[1] https://unctad.org/publication/world-of-debt ("Global public debt surpasses $100 trillion in 2024.")
In the mid 2000's when I was a kid, at school I was taught that there would be a HUGE labour shortage once certain large generations retire, as younger generations are much smaller. Guess what, they retired a decade ago, and yet my country has the second highest unemployment rate in EU, with a very weak job market for fresh graduates in particular. Increased efficiency & automation ate all those jobs, nobody was hired to replace many of the boomers who retired. I doubt the future will be any different.
I suppose I've never expected to ever be able to retire unless I get truly wealthy. It's not something I've ever included in my life plan because I've kinda seen the writing on the wall about this since I was in my twenties.
I don't think this crash in fertility is that unexpected, and it's not even all bad. It'll help us weather things like climate change and natural resource depletion.
Every year total fertility rate remains lower than replacement rate further locks in the fertility curve, but there is no political will or desire to implement the fixes required. So, we keep kicking the can until we cannot anymore. It's unfortunate. Demographic destiny comes regardless, as each year total fertility rate continues to fall.
https://usafacts.org/articles/how-much-does-the-us-spend-on-...
https://www.pgpf.org/article/social-security-reform-options-...
That's probably an underestimate. As population shrinks, GDP will shrink as well, unless we have large gains in productivity, which have stalled. It's not clear to me that the projections about SS/Medicare as a percentage of GDP account for the effect of GDP shrinking due to population decline. CBO assumes a stable population through 2060, using quite arbitrary assumptions about immigration: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/60875.
Happiness is reality minus expectations.
[1] https://x.com/KenRoth/status/1753526235173450213 | https://archive.today/rY4WG
One quarter of adult children estranged from a parent - https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/4104138-one-qua... - July 19th, 2023
On the flip side, for those childless, it's completely guaranteed none will.
> One quarter of adult children estranged from a parent
That sounds like a 75% success rate.
To the surprise of demographers, African fertility is falling - https://www.mercatornet.com/to_the_surprise_of_demographers_... - September 19, 2024
> Previously in this space, under the heading “Africa Rising?” yours truly cited The Lancet’s latest population stats on sub-Saharan Africa: Sub-Saharan Africa is the world’s only region with an above-replacement total fertility rate (TFR), currently estimated from 4.3 to 4.6. They’ve gone from 8 percent of global births in 1950 to 30 percent in 2021, headed to 54 percent by century’s end. While the region’s TFR is falling fast, any sub-Saharan population contraction is at least a century out. However, according to Macrotrends, Africa’s TFR (4.1) has declined an average of 1.3 percent annually over the last three years. Should this trend persist, Africa will eventually plunge into below-replacement territory. Demographers believe fertility decline is accelerating faster than projected, especially in sub-Sahara Africa. Statista, the European aggregator of figures, projects Africa’s 2030 TFR at 3.8.
Fertility rates fall as education levels rise in sub-Saharan Africa - https://www.nature.com/articles/d44148-025-00026-3 - January 29th, 2025
The tide is rising and most ships are sinking. Productivity in the last 40 years has skyrocketed. The gains have overwhelmingly gone to a tiny minority while everyone else has seen rent, food, education, and more go up dramatically faster than wages. This has accelerated in the last 15 years and has destroyed any faith in the social contract.
The US resisted the fertility drop for much longer, because of higher suburban population.
It was immigration, but next generation of all immigrants (native born) adopts host country total fertility rate in this context.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/08/08/hispanic-...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/10/26/5-facts-a...
https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/FT_19... visually nails this.
Now, would these people have had a higher birth rate if they remained in their LATAM countries? The data indicates no.
Latin America’s Baby Bust Is Arriving Early - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2025-05-22/latin-... | https://archive.today/EPMAU - May 22nd, 2025
Population Prospects and Rapid Demographic Changes in the First Quarter of the Twenty-first Century in Latin America and the Caribbean - https://repositorio.cepal.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/dc5... - 2024
None of the solutions I can think of are very appealing or even tolerable. It really feels like it's a matter of carrying on and having hope. But perhaps we could start by merely describing the data and the situation.
National fertility rates don’t correlate with any measure of average income. The only thing that does is the average number of years a woman spends being educated; this probably isn’t causal because the decline in fertility occurs across all income and education levels.
Plus it is probably a good thing population will start dropping.
The much larger worry should be Climate Change, a dropping population can only help Climate Change in the long run. But right now, due to how we all live, we are heading into a whole lot of hurt due to Climate Change. Far more "hurt" than the population falling.
Also, worried about population dropping ? Wait to see how fast it drops when Countries start massive wars due to dwindling resources.
EDIT: want an example of the Impact of population dripping ? Look at Europe during the Plague in the 1300s(?). What happened was the rich had a hard time finding labor, so they had to start paying people a lot more for their work. To me, that is the big fear, the rich may have to start paying more.
It will likely bring back the problem of old age destitution as rule, not exception. It's a previously common scourge that never went completely away[1][2], but went into the sidelines by early-mid XX century, and is set to coming back with a vengeance, by the time current people in their 20s-30s reach old age. It hits the poor hard.
[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/successful-educated-but-no...
[2] https://citizenmatters.in/mumbai-abandoned-destitute-elderly...
We could just kill ourselves, since we don't seem to care much for life, reproduction, and all that.
Not "yes and no", the answer is simply yes. You cannot simply flood your country with unrestricted migration from lower GDP per capita countries and not expect overall growth to slow down.
> Yes, output per capita is the primary measure of individual welfare but...
> our ability to service debt and social security obligations depends on total output.
Our ability to service social obligations and debt entirely depends on GDP per capita. Whilst they are both paid on a GDP basis, they a generated as a multiplier of capita. If you have 1 million people, and add another million people (of the same distribution), social obligations are also doubled, as will debt, but both delayed. It's not that complicated.
> We live in a welfare state, and this is unlikely to change anytime soon.
It's about to change now, the time is up. Governments world wide are now struggling to issue bonds at reasonable rates, there are no known mechanisms to unwind. The likes of Japan, a large buyer of the foreign bond market, starting to bring down its bond purchases, indicates this.
> Most immigrants worsen the fiscal position of the government.
This is especially true whilst you have a system already setup making a loss, such as the UK's pension system.
> Each immigrant into a rich country makes the position of poor countries harder.
Every doctor, nurse, engineer, etc, that we import is one less for their original country. What do we think that does to the original country on scale? What do we think that does to their growth?
> Affordable housing:
Many animals will not breed, and some even miscarry, if they are not in a suitable environment. Giving birth and raising children makes the mother/family very vulnerable. It seems that for all of our sophistication, the human race is no different. What we're measuring world wide appears to be an enormous economic deficit.
Depopulation shouldn't be a big deal when it's decades away and will be a slow decline.
> Most immigrants worsen the fiscal position of the government.
According to an Economist article addressing data collected by Denmark, each non-western immigrants produce a negative financial benefit over their lifetimes, and immigrants from the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan, are a net cost on the government at every age: https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/the-effects-of-immigration-in-...
We can see this happening now at Amazon. Amazon is a good case to watch, because their operations replace humans with robots on close to a one to one basis. Right now, Amazon has about 1.5 million human employees, and 1 million robots. Amazon reached peak humans in 2022, with around 1.6 million employees. Then human employees began to decline slightly. Robots continue to increase. Here's an old chart from 2017, when Amazon had increased all the way to 45,000 robots and some people were worried.[1] Now, it's 20x that.
How a society of mostly robots will work is not clear, but it's coming anyway.
[1] https://www.statista.com/chart/7428/45000-robots-form-part-o...
As people become older, they'll either have to work longer, or the system will come crashing down. Especially with lower fertility rates. My generation should be birthing kids as the previous ones, but I think almost half of my peers are childfree, too. And we're in the age that we have maybe - if lucky - 6,7 more years to reproduce.
I can't imagine a population where 1/3 will be retired people. It is also a huge drain on the healthcare system.
We're currently trending towards a birth rate of 1 or less. This means 4/5 will be retirees in three generations.
Your 1/3 figure is wildly optimistic. Little chance it will be that good.
Recorded talk for the slides in this post.
Anything placed in the path of reproduction is a barrier to be overcome.
If there is anything in the human genome that correlates with a positive desire to choose to have children, we are selecting hard for that right now. We may see a bottleneck this century and then a gigantic population explosion next century as a result, with a world full of people with very loud "biological clocks" who just adore and crave babies.
That is assuming this is genetically determined enough to be a target for selection. There are probably correlates that are, and I could speculate endlessly about what they are, but I also know that such speculations are likely to be wrong because these systems are complex and often counter-intuitive.
One I've speculated about recently is negativity bias. It seems to me that a lot of people choosing not to have kids right now are doing so because of negativity bias, because they see the world as a terrible place as a result of their consumption of negative media. Historically negativity bias may be something that's been selected for, but this may now have flipped. Optimists may have higher fitness now while pessimists did pre-industrialization and pre-modernity. But again, speculation.
api•2h ago
profstasiak•2h ago
what is he wrong about?
UncleMeat•2h ago
He was completely wrong. I think it is a great example to use in these modern discussions. Just 50 years ago we were seeing highly influential people say "we are going to breed ourselves to death and the only solution is extreme curtailing of rights." Today, we are starting to see highly influential people say "we are going to not-breed ourselves to death and the only solution is extreme curtailing of rights."
api•2h ago
UncleMeat•2h ago
Similarly, we are starting to see people say that we need to commit brutal oppression against a large portion of the world (this time based on gender) in order to prevent future catastrophe. I suspect that these people will be wrong in every possible dimension and that if we listen to them that we will be committing a world-historic evil.
lurk2•1h ago
What is this referring to?
pearlsontheroad•15m ago
UncleMeat•3m ago
* programs of mass sterilization in the third world
* a "triage" program where we partition the third world into "savable" and "unsavable" zones, block all movement between these zones, and expel the unsavable zones from our world order such that they will simply all starve to death.
rendang•1h ago
api•1h ago
Animats•1h ago
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_scarcity_in_India
FredPret•1h ago
This is a technological and economic problem, not an overpopulation problem.
UncleMeat•6m ago
FredPret•1h ago