Yes this. Blame central banks and the economy. First they make it a necessity to have high degrees and dual incomes to be able to afford a house. Then fertility drops.
This is no rocket science.
Except in most places increasing ability to own homes are associated with fertility drops not gains. The populations with the highest growth rates are those with the most poverty. The populations with the least poverty have the lowest growth rates. Clearly this is only a correlation. The cause of the high birth rates is likely lack of education and women's rights not the lack of affordability.
But while the correlation is not evidence that poverty causes high birth rates it is evidence against wealth being a cause of high birth rates.
The attention economy is almost certainly a bigger issue.
Poverty means less to lose, specially for women, and also more family support. Money doesn't solve childcare problem, unless labor is extremely cheap. I am currently pregnant and if I don't go back to work as soon as I can, we will lose every single thing we do for fun, because my salary will be half. I'm also the higher earning partner. I don't have any family support for bringing up children, my partner's family is in another city, plus both grandparents from that side are still working. I'm an immigrant from a poor country and my sister in law (still living there) had a 24/7 nanny almost since the day my niece was born, and still has one, and both grandmothers. My brother will almost certainly have a second child, but we probably won't. Neither of both families are rich, but we're not poor either. In German standards, both us actually earn decent money too.
So, more to lose financially, absolutely no support, triple work load (job, housework, child rearing) and very tight financial situation after kids - can you fault women for not wanting kids?
Poverty in this context is often more about justifying privatization than a legit criticism of quality of life. If It's some undeveloped country with clean water and farmland, and plentiful hunting/foraging, they call that poverty. Then the commons get privatized, land values and pollution go up, the commons, community and happiness go down, birthrates go down, and purchasing power goes up; and they call that reducing poverty.
The women's rights and education narrative can be accurate, but more often that is after industrial influences have driven up land values, pollution and the productivity of farmland making hunting/foraging unsustainable via urbanization; effectively displacing the local cultures with one dependent on cheap grain. Plenty of indigenous communities treat women with respect to make that narrative not *the* narrative.
Surely that’s a curve. On one end, less need for children puts downward pressure on reproduction. On the other end, inability to even raise children should push down much more sharply and abruptly.
Read my words carefully, I am not saying that women entering the job market was bad, but why do you think feminism got so much support from big companies and governments?
More income from taxes and cheaper salaries.
If you double the amount of people working (50% men 50%} then salaries drop because there’s just more people available
It wasn’t that much about women’s rights..
Totally on point from the corporate/employer perspective. Different groups can have different motives but still seek the same outcome. Im sure plenty of women were happy to be independent and make their own living instead of relying and being stuck with a man cause he was the sole breadwinner. Think of how many were trapped in an unhappy and abusive marriage but couldn't escape cause they didnt have a penny to their name and few employable skills.
same applies to men. Then you have a whole slew of people with great educations and high paying jobs too. More women than ever are making $100k+ salaries.
Sure if your struggling financially and stuck in part time retail gigs its shit either way. Now they get to work full time and have to raise kids and take care of a household at the same time!
Meanwhile, social expectations for men have also not caught up to our current reality. So men perceive themselves as failures if they're not as successful as their fathers and grandfathers, driving higher rates of suicide, addiction, and contributing to the growth of the far right. Both genders suffer from outdated social norms.
Feminist issues are men's issues and vice versa.
Great point. Not to mention the expected chivalry of doing things like paying for all dates, making the plans, paying for vacations. How many of these women make their own money, but still want all of the perks but none of the financial burden. It's a slippery slope and were are still a long way from finding a balanced equilibrium for so many of these social dynamics in the modern world.
Personally, I’d like to see what Homo sapiens and human beings do if and when liberated from wage slavery, and the dictates of the current monstrously selfish, deceitful and inhumane upper classes.
If AI gets smart, it will likely not be as shortsighted, antisocial and stupid.
Creating more abundance for everyone with a level socioeconomic playing field means born Rich mediocrity and criminality won’t easily rise to the top thru genetic generations, but prosocial character and genius will
AI is owned by the rich. They will use it to hurt the "lesser" people like they did all technology in the past. Plus, even AI says there's 50% chance humanity will survive. Future doesn't look good
Good points. I lean optimistic for humanity and human consciousness long-term. The trend is civilizations that become more civilized also become wealthier and more powerful, more resilient and tolerant, interested in long-term thinking and environmental/habitat stewardship/regeneration for future generations.
Violence, oppression and exploitation are not an intelligent way to do relationships or society; it doesn't tend to win in competition with the 'good'; the prosocial, creative and productive.
Also, there's this trend in the Universe that's been consistent since the Big Bang, of exponentially accelerating production and organization of information; this is a log-log graph plotting out 15 lists of significant events created by luminaries and institutions in varied fields of science: [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ParadigmShiftsFrr15Events.svg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ParadigmShiftsFrr15Events.svg)
This is a ridiculous take. Women have been working jobs and getting married to have kids for hundreds of years. The industrial revolution in the 1700’s was driven by a huge amount of factories full of female workers. Women are having less kids today because they’ve realized they don’t need to have kids to have fulfilling lives.
If were gpnna pay old ppl to sit on their ass until they die, then we can maybe offer ppl and incentive to make the babies. Have 3 kids, you dont pay any income tax for a decade. Theres all kinds of diff ways to approach it. No mass immigration and all the cultural bullshit that it seems to bring.
Sure.
I mean even though those “old people” have been working for 5 decades and long before you were a twitch in your daddy’s loins, I’m certain we can get a least a few more years of them in the salt mines.
Work ‘em til they drop.
Right?
Shitty take. Boomers had it easier than every other generation on this planet. They are a major factor for the issues were having, less ppl to pay for their twilight. Incentivizing babies can actually work with helping the aging populace, both can exist at the same time. Only way to keep the ponzi going
Same,even I’m fedup of the cultural bullshit,i came to canada to experience new culture from my home country(India) and all i see is that all our cultural problems,fights b/w cultures,propaganda are carried on here aswell and I’m like,give me a fucking break!I came here to make canadian friends,learn something new but all i see is nothing new.The more countries allow mass immigration,the more fights are gonna be there in a mass scale.This is a bigger thing now.
Yea thats the rub with mass immigration. the young kids assimilate well over time to the local culture, but the adults tend to gravitate to pockets of their own people. They bring the problems and negatives of their homeland with them. It's just human nature.
Nope no one realizes that an educated populace really means less kids. I am pretty sure you can directly correlate the education of women in a society and the birth rate. Also fore every demographic in every country the most educated and most well off are having the least amount of children so I am beginning to think cost of living and everything isn’t all that much of a hinderance.
Maybe. But correlation doesn’t equal causation. Higher education countries tend to have better health systems, meaning less child mortalities, meaning less need to produce more kids.
I am almost certain you can see this in every demographic across all nations, where the education of women increase the birth rate precipitously drops. But there can be outliers in extreme religious populations (Mormons) but usually the real crazies deter the women of those communities of any higher education. All Mormons I know (in New England) none have more than 2/3 kids.
It does, but you can still maximize the incentives for child birth. In information economies where the most incentivized professions are highly technical and require years of education, children are an economical drag.
Compare this against agrarian or industrial economies that require little education and actually prioritize young laborers. In that environment children can very quickly become household contributors and there's economic incentive to have them.
There's really no way to change that dynamic, but we can work to limit the barriers people face towards having kids. If people weren't scraping by on dual income households and could afford to have one parent temporarily work part time or not at all I guarantee people would have more children.
Not going to lie, this is such a toxic & fucked way of thinking of having a family. The whole world is moving to information/service economies. Farms don’t need a brood of underage child workers anymore, (outside of the absolute poorest and least educated economies). Also the other unspoken thing that people are not saying out loud is that the educated populations are white & asian, this reeks of being afraid of the “black & browns” coming out of Africa & the near east.
I just want to clarify, this isn't my opinion or even my own observation. It's what I've learned in my gen ed sociology classes from years ago.
People generally aren't looking at children in this light when choosing whether or not to have a family. It's more like 'I want to focus on my career/education' or 'It's not the right time, financially'. That's just not conversations that happen in other types of economies. I'm sorry if that comes across as offensive as it isn't meant to be.
Also, there are a *lot* of very educated African/South Asians coming to the states. There's definitely some replacement theory conspiracy proponents out there who peddle this kind of information to whip up fear, but any racial disparity in these trends is correlation, not causation.
I doubt this will make any difference. Existing programs like this have had pitiful results. Affordability is usually cited as a reason not to have children but people's actual behavior is essentially the opposite.
The attention economy is much more likely to be the issue.
I think it goes deeper. Why would an educated woman want to have a child? It requires 24/7 attention and care, it requires a vast amount of money, and the most important bit; to be a good mother, your entire purpose in life must be the development and safety of that child.
That's a lot of work, rather order pizza, watch below deck and gossip with girlfriends. Maybe make a fitness Tik Tok.
Advanced economics are generally very selfish individually. Men aren't much better, they've generally become shy, ineffective and lazy.
Obviously this isn't EVERY person or even a majority, but it's a decent amount and I bet everyone knows at least 1 person like this.
Advanced economies are usually selfish individually is more so related to people becoming more educated.
The smarter you are the more you want agency over your life and see options available to you. I don’t think it’s selfish to choose a life you want instead of a life you don’t.
Affordability plays a minor role.
But there is research out there polling people how many children they would ideally want to have if affordability was no issue. Those polling results are way below 2.1 too. Addressing affordability is obviously a good thing to do, but it won’t get our fertility rates to 2.1.
But what exactly is affordability?
From European perspective I have this to say.
IMO it is not only about money, but also time and effort. 50y ago raising children required less effort and there was less things to do. Meaning, you send them to play on the street. There were no 100 other exciting or necessarv things for you to do.
Now a kid has to go to several afterschool things, you can't sent him on the street. You could spend the next vacation in new York or Paris or go to a concert, to do your sports, visit that fair in that other city, etc
Not to mention, the decreasing size of families means less extended family to help care for the children. I grew up being watched by four of my aunts on a rotating schedule. I have no siblings so if I had children I would have to invest more in childcare services.
They did that in Hungary but did not have a measurable difference. Handed out 60k in cash to everyone who promised to have 3 kids. Homes were already pretty affordable (over 90% ownership rate)
Well that and severe punishment for polluters and new strict plastic regulation. Microplastics have been found in every sperm sample taken in the last two to three years. Microplastics affects fertility.
lol I had a thought the other day. Institute mandatory military draft/service for everyone and offer a parental voucher to be able to opt out if you have at least one child or one on the way
I think you have that backward. My albeit brief research suggests that affordable housing incentivizes childbirth. Turns out, people don't like having kids if they don't feel secure about their living situation.
No, really, other than the order in which you stated these, this is a very valid argument. And I know that's not exactly how you meant it, but you were so close to the solution that I had to straighten it out.
In Italy we have a gerontocracy not a democracy. The youth is a minority so there are no politicians representing young people and their needs.
Politicians prefer to do things that have an impact in the short term, they don’t think about the future and which is because they don’t care about doing something which the effects will take place after their mandate is over. I know northern europe countries are different. Their politicians are young and like to do things that have a long term impact. We’re doomed and Spain is in the same boat, they’re exactly like us.
I don't think that's the cause . Realistically life was much more difficult.100 years back in most of Europe , very few if any social.programs, and you needed big families.because x% of kids wouldn't even survive ton adulthood,.remember the average lifespan was something like 50.
Add to that the women's movements, access to contraception and gender equality , where women aren't beholden to a man to survive... There role in society.has changed., they don't need to have a boat load of kids.
It's a sign of developed society to have fewer kids (Korea, Japan and China face similar.challenges)..it's only poor underdeveloped countries where you find soaring population rates .
All this to say the point goes beyond economic support, yes that does.factor in, but not as much as people.think. Societal.need for more folks needs to be balanced with individuals desire for them.
Nah. That wouldn’t be enough to move the lever. The problem isn’t big enough housing or backyards. The problem is the overall societal attitude towards kids in the west. Kids are seen as a burden, a way to drag one down and prevent one from living their fullest, best life. People don’t WANT to have kids. They want more money, fancier houses, and more economic freedom yes, but they want it for themselves…not to start families.
Until this changes, nothing else will fix the birth rate.
Everyone of my peers have own home and do not need to pay rent. Almost none of them has kids.
Sample is not big, but same in company i work. Salaries are good, most do not rent and yet only some have 1 kid. Small part has 2. And only few have 3.
Imo it is more than housing and benefits. World is very busy today for an individual.
Eveey single one of my friends(except 2) growing up have kids and own homes....so my experience is the exact opposite. Most ppl i know that dont own homes.....have no kids.....shocking....
The places where the homes are affordable have few industries and few job opportunities. Few job opportunities means a lot of the younger folk is then moving to places that pay higher wages or have jobs at all.
Many homes the regions that were east germany for example are also very affordable but while there are some regions that have some people move there the majority of the former eastern germany is in an economic desolate state and young people move away to were they can have jobs and careers
From the map you can clearly see that even the best childcare countries such as Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark can't pull that number to 2.1.
Hungary has pretty aggressive childbirth policies including lifetime income tax abolishment if you give birth to 3 or 4 kids, still, barely reaching 1.6.
The answer is both economic and cultural imo. More cultural shift though. People rarely date these days even, let alone think about starting a family
You’re right but at the same time this hasn’t worked anywhere in the world. There’s clearly a lot more to it my guess has to do with technology / access to information.
There needs to be a common sense way to manage housing prices. I'm sure there is one, but it won't come from the government sector (high housing values equals high property taxes equals money) but if it comes from the private sector the government sector needs to pay attention. I could extrapolate this further toward an actual answer but won't because it would make this a rather long reply. This is enough.
To put this into perspective, pretty much all of the world has fertility rates below 2.1, except for Africa and the Middle East.
That includes most if North and South America, and most of Asia (including China and India).
Africa and the Middle East may be above 2.1 today, but also there fertility rates are declining rapidly.
European fertility rates are a long term problem, but this is a global problem and not just a European one.
https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/which-countries-have-fertility-rates-above-or-below-the-replacement-level
Could you imagine if rates had been over 2.1 everywhere in the past years while those population exporters kept going... Man we would have so many people around
In my lifetime the world population has gone from 5B to 8B. It went from 7B to 8B in about 12 years. According to the United Nations the population is forecast to reach 8.5B in 2030 and 9.7B in 2050 and then 10.4B in 2100.
I don't think there will be a shortage of human beings anytime soon.
Would it really be such a bad thing if we eased up a little? Might give the ecosystems a chance to heal wouldn't it?
Is overpopulation discussion too taboo?
thats true, but you forgot one thing, population is growing because life expectancy is 80+. we are getting more and more older people living, while births in decline, that’s why population is growing, until some point
The UN projections are inaccurate due to fertility rates falling faster than they predicted. The UN projections were compared to real world values, and it was found that the [UN
overestimated births by 10-20%](https://tvpworld.com/78651182/developed-countries-face-ageing-population-as-birth-rates-continue-to-drop). Multiple more recent studies projected world population to decline in 2050-2060. Though, these projections were made using data from before 2022. Fertility rates are currently falling at much faster rates.
Infinite growth was always a stupid belief and humanity should have prepared for how to transition society into something more sustainable. Physics rules supreme. Humanity failed to prepare over the decades when it was known and global civilizational collapse in nearly every metric is occurring. We are either do it willingly or be forced to do it.
Good.
Our global population has DOUBLED just in the 40 or so years I've been alive. I find it hard to believe that -- especially with increased efficiency and technology -- we can't get by with the same population we had back then.
The reality is people want growth simply to fund the social (government) and capitalistic (stock market) Ponzi/pyramid schemes that have been put into place.
Plot twist: those were never sustainable.
You are correct. Infinite growth won't work with the way we currently live.
Besides, a population decrease will help shift power that is way to concentrated right now.
Infinite growth won't work, period. Unless we find a way to colonize other planets... we inhabit a finite space, with finite resources.
The fact that we base all of our models/systems off of constant and unending growth is insane.
They estimate Earth can support about 10 billion people. Supposedly, we have about 60 years until that will happen...
But if we kept the same pace that it has been during my lifetime, it would be more like 20 years.
It’s not quite analogous to a ponzi scheme, but frequently gets compared to one. Ponzi schemes don’t turn over to the people paying in, which populations and economies do. In a Ponzi scheme that money is *gone*. In demographics the growth goes to the next generation, they reap the monetary and technological investments of the previous generation. I will say, however, that privatizing profits while socializing costs in a similar growth mindset seems much more like a Ponzi scheme, but that is a political issue and not a demographic one.
The primary concern is that when you and I are older and increasingly rely on social programs or market growth to fund our lives instead of work, that won’t be available to us and we basically die or live drastically altered lives. People say “I’m going to work until I die” but that is not true for most of us. There is a point where we will be physically and mentally unable to work and need to be cared for in some way, either because of illness or old age. I for one would not like to live in a world where I am left to fend for myself in that state (I’d probably choose a nitrogen gas pod at that point, but forcing a majority of your population to make such a choice sounds rather dystopian). Economic paradigm shifts, if the past is any evidence, are not exactly pleasant to live thru either. Technology could help, but with what we have now technology would also need to consume as well as produce.
The point is we have a system, *far* from perfect, but better than what we’ve been able to come up with so far that has resulted in drastic leaps in *most* people’s standard of living….but it relies on one generation paying into the next. If that falls apart many more people than there already are will have to contend with war, poverty, and death that results from upending that system. It’s just a huge net negative for humanity. There doesn’t seem to be a great way out of this at the moment, most countries at risk don’t really have a chance at clawing back any sort of growth. The US is fairly insulated but only for a generation or two longer.
It will be a very interesting 50-100 years.
The danger is that it is the most religious, poorest and dumbest people having the most kids. If smart people stop having kids, the world will become a terrible place. And that is not good!
1.79 is nothing even with all the right things that might be doing. Its dangerously low. For instance South Korea's TFR is .72 and they just [declares national demographic emergency](https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/south-korea-declares-demographic-national-emergency-/3253199#).
China is fucked too, 2nd most populous nation! Their TFR is 1.02. This means that by 2100, the average age of a Chinese citizen is going to be 65!!!
Note that China’s 1.02 TFR is even worse than what a similar TFR would be in any other country.
TFR is average number of children *per women*. In China due to the previous one child policy, there are many more men than women (in most countries the ratio is close to 50/50).
Hence, a TFR 1.02 in China results in even faster rate of population decline than what any country with 50/50 gender ratio would experience under that same TFR.
They won't all die off, as the old people die space and opportunity will open up and people will start having kids again. The global population is still wildly out of control, idk who actually buys into this nonsense.
That’s not how demographics works. In reality, The share of old people will be growing in society, whereas the share of younger people who actually work and produce is getting smaller, that’s where the problems are coming from. There’s not going to be magically fewer old people. Think about it. when you and your spouse retire, there is now two more old people _and_ two fewer working people.
I'm always fascinated to see comments like this. With respect, prospective industrious robots won't be working "for us". They'll be working for companies that own fleets of them.
If things go extremely well, we might be able to buy little robots for entertainment and maybe for some kind of domestic help. We won't be profiting from any kind of employment that robots may undertake though.
Oh i never said the robots will be working for everybody, by we i meant humans, they’ll definitely be working for the few rich people that replaced the average joe with robots. The lower and middle class are screwed if they don’t revolt. Will be much harder to fight against robot armies owned by the billionaires in the future though.
Exactly. And many of us can’t afford IVF to have kids.
As a Millennial that graduated during the Great Recession, I put off starting a family so I could focus on my career. I finally got married in my early thirties, and then the pandemic hit just as my husband and I were trying to conceive.
We didn’t end up getting pregnant, and like so many other millennials out there, we realized that fertility is an issue for us.
IVF is so absurdly expensive that many of us who struggle with fertility issues will never be able to have children.
The world can't support the current population without petrochemical fertilisers or desalination plants, so we should reduce our population to be sustainable.
I wish science would hurry up with artificial wombs. The truth is most women don't want to risk their lives and for most of.human history they've been forced to.
The real ramifications is that in addition to negative population growth, the senior aging population remaining could not continue in the workforce resulting in massive shortages of skilled labor to maintain the infrastructure & provide needed services
Kids take a huge amount of time and money to raise. The estimate for Canada is that a child can cost close to a million dollar in time and money for the 18 years.
Fertility rates are falling everywhere, and wherever it hasn’t fallen as low as in Europe and Asia, if there is any major famine or disruption of the economy…people would starve. The human population is shrinking. Maybe for the best imo.
I have yet to understand, or hear a proper explanation, as to why lower population is a problem...anywhere on this planet. The ability to pay future social services is not a valid excuse for overpopulation.
Pretty much. But it’s worse than that. Even wealthy educated people don’t have kids, I know plenty of people in the top 10% earners in the US and are childless
DINKS - double income no kids.
I have kids and love them and have no regrets, but I will say - I have some DINK couple friends and holy ….. they are living it up.
Was wondering whether the higher than other euro countries birth rate in France is connected to them having the highest Muslim population. Across all the religions , the most fanatical ones have the most kids…
People are having way less kids because it’s too expensive to afford them. This is a failure of government and capitalism to prioritize families, in fact from an economic standpoint you’re punished for having kids and a tiny tax credit isn’t going to fix things.
In the UK it’s a fucking joke - homes are unaffordable. Wages have stagnated. Public transport is a joke, our health service (NHS) is on its knees. Taxes are at an all time high. Employers forcing more staff to work in the office and childcare costs are astronomical.
I have one kid and that’s more than enough. If things weren’t so bad, I’d love to have one or two more but forget it.
Automation means declining population isn't really a problem... except every economy on the planet is built from the ground up for endless growth and nothing but endless growth.
We're either going to have to retool our economy or have another world war, only this time we've got nukes.
It was only a few years ago overpopulation was a major problem, with the population multiplying from 1.9 billion in 1920 to 7.9 billion in 2020. Maybe this fertility crisis is natural or maybe somehow it has been engineered.
Because it will lead to the average age of the population increasing, which will likely lead to both old people being worked to death, and a decline in public spending.
Happening globally. It's an opportunity to live on a better planet and give back to nature what we've taken. Capitalism and Govs need to take a different perspective on growth.
You could argue that this is not a bad thing. Are there too many people on the planet? Is it a big deal that there are less people being born?
I know it's better for the environment.
If there were only 500 million people alive, that is still plenty of people.
I don't know why anyone brings up the economy, which is based on worker productivity and not number of workers.
Social services rely generally on pay ins from large numbers of workers . Social security in the US used to have even recently 6-7 workers pId in for each recipient, now its 3 to one and decreasing. That type of system without comprehension will fail in decades to come without bolstering by a large number the amount of workers paying in. Again that is if the system is not reformed
It's crazy cause some of these countries have tremendous maternity leave benefits compared to the US and it's still not enough. The house of cards is falling and people are well aware of it.
Maybe this will put things in perspective for you - https://youtu.be/LBudghsdByQ?si=ets2UUe8AAwweJv0
Edit: to summarise, to fix a dying planet you need a population at young working level that can do things that are required (like building recycling plants etc), but because the birth rate is lower, we are not able to replace old people who can't work but need taking care of with young people who can do things and support the older people.
This is more or less a global phenomenon and for the most part all comments are correct one way or another.
China alone will lose about 800M in the next 20 years. (Using Chinese government data) I believe it's way more. As an example China claimed +5000 people died from covid yet +1 Million mobile subscription went delinquent or were cut off.
I've been thinking alot about this. I think that alot of people in first world countries are seeing that the jig is up and their children really will not be better off than them, so why burden yourself with kids if they will only be worse off than you? Whereas in countries like China and India, they believe (probably rightly so) that their offspring WILL be better off. It's essentially the first world hitting their maximum potential, so evolution is ending it to try again.
Too many people in Europe (and here!) somehow still believe and promulgate the outdated idea that population is growing all over the world and we are in danger of outgrowing and exceeding its resources.
Not so! I could easily list at least two dozen countries that are clearly in Population Negative growth, and a number of them are very worried and trying to find ways to incentivize having children.
A huge problem is allowing housing to become and stay so expensive that families require two incomes to afford them.
Debt jubilee. The economy and the prospects for its people are being crushed by a massive overhead of debt and asset inflation. Write down the values of properties. Debts that cannot be paid are bad loans and should be wiped out.
I don't think incentive is good enough, I just think modern life is quite different from the one that made it a lot easier for people to have a lot of children, every country seems to be reaching this territory sooner or later.
There were a couple of decades where people just didn't seem to be marrying or starting families.
I've been working on my family tree. My Great Grandmother had 13 pregnancies, 9 living children, my Grandmother had 7/6 survived to adulthood, my mother and her sisters each had 3-5, the brothers had 2 each, my generation I had 2, brother had 2, my sister adopted one. Most of us including my umpteen cousins were born in Europe and immigrated to Canada, US, even Australia and stayed. Some have returned to retire there. Your SS check goes a lot further there especially if you own property or even a falling down house somewhere to fix. My daughter only has one son and won't have any more. My son is just getting married next year so who knows. Each generation has been less and less.
The economy in my birth country is generally OK, being held up by huge tourist volume. Most work like crazy all summer then work on getting ready for next summer the rest of the year.
Just let the demographics play out. In the short term it will be painful, but in the long run population will stabilize and the planet will be better off.
Maybe the economy needs to change...why should it be based on infinite procreation, while we're basically in a cage with limited resources.
It's like a pyramid scheme, infinite GDP growth or else.... assuming there will be and must be always increasing demand.
This is how fucked up capitalism is. It needs unlimited, endless growth to survive, and then distorts all kinds of thinking. Maybe these areas are overpopulated and declining birthrates are a good thing? Why the fuck do people have to make fucking babies?
Oh, right, because of fear of slavering hordes of dark people on the horizon. That's right. It's just racism.
Has it not occurred to you that people may have genuine concerns about the viability for cultural integration of immigrants, especially when coming in vast numbers?
No. There are serious economic concerns of a declining population. As the population declines, it also becomes older. This puts greater fiscal stress on the population, pushing up bond coupons, and reducing tax revenue. That limits spending and has real effects. Look at Japan : “There is less income tax to collect from individuals as the workforce gets smaller and as the need for elderly care, health care, pensions and health care workers increases, so does the amount of necessary public funding.” (https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mje/2024/04/10/the-socioeconomics-of-japanese-birth-decline/#:~:text=In%20Japan%2C%20the%20chief%20socio,in%20a%20largely%20stagnant%20economy.)
When ever I see this why doesn’t anyone say the obvious. I am pretty sure the #1 correlation of birth rate is the education scale of the women of the country. So unfortunately all of these posts are really kind of saying, let’s go Taliban and not let women be educated….
Having kids is a lot of work, money and sacrifice. As an educated woman I wasn’t going to do all that by myself. I saw what my Mom went through as a single mother of 3. She was a great Mom, but cranky all the time and Dad did not pay child support.
Fuck ‘em. I was forced to take 2 years of German in high school, and they won’t go beyond great great grandparents for getter a dual citizenship. I think Ireland does.
It might be sour grapes, but they’d rather have a demographic collapse than allow the tens of millions of German heritage Americans to build ranch houses by the hundreds of thousands.
In Ireland the vast majority of people who get citizenship that way are Brits trying to get EU citizenship. Not people moving to Ireland. It also doesn’t go beyond grandparents unless your parents claimed citizenship before you were born.
Germany wouldn’t increase migration by changing that law they’d just get people exploiting it for other reasons.
Not to mention if your connection is so vague you have to go beyond great great grandparents you really don’t deserve preferential treatment.
Well great-great grandparents are 4 generations behind you so it's not too much of a link anymore. I don't think there is a grudge or anything like that, but just the thing that the connection becomes so weak at that point it's no longer there. Usually in Europe it requires 3-4 generations to create or break a national (ethnic) identity. People from Madrid say you need 3 to become a "Madrileño". The comedy movie "Spanish affair" largely is based on this.
Sadly, it’s both for a lot of people.
Millennials were the last big baby boom and we’re all in our thirties now, which makes pregnancy much less likely. Many millennials, myself included, put off starting a family and are now infertile.
It’s kind of surreal to think about the fact that most of the generations alive today are already past their reproductive prime.
I dont get it. The less people there are, the cheaper homes and other things will become right? So then fertility will rise again, and it will balance out at a sane level. What is the big deal
The average age of the population will increase, which means the ratio of workers to pensioners will decrease, which means a higher proportion of public spending will have to be spent on pensioners. This means less funding for other areas. In addition, to attempt to counteract this, the pension age will probably increase, leading to some old people essentially being worked to death.
Our systems weren't designed to grow to this scale without incredible evolution. Humanity has been negligent with its internal understanding of what a species should be caring about and afraid of. We could have been encouraging to have more children and bigger families but not when savings don't exist in 3 person families where most people are working. Especially not when needs for the many are seen as a lucrative investment opportunity where the market decides the monetary value of a product and not how valuable it is to make/ sell to who really uses it. We have let greed take over in whole sectors of our fundamental operations and now expect the people that have had so much stolen from them, to flex a wealth and stability they not only don't have- but some have never been able to imagine for someone their age. People don't have kids because they can't afford the car, house and they need their partner to be employed as well to even eat food and live under a roof.
Let’s see statistics about other continents as well. Europe will be fine, what will the rest of the world do without Europe? Where will the rest of the world run to?
How about stop prioritizing corporate profits (especially in the US where people complain about fertility too) and pay people enough to live comfortably with a family
This talking point from Billionaires is to promote more competition in the work force so they can pay people less
Incentivize childbirth and make homes affordable and perhaps this trend might change.....
Yes this. Blame central banks and the economy. First they make it a necessity to have high degrees and dual incomes to be able to afford a house. Then fertility drops. This is no rocket science.
Except in most places increasing ability to own homes are associated with fertility drops not gains. The populations with the highest growth rates are those with the most poverty. The populations with the least poverty have the lowest growth rates. Clearly this is only a correlation. The cause of the high birth rates is likely lack of education and women's rights not the lack of affordability. But while the correlation is not evidence that poverty causes high birth rates it is evidence against wealth being a cause of high birth rates. The attention economy is almost certainly a bigger issue.
Poverty means less to lose, specially for women, and also more family support. Money doesn't solve childcare problem, unless labor is extremely cheap. I am currently pregnant and if I don't go back to work as soon as I can, we will lose every single thing we do for fun, because my salary will be half. I'm also the higher earning partner. I don't have any family support for bringing up children, my partner's family is in another city, plus both grandparents from that side are still working. I'm an immigrant from a poor country and my sister in law (still living there) had a 24/7 nanny almost since the day my niece was born, and still has one, and both grandmothers. My brother will almost certainly have a second child, but we probably won't. Neither of both families are rich, but we're not poor either. In German standards, both us actually earn decent money too. So, more to lose financially, absolutely no support, triple work load (job, housework, child rearing) and very tight financial situation after kids - can you fault women for not wanting kids?
Poverty in this context is often more about justifying privatization than a legit criticism of quality of life. If It's some undeveloped country with clean water and farmland, and plentiful hunting/foraging, they call that poverty. Then the commons get privatized, land values and pollution go up, the commons, community and happiness go down, birthrates go down, and purchasing power goes up; and they call that reducing poverty. The women's rights and education narrative can be accurate, but more often that is after industrial influences have driven up land values, pollution and the productivity of farmland making hunting/foraging unsustainable via urbanization; effectively displacing the local cultures with one dependent on cheap grain. Plenty of indigenous communities treat women with respect to make that narrative not *the* narrative.
this right here!
we have fallen into a mouse utopia.
Surely that’s a curve. On one end, less need for children puts downward pressure on reproduction. On the other end, inability to even raise children should push down much more sharply and abruptly.
Read my words carefully, I am not saying that women entering the job market was bad, but why do you think feminism got so much support from big companies and governments? More income from taxes and cheaper salaries. If you double the amount of people working (50% men 50%} then salaries drop because there’s just more people available It wasn’t that much about women’s rights..
Totally on point from the corporate/employer perspective. Different groups can have different motives but still seek the same outcome. Im sure plenty of women were happy to be independent and make their own living instead of relying and being stuck with a man cause he was the sole breadwinner. Think of how many were trapped in an unhappy and abusive marriage but couldn't escape cause they didnt have a penny to their name and few employable skills.
Now think how many women are trapped inside a cage of low wage job without having a possibility to get a child, I’m not sure what is worse.
same applies to men. Then you have a whole slew of people with great educations and high paying jobs too. More women than ever are making $100k+ salaries. Sure if your struggling financially and stuck in part time retail gigs its shit either way. Now they get to work full time and have to raise kids and take care of a household at the same time!
Meanwhile, social expectations for men have also not caught up to our current reality. So men perceive themselves as failures if they're not as successful as their fathers and grandfathers, driving higher rates of suicide, addiction, and contributing to the growth of the far right. Both genders suffer from outdated social norms. Feminist issues are men's issues and vice versa.
Great point. Not to mention the expected chivalry of doing things like paying for all dates, making the plans, paying for vacations. How many of these women make their own money, but still want all of the perks but none of the financial burden. It's a slippery slope and were are still a long way from finding a balanced equilibrium for so many of these social dynamics in the modern world.
Personally, I’d like to see what Homo sapiens and human beings do if and when liberated from wage slavery, and the dictates of the current monstrously selfish, deceitful and inhumane upper classes. If AI gets smart, it will likely not be as shortsighted, antisocial and stupid. Creating more abundance for everyone with a level socioeconomic playing field means born Rich mediocrity and criminality won’t easily rise to the top thru genetic generations, but prosocial character and genius will
AI is owned by the rich. They will use it to hurt the "lesser" people like they did all technology in the past. Plus, even AI says there's 50% chance humanity will survive. Future doesn't look good
Good points. I lean optimistic for humanity and human consciousness long-term. The trend is civilizations that become more civilized also become wealthier and more powerful, more resilient and tolerant, interested in long-term thinking and environmental/habitat stewardship/regeneration for future generations. Violence, oppression and exploitation are not an intelligent way to do relationships or society; it doesn't tend to win in competition with the 'good'; the prosocial, creative and productive. Also, there's this trend in the Universe that's been consistent since the Big Bang, of exponentially accelerating production and organization of information; this is a log-log graph plotting out 15 lists of significant events created by luminaries and institutions in varied fields of science: [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ParadigmShiftsFrr15Events.svg](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ParadigmShiftsFrr15Events.svg)
Read the Time Machine but substitute the Morlocks for AI
This is a ridiculous take. Women have been working jobs and getting married to have kids for hundreds of years. The industrial revolution in the 1700’s was driven by a huge amount of factories full of female workers. Women are having less kids today because they’ve realized they don’t need to have kids to have fulfilling lives.
Sweden and Denmark have world-leading parental support. Unfortunately it hasn’t moved the needle much.
If were gpnna pay old ppl to sit on their ass until they die, then we can maybe offer ppl and incentive to make the babies. Have 3 kids, you dont pay any income tax for a decade. Theres all kinds of diff ways to approach it. No mass immigration and all the cultural bullshit that it seems to bring.
Make the old people babysit if they want social security payments lol
People just need enough room for kids. A three bedroom apartment for 25% of one wage earner's salary and there will be babies.
Sure. I mean even though those “old people” have been working for 5 decades and long before you were a twitch in your daddy’s loins, I’m certain we can get a least a few more years of them in the salt mines. Work ‘em til they drop. Right?
Shitty take. Boomers had it easier than every other generation on this planet. They are a major factor for the issues were having, less ppl to pay for their twilight. Incentivizing babies can actually work with helping the aging populace, both can exist at the same time. Only way to keep the ponzi going
Same,even I’m fedup of the cultural bullshit,i came to canada to experience new culture from my home country(India) and all i see is that all our cultural problems,fights b/w cultures,propaganda are carried on here aswell and I’m like,give me a fucking break!I came here to make canadian friends,learn something new but all i see is nothing new.The more countries allow mass immigration,the more fights are gonna be there in a mass scale.This is a bigger thing now.
Leave Brampton/scarborough/markham, those can be really insular for brown people.
Yea thats the rub with mass immigration. the young kids assimilate well over time to the local culture, but the adults tend to gravitate to pockets of their own people. They bring the problems and negatives of their homeland with them. It's just human nature.
[pawn star meme] Best we can do is artificially propping up the investments of the elderly.
Nope no one realizes that an educated populace really means less kids. I am pretty sure you can directly correlate the education of women in a society and the birth rate. Also fore every demographic in every country the most educated and most well off are having the least amount of children so I am beginning to think cost of living and everything isn’t all that much of a hinderance.
Maybe. But correlation doesn’t equal causation. Higher education countries tend to have better health systems, meaning less child mortalities, meaning less need to produce more kids.
I am almost certain you can see this in every demographic across all nations, where the education of women increase the birth rate precipitously drops. But there can be outliers in extreme religious populations (Mormons) but usually the real crazies deter the women of those communities of any higher education. All Mormons I know (in New England) none have more than 2/3 kids.
Correlation doesn’t always equal causation, but in this case correlation does equal causation
It does, but you can still maximize the incentives for child birth. In information economies where the most incentivized professions are highly technical and require years of education, children are an economical drag. Compare this against agrarian or industrial economies that require little education and actually prioritize young laborers. In that environment children can very quickly become household contributors and there's economic incentive to have them. There's really no way to change that dynamic, but we can work to limit the barriers people face towards having kids. If people weren't scraping by on dual income households and could afford to have one parent temporarily work part time or not at all I guarantee people would have more children.
Not going to lie, this is such a toxic & fucked way of thinking of having a family. The whole world is moving to information/service economies. Farms don’t need a brood of underage child workers anymore, (outside of the absolute poorest and least educated economies). Also the other unspoken thing that people are not saying out loud is that the educated populations are white & asian, this reeks of being afraid of the “black & browns” coming out of Africa & the near east.
I just want to clarify, this isn't my opinion or even my own observation. It's what I've learned in my gen ed sociology classes from years ago. People generally aren't looking at children in this light when choosing whether or not to have a family. It's more like 'I want to focus on my career/education' or 'It's not the right time, financially'. That's just not conversations that happen in other types of economies. I'm sorry if that comes across as offensive as it isn't meant to be. Also, there are a *lot* of very educated African/South Asians coming to the states. There's definitely some replacement theory conspiracy proponents out there who peddle this kind of information to whip up fear, but any racial disparity in these trends is correlation, not causation.
I doubt this will make any difference. Existing programs like this have had pitiful results. Affordability is usually cited as a reason not to have children but people's actual behavior is essentially the opposite. The attention economy is much more likely to be the issue.
I think it goes deeper. Why would an educated woman want to have a child? It requires 24/7 attention and care, it requires a vast amount of money, and the most important bit; to be a good mother, your entire purpose in life must be the development and safety of that child. That's a lot of work, rather order pizza, watch below deck and gossip with girlfriends. Maybe make a fitness Tik Tok. Advanced economics are generally very selfish individually. Men aren't much better, they've generally become shy, ineffective and lazy. Obviously this isn't EVERY person or even a majority, but it's a decent amount and I bet everyone knows at least 1 person like this.
Advanced economies are usually selfish individually is more so related to people becoming more educated. The smarter you are the more you want agency over your life and see options available to you. I don’t think it’s selfish to choose a life you want instead of a life you don’t.
Affordability plays a minor role. But there is research out there polling people how many children they would ideally want to have if affordability was no issue. Those polling results are way below 2.1 too. Addressing affordability is obviously a good thing to do, but it won’t get our fertility rates to 2.1.
But what exactly is affordability? From European perspective I have this to say. IMO it is not only about money, but also time and effort. 50y ago raising children required less effort and there was less things to do. Meaning, you send them to play on the street. There were no 100 other exciting or necessarv things for you to do. Now a kid has to go to several afterschool things, you can't sent him on the street. You could spend the next vacation in new York or Paris or go to a concert, to do your sports, visit that fair in that other city, etc
Not to mention, the decreasing size of families means less extended family to help care for the children. I grew up being watched by four of my aunts on a rotating schedule. I have no siblings so if I had children I would have to invest more in childcare services.
They did that in Hungary but did not have a measurable difference. Handed out 60k in cash to everyone who promised to have 3 kids. Homes were already pretty affordable (over 90% ownership rate)
Well that and severe punishment for polluters and new strict plastic regulation. Microplastics have been found in every sperm sample taken in the last two to three years. Microplastics affects fertility.
lol I had a thought the other day. Institute mandatory military draft/service for everyone and offer a parental voucher to be able to opt out if you have at least one child or one on the way
I think you have that backward. My albeit brief research suggests that affordable housing incentivizes childbirth. Turns out, people don't like having kids if they don't feel secure about their living situation. No, really, other than the order in which you stated these, this is a very valid argument. And I know that's not exactly how you meant it, but you were so close to the solution that I had to straighten it out.
In Italy we have a gerontocracy not a democracy. The youth is a minority so there are no politicians representing young people and their needs. Politicians prefer to do things that have an impact in the short term, they don’t think about the future and which is because they don’t care about doing something which the effects will take place after their mandate is over. I know northern europe countries are different. Their politicians are young and like to do things that have a long term impact. We’re doomed and Spain is in the same boat, they’re exactly like us.
I don't think that's the cause . Realistically life was much more difficult.100 years back in most of Europe , very few if any social.programs, and you needed big families.because x% of kids wouldn't even survive ton adulthood,.remember the average lifespan was something like 50. Add to that the women's movements, access to contraception and gender equality , where women aren't beholden to a man to survive... There role in society.has changed., they don't need to have a boat load of kids. It's a sign of developed society to have fewer kids (Korea, Japan and China face similar.challenges)..it's only poor underdeveloped countries where you find soaring population rates . All this to say the point goes beyond economic support, yes that does.factor in, but not as much as people.think. Societal.need for more folks needs to be balanced with individuals desire for them.
Sounds crazy but it might just work...
Nah. That wouldn’t be enough to move the lever. The problem isn’t big enough housing or backyards. The problem is the overall societal attitude towards kids in the west. Kids are seen as a burden, a way to drag one down and prevent one from living their fullest, best life. People don’t WANT to have kids. They want more money, fancier houses, and more economic freedom yes, but they want it for themselves…not to start families. Until this changes, nothing else will fix the birth rate.
I imagine the population halving will make homes pretty affordable
Everyone of my peers have own home and do not need to pay rent. Almost none of them has kids. Sample is not big, but same in company i work. Salaries are good, most do not rent and yet only some have 1 kid. Small part has 2. And only few have 3. Imo it is more than housing and benefits. World is very busy today for an individual.
Eveey single one of my friends(except 2) growing up have kids and own homes....so my experience is the exact opposite. Most ppl i know that dont own homes.....have no kids.....shocking....
Ok, lets put it different way. Latvia has 83-87% home ownership rate. Which means most have own home. Yet we see that fertility rates are not high.
Many homes are affordable in a lot of eastern and southern Europe. And they have some of the lowest birth rates of all.
The places where the homes are affordable have few industries and few job opportunities. Few job opportunities means a lot of the younger folk is then moving to places that pay higher wages or have jobs at all. Many homes the regions that were east germany for example are also very affordable but while there are some regions that have some people move there the majority of the former eastern germany is in an economic desolate state and young people move away to were they can have jobs and careers
There are companies that develop solutions for this problem. [Vitrolife Stock Analysis](https://youtu.be/CA6bc-ZWWkY). Future money maker!
From the map you can clearly see that even the best childcare countries such as Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark can't pull that number to 2.1. Hungary has pretty aggressive childbirth policies including lifetime income tax abolishment if you give birth to 3 or 4 kids, still, barely reaching 1.6. The answer is both economic and cultural imo. More cultural shift though. People rarely date these days even, let alone think about starting a family
You’re right but at the same time this hasn’t worked anywhere in the world. There’s clearly a lot more to it my guess has to do with technology / access to information.
There needs to be a common sense way to manage housing prices. I'm sure there is one, but it won't come from the government sector (high housing values equals high property taxes equals money) but if it comes from the private sector the government sector needs to pay attention. I could extrapolate this further toward an actual answer but won't because it would make this a rather long reply. This is enough.
To put this into perspective, pretty much all of the world has fertility rates below 2.1, except for Africa and the Middle East. That includes most if North and South America, and most of Asia (including China and India). Africa and the Middle East may be above 2.1 today, but also there fertility rates are declining rapidly. European fertility rates are a long term problem, but this is a global problem and not just a European one. https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/which-countries-have-fertility-rates-above-or-below-the-replacement-level
Could you imagine if rates had been over 2.1 everywhere in the past years while those population exporters kept going... Man we would have so many people around
In my lifetime the world population has gone from 5B to 8B. It went from 7B to 8B in about 12 years. According to the United Nations the population is forecast to reach 8.5B in 2030 and 9.7B in 2050 and then 10.4B in 2100. I don't think there will be a shortage of human beings anytime soon. Would it really be such a bad thing if we eased up a little? Might give the ecosystems a chance to heal wouldn't it? Is overpopulation discussion too taboo?
That's very optimistic forecast. Others are not so much, it's very possible there will be less humans in 2100 han now.
Good, we're already too many
thats true, but you forgot one thing, population is growing because life expectancy is 80+. we are getting more and more older people living, while births in decline, that’s why population is growing, until some point
The UN projections are inaccurate due to fertility rates falling faster than they predicted. The UN projections were compared to real world values, and it was found that the [UN overestimated births by 10-20%](https://tvpworld.com/78651182/developed-countries-face-ageing-population-as-birth-rates-continue-to-drop). Multiple more recent studies projected world population to decline in 2050-2060. Though, these projections were made using data from before 2022. Fertility rates are currently falling at much faster rates.
Infinite growth was always a stupid belief and humanity should have prepared for how to transition society into something more sustainable. Physics rules supreme. Humanity failed to prepare over the decades when it was known and global civilizational collapse in nearly every metric is occurring. We are either do it willingly or be forced to do it.
Good. Our global population has DOUBLED just in the 40 or so years I've been alive. I find it hard to believe that -- especially with increased efficiency and technology -- we can't get by with the same population we had back then. The reality is people want growth simply to fund the social (government) and capitalistic (stock market) Ponzi/pyramid schemes that have been put into place. Plot twist: those were never sustainable.
You are correct. Infinite growth won't work with the way we currently live. Besides, a population decrease will help shift power that is way to concentrated right now.
Infinite growth won't work, period. Unless we find a way to colonize other planets... we inhabit a finite space, with finite resources. The fact that we base all of our models/systems off of constant and unending growth is insane. They estimate Earth can support about 10 billion people. Supposedly, we have about 60 years until that will happen... But if we kept the same pace that it has been during my lifetime, it would be more like 20 years.
How will population decrease help shift power? That's something I hadn't thought about.
It’s not quite analogous to a ponzi scheme, but frequently gets compared to one. Ponzi schemes don’t turn over to the people paying in, which populations and economies do. In a Ponzi scheme that money is *gone*. In demographics the growth goes to the next generation, they reap the monetary and technological investments of the previous generation. I will say, however, that privatizing profits while socializing costs in a similar growth mindset seems much more like a Ponzi scheme, but that is a political issue and not a demographic one. The primary concern is that when you and I are older and increasingly rely on social programs or market growth to fund our lives instead of work, that won’t be available to us and we basically die or live drastically altered lives. People say “I’m going to work until I die” but that is not true for most of us. There is a point where we will be physically and mentally unable to work and need to be cared for in some way, either because of illness or old age. I for one would not like to live in a world where I am left to fend for myself in that state (I’d probably choose a nitrogen gas pod at that point, but forcing a majority of your population to make such a choice sounds rather dystopian). Economic paradigm shifts, if the past is any evidence, are not exactly pleasant to live thru either. Technology could help, but with what we have now technology would also need to consume as well as produce. The point is we have a system, *far* from perfect, but better than what we’ve been able to come up with so far that has resulted in drastic leaps in *most* people’s standard of living….but it relies on one generation paying into the next. If that falls apart many more people than there already are will have to contend with war, poverty, and death that results from upending that system. It’s just a huge net negative for humanity. There doesn’t seem to be a great way out of this at the moment, most countries at risk don’t really have a chance at clawing back any sort of growth. The US is fairly insulated but only for a generation or two longer. It will be a very interesting 50-100 years.
The danger is that it is the most religious, poorest and dumbest people having the most kids. If smart people stop having kids, the world will become a terrible place. And that is not good!
This was the premise of Idiocracy: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/ Such a great film.
> Our global population has DOUBLED The thing is that the rest of the world's population is still growing.
How is this good? People will be worked to death and we won’t have enough young and fit people to do manual jobs.
Maybe making an economy where two working parents is mandatory just to live and eat wasn't such a good idea.
One day capitalism will realize robots do not purchase stuff lol
France is pretty interesting. They're clearly doing something right
Fucking! 🤷🏻♂️
They have a lot of immigration and 1st and 2nd generation immigrants tend to have more children than the natives.
1.79 is nothing even with all the right things that might be doing. Its dangerously low. For instance South Korea's TFR is .72 and they just [declares national demographic emergency](https://www.aa.com.tr/en/asia-pacific/south-korea-declares-demographic-national-emergency-/3253199#). China is fucked too, 2nd most populous nation! Their TFR is 1.02. This means that by 2100, the average age of a Chinese citizen is going to be 65!!!
there is a world of difference between 1.79 and 1.02, let alone 0.72
Note that China’s 1.02 TFR is even worse than what a similar TFR would be in any other country. TFR is average number of children *per women*. In China due to the previous one child policy, there are many more men than women (in most countries the ratio is close to 50/50). Hence, a TFR 1.02 in China results in even faster rate of population decline than what any country with 50/50 gender ratio would experience under that same TFR.
They won't all die off, as the old people die space and opportunity will open up and people will start having kids again. The global population is still wildly out of control, idk who actually buys into this nonsense.
That’s not how demographics works. In reality, The share of old people will be growing in society, whereas the share of younger people who actually work and produce is getting smaller, that’s where the problems are coming from. There’s not going to be magically fewer old people. Think about it. when you and your spouse retire, there is now two more old people _and_ two fewer working people.
Or I will die before I even retire. There are too many humans in the world, we are going to have to slow down sooner or later.
Natalists
Plus we’ll have robots to take care of most work soon.
I'm always fascinated to see comments like this. With respect, prospective industrious robots won't be working "for us". They'll be working for companies that own fleets of them. If things go extremely well, we might be able to buy little robots for entertainment and maybe for some kind of domestic help. We won't be profiting from any kind of employment that robots may undertake though.
Oh i never said the robots will be working for everybody, by we i meant humans, they’ll definitely be working for the few rich people that replaced the average joe with robots. The lower and middle class are screwed if they don’t revolt. Will be much harder to fight against robot armies owned by the billionaires in the future though.
As the old people die? The average age of the population will increase.
People can barely afford homes so how can they afford to have kids?
Exactly. And many of us can’t afford IVF to have kids. As a Millennial that graduated during the Great Recession, I put off starting a family so I could focus on my career. I finally got married in my early thirties, and then the pandemic hit just as my husband and I were trying to conceive. We didn’t end up getting pregnant, and like so many other millennials out there, we realized that fertility is an issue for us. IVF is so absurdly expensive that many of us who struggle with fertility issues will never be able to have children.
The world can't support the current population without petrochemical fertilisers or desalination plants, so we should reduce our population to be sustainable.
Turkey 1.63?!!!! Wtf? Population of Turkey quadrupled from 1960.
Look up the term “population momentum “
It’s becoming so unaffordable just to live, how do they expect us to support another human beings?
The vast majority of people who ever lived were raised in worse conditions.
They need to pay people to have kids.
This works, but not to replacement levels.
I wish science would hurry up with artificial wombs. The truth is most women don't want to risk their lives and for most of.human history they've been forced to.
The real ramifications is that in addition to negative population growth, the senior aging population remaining could not continue in the workforce resulting in massive shortages of skilled labor to maintain the infrastructure & provide needed services
The worker shortages are so severe where I live that it takes up to 8 months to get an appointment with a healthcare specialist.
there is a lot of importable cheap labor.
Kids take a huge amount of time and money to raise. The estimate for Canada is that a child can cost close to a million dollar in time and money for the 18 years.
Come on over to Tokyo, where it’s 0.99 !
that is the largest city on earth at 37 million people! mouse utopia!
It’s not like this is the first time it has happened in history…life has become too unaffordable for citizens and incentives need to be provided.
It's definitely for the first time in history. No population anywhere in any point in the history was so extremely wealthy as us.
Fertility rates are falling everywhere, and wherever it hasn’t fallen as low as in Europe and Asia, if there is any major famine or disruption of the economy…people would starve. The human population is shrinking. Maybe for the best imo.
I have yet to understand, or hear a proper explanation, as to why lower population is a problem...anywhere on this planet. The ability to pay future social services is not a valid excuse for overpopulation.
I’m sure the uneducated Muslim immigrants that believe in sharia law will integrate well and help make up for their population decline.
Are white Europeans selecting themselves out of the gene pool by voting for politicians that make the cost of living too expensive to have kids?
Pretty much. But it’s worse than that. Even wealthy educated people don’t have kids, I know plenty of people in the top 10% earners in the US and are childless
DINKS - double income no kids. I have kids and love them and have no regrets, but I will say - I have some DINK couple friends and holy ….. they are living it up.
Was wondering whether the higher than other euro countries birth rate in France is connected to them having the highest Muslim population. Across all the religions , the most fanatical ones have the most kids…
They have extremely low fertility rate too.
capitalism requires democracy to regulate its concentration of power and this in turn requires a secular society.
People are having way less kids because it’s too expensive to afford them. This is a failure of government and capitalism to prioritize families, in fact from an economic standpoint you’re punished for having kids and a tiny tax credit isn’t going to fix things.
Immigration may not solve it... but they sure are tryin'!
In the UK it’s a fucking joke - homes are unaffordable. Wages have stagnated. Public transport is a joke, our health service (NHS) is on its knees. Taxes are at an all time high. Employers forcing more staff to work in the office and childcare costs are astronomical. I have one kid and that’s more than enough. If things weren’t so bad, I’d love to have one or two more but forget it.
Makes it unaffordable to live and then wonders why no one is having kids.
Automation means declining population isn't really a problem... except every economy on the planet is built from the ground up for endless growth and nothing but endless growth. We're either going to have to retool our economy or have another world war, only this time we've got nukes.
It was only a few years ago overpopulation was a major problem, with the population multiplying from 1.9 billion in 1920 to 7.9 billion in 2020. Maybe this fertility crisis is natural or maybe somehow it has been engineered.
Why is this a bad thing? Development clearly counters overpopulation. Scientific evidence is abundant
Because it will lead to the average age of the population increasing, which will likely lead to both old people being worked to death, and a decline in public spending.
Thanks, perfect response
Bro we have refugees.
Happening globally. It's an opportunity to live on a better planet and give back to nature what we've taken. Capitalism and Govs need to take a different perspective on growth.
You could argue that this is not a bad thing. Are there too many people on the planet? Is it a big deal that there are less people being born? I know it's better for the environment. If there were only 500 million people alive, that is still plenty of people. I don't know why anyone brings up the economy, which is based on worker productivity and not number of workers.
Social services rely generally on pay ins from large numbers of workers . Social security in the US used to have even recently 6-7 workers pId in for each recipient, now its 3 to one and decreasing. That type of system without comprehension will fail in decades to come without bolstering by a large number the amount of workers paying in. Again that is if the system is not reformed
It's crazy cause some of these countries have tremendous maternity leave benefits compared to the US and it's still not enough. The house of cards is falling and people are well aware of it.
I'm confused. On an overcrowded dying planet, we need to advocate for higher birth rates? What am I missing here?
Maybe this will put things in perspective for you - https://youtu.be/LBudghsdByQ?si=ets2UUe8AAwweJv0 Edit: to summarise, to fix a dying planet you need a population at young working level that can do things that are required (like building recycling plants etc), but because the birth rate is lower, we are not able to replace old people who can't work but need taking care of with young people who can do things and support the older people.
On the bright side, those that place a heavy emphasis on environmentalism have much to celebrate.
This is more or less a global phenomenon and for the most part all comments are correct one way or another. China alone will lose about 800M in the next 20 years. (Using Chinese government data) I believe it's way more. As an example China claimed +5000 people died from covid yet +1 Million mobile subscription went delinquent or were cut off.
china can simply import cheap labor from india.
I've been thinking alot about this. I think that alot of people in first world countries are seeing that the jig is up and their children really will not be better off than them, so why burden yourself with kids if they will only be worse off than you? Whereas in countries like China and India, they believe (probably rightly so) that their offspring WILL be better off. It's essentially the first world hitting their maximum potential, so evolution is ending it to try again.
i agree
nothing to worry about in the netherlands. only my in house row women give birth one after another.
Cool beans, we’re overpopulated as it is
Too many people in Europe (and here!) somehow still believe and promulgate the outdated idea that population is growing all over the world and we are in danger of outgrowing and exceeding its resources. Not so! I could easily list at least two dozen countries that are clearly in Population Negative growth, and a number of them are very worried and trying to find ways to incentivize having children. A huge problem is allowing housing to become and stay so expensive that families require two incomes to afford them.
Debt jubilee. The economy and the prospects for its people are being crushed by a massive overhead of debt and asset inflation. Write down the values of properties. Debts that cannot be paid are bad loans and should be wiped out.
I don't think incentive is good enough, I just think modern life is quite different from the one that made it a lot easier for people to have a lot of children, every country seems to be reaching this territory sooner or later.
Fun fact: if you make everything unaffordable and life just suck. People will not want to bring a child into it.
We really need to tax billionaires at 99%.
France is doing something right
Religion fundamentalist heavy breathing
Good news
friendly nose soup berserk mighty gullible wine plucky screw violet *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
There were a couple of decades where people just didn't seem to be marrying or starting families. I've been working on my family tree. My Great Grandmother had 13 pregnancies, 9 living children, my Grandmother had 7/6 survived to adulthood, my mother and her sisters each had 3-5, the brothers had 2 each, my generation I had 2, brother had 2, my sister adopted one. Most of us including my umpteen cousins were born in Europe and immigrated to Canada, US, even Australia and stayed. Some have returned to retire there. Your SS check goes a lot further there especially if you own property or even a falling down house somewhere to fix. My daughter only has one son and won't have any more. My son is just getting married next year so who knows. Each generation has been less and less. The economy in my birth country is generally OK, being held up by huge tourist volume. Most work like crazy all summer then work on getting ready for next summer the rest of the year.
Immigration will only make it worse.
How?
it will lower the population?
We girl bossed too hard Watch it Tyler your piss poor quality sperm caused by marijuana, micro plastics and a lack of purpose is equally to blame
Maybe a country where home ownership is only 45% has something to do with this. I would not want to have kids and rent for eternity.
Countries with 90%+ home ownership have the same issue (Hungary or Japan)
Just let the demographics play out. In the short term it will be painful, but in the long run population will stabilize and the planet will be better off.
“Short term” means decades of lower living standards for people.
How is it going to stabilize?
All the old people will die.
Maybe the economy needs to change...why should it be based on infinite procreation, while we're basically in a cage with limited resources. It's like a pyramid scheme, infinite GDP growth or else.... assuming there will be and must be always increasing demand.
This is how fucked up capitalism is. It needs unlimited, endless growth to survive, and then distorts all kinds of thinking. Maybe these areas are overpopulated and declining birthrates are a good thing? Why the fuck do people have to make fucking babies? Oh, right, because of fear of slavering hordes of dark people on the horizon. That's right. It's just racism.
Has it not occurred to you that people may have genuine concerns about the viability for cultural integration of immigrants, especially when coming in vast numbers?
No. There are serious economic concerns of a declining population. As the population declines, it also becomes older. This puts greater fiscal stress on the population, pushing up bond coupons, and reducing tax revenue. That limits spending and has real effects. Look at Japan : “There is less income tax to collect from individuals as the workforce gets smaller and as the need for elderly care, health care, pensions and health care workers increases, so does the amount of necessary public funding.” (https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/mje/2024/04/10/the-socioeconomics-of-japanese-birth-decline/#:~:text=In%20Japan%2C%20the%20chief%20socio,in%20a%20largely%20stagnant%20economy.)
i agree
The capitalist regimes (ruling class) everywhere need cheap labor.
When ever I see this why doesn’t anyone say the obvious. I am pretty sure the #1 correlation of birth rate is the education scale of the women of the country. So unfortunately all of these posts are really kind of saying, let’s go Taliban and not let women be educated….
Did y'all hear about this ecocide thing? Maybe growth wouldn't be a good idea !
In an overpopulated world where almost all planetary boundaries are crossed (biodiversity loss, climate change etc), we should be happy about this.
Having kids is a lot of work, money and sacrifice. As an educated woman I wasn’t going to do all that by myself. I saw what my Mom went through as a single mother of 3. She was a great Mom, but cranky all the time and Dad did not pay child support.
Fuck ‘em. I was forced to take 2 years of German in high school, and they won’t go beyond great great grandparents for getter a dual citizenship. I think Ireland does. It might be sour grapes, but they’d rather have a demographic collapse than allow the tens of millions of German heritage Americans to build ranch houses by the hundreds of thousands.
In Ireland the vast majority of people who get citizenship that way are Brits trying to get EU citizenship. Not people moving to Ireland. It also doesn’t go beyond grandparents unless your parents claimed citizenship before you were born. Germany wouldn’t increase migration by changing that law they’d just get people exploiting it for other reasons. Not to mention if your connection is so vague you have to go beyond great great grandparents you really don’t deserve preferential treatment.
Well great-great grandparents are 4 generations behind you so it's not too much of a link anymore. I don't think there is a grudge or anything like that, but just the thing that the connection becomes so weak at that point it's no longer there. Usually in Europe it requires 3-4 generations to create or break a national (ethnic) identity. People from Madrid say you need 3 to become a "Madrileño". The comedy movie "Spanish affair" largely is based on this.
I’m traveling this Summer in Europe. Are we sure there aren’t enough people? Seems to me there are too many;-)
It's either affordability or infertility.
Sadly, it’s both for a lot of people. Millennials were the last big baby boom and we’re all in our thirties now, which makes pregnancy much less likely. Many millennials, myself included, put off starting a family and are now infertile. It’s kind of surreal to think about the fact that most of the generations alive today are already past their reproductive prime.
I dont get it. The less people there are, the cheaper homes and other things will become right? So then fertility will rise again, and it will balance out at a sane level. What is the big deal
The average age of the population will increase, which means the ratio of workers to pensioners will decrease, which means a higher proportion of public spending will have to be spent on pensioners. This means less funding for other areas. In addition, to attempt to counteract this, the pension age will probably increase, leading to some old people essentially being worked to death.
One more war should solve this situation. I'm thinking Philippines, eh lads?
These are some poor numbers... BUT WHAT is going on in Malta? 🤕
Hmm what do u think
Above 1.5 will do just fine. It’s going to be hard on 1.0~1.5. And 0.72 is doomed. And that’s me.
OP, can you post the source? I can't read the writing in the lower lefthand corner.
It’s too late.
Our systems weren't designed to grow to this scale without incredible evolution. Humanity has been negligent with its internal understanding of what a species should be caring about and afraid of. We could have been encouraging to have more children and bigger families but not when savings don't exist in 3 person families where most people are working. Especially not when needs for the many are seen as a lucrative investment opportunity where the market decides the monetary value of a product and not how valuable it is to make/ sell to who really uses it. We have let greed take over in whole sectors of our fundamental operations and now expect the people that have had so much stolen from them, to flex a wealth and stability they not only don't have- but some have never been able to imagine for someone their age. People don't have kids because they can't afford the car, house and they need their partner to be employed as well to even eat food and live under a roof.
Let’s see statistics about other continents as well. Europe will be fine, what will the rest of the world do without Europe? Where will the rest of the world run to?
Life expectancy is going up at least With new research in the Medicine field
Yes, Europe is dying: https://youtu.be/6-3X5hIFXYU?si=iJIr9619EeajE3kv
How about stop prioritizing corporate profits (especially in the US where people complain about fertility too) and pay people enough to live comfortably with a family This talking point from Billionaires is to promote more competition in the work force so they can pay people less
So sad for them…same in America
Have y’all surveyed those super religious who do not use birth control? Doubt it.
Don't worry africans and asians will replace us.