Are We Doomed?

No, it wont: Population statistics are among the most robust & stable one and one with the most accurate data that we have across the globe. Populatoin statistics are running reaaaallly slow - on that one day when you see the decrease in the graph, it is already too late.

> Birth rates aren't plummeting around the world at the same time.

They are "plummeting around the world at the same time," they just didn't start plummeting everywhere at the same time.

> The labor gap is a short-term problem and can be fixed with immigration and maybe AI. Birth rates aren't plummeting around the world at the same time. By the time the birth rate becomes a problem in Africa, America would have long recovered.

Except Africa can't fill the gap for everywhere else, and if immigration is the "solution" then what do you do about Africa after it's been sucked dry of its prime labor force? Just leave all its poor elderly to die on their own?

Natural selection doesn't optimize, it selects.

> But ramping up the birth rate? Only three ways to pull that off: straight-up tank women's rights across the board, socialize childcare big-time, or just smash the current political system to bits and build something better.

Actually it's probably more about smashing the cultural and economic system. IMHO the problem with fertility isn't so much with "women's rights" or the "political system" per se, but capitalism (including capitalism-inflected feminism that idealizes careers, which is pretty much all mainstream feminism).

Under the current system you exist to be maximally exploited to increase profits (ideally consuming all your capacity, including that which you'd use to reproduce and raise children), and childcare (socialized or no) is a foolish attempt to solve that problem with more of the problem (and of course that doesn't actually work).

The solution is a system the allocates a significant fraction of everyone's labor to cultural continuity (reproduction, child-rearing, and civic engagement), which would require a significant re-ordering of priorities.

your suggestion of "socialize childcare big-time" is tried in EU, countries like sweden offers the best support of families and yet are parley getting the numbers up without immigration, the root of the drop is the change of women role in society, finding a political sweet spot is required, if women get a salary from the government when they have more than 3 kids then it might encourage families to take the big step and the women to spend more time doing the real full time job of home care, also families needs help with bigger housing, logistics and home duties when they have more kids, normally that help came from the grandparents but it's not happening anymore because the average age of the grandparents is higher, and baby boomers and "older generations" are assholes by blocking the housing options for their kids, i can also suggest that a adults with no kids can get some money by hour from the government for helping families with many kids as it is also needed sometimes.

solve this: - Housing issues. - Income issues. - Care and time issues.

It's really alarming when governments see their society collapsing and do nothing, if you have such government, remove it, it's a stupid government.

> folks are so damn self-absorbed that the whole system screws over regular people and kills their vibe for having kids.

Or maybe, just maybe,having kids just isnt that great and people (and especially women) are finally realising it.

For a lot of woman in "somehow develoed countries" the labour market is today more attractive than the "marriage market" as women rights etc. give them much more freedom than it was in older days (e.g. in some EU countries the woman had to ask their spouse if they allow them to work up into the 70s).

If you are for women rights etc., then you have to accept that this includes much lower birth rates (as having childrend is not the only way to survive).

Birth rates are only up in countries without any social development of women rights.

If we're going by "all species die out in the end" then anything we transition to will die too: entropy will get the whole universe in the end. Past that there's nothing that says any species can't expand out, settle whatever planets they want and stick around to the end. I'm also pretty cool with my millions-of-years-from-now descendants looking back at me and thinking about how different they are from me. I would consider it an incredible success to go that long without catastrophically destroying ourselves.

In other words: no pressure.

Pressure seems to be another factor why many women don't have kids. That and mixed messages about what constitutes a good person and not being told that your fertility starts tanking after 30

From TFA:

> Because Homo sapiens went through a series of near extinction level events before eventually triumphing – periodically reduced to a few thousand surviving members clinging on in a handful of African enclaves – we have very little genetic variation. The human family tree spreads out from a few individuals to encompass all of us.

How do we know there was only 1,000-10,000 individuals, 70,000 years ago?

>One statement in there grates: the idea that there never was a big population drop before

Nobody actually thinks there was never a population drop. The issue is there never was an economic, pension and welfare system built on population growth, so that when populations did dip, nobody was affected by the dip.

But on the contrary, in the past of agrarian societies, population declines massively benefited the working class, as they had more bargaining power with the landlords.

This doesn't work in the economies and societies of today when your retirement depends on there being constant economic and population growth.

Problem is not shrinking population. Problem is shrinking population with shrinking share of children and young adults and growing share of old people in the time when most people are completely helpless without access to modern goods and services.

China is now encouraging higher birth rates after many years of the one-child policy. But the general consensus is that it hasn’t been very successful, even with the CCP’s authoritarian power. The causes are multi-dimensional and difficult to solve: high living costs, changing social values, and younger generations who no longer want to marry young—or marry at all.

Even North Korea has to encourage women to give birth[0]; the Kim dynasty can’t simply issue an order and shoot anyone who disobeys. It simply doesn’t work that way.

[0]: https://www.voanews.com/a/north-korea-s-kim-calls-for-women-...

Banning the pill alone would be sufficient.[0] And you don't even need to ban it entirely, just slightly limiting the supply would be enough. Banning it entirely would double the fertility rate because the pill had cut it in half from 1960-1975 when it was introduced in the US.[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_oral_contraceptive_pi...

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...

I'm not sure. I know a lot of people who want to have kids, but are not because of the current economic situation. Whether this is real or perceived I am not sure; I have 3 kids, but I am doing alright at the moment.

The simple answer is that our current way of life (in the west at least) does not accommodate kids. We USED to have kids because they were an economic benefit to agrerian cultures, but have since become a burden since our society does not make time or resources for them, least of which is physical space when you consider urban life.

IF we want to increase the birth rate again, we need to shift our lifestyles away from being as career centric as they are today. We could for instance, remove the stigma of working part time or having a stay at home parent. We could encourage people not to grind long hours to climb the corporate ladder. Actually fix the housing problem without bending to NIMBYists and investors and provide affordable/accessible childcare.

Since children are the future tax-base and labor force of a nation, pay parents for raising kids, like its a job. It is kind of gross to view children in this perspective, but if we are talking about economics, well-adjusted children are just as much an input just as much as energy is.

Technologically speaking, we as a species are basically magic at this point, so I reject the notion that strategically recovering the birth rate is impossible, rather there is no will to.

You could also skip all that noise and just force women to have kids.

Thankfully most people have realized such things are insane and sexist, and don't want to see millions of more kids born to parents unable to properly care for them.

This problem is more nuanced that any party involved in the discussion admits.

It is a combination of consumerist, pseudo-individulistic, hedonistic, nihilistic culture, economic exploitation under late-stage capitalism, destruction of familial and local ties, access to birth control, women emancipation etc.

Even such authoritarian countries like China are still very much soaked in the same systemic goo, so you may ban abortions if you like, but that won't change much.

>Ban birth control pill

>Ban Abortion

Addressed in the article, but I'll reiterate here: Ceausescu's tried and failed.

Also, during Ceausescu reign, there was no social media, there was no TV, and housing was literally handed out by the regime for almost nothing.

It didn't matter. Fertility rate still went down. And the unwanted kids ended up in large numbers in the grim orphanages.

This is just not interesting. A dictator can force people to do things.

>My feeling is that birth rate could be solved in properly authoritarian country.

Socialist Romania did all that during communist rule and it exploded spectacularly 30+ years later when communism ended, that we're still feeling the negative backlash effects today.

The answer to birth rate issues, is not more forced government intervention, but less to none of it. The reason we're in a mess in the west is the governments putting too many thumbs on the economic and regulatory scales for far too long, manipulating the natural order of life. Modern industrialized highly skilled societies are detrimental to human biological reproduction.

If you built an economic system where kids need to leave the parents' village to go spend time grinding studying and upskilling till their mid 20s in a big city and then working till their mid 30s before they afford to move out of shoebox, with their parents nowhere near to help with childcare, you can't be surprised demographics collapse. As per the saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child.

You can't fuck with mother nature and not have it fuck you back. It's Newton's Third Law.

Plus, contrary to Reaganomics, the economy can't grow infinitely and neither can the population. Everything created by man eventually has a plateau and an end. So then why not reform the dated and broken "infinite growth" Ponzi-scheme economic system now towards a more sustainable model, instead of delaying its inevitable failure with stuff like 50 year mortgages and unlimited migration?

> My feeling is that birth rate could be solved in properly authoritarian country. With policies that won't fit to most "western" schemes.

Nazi-Germany had a pretty illiberal and authoritarian family policy which basically reduced women to their role as housewives and mothers by banning married women from the job market and incentivizing having multiple children. They didn't achieve their goal of increasing the birth rate in any significant means. Their family policy also backfired hard during the war. Because women were not supposed to work and received financial support in the absence of their husbands, women refused to go to work during the hot phase of the war. Note that this was in a time where access to birth control was practically non-existent and access to abortion difficult.

You can have a spiral of bad economic decisionmaking through demographic biases in natalism, but that's likely to be a product of cultural transmission, not of any biological property of intelligence, which is mean-reverting and only dubiously and marginally correlated with genetic variation.

Which is to say, you can make the point you're making without going out on a politically (and probably scientifically) incorrect limb.

Demographic collapse paired with high fertility for scientifically illiterate religious groups (Like the amish, who have a fertility rate of over 6) might still pair terribly with climate change driven by positive feedback loops (like methane leaking from thawing permafrost). We'll lose the technological and state capacity needed to mitigate & adapt while the global climate slowly trends towards an uninhabitable equilibrium.

Ever watch the movie Idiocracy? Was a stupid "comedy", today it seems to be a prophetic documentary.

I just fundamentally do not understand the economics of why everybody is so worried about aging and depopulation. TECHNOLOGY. ROBOTS. We us technology to increase production. We create more with less. Automation and technology should create an environment where less people can care for more more efficiently than ever before. Food production should require less people than ever before. Shipping. And not even just mechanical robots. Sunlight and yeast -> food.

The problem becomes the banks financing private ownership of the robots. Maybe the populations livelihood shouldn't be a profit center. Or in the case of the modern economy, where consistent profit is failure, an wealth extraction growth center.

I spend a lot of time thinking about this.

Stock market? As you write - what will happen when the next generation of consumers and workers won't be born? On the other hand it is clear that market is anything but rational, and maybe it doesn't really need people in the same way internet doesn't need real people. Maybe the future is bots trading with each other, pumping up the bubble.

Bonds? The same problem, lack of next generations.

Real estate? Land? Maybe if you already have something in very good location, though even then I am a bit skeptical.

Then one needs to remember that money is just a number. It doesn't matter how much digits you have, but what can you get with them - real resources and services. So maybe the question is wrong from the very beginning.

I sometimes believe that ironically the best insurance in childless world are your own children. Unless, of course, we will face a scenario where old people, constituting majority of the population, will squeeze those few remaining young hard to get their pensions and healthcare. Yes, the same people that today preach about how it is good to not have children etc. will be first to put a boot on them in the future. For this reason I expect growing tensions between those people with children and childless ones.

This is why I constantly find most such discussions on demography pointless, as participants rarely understand how everything in our society depends on the assumption that no longer holds - that there will be more people, and that young will be more numerous than old.

In the end probably best things to safeguard you in the upcoming crisis will be the same as always - local community, family (including children), friends and your own skills. People living in more agrarian societies, or just in the countryside, generally have better situation in that regard.