South Korea – a Cautionary Tale for the Rest of Humanity

- no replacement brought from outside to combat the decline - no obligation for the "society" to take care of non-ancestral elderly

Elderly care is basically going to wipe generational savings from the 20th century off the map and all that wealth will be reallocated to PE.

Capitalism needs constant growth

All of society and industrial functions require young people.

20 years ago it was global cooling. We're gonna freeze to death.

10 years ago it was global warming. We're gonna cook to death.

Now it's climate change.

It's whatever the rich elite want them to print. Don't believe anything they print, it's all fabricated. Including this global birth rate thing.

The latest UNEP report includes it - see page 37 from https://www.unep.org/resources/global-environment-outlook-7 -> https://wedocs.unep.org/rest/api/core/bitstreams/902187bf-ea...

"Among the major global environmental crises – climate change, biodiversity loss and land degradation, and pollution and waste – population growth is most evidently a key factor in biodiversity decline. This is largely due to increased demand for food production, which leads to agricultural expansion and land degradation (Cafaro, Hansson and Götmark 2022). As the population grows and consumption rises, fewer resources and less habitat are available for non-human species (Crist 2019). Overpopulation occurs when the total human population multiplied by per capita consumption surpasses the capacity of sustainable ecosystems and resources. Although the global human population continues to grow, per capita consumption is increasing at a faster rate. To the extent that people are disrupting natural habitats and degrading ecosystem services for future generations, despite regional heterogeneity, some research suggests that most of the world’s nations may be considered overpopulated (Lianos and Pseiridis 2016; Tucker 2019)"

People in these comments are considering to enslave women like The Handmaid's Tale before even asking if it’s a problem.

Capitalist concern is human concern.

The reaction to overpopulation concerns probably discouraged people from having kids but it's unlikely to be the main cause.

Viz: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/feb/19/kibbutz...

  Why not have dedicated facilities that handle raising children professionally?

Who pays for it? How often can the parents see the kids? How does this differ from schools?

It would be simply better (probably harder) to improve society so one could have a great work-life balance.

Otherwise you would realize what dystopian hellscape of an idea you are suggesting.

I feel really lucky I worked from home and home educated my kids, and feel most people already miss a significant amount of the joy of having kids because of work and school. Your idea would make a significant part of it into all of it.

People in general have a built-in biological incentive to treat their own biological children well. People child-rearing just as a job generally treat children worse than biological parents, and the empirical evidence supports this (e.g. the earlier children enter paid childcare, the worse their outcomes on average). Only a small minority of extremely moral people treat other people's kids as well as their own biological children.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980s%E2%80%931990s_Romanian_o...

Even in some dystopian future where there are dedicated facilities that raise people, I can only think of labour and military being raised.

Because to even contemplate that means dismissing the entire notion of a parent child bond. Of course socialism, with it's inherent disdain of existing social structures have tried collective living, famously some kibbutzim in israel tried it, but most sensible people are horrified by such an idea.

I want to let it go but i can't. The suggestion that trained professionals would somehow do a better job of raising a child then parents would is terrible. It's probably one of the worst ideas i've ever seen here.

https://news.sky.com/story/kim-jong-un-wipes-away-tears-as-h...

It always seemed crazy to me that there still are societies and countries out there not offering more support to new parents, and even existing parents. It's literally what makes the country survive long-term, and without new children, you'll obviously end up in stagnation. So why not make it really easy and worry-free?

It is without doubt beneficial for children to have their mother with them in early childhood. This work over all else society is harming the next generation and ripping new mothers away from their babies after a few weeks/months after birth.

what we need is better protection for employees, and especially for parents.

in my vision childcare times are counted towards pension times. stay at home times are required to be taken by both parents equally, so that their careers are affected equally and there is no question on who has to throttle their career because it's both.

that still leaves a career difference between those who have children and those who don't. not sure what to do about that other than serious tax benefits for every child. in germany you get 250euro per month per child in cash until the child is grown up. unconditionally. that's a start, but may not be enough. somehow the income difference needs to be made up. not having children should simply not have benefits in terms of income and career.

just throwing out ideas here: how about preferential hiring for parents? but that's difficult to enforce. same goes for promotion.

actually, with automation taking over jobs maybe the simplest solution to equalize career chances is to reduce everyones working hours. if working time is limited to 20 or at the most 30 hours per week, then childless people get more free time, but parents get more time for their children without having to throttle their careers.

That would mean breaking up big tech and prohibiting firms above a certain size from buying competitors.

Otherwise, there're huge swaths of the economy that used to be accessible to entrepreneurs that now aren't economically viable (without an attached unrelated business pumping in cash).

This has been my assumption, but now I question it. See

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1644264/

In this experiment, a mouse population grew quickly, then at high population density started falling quickly. But rather than recovering when the population decreased, it continued to fall until it was wiped out, in the presence of plentiful resources.

This keeps me up at night. Please someone tell me why it doesn't apply to us.

Fertility used to be higher because women used not to have that choice. At this point, if we want to grow or sustain populations, the only possibilities seem to be

1. Take that choice away from women. Not only would this be abhorrent, I'm not sure it's even possible without some sort of mass violence or horrific war.

2. Bribe women to have children, above and beyond the (economic) cost of having them. This seems difficult, and I genuinely don't know how high you'd have to go to get to replacement fertility. If you're not a woman, genuinely imagine how much you'd have to be paid to give birth to two babies you don't want. Then add the economic opportunity costs to that. Do we really have the resources to give that to half the population (because how do you know who wouldn't give birth without it)? Plus, a lot of men would be very mad.

3. Massive government investment into obstetrics to make pregnancy and childbirth dramatically easier on your body. This, to me, seems the most plausible, though there're obviously still major social barriers.

4. Develop sci-fi tech that removes or reduces the obligation for only women to bear children - either by inventing make pregnancy (halves the necessary average fertility, plus it's much easier to convince people who haven't done it before to have a baby) or artificial wombs. This is pretty far out, but I'm not aware of any actual hard limits on the possibilities. From my perspective, it's probably easier than stopping aging, which looks to have some genuine enthropic challenges.

Everyone (including me) is inclined to blame lower birthrates on their pet social cause (economic inequality, cost of housing, "The LGBT agenda", cars, cities, foreigners, the job market, social media, feminism, Marxism, conservatism, obesity, vaccines) but just as an example, the reduction US birthrates has largely been driven by a precipitous drop in teen pregnancy. As hormonal birth control and sex education has become more available, it's been easier and easier for women to prevent unwanted pregnancies without the cooperation or involvement of men, and birthrates have, predictably, dropped.

And I think it's probably going to be pretty hard to put that genie back in the bottle, unless you can get women to vote against their own right to vote and weather the inevitable storm caused by telling 50% of everyone they're not really people anymore and should just do what they're told. Women tend to be less violent and less physically imposing then men, but I don't think they're actually much less capable of causing destruction with, like, a petrol bomb, and I think we would probably find the line that overcomes that tendency pretty fast if we went down that path.