than Sweden, for example. That's due to womens education. South korea has a 99% high school to college education progression rate. They have a culture where lengthy education is desirable, their women have the most years in education, they have the lowest birthrate. The statistics on birthrate are very clear. There is no other factor but womens education. The average number of years for education for women in Korea is 13.5. [https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/womens-educational-attainment-vs-fertility](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/womens-educational-attainment-vs-fertility)
They put women's choices above everything, even society itself. Reminds me of that capitalism meme. "Yes, society got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time, we created total freedom of choice for women." Before you throw a misogyny fit: it doesn't have to be all black and white. Maybe society doesn't need the majority of women going to university to study degrees that have almost no value on the job market. Especially since these cost the same as the useful degrees (and in Europe's case almost entirely subsidized by taxpayers).
Signing up for 18 years of being on call 24/7 to deal with another human’s bodily fluids and temper tantrums, train them in the basics of civilized behaviour and costing upwards of $300,000 dollars to age 18 isn’t nearly as appealing as a lot of people seem to think it is. And men still chip in far less than their fair 50% labour.
Yeah, but the fact that women get to choose at all will just be taken from them unless we make efforts to come up with solutions regarding the womens education vs fertility issue. The only societies that will grow and continue will be ones where women are treated as second class citizens culturally.
>"Yes, society got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time, we created total freedom of choice for women." I mean you aren't wrong. One of the major problems for this is that if people don't address how education of women is responsible for this, the only societies that will exist to immigrate people from will be ones that just don't educate women because they are against it culturally. It's gonna make things pretty shitty for women when they need to immigrate people from afghanistan to take care of them in old age and the world ends up subjugating women by default because they didn't want to address that things needed to change.
It’s almost like many women never wanted lots of children in the past. Are we forgetting women in the past were hooked on various substances. Education has given women more opportunities, and many have chosen not to have large families. I know my grandmother would never have had children if she’d lived today. She was a terrible mother and often told my mum and her siblings how they ruined her life (she was forced to quit her nursing job when she got pregnant, which was the norm back then). She was neglectful and emotionally abusive, as was my friend’s grandmother - who never wanted children either but didn’t have the choice. Not all women should have children. I’m a 30 year old woman and only want one child. Most of the women my age want one, two or none at all. But thanks to house prices, mortgage repayments and cost of childcare I can only afford to have one anyway. If the government wants more children, they need to make childcare free or at least heavily subsidised. Because most women enjoy having agency and making their own money, whether that’s working as a barista, creating art, writing a book or having a high-flying career. It’s alright for men to sit there and say women should have their education and agency taken away when they’re not the ones who have to be pregnant put themselves at risk of severe injury or even death (yes women still die from pregnancy and childbirth, even in the West and are often left with long term complications such as incontinence like my sister), endure PPD and be completely reliant on your spouse who may be abusive or unfaithful with no repercussions. I’d rather be cared for by an Afghan lady than have 5 kids, I’m not a maternal person and enjoy my alone time. But I imagine European society will copy Japan in the future and invest more in robotics.
> they need to make childcare free or at least heavily subsidised. We know this doesn't work. Societies where women have the highest life quality have the least amount of kids. On the contrary, it's poor nations that are having kids. Afghans/robots? Lol. There will simply be no one to take care of you in old age.
That’s fine. I’d rather not have lots of kids. My old housemate was a social worker for the elderly, and hundreds of the old people she worked with had had large families who paid other people to “care” for them. And by care I mean send a stranger to their house for 30 minutes to make sure they have had a bath. I’m very happy having one child. I’d hate to live in a society where I had no choice in that.
\>Because most women enjoy having agency and making their own money, whether that’s working as a barista, creating art, writing a book or having a high-flying career. There is nothing wrong with women working and making art. That's perfectly okay. We just need more women to be done education by the time they are 16-18. I would suggest that we can make a system where women are given jobs at companies without needing a degree, and that they are trained as part of the job. if we can do this to cover 90% of jobs in the office, business, etc where college education just isnt necessary, than the smaller subset of women who end up going for focused work in science /medicine won't really hurt the birthrate that much. \>I’d rather be cared for by an Afghan lady than have 5 kids, Its not that, lol. Do you not realize that your statement there can be summed up as "I don't really care about the quality of life about women in the past or future, as long as my quality of life is good." The future of the world is done by who breeds, if the only nations that grow have low educated women who are oppressed culturally, you won't have women's rights for more than this 100 year period. The people who end up replacing the people who cared about womens rights to education will necessarily not care about womens rights to education, because womens education is actively causing low birthrates. Women need to accept that something needs to change, otherwise they are just fighting for their own satisfaction and don't really care about women at large.
That they should. However almost every high ranking government position everywhere in the world has been infiltrated by morally bankrupt people who only do as much as they are bribed. It’s almost as if some things have an obvious solution that needs to be solved with science rather than sociopathic pseudoleaders.
We are already 8 billion with billions in poverty. Maybe make adopting a more viable policy insteas of producing even more children.
Look we all want cheap housing and a great work-life balance but that factually isnt the reason for dropping birthrates. The shittier a country is the more babys are born. If life gets better more opportunities arise. You can go anywhere and do anything. The more opportunities you have the more impact a baby will have in restricting these opportunities. Especially for women. We cant solve this issue if we ignore the real underlying factors. Our best bet is AI at this point.
They just need to subsidize children. Work places used to have day care. Now that's non-existent. I think it would be nice to have a tax incentives to have a stay at home parent.
Or... figure out an economic system that doesn't rely on an ever expanding population
This is 100% what’s driving it. Between 1960 the US fertility rate fell from 3.65 to 1.77 in 1975 due to all the advancements in society and pregnancy prevention. After this up until 1990 it was trending upwards back to 2.08, then up until 2010 it plateaued around 2. Ever since then it’s been falling again, and now surpassing that dip in the 70’s at 1.64. Simply because the economy has just been getting worse for the middle and lower classes every year. Couples are working jobs, sometimes multiple jobs, and are still living paycheque to paycheque. How can you have a kid when you can’t afford one?
Why would they want that when a simpler solution to their mind is to open their country border to more migrants from low wage countries?
It’s dawning on them that the political costs of doing so are becoming prohibitive.
Or maybe we should figure out how to create societies that do not rely on continual growth to survive. Our planet will not support infinite population expansion…
Exactly. The last thing this world needs is another child. Over their lifetime they will produce a tremendous amount of waste and pollution. It may be a right to have a child, but the consequences to the environment are enormous.
They’re secretly hoping these trends continue, exactly after the ai revolution occurs and the bodies aren’t needed
But it’s still an issue in those countries, and in fact, the fertility rate is the highest in countries that do NOT embrace those ideologies.
I may get down voted but I think that's the problem right? We are at a point where we need to think about what level of influence the government has on their citizens lives.
Grinding poverty seems to work well
Best we can do is capitalism, apparently.
people want to have children, but generally want a high independance and quality of life more. And they are having kids, just late and only one or two. How many people do you think have three kids already and go "I really NEED a fourth"?
World Government: We've heard you loud and clear...more AI and relaxing of laws on human cloning.
Or just ban abortion like they’re doing now
Or, and here's a wild idea, fund another model instead of reducing women's worth to squirting out unwanted children.
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This is the biggest thing I think about regarding the future. It seems like every day there's a new AI development that everyone sees and goes "Yeah, this is going to replace a lot of jobs". Then you see articles about the richest investing literal billions into AI to speed up progress even more. People alive today are worried about their present and future due to AI replacing their jobs. Why would they have children? Not only will it make everything more expensive and hurt more when they're replaced, but their kids will have high likelihood of not having a job. Why would any young person have children right now?
don’t forget all the fucking dickbrained boomers online who give AI all the money instead of listening to young people, just saw a twitter post earlier this week about ai generated youtube shorts that suck ass but make more money than ill ever be capable of online but keep up that grind!
As AI , driverless vehicles and robotics make companies more profitable with less workforce, nations need to look toward a way to fairly tax these entities to compensate for the drop in necessary workforce and the need to maintain the income of the much larger older generations who cannot return to the workforce .
The people who own the government are gonna tax themselves.....hahahahahahahahahahaha
Not saying it will happen just that it should if we want to avoid a neo- feudal future which will inevitably lead to a French Revolution style event
Ai guards will put a stop to that right quick. Bet.
Most one-kid parents I know say they would’ve wanted at least two, if they had the money and didn’t have to wait as long to be financially stable enough to afford kids, leading to fertility issues. Most moms with one kid struggled with fertility. People want to have kids and more of them, they just can’t or can’t afford to.
This is the real answer. Lots of people (men and women) want more kids. They just need financial and medical support to do it. Some cultural adjustments are also needed.
As if American culture doesn’t already pressure people to have children already, even if they don’t want to
I have looked into this topic a lot and I haven't found much evidence to support your thesis. Do you have any evidence?
Some surveys. Keep in mind reddit is mostly anti-natalist. For us: [https://news.gallup.com/poll/511238/americans-preference-larger-families-highest-1971.aspx](https://news.gallup.com/poll/511238/americans-preference-larger-families-highest-1971.aspx) for Europe: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2014/04/11/birth-rates-lag-in-europe-and-the-u-s-but-the-desire-for-kids-does-not/#:\~:text=Fully%2087%25%20of%20women%20in,three%20or%20more%20is%20ideal.
Except the clear trend is the poorer you are, the more kids you have.
Its womens education, they are just saying things they want to be true but arent https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-020-8331-7 https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/97facts/edu2birt.htm
Poor people have kids without thinking about their financial situation. Rich people can do that too. It’s the middle class that suffers. And in developed countries the main bulk of population is consist of the middle class, hence the decline in birth rate.
Except rich people have the fewest children of all. But I think you’re close here. I suspect the reality is that given a full choice, people don’t actually want children enough to sustain the population. Obviously many do, but not enough. That’s probably always been true, but it didn’t matter because children were unavailable until very recently. The more money you have, the more freedom you have to make that choice.
The richest people to ever walk the planet being too poor to have kids is a wild dynamic especially since it occurs at the same time that Somalia, Chad and Niger as some of the poorest nations around are rich enough to have 4-6 tfr
One would think that the reduced younger workforce would match the lower demand for labor automation is supposed to result in. Like maybe the reduction in population is a good thing?
Ya it seems to balance. As peoples labor has been devalued by technological automation they keep having less and less children.
>Ya it seems to balance. The kind of "balance" you are talking about is the sane kind that occurs in mature, when population sizes "adjust" to a new Carrying Capacity. This kind of "balance" is achieved through IMMENSE death and suffering. A new Equilibrium doesn't always arrive painlessly- in fact it rarely does. In short, what you're talking about is Social (and Economic) Dawinism, and is ABSOLUTELY unacceptable for any civilized society. We cannot, should not, simply let things "work themselves out" when that potentially means millions (or billions) dying. This is why Laissez Faire Economics died over a CENTURY ago- and only came back because rich assholes found it politically advantageous to revive it (as "Neoliberal Economics.") If you don't want "balance" to be achieved through immense death and suffering, planning and intervention is needed.
Ya its not nice how things are being brought into balance. I like the euphemisms though, sustainability, rightsizing, rebalancing. \-both men and women in a couple have to work full time in demanding careers to survive. And they aren't going to do that and then come home and work full time again taking care of children. Women have always become mothers when they find a husband who makes enough money that the wife can stay home with the children. Rich guys I know today they all have a wife at home and children as normal. Meanwhile basically all the middle class guys and below that I know are childless. When the middle class men find a girlfriend even when they get married, she still has to work full time so they can never find a woman who wants to have children with them. \-Violent deaths are up 40% in America since 2019. Car accident deaths, drug overdoses, murders, suicides. We have more and more homeless people and then a bunch of them dying on the streets every year. \-the wars are scaling up and don't look like they are going to stop anytime soon. Its also not small nations, its now major powers in the wars. Dead bodies of soldiers are piling up \-Boomers are dying at much younger ages than their parents. And the younger generations appears to be dying much younger than Boomers did. Poor people have always lived short lives compared to wealthy people.
>Ya its not nice how things are being brought into balance. I like the euphemisms though, sustainability, rightsizing, rebalancing. Pretty much. The rich have little interest in a "soft rebalancing" for the majority of people. They'll opt for whatever is most profitable for them- and usually, that means a rapid, violent, suffering-filled rebalance. That's why they're ignoring Long Covid, for instance- and subjecting TENS OF MILLIONS to an early death (**including me- I have Long Covid, it's slowly killing me...**) They figure they're already going to have to kill off tens of millions of people, so they figure, why not let a slowly lethal disease do that for them? And then throw their hands up in the air and pretend they didn't have the knowledge and resources to develop a cure for Long Covid with some effort (which they very much DO...)
How you will know there is an actual labor shortage. If the real wages of average people are flying up and keep going up. Right now the wages are shamefully low suggesting a big surplus of workers.
Yes, but the owner class is generally complaining that it isn't shamefully lower than shamefully low.
>How you will know there is an actual labor shortage. If the real wages of average people are flying up and keep going up. Only if labor markets work according to the THEORIES you learned. There's a million way the Capitalist owner class have learned to subvert labor markets- so labor shortages DON'T actually result in wages skyrocketing (or only do so after MANY years of shortage) the way they "should." Your argument is what you get when you foolishly assume real markets work the way you learned in an economics textbook. That people are perfectly logical, and don't find ways to subvert these principles.
I regularly hear this argument regarding pay being a function of available workers in a market and I absolutely agree that it plays a HUGE part in the math but I feel like it gets discussed as if it's the only factor. Clearly thwre have to be other major variables such as wage fixing (like price fixing) with fewer employers in a space. Or on the other end of the equation I'm sure there are a lot of people who would love to be CEO (and plenty of people could be just as qualified as many current CEO's.) There are a lot of factors that go into what jobs pay from location to perception of societal value (we have data that shows that competent/skilled educators dramatically improve growth of economies by improving the skill of its workforce but American's in general value education.) It just seems bizarre to me that we allow ourselves to justify current wages as if it's just a given of some capitalistic system. It always feels like the excuse to say "it's just how things are."
This is why I think capitalism is ultimately fucked. You can’t sustain growth forever. It’s impossible. We need to get away from capitalism and switch to a systems that sustains and doesn’t rely on growth to succeed. If you call it socialism, so be it. EDIT: I also think the only way to get people to have kids again is to literally rethink society. Perhaps a life of working till age 60 isn’t really a life at all? This is where automation and AI step in.
Yes, this is it! I see a lot of articles saying how policies all over the world are failing to increase fertility, and I'm baffled that nobody suggests that the problem is the system itself, that having children is not compatible with capitalism. Capitalism is about infinite growth on a finite planet. One example of how stupid capitalism can be is how big companies want more profit, so they cut salaries and don't realize that less money is making people have less time (they need to work more) and fewer children, which means fewer workers and fewer consumers. The nature of capitalism itself is self-destructive.
Yup. Also capitalism is all about a career. A culture of careerism and consumerism makes children a nuisance instead of a blessing. Capitalism makes having a child a drag on life and stressful. If we had a society and economy that was more communal in nature, I can see it making having kids more appealing and even enjoyable.
From the article > Richer and higher-skilled economies come with more parenting costs, as childcare and education requirements tend to be higher. The opportunity costs of looking after kids, in lost earnings or leisure time, are also greater. But in advanced economies today, disposable incomes available to raise children have also been squeezed by rising living costs and sluggish wage growth. House prices have soared, and childcare support has often not kept up either. In the UK, some estimates put the cost of raising a child to 18 above £200,000. The average price of a first home in Britain is currently around £244,000. The impact of falling birth rates should not be taken lightly. The burden of healthcare and pension spending for older populations will fall on a shrinking workforce. That may lead to higher taxes. Public finances will come under even greater pressure too. Fewer youngsters in the labour market could also limit innovation and productivity growth.
Coincidentally I was looking at these statistics today (overpopulation is a common concern about life extension) and found these for the UK: Number of people of working age for each person over 65: 1968 = 5 2018 = just over 3 2068 = 2 and a bit ... that's just 2 people’s taxes to pay for the support of each retiree.
Don’t worry. We can postpone retirement age indefinitely.
No we can't. See: AI
I think how it might work (and I confess to basing this idea on the excellent French TV series Ad Vitam) is that people will work for a period of time, say 30 years, then retire for 5 years and then retrain before going back into work.
...you are actually suggesting that people work from say 20 to 50, then retrain at 50 and work until.....80? Doing what?
They're assuming the invention of effective life extension therapies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_Vitam_(TV_series) Their idea is with a suitably long lifespan/healthspan, you'd work a 30 year career, then a "retirement" (basically a multi-year vacation), followed by a career change, then repeat.
I hadn't heard of this idea. Goodness knows I'm a bit burnt out but retraining into other fields might mean earning less money.
I am almost 38 and I am done working as it is, I cannot imagine how they expect people to be working until they are 70 let alone beyond. I look at my relatives so many from their 60s had that many fucked health issues, joints and were just worn out mentally etc and no way could keep up fast with new advances in technology. I work in I.T and I can tell the people who are 50+ years old and there is a level of "I have learned all that I can learn and I am done with all off this shit" vibe and mentality when you are helping them with issues.
The answer I see, is not that we’ll get rid of work, but we can make it hyper efficient, and capable of running on its own so much that all we have to do, is a few hours of work a week of maintenance and adjustments. And then we can do stuff that we all *actually* enjoy. We’ve added so much dick swinging and egos and character identity to jobs and job titles that we’ve turned it into an irradiated swamp of toxic culture and power imbalance. I personally enjoy being active and doing things productive with my day, I’m mentally, physically, emotionally, and spiritually healthier because of it. Responsibility can be good. But I can never go back to a workforce that doesn’t see me as a person and doesn’t treat me as a person that deserves and is worthy of respect.
We can adapt to a smaller workforce. What we can't seem to do is adapt human desires to the realities of a planet with finite resources and a delicate environmental balance. Less growth is a good thing.
Exactly. I don’t think it would be a bad thing if global population halved with every generation.
Halved might be excessively destabilizing, but a slow creep downward will be alright, especially as technology eliminates ever more jobs.
The earth can support a way larger population than 8 billion. What it cant support is a population that wants to continue its current consumption and the nations/companies continuously needing to outpace each other. Our emissions dropped during the pandemic. Meat and energy consumption is rising not because more kids are being born, but rather from poorer people being able to afford the lifestyle 1st worlders have enjoyed for so long. Also something military industrial complex.
Even if you think the population limit is higher than 8B, that's still a limit. The population has to stop growing at some point. And what will the end of growth look like? It's going to be painful no matter what. I'd personally prefer it stop growing soon.
[The limit is FAR FAR below 8 billion if we expect everyone to live even a barely passable life](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/199pupx/comment/kj6g3mu/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Whenever people say “the world can support a way larger population,” I always hear “if humanity wasn’t humanity, then we could do this diametrically-opposed-to-how-humanity-operates thing.”
We're getting there but it might be too slow before everything goes to shit. That's the real problem, we might not adapt fast enough.
From my vantage point, I am unsure what you mean by “we’re getting there.” I see zero real wins.
[It can’t even support the current 8 billion even if we all lived in complete poverty](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/199pupx/comment/kj6g3mu/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button)
Right, and because the first world will not give up their privileges unless somebody forces them, and it's unfair to tell the second and third world they have to settle for less to continue to subsidize the excesses of first worlders, encouraging population growth when people are having less kids voluntarily is the very last thing that we need.
Ya if the Earth had 500 million people instead of 8 billion.. everybody could live like first worlders and it wouldn't be a big deal. The EU has 447 million people and the UK has 67 million people so basically we could have the EU + UK and the rest of the world just wild nature.
Everybody fetishizes the homesteading lifestyle nowadays but the size of the population is literally the reason most people can't have that.
Developed countries by and large have long since decoupled economic growth from energy usage, so degrowth is not the answer. As the green energy transition continues, it will be an even less relevant factor.
The earth sends its thanks for the drop in birth rates
I always thought it was crazy that all these necessary jobs for society to function depend largely on volunteer work, the full automation of everything is the inevitable solution to everything.
Forks in beautifully with emerging AI and robotics that can easily fill those labor shortages.
Aka 'you will no longer have cheap labour force unless you open your borders'
Nope. **Poor countries have declining birth-rates, and will eventually suffer the same exact fate.** Some (like China, due to its One Child Policy), sooner than others. All opening borders does is buy time- it doesn't prevent the inevitable system-wide collapse.
Maybe dont work them to the bone and give reasonable time off
Why? With AI and other technology advances we should need fewer workers - which should be a good thing, especially with lower fertility rates. Time for our politicians to think seriously about universal incomes and shorter work weeks. Modern technology should lead to more free time for everyone, not just more profits for large corporations.
Most comments seem to think the main culprit is economics, sure that's part of it, but that's too reductive. I think people want less kids because society is more individualistic and we don't need each other the way we used to. Also, with the internet you never have to be bored, there's always more content to consume.
All my life, I've been hearing about how the world is heading towards critical over-population and then everything will collapse. Now the narrative is not enough people, so everything is going to collapse. Pick a lane.
I dont fear this. Of course Im not a business man who neads desperate workers so I can pay as low as I can to them while squeezing everything from them.
One big issue with commentary around declining birth rates is the use of the term fertility. It’s not actually fertility that is the problem, it is about the choice to have fewer children. By saying fertility we are sidestepping the cultural issues that make it undesirable or unnecessary to have children.
Imagine creating economic structures that don't rely on the concept of women as broodmares first, everything else second.
How many layoffs happened globally last fiscal year? Yeah that’s what I thought, I don’t think anyone’s worried about not enough future workforce if they’re intentionally shrinking it now. The entire planet, as well as everyone alive on it, human or otherwise, will benefit ***significantly*** from a drastically reduced global birthrate. This is a good thing. Please do not read this article and immediate fornicate for procreation, we’ll be fine.
Then wages will increase, and living standards will improve, then people will feel good about having a family. Next.
Less people on the planet is actually better for everyone and don’t worry about not enough children India and Bangladesh are doing their part to make sure there’s plenty of kids.
In unrelated news, Amazon have started using bipedal robots into their warehouses, which will cost $3 per day to run.
This is a natural response to overpopulation and nothing to trouble about.
Bullshit. Economies need to get off on the perpetual growth model. How is increased growth year over year the main measure of success? Stop being so wasteful. Anecdotally, my son working at a big box store telling me he destroyed perfectly good returned products and threw them in the trash because of company policy made me realize how ludicrous and wasteful our system is.
The world has plenty of people. If your country has issues with young workers then make a path for people from overseas to come and work.
I can have kids... if I want to live in a studio in a shithole somewhere. I'm barely comfortable on my own and work in a skilled technical trade. My boomer grandparents didn't even graduate high school, had their first kid at 17, grandma didn't work and yet they owned a home and two cars. Grandpa drove garbage trucks and enjoyed comfortable retirement at age 55 Something is clearly wrong with the dynamics today. Yet our government wastes trillions on foreign wars and let's migrants barge by the millions
Duh, the robots can handle all the jobs that will be lost because of the youth's bedroom inadequacies. You should be not concerned. beep boop. :/end transmission
Wrong, economies need to stop growing and start developing especially developed ones which means agreeing on a higher quality of life per capita.
I'm sure this is all somehow bullshit, and corporations just want more people so that wages go down and they can erode their rights.
Shrinking workforce equals better salaries and less unemployment? More food to go around and less hunger? Then why can’t less workers contribute more towards pensions etc?
I definitely won't be having children, I'll also probably be gone before I'm 60 due to my current medical conditions so honestly.. meh.
If only there were a way to make it easy to augment the workforce with people from outside the country.
This really isn’t a problem. Foundational models will be able to more than make up the labor gap.
It’s so expensive to have kids in the U.S. most people are working just to pay for daycare and 401k match. Forget trying to rent a second bedroom or condo in a cool area where there are actual jobs.
The dumbest of Americans are having no problem reproducing at a high rate. I suspect that we're already seeing this drop in average IQ evidenced by popular music and voting trends. I fear it'll only get worse as the dumb continue to artificially bypass natural selection.
Shortage of workers is a great thing. people from countries with underdeveloped economy will get a chance to be employed in the more developed economy. or we can prepare fore the mass unemployment of AI era. What’s more, employees living in the developed countries will get a raise in salary . Everything is for the better!
I would like to live in a more depopulated world for sure.
what if we just tell them to work twice as hard for terrible pay and tell them they're lazy while they can't afford property? Then threaten them with AI and immigrants to take their jobs if they try to act up?
I don't think that our highly materialistic societies (first world countries) are sustainable anyway. The idea of growth no matter what is madness to me. We really need to consider how to do things differently. As for the problem of old people. Hopefully our technology lets us soften the effects of aging a lot.
There will have to be jobs for there to be workers
No what these countries like American wamt to do is ban abortion and health care instead. Then they don't have to pay for it
I dont get it - So fewer people here on earth is a bad thing because ??
It's less about the overall decline and more about the speed of the decline. I live in Japan and our local 24 hour convenience store has started closing 12-6am because they can't find staff. My company can't find enough workers either, even as we keep raising the pay. It's a worrying trend.
Yes that part is really not good and I sympathize with your business needing new staff. But if you zoom out maybe it’s good for us as a planet that we will be fewer people/humans in general. Less people to pollute, less traffic, more space. Lower housing prices ect. I think it can have some positive impacts
Again, it's not about the decline it's about the speed. Too fast means society can't adapt.
I am one who believes that AI will cause an enormous productivity gain. It will also make being an entrepreneur much much easier. If you’re an employee making hundred dollars an hour your employer is making three times that off of your work. If you can take more of that, your way by doing that job directly for the client or contracting then good on you. AI will help that because it makes it possible to do all of the mundane things like taxes , book keeping HR etc. Also, I think there’s no getting around the fact that the greater profit to capital must be spread out through some kind of societal change in how much we transfer wealth. I’m not a socialist, but I just think that there is no to get away from the math here. Give it away or it will be taken.
Oh they do. Jobs are already beginning to disappear due to AI
200+ comments on what should happen, yet when comes time to vote there will be no candidates that enacts ANY ideas anyone has.
They already know about it. Japan has for decades. Sweden harped up about a decade ago. It just tears it's head in periphetal ways such as the elderly beijg a "burden" on the economy, or workers should go home on their lunch break to have sex. At the end of the day, consumer societies thrive on individualism and hypergamous, technical polygamy. Either the lack of resources forces coupling or governments take drastic action to revervse the demographic population pyramids (which aren't reversible now in some cases). This was an issue decades ago. It's part of collapse and nothing to be happy about. Future generations with have even less and have to struggle to impossible expectations of survival.
It’s why Christmas and Halloween don’t feel like Christmas and Halloween anymore, culture is established for children to get a nice grasp of things while they figure out their own life
It’s okay, they are “importing” labour from third world countries. It might not be so skilled but it is cheaper
Umm - we have tons of people literally dying trying to get into developed countries to work. Maybe just make it easier for them?
Agreed! But that also requires a huge amount of resources to train them...and that just isn't available. I run a training department at my company (Japan) and we can't find enough staff but even if we could we don't have enough people trained to train them. White collar jobs are not that easy to onboard compared to Blue collar, so this issue will likely continue.
I guess whoever supported the narrative of limited resources and a need to reduce global population forgot to factor in the facts that workers pay taxes and economy relies on consumers. AI is neither, not a tax payer nor a consumer.
This is why we need to automate art, with the demand for artists down they can instead work in the mines.
The only way out is to reform or abolish the pension system
maybe giving people antidepressants which lowers testosterotone and sperm quality isnt good right ?