The Economist magazine is also raising the alarm that before 2100 the number of people on the planet could shrink for the first time since the Black Death. The root cause is not a surge in deaths, but a slump in births. Across much of the world the fertility rate, the average number of births per woman, is collapsing.
If people or kids do not exist, then they cannot contribute to a nations economy. These will be huge effects by 2050 and even larger by 2100 and beyond. All of the forecasts that China and India will have economies many times larger than the USA will NOT happen. It is not just that the countries get old before they get rich, the countries economies shrivel up and shrink.
Japan is going from 122 million people today to about 100 million people in 2050-2056. By 2050, its population could fall below 100 million, of whom 38.8% will be 65 or older. 20 million of Japan’s people are over 75 years old today and 37 million are over 65. Japan’s per capita GDP is shrinking because the median age in Japan is 48.4 years old. About half of Japan’s work force is over 50, which is when productivity starts dropping until they stop working.
Population loss does directly cause economic losses. Population loss from now to 2050 will cause about 20-30% in economic damage or about a $60 trillion in economic loss. The GDP of a country is the amount of working people times the average economic contribution from each person. If your economy has 30% fewer people and all the people had on average the same productivity then you would lose 30% of your economy.
China currently has a total fertility rate of 1.18. However, a survey of Chinese women indicates similarities to South Korean women for family size. South Korea has a total fertility of 0.78. IF China will struggle to stabilize its fertility rate at 0.8, then its population will fall to less than 1.02 billion by 2050 and 310 million in 2100. If China succeeds in holding its fertility rate to 1.1 and prevents it from declining, its population will likely fall to 1.08 billion by 2050 and 440 million by 2100. This would be 232 million fewer people in China in 2050 than the UN projections. The UN was assuming that China would have a total fertility rate of 1.5. This would be about a 18% drop in total population but a 30-40% drop in the working age population by 2050.
China will be losing 10 million people per year from its working age population from 2027-2050. Japan will be losing 1 million people per year from its working age population from 2023-2050. The working age populations for China, Japan, Italy and Spain will be about 20-30% smaller in 2050 than today.
Total Fertility Rates of Top GDP Countries USA 1.66 China 1.18 Japan 1.3 Germany 1.6 India 1.99 UK 1.75 France 1.84 Italy 1.29 Canada 1.47 Brazil 1.67 Russia 1.5 S Korea 0.78 Australia 1.60 Mexico 1.79 Spain 1.29
Populations that are already shrinking : China, Japan, Italy, Spain, Russia, South Korea
If there is a TFR of 1.4 that means that each woman will only have an average of 0.7 daughters. This means in two generations the number of fertile women drops in half. If there is a TFR of 1.0 that means each woman will only have an average of 0.5 daughters. This means in one generation the number of fertile women drops in half. Korea with a TFR of 0.78 that means each woman will only have an average of 0.39 daughters. This means in one generation the number of fertile women is 40% of the previous generation.
South Korea was not going to peak until 2024, but this was accelerated to peak population in 2019. Covid started South Korea’s population decline sooner.
Over 80% of the world’s GDP is in countries that have total fertility rates that are below replacement.
It is not just a China, Japan, Italy, Spain, Russia and South Korea problem. Those countries are first but the below replacement rate issue and the loss of fertile women in each of the next decades means that the avalanche has started for almost all countries. It is something about our cities, work life and society that is anti-family.
None of the pro-natal measures have moved ANY country back up to over replacement level.
The measures and re-organization of societies and cities must be vastly more aggressive.
The Rule of TWO… point one
Husband and wives MUST average 2.1 children. It is not optional for humanity and society.
In biology, when a population starts declining, it is usually not a controlled thing that re-stabilizes at a lower level.
Self-Genocide
If Aliens from space or an other country were forcing the disappearance of large numbers of the next generation, then the population would fight and resist. Japan losing 30 million people from a peak of 128.2 million in 2008 to 98 million in 2055 would be worse than all its losses in WW2. It would be 200 times worse than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombs.
China could lose over 300 million people 2050 out of 1.42 billion. China lost 20 million people in WW2 out of 525 million.
The Black Death was the most extreme pandemic. It killed 30 to 50 percent of the entire population of Europe. The plague might have reduced the world population from c. 475 million to 350–375 million in the 14th century. (1346-1353)
A global TFR of 1.4 over the remainder of the century could bring global population from a peak of 9-10 billion in 2050 to 6-7 billion in 2100. It would be a Black Death over 50-60 years instead of 7 years. But the low birth population decline might not stop.
China and South Korea or any other country that has TFR dropping to 1.0-1.1 would 30-40% of its current population. It would be worse than the 30-50% of the hardest hit Black Death European countries. The low population culling would be 60-70%.
Cold War nuclear war casualty estimates were about 30-50% of the targeted countries.
Again low birth rates will be worse than nuclear war in reducing populations.
The Tomorrow War
Countries have standing armies and military to defend against slaughter of civilians by outside or internal forces.
China has 2.8 million men in its armed forces and Japan has 250,000.
They need to have double that number in a “standing army” of surrogate women. They may have to pay willing immigrant women from poorer countries to act as surrogates. If China had 5 million surrogates to deliver two to four births each over five years then this would help correct the shortfall. Japan would need about 500,000 surrogates. Women that would be willing to have four or more children would be given state support to retire after doing their duty for their country. This is the scale of re-organization that is needed. Remember, this low birth rate problem is just a slower “Black Death” or a shadow nuclear war.
There would also need to be free egg freezing and free IVF implantation.
There would also need to be a military scale hiring of nannies and setting up nurseries and education and other career support.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
Its worse than that- In the West, the welfare states, the children being born will not be able to keeping society going. The moment Govt starting paying for unmarried mothers a gigantic gravy train left the station, so now the average IQ is dropping as college-educated women don’t reproduce and unemployable girls have children with multiple fathers.
Never mind the dropping IQ, the work ethic vanished when children grew up in a house where three generations had never worked. Need money, just wait for dole day..
..and on top of both of those, as mentioned here and there, immigrants from some areas of the world are happy to raise their living standards above when they left, and settle for not as much as our local middle class, so they have no reason to work either. A little crime or drugs keeps some cash coming in to top up Govt payments while living in a Govt house.
Of course currently you have the problem of no marriageable men- he’s got a low sperm count, and he’s trans, and he’s homosexual, he’s not worth marrying, he’s some 41st sex type.. Just being a normal guy with a family is frowned upon!
Still, its an economic problem really, the type of economy that has produced today’s billionaires isn’t going to work much longer, but a different economic model will replace it. I’d be quite happy if the largest 5 cities in every country vanished, we would have a lot more common sense then.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. “Oh my god the sky is falling, we’re all gonna die!!”
Puleeese!
First it was, “We’re all gonna die from overpopulation. There are too many people!!!”
Then it was, “We’re all gonna die from nuclear war and nuclear winter!!”
Then it was, “We’re all gonna die from global warming!!”
Now it’s, “We’re all gonna die from population collapse!!”
Well, we ARE all gonna die … sooner or later … no matter what. Get over that.
Brian writes: “If people or kids do not exist, then they cannot contribute to a nations economy.”
So what? Soon, the consumer-based legacy economic model will be transformed. AI-directed robots will generate all the productivity necessary for basic human needs. The number of humans — more humans or less humans — will be irrelevant.
In my view, when work is no longer necessary for survival, the problem for humanity will be a lack of purpose. In the current system one’s identity is defined/tied to one’s occupation, an occupation that is ***required*** for economic survival. When that requirement is gone, “Who are you? What are you?” I suspect that people will figure it out, but it will be a whole new world.
Okay, here are some solutions for you.
1) a ban on the purchase of real estate for investment purposes, that is, a ban on having more than one apartment per village and having them for legal entities. Demolition of historic housing and construction of high-rise buildings. Prohibition of small towns in the US to set building rules The price of housing will collapse, the birth rate will increase, after the crisis caused by the collapse is over.
2) the legally enshrined right to work remotely, if possible. Same as point 1
3) direct reproduction of children and their upbringing in state orphanages. The artificial womb is almost ready, but not yet ready, you can just buy the services of surrogate mothers in poor countries
Well, now the main question is “what will these young people do when automation makes most people uncompetitive and out of work? “. Answer
“to be on welfare.”
Which countries will benefit? Those in which fewer people were born or more in such a scenario? It is easier to feed a billion parasites or half a billion, given that the product in an automated economy can be increased indefinitely, as long as there are resources with very few people.
I honestly don’t know which solution is right, but I hope you find it. Otherwise, I kind of dumped from Russia and plan to move to you and bet on your society
don’t get this obsession of yours with fertility and global population, Brian. I’m female, well beyond reproductive years now, and so far haven’t regreted it for a minute. life sucks and, in the end, isn’t worth it. I’ve always thought I’d much rather never had been born in the first place.
*meant to say – I´m female, haven’t reproduced, am well beyond…
One thing to remember is that the rule is that a population stays a year shorter that the carrying capacity of the respective environment. There might be some outliers like black death but the trend gets restored in merely a couple of generations. If there’s any sizeable population reduction it leaves more resources/space available (real estate, food, daycare) for the ones willing to procreate. The more traditional, fundamentalist, less progressive and such. So we can safely assume the population will not call much below 80% of what we have today. This is far from extinction. Of course we’re might not like the composition of that new population of 2100s but neither would o our predecessors from 1900s be too proud of us
If this is a problem at all, it is going to be solved by life extension, rejuvenation and emerging reproductive technology.
Also, there is AI that can, in addition to accelerating the above mentioned, influence the productivity and demand for human resources in its own way.
What we really need to do is to develop these things consciously, not just waiting for them to appear out of the blue. We won’t return to “2.1” with current lifespan, period. And we don’t need it either.
I look forward to seeing well characterized mechanisms for the shortfall: the pill, the condom, the abstinence, the disease. Until we understand why, there is little hope of a solution.
Why housing crisis is the everything crisis
https://youtu.be/4ZxzBcxB7Zc
I saw a very interesting documentary about a Japanese hotel and restaurant in the mountains. The chef uses local ingredients. But the most interesting part about the show is his father, who is 100 years old and still cooks in the restaurant. He is probably the oldest working cook in the world! NHK television has programs about Japanese artists and craftsmen. Many are in their ’70s and even older. Also, many shop owners and cafe operators in Japan are in their 60s and some in their 70s. In conclusion, a significant percentage of the Japanese population is capable are working beyond 65. Google states that 25% of Japanese over 65 are still working, 9 million.
Americans? Google: Among adults ages 65 to 74, the workforce participation rate was 25.8% in 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That share is expected to grow to 30.7% by 2031. In the 75-and-older crowd, the portion in the workforce is expected to reach 11.1%, up from 8.6% in 2021.Feb 22, 2023
“…65 to 74, the workforce participation rate was 25.8% in 2021, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That share is expected to grow to 30.7% by 2031. In the 75-and-older crowd, the portion in the workforce is expected to reach 11.1%,…”
glad to hear it that people are willing to continuing contributing to society past traditional retirement.
Hopefully that leads to a world where directed ‘guaranteed’ 100% pensions are eliminated and most medical and other public support systems are (at least) partially privatized past retirement.
You’ve got 20 years to prepare for Work. 40 years minimum to gather as much wealth as possible during Work, while paying your mortgage, kids life, kids education, and ideally, their first used car and downpayment on their post-grad house –and– to fund your own post-Work supplemental income (independent annuity or other). With this in mind, you choose what you want to do, where to live, and how many kids to have within your financial capacity.
And hey – if anti-aging kicks in, you can Work-earn in episodes – 30 years on – 10 yr sabattical, 10 yr Work, 10 yr sabbatical…
and if anti-aging equals ongoing fertility – you can have a kid or 2 for each cycle…
The Future is Bright – we just have to work for it and not depend on anyone else outside of family.
“40 years minimum to gather as much wealth as possible during Work, while paying your mortgage, kids life, kids education, and ideally, their first used car and downpayment on their post-grad house –and– to fund your own post-Work supplemental income” – how the ph@ck do you manage to earn enough money to pay and save for all that? not where I’m from (Portugal) and I have a high education.
In one article the coming of robotics is touted, and in the next the lack of future labor force is lamented.
But robots would solve the labor shortage, would it not?
If we get robots within 20 years and effective AI, the demand for labor will fall drastically. The effective AI is pretty much a given whereas robots are less certain. With such changes we can support any ratio of old-to-young. And we will have all the land we want, no shortage of houses for coming generations. Seems like a pretty bright future to me. Except, of course, the fact the communists can lock the population of China into an eternal dictatorship with the help of said technology….
The house is already on fire (labor force and population collapse) and has been burning for over a decade. In Japan for 4 decades. There are risks that the robots are not developed and do not scale to billions. It os not just the labor shortage.
We have GPT4 now but there is still financial crisis and risk of US recession. We had the internet boom for a few decades but there was still the 2001 dot.com bust and the 2008 financial crisis. We developed 1-10 million industrial robots in the 1990s-2020 but Japan still had its lost decade.
You are projecting 20 years. In the meantime, Japan, China, Korea and others loses over 10% of their population and Europe also has issues. Those are 50% of the world economy. 10% drops are depression level drops. The world is financially and technologically connected.
“ The house is already on fire (labor force and population collapse) and has been burning for over a decade. In Japan for 4 decades. ”
And yet Japan continues to exist with a reasonable GDP and doesn’t want to raise its immigration levels. It’s not ideal there but hardly the equivalent of a Black Plague type of crisis!
“We have GPT4 now but there is still financial crisis and risk of US recession.”
How is the current financial crisis linked to population? It is due to Covid and inflation.
“ The world is financially and technologically connected.”
And needs to be better connected in terms of people. Wake me up when the population crisis is so bad that immigrants aren’t seen as something worse.
A 10% economic drop WITHOUT EQUIVALENT POPULATION DROP might be a depression. But if we need 10% less stuff, being able to make 10% less stuff is not a real problem. It may be a problem for the financial types, who live off the promise of ever increasing wealth. Not so much for anyone who works producing stuff or services for a living.
ps for those countries either unwilling to open up their immigration or alternatively, are just so unattractive that people just don’t want to immigrate there, this will be a wonderful lesson on what cultural attributes societies should actually be striving for….
Couldn’t disagree more.
It depends on what kind of world is desired: a great world or a fair world.
A great world is what the US and UK, and to a lesser degree Canada and Australia are aspiring to. This is a world of merit, individual striving, technological solutions, ‘real’ wealth creation by productivity and creativity (less about stock market shorting and rent-seeking and cronyism), etc. These systems solve problems by new solution rather than cultural or individual bullying/ regulation. This greatness is not accomplished by endlessly importing untold hordes of immigrants – who admittedly, a very small portion of which, likely have an above-average work ethic and skill set, knowledge base — but certainly not many/ most; BUT IS accomplished by assimilating all into a common vision (as in the US and UK, i.e. individualism, work as indentity, consumerism, productive/non-cronyist opportunism, etc.) of the culture (but not fascist or communalist or over-centralized). Immigrants have not generally assimilated well into rich ‘free’ countries; carrying most of their cultural baggage, existing back-home relationships, and a lack of the true identity items as above. They have resisted language, consumerist patterns, new business relationships, etc. This has diluted the greatness potential, deprived the original country of its most dynamic emigrants (now finding that they are out-classed in their new home), and created a population quantity-over-quality dynamic. There is even very little evidence that the new immigrants are communicating the benefits of their new home to the old place, or that the old place is learning to change (or be a lot more like them) from having its people move. There have been negligible technological benefits (though some economic, which is different) from immigration over the last 20+ years in destination countries, except sentimental-only feelings in the immigrants who have found an easier (sheltered) life, which is not important.
Great systems will mitigate the perceived drawbacks (or at least mitigate the feelings of impending doom of the alarmists) of climate change risk, population stagnation, etc., through technology and creativity, but not if they are endlessly diluted.
Fair systems, on the other hand, cannot do this as they aspire to consensus, sentimentality, risk-free agendas, and inclusiveness — and ironically, this has been made obviously worse and more untenable by the immigrants they have accepted ‘compassionately’. The message is: that the rich, great world will solve the world’s problems the way it is best at, and the rest of the world can either follow suit separately or wait until technology makes it easier for them to ‘slouch into a better age’. Immigration, as with invasive species issues, cannot hope to make the home ecosystem/ culture better, except, by filling small unimportant roles. The place you were first imbued with culture matters.
And, further to the population quality-over-quantity debate (framed as stagnation or decline or even -haha- collapse) the top 1%/10% of the population within the rich world so intensely and out-proportionately outperforms (and is thus most responsible for its success and our collective future) the remaining 90%, that huge population drives and immigration inflows will do little to move society forward — of course, the bottom 50%, as measured today, is likely contributing to its demise — which more and more immigration is falling into. Our only hope is to create ‘top 10%’ type people that will then add to the top (obviously becoming more than 10% eventually). Since this is best accomplished by family units, however you define that (1-parent, 2-parents, 3-parents, Mormon-camp, creche, test tube incubator…) that can spend a lot of resources on maximizing the performance of their offspring, thus limiting the resources available to having more offspring simultaneously. Of course, getting immigrants to top 10% potential (or at least 50%) takes greater resources, comparatively, and we can’t send them back if they are unwilling (since many immigration schemes are not limited time or conditional).
Let me know when Japan, South Korea etc welcome as many immigrants as Australia, the US, Germany etc. if immigration is seen as worse than the population crisis, then the population crisis simply can’t be that bad. End of story.
I agree with others that equating events that kill young people to situations where there are simply not enough new borns to replace old people is wrong.
For those countries furthest along, they just need to open up their borders a bit. For the others we just need to integrate ChatGPT with Tesla bots. Probably will take about 10 years. Is that too late? I don’t think so.
Meanwhile the rest of the species trying to inhabit this planet might get a breather. About time.
When you look at the population levels long term the Black Death virtually didn’t happen. Things bounced to the trend line in a snap. And trend lines are not laws of nature. The projection of the trend line into exponential growth didn’t happen. The decrease won’t fall into extinction. If society is to blame for being “family unfriendly” do you think such a society will continue being able to enforce such conditions if the economy is collapsing?
We were first told that all of humanity would expand exponentially. The line will go up forever! Faster and faster!
Then we were told, maybe not all of humanity—European would shrink but East Asians would expand exponentially.
Ok, maybe not them but the South Americans… oh, they’re shrinking now?
Muslims! They’ll blanket the planet with their sky high fertility…
Sub Saharan African?
Maybe the Amish?
Oh, no! The line is going down! It will go down forever! Faster and faster!
“It takes a village to raise a child” to fecund adulthood. This is not self-genocide. It is being committed by those who refuse to permit mutually consenting parents to exclude from their “villages” anything and anyone they see fit for any reason whatsoever. Such a “laboratory of the villages” would have long ago demonstrated what works and what doesn’t work via social experiments conducted on consenting populations, and produced an explosion of diverse sustainable societies.
Those who centralize social policy are the enemies of humanity.
There is truth in this.
All species share the same population cycle. 90% population decline is a normal part of the cycle.
Just faggedaboutit. I say focus on the SENS and cellular reprogramming instead.
The Black Death seems to have triggered the Renaissance and the sequence of events in Europe that lead to the scientific and industrial revolutions.
It seems a bit premature to assume that downward pressure on birth rates in an era that may see greater longevity, rejuvenation, AI and humanoid robot replacements for labor is necessarily a bad thing.
Like I wrote below, the Black Death, like most pandemic diseases, tended to kill older people, and so to the extent it distorted age demographics, it shifted them towards younger ages. Which had the effect of upsetting entrenched power structures.
Instead here we’re seeing a shift towards older ages.
Now, if rejuvenation includes restoring youthful neural plasticity, maybe it would work out that way. But if it enables entrenched power holders to just stay entrenched even longer, it could have the opposite effect.
Just checked wikipedia 2020: 930,160 abortions (for the USA only.)
So enough humans are conceived though…,
stop complaining about fertility’s, we should talk about natality problem
Declining fertility is rational economic behavior in societies where women participate in the workplace.
The primary cost of children is lost income and lost potential income from a parent. Maybe you have one child and a parent takes a year off – that’s one year of pay, and maybe your company still thinks you are serious about your career. Maybe they don’t.
Have more children, lose more income, potentially lose more reputation and have lower chances of promotion.
For a family in an urban area, these losses could be hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars.
The related problem is that if you create a million dollar incentive package for people to have children, you’ll create a culture war. Most societies are still racist and classist. The people who respond most strongly to incentives will be different races and classes from the people paying the taxes to fund the incentives. Changing the mix of people in a society will be fought.
That’s a good point. If we institute the level of incentives necessary to restore replacement level fertility, without any controls on who gets the incentives, the people most responsive to this will be those for whom the child bearing and raising doesn’t displace paying work: People on welfare! For these people it’s all gain, there’s no forgone income involved.
This is already the population segment with the highest reproduction rate.
Yes, people who work for a living will not be terribly enthusiastic about paying people on welfare to have still more kids to grow up to be on welfare.
On the other hand, if we condition the incentives so that they only increase reproduction among low reproduction rate groups, it would be politically explosive, sure to be attacked as racist even if it were just conditioned on educational attainment.
This is where totalitarian states have the edge: They don’t have to care about reactions like this, they can just issue a rule that women with college degrees get paid to have children instead of working, and shoot anybody who complains.
In the US we won’t do much to incentivize population as we can lean heavily on immigration.
And that’s a serious mistake.
First, it’s not sustainable, because this lack of reproduction is spreading, so where will we get the immigrants from? Ultimately kicking the can down the road doesn’t solve the problem, if anything, the longer we let it go on, the harder it’s going to be to recover a society where people actually reproduce.
Secondly, realistically most of the immigrants will come from where they come from now, the only part of the world that’s above replacement, the third world.
And you are what you eat! The more immigrants we take in from third world countries, the more we become, culturally, a third world country. The more we lose the cultural traits that are responsible for us NOT being a third world country.
If we respond to the birth dearth by immigration, 100 years from now there might still be a country labeled “America” on the map, but it won’t be recognizable.
To sum it the opportunity cost of having children is to damn high.
stop complaining
Worldwide we collectively spend 13.000.0000.000.000 $13 trillion to give some co-morbides and same +80 to live some 1-2 month longer in social isolation.
As long as we burden our younger generation with our choices i.s.o. giving them affordable education and childcare.
Labor shortage? Robots. Fewer people? Life extension technology. But the economy will have to be extensively modified.
> something about our cities, work life and society that is anti-family.
Low wages that haven’t kept up with inflation for decades, excessive work hours that leave too little room for self and family time, a shortage of adequate housing that’s only getting worse, and an overall doom-and-gloom atmosphere wrt to the environment, society, and economic prospects.
All the other comments posted as “Michael K” are not by me.
Yes, there’s an autofill bug at this site, where the name and email occasionally randomly populate with somebody else’s data. And Brian has been doing nothing about it, so far as I can see.
Random people now have everything they need to impersonate established commenters.
Ah, but all these things are actually better than they were throughout almost all of human history. About the only valid issue here is that income inequality has increased greatly since the baby boom era; But not through an increase in poverty, through an increase in the fraction of wealth going to the wealthy.
During the baby boom, people who had substantially less in the way of resources routinely had large families. It isn’t the lack of resources, it’s a change in priorities.
I think Moriarty has a valid point about TV: People in my generation were socialized to expect to marry and have children; TV was full of sitcoms showing married families with children. I grew up expecting to have kids, I married planning to have kids. I only had one, but that was because cancer treatment sterilized me before I could have more, I certainly intended to have several.
Now media are full of single people and childless couples leading glamorous lives.
We had a couple new engineers in here for a while, just out of college. Both in the appropriate age range for having children, both in romantic relationships or outright married, both with sufficient resources to have families. The guy didn’t plan on having kids, the girl was kind of thinking about having one “eventually”, like it was something she could realistically put off. They apparently weren’t socialized to think of reproducing as something you just did. Instead they view it as something like an expensive hobby.
We need a MAJOR push to re-normalize reproducing. Incentives to reproduce far beyond anything anybody is actually trying.
But I don’t see how that happens in a democracy where most of the voters aren’t having kids, and the political class see high levels of immigration from 3rd world countries as an opportunity to ‘elect a new people’ more to their liking.
It might have to wait until a population collapse gets rid of everybody but the hardcore ‘breeders’, who are utterly resistant to social pressure to stay childless.
Objectively and in absolute numbers, yes, we are far better off than in previous history. But people of reproductive age haven’t lived though previous history. They judge what they see and experience based on the reality they live in – and yes, also based on media portrayal.
There are of course those who are more affluent, and postpone (or avoid) reproduction for other reasons. But there are also many young people who are struggling to get by; who don’t know how, when, or even if they’ll manage to find housing; who can barely find time for themselves, much less for a family.
And add to that the current dating world is a total mess too.
Essentially, they’re struggling to get by because they have an elevated notion of what “getting by” consists of. They wouldn’t be struggling to get by if they were satisfied with a lower standard of living. Not a BAD standard of living, just lower than they want.
Apartments in trendy areas. McMansions instead of small homes in older neighborhoods. A big screen TV and expensive vacations. They’ve been socialized to think of these things as “getting by”.
Having a family involves tradeoffs that they don’t want to make.
I don’t have concrete statistics, and maybe you’re right. But my personal impression is that there are many who are struggling on a much more basic level. Paying the rent and bills on a small apartment. Having to choose which groceries to buy (and which to skimp on). That sort of thing. What you’re describing sounds like luxuries to me.
I’ve looked at the local housing market: I live in a house built in the 1970’s, in an older, established neighborhood. I bought it before the new housing bubble started inflating, so it was in the neighborhood of 100K.
All the new housing developments around here have starting prices of 3-4 times that. And, some friends have bought in them, so I’ve gotten a look at them. They’re quite nice houses, what they aren’t is starter homes.
Nobody seems to be building starter homes these days, because apparently the demand isn’t there.
Compared to 5 millions surrogates, artificial wombs aren’t hard to develop. We can also make basically infinite eggs (and sperm, if interested) from somatic cells. Not approved for humans yet, but could be ready in a few years. Bearing children would be really convenient and infertility would be an issue of the past. This also makes genetic selection really convenient, so very few surprise special needs children.
Then the real problem begins – those who aren’t willing or “ready” to be a parent. The logic of being born ensures that people are raised by child-havers. In the pre-modern world, this and a village of people in similar conditions was the entire social environment – childlessness to people in these conditions seemed aberrant. Then TV was invented, a new avenue of socialization.
Everyone in TV is single because it makes for romantic tension. They are young and beautiful and successful and often have improbable resources. We watch that, and we raise the bar on what we want for and from ourselves, our potential mates, our children. So we delay and delay and it doesn’t happen. If we raise the average living standard, number of spare bedrooms, human attractiveness, whatever, it doesn’t matter – TV just raises the bar further to get viewers. Other media have a similar effect. We accidentally propagandized ourselves into sterility.
This created a feedback loop, because as singleness or childlessness became more common, they became easier to depict on screen. Normalization leads to more normalization. The scary thing is that cultural norms might have a tipping point and we could freefall to zero.
Yes, the improbable resources if particularly hilarious. Everybody in a sitcom has a 200 m2 apartment with big windows and designer furniture, even though the main characters have a normal office work and are in their 20’s. Hello, how much money did you have in your 20’s?
When decided to settle down and having kids I realized that I am not ready but will be even less ready if I wait more. And our household didn’t cover the 2.1 bar we rounded it down to two ..
How about we stop focusing on putting out numbers and consumption and instead try to be more sustainable with what we have already
Global total fertility below 2.1 is unsustainable. Persistent below replacement level leads to extinction. It is the very definition of unsustainable
There is absolutely no reason to panic. Fewer people will mostly solve our resource and climate change problem, which no matter how hard NBF and many, many, others try, shows little sign of being solved at scale any other way. We are living through the 6th major extinction and it’s caused by human over-use of resources.
Even a 50-year reduction in human beings would give the Earth a breather it desperately needs. If I was a religious person, I’d say God in his infinite wisdom arranged it perfectly.
In NYC, there are 80,000 homeless and migrants sleeping in shelters every night, and more on the streets. Of course policy toward the poor is responsible for most of that but, again, there’s little will to change things. However, if there are vacant housing units, or at least much cheaper ones, these problems solve themselves without rent-seekers having to give up their precious parasitic lifestyles much.
As others have pointed out, after the Black Death, the remaining labor class was able to command higher wages. This led to more labor-saving devices, then the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. Today we have a shortage of healthcare workers, teachers, truck drivers, etc. And AI is coming up fast to replace many of these and much more. We will get far more productivity out of existing people by using technology instead of just producing more mouths to feed. And the wrong people are often the ones having too many children; they are R-Strategists having lots of babies (Reproducing) but not many survive or at least not many get expensive educations enabling them to be very productive. This is the problem.
Then too, if we’re so short of people, how come so many groups and countries are willing to throw them together in wars and conflicts, often over scarce resources?
Something doesn’t add up if people are supposedly so precious.
Even Elon Musk’s 9 children look like an over-production he spends little time training to carry on his level of innovation. At least one of them can’t stand him. There is no advantage to rolling the dice 9 times, but a lot of advantage to society to controlling how the dice come up 1 or 2 times.
False analogy: the Black Death killed people before their time. This does not.
Fewer people means less young people contributing to the economy. One solution to this would be people working past the traditional retirement ages of 61-65.
Even the most pro-natal advocates should be reminded, that off on the horizon are hard physical limits to how many people can exist on the earth. And that exponential growth would lead to these in a few centuries.
Actually, pandemics cause less damage, because they usually kill the elderly at a higher rate than young people. The Spanish Flu was an exception to this rule, but the Black death was very much not an exception.
So, while pandemics reduce population, they don’t normally cause an unfavorable age profile in the population; If anything, they shift the population towards the productive end of the spectrum.
Failure to reproduce, on the other hand, skews a population towards the elderly; You don’t get just a diminishing population, you get a less vigorous population, too. It’s a double hit: Fewer people, but a larger percentage of dependents.
Brian is not exaggerating here. While there’s still time to pull out of it, we are charting a path towards extinction. In GOOD times, we now have a reproduction rate that’s lower than normally would be seen in war or plague zones.
This, not climate, is the real challenge to humanity, the real test of our fitness as a species. Our societies have to find some way to restore human reproduction to replacement levels. It’s not going to be easy, particularly in democracies, because the fewer people are having children, the less political will there is to institute policies favorable to families with children.
And if we don’t find a societal way to motivate people to reproduce, the alternative isn’t going to be extinction, in the long run. It’s going to be “Brave New World”. We won’t even recognize the resulting societies when governments resort to baby factories to replace family style reproduction.