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Funny, I just wrapped a blog post about this: https://green.spacedino.net/i-dont-worry-about-population-de...

Good presentation by the author that reaffirms my own opinions about the topic, specifically that while it sucks and cripples the social welfare programs our (deceased) elders built on the theory of continued population and productivity growth, it's also an issue we can fix with coordination between powers and workers. It's about building a new environment that puts families, rather than employers, first, and encouraging participation in the creation and maintenance of that environment by everyone regardless of age or demographic. The return of third places, social events, volunteerism, clubs, transit, public gatherings, stay-at-home parents, and more.

And as I've seen others point out in regard to the biological procreation imperative, we as a species are wired to breed. For all the whining from puritans about pornography, I'm of the opinion that its proliferation and normalization in fact reflects a deeply-held urge of humanity to have more time to have sex and live authentically again, whatever that may look like to the individual or family unit. Humans clearly want sex, and families, and time off, but the current global civilizational model is work > all, and thus families have taken a backseat to GDP growth at all costs.

I'm a single, gay man. During two of my last major existential crises, for about two weeks following, I noticed a marked turn of my thoughts and feelings towards having (biological) children. Stuff like, "If I'd had a kid at such-and-such age, how old would they be now?", "How would I manage if a child was suddenly in my life?", and "Oh god, my line stops with me panic". For a number of reasons, I am extremely unlikely to ever have kids; it would take a change in my prospects so massive that I can't really conceive of it. For this reason, I have come to feel that there may be a common (often irrational) biological impulse to procreate.

But now that I get to the bottom of my message, it occurs to me that it might be tangential, since you're talking about sex, which is related to but encompasses a far larger category of activity than just procreation. Speaking through my lgbt lens (and again, probably tangentially) this false conflation creates at least the dual issues of the incorrect ideas that sex should only be for procreation, as well as the the incorrect idea that queer people can't (or shouldn't) be parents. Here's hoping that both get nixed as we rethink the role of sex, and the importance of family, in society.

Just some rambling, don't mind me.

The fertility rate is falling everywhere, even countries that have extensive childcare and maternity/paternity leave. Sweden grants 68 weeks of shared parental leave and their TFR is at 1.45.

There is nothing authentic about porn, what a strange comment. Sure, it hacks the reward system of the brain in the same way that a slot machine does, but this does absolutely nothing to promote families.

This friend speaks my mind. Population decline is, on the whole, Good for humanity, in many, many ways. It's just bad for an economic system predicated on permanent growth, forever. That system was always doomed - if it weren't for demographic decline, it would just hit hard resource limits sooner. On the whole, I would much rather human population gradually decline through falling births, than precipitously crash through rising deaths.
Humans all across the developed world work 40% fewer hours than in 1900: https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever. Yet, in the U.S., TFR has consistently been dropping since 1800: https://ourworldindata.org/working-more-than-ever.
I’ve noticed that, besides the magnetism and drive for sex (which would be sufficient for a species to propagate), many people also experience the biological imperative (wanting their genes replicated) as its own separate feeling.

This makes no sense to me – it’s not a feeling I can personally relate to. I’d like to raise kids because I’d enjoy getting to teach them and share things with them, but I don’t care whether they are my biological children or not.

So it’s something I’ve wondered about. The likely why makes sense, but I don’t really get the what.

I think your thinking also aligns with the ideas outlined in The Future is Degrowth (https://www.versobooks.com/products/2620-the-future-is-degro...). I found it to be a very approachable book, if you haven't read it yet.
> we as a species are wired to breed.

Wired to orgasm, maybe. Wired to breed, no. According to all the data.

Humans are very analytical and do tons of cost benefit analysis before breeding, and apparently, choose not to in many cases.

> it's also an issue we can fix with coordination between powers and workers

Which is severely lacking in the most powerful nation on Earth

> It's about building a new environment that puts families, rather than employers, first, and encouraging participation in the creation and maintenance of that environment by everyone regardless of age or demographic.

Again, never going to happen in the USA at least.

The current human model is work > all because we are a capitalist system, and we reward greed because it's the best economic system we put up so far. There will be powerful interests fighting this and pushing all the costs of this heavy system failure onto their workers and consumers etc. and that's the whole problem we are facing...

“the ruling classes chose to ignore its symptoms out of convenience until the problem became insurmountably difficult to solve”

Not only the elite, but all the voters who don’t care because the elite told them large populations were dangerous. I still meet so-called smart college educated people that think a large population crisis is coming.

Here is an uncomfortable truth: religious people produce more children, regardless of their income, social welfare status and living conditions. They are thought from birth that marriage, family and children are gifts from "God".

In fact, Christians make it a _requirement_ to be "open to life" (i.e have children) before they agree to marry you in Church (in addition to banning contraceptives, abortions and porn).

They also believe that pursuit of wealth, status and greed is a sin and one should focus his attention inward , towards "God", "Family", and "Charity".. disincentivizing people from dedicating their lives to their careers and missing their chances of having kids. is it no surprise then, that they ten to have larger families?

What I'm trying to highlight here, isn't a celebration of religious practices but the fact that we need a massive cultural shift, first and foremost to resolve this issue and if I'm being honest, I don't see this happening anytime soon.. at least not in our hyper capitalist society.

I'm not sure many people (especially women) are willing to sacrifice their lifestyles, career aspirations and goals to have children.

Unless people are taught from birth that having kids is their sole purpose in life and that family, motherhood and communities are deeply celebrated by society, they will opt out of having kids.

The last line of the slide reads "Once you start thinking about these issues, it is hard to think about anything else: demography is destiny."

Raoul Pal primary thesis about macroeconomics is that Demographics is everything. Here is a 54 second video of him highlighting that issue.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJm_zFbIqPE

GDP = people * productivity

I’m super interested on the economic modeling when every society is shrinking.

In that case, the best index fund will be the one that shrinks the slowest. This will happen about 10 years after the average reader here dies.

Maybe expecting every single person to work and no one to homestead and care for the kids, within a system that explicitly does not support families, was a mistake. (Please note that I did not gender the roles. My best friend is a stay-at-home dad and he is amazing. They can afford to do this, though, because his wife's compensation is extremely high.)
Expectations are part of it, but regardless of compensation or lack thereof it turns out that a lot of adults simply prefer to work outside the home instead of caring for children. Child rearing is essential, and rewarding in many ways. But it's also exhausting, repetitive, and frustrating. It's not surprising that given the choice many adults would rather spend time around other adults instead of children. In the past most societies kind of "solved" this inherent problem by artificially restricting women's but obviously that's not acceptable or even feasible now.
No matter the gender of the one staying at home, it creates a problematic power imbalance between the two parts of the couple, where one depends on the other and may be left in trouble if ever the couple should find an end.
The future is probably a society with more robots than humans.

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...

The 1 million robot number that Amazon keeps on using is a quite nuanced. It includes more ~800K robots that simply just move stuff in a 2D plane. I think the number of robots that actually manipulate things is far far less (probably less than 500) (but really no human wants to just move things from A to B).

Also, I completely agree with what you said. Cars (w/ no self-driving) can be thought of as primitive robots (just like robots of today). For good or bad, we will move towards more and more automation.

they should form a union
The mid-century Baby Boom occurred after a surge in affordable home keeping technologies (vacuum cleaners, washing machines, refrigerators, etc). I think a rebound in fertility will have to come from technology. Specifically, robots to help with child care and new fertility treatments to allow women to have children later in their lives.
The mid-century Baby Boom came after WWII, and probably had very little to do with technology. The upswing started some time in late 1944 to mid 1945 as combat was winding down in Europe and a lot of young men were returning home. Otherwise fertility has been declining steadily since 1800 in western countries.
Late child birth is not about fertility but about risks for the child. The only woman I know (yeah, anecdotes) who attempted to delay getting a child until after her 40th birthday got a baby with down syndrome. I know what living with a disability in our world means, from personal experience. And given that experience, I have a hard time giving these women some slack. I think they are risking the well being of their children just for their own selfish reasons. We are humans, and there are limits to what we can do. We need to accept them, or we will make other people suffer.
While I wouldn’t like to place all my faith in that happening, that would certainly be a great development.
Baby booms normally happen after a big war. After all the death, people have a primal urge to procreate.

I read that people were copulating in the streets of London the day of the Armistice.

> robots to help with child care

Tell me you don't have kids without telling me you don't have kids.

From an "efficiency" perspective, one can already eliminate 90% of the work of childcare by putting your kid in a sturdy playpen with a secure hard top and wearing noise canceling headphones. People don't really want to do this, for the most part.

The interactive learning is the entire point of childcare. Having machines raise your kids will make it so you end up with kids that were raised by machines. Is that what you want? It seems like this is basically already a thing, with the varying amounts of screen time that parents will allow kids.

I'm probably going to get in trouble for this, but the population numbers and statistics for Africa are totally unreliable. Fertility and total population are all wrong.

The DRC is said to have 100M people, but check out satellite imaging. There's no chance -- and I mean none -- that it actually has 100M people. Unless 9-out-of-10 inhabitants live in the woods under tree cover, the actual population of the country is probably closer to 10M.

You don't have to take my word for it. Look for yourselves. And take an satellite shot of Kinshasa (reported population ~19M), rotate or mirror-image it, and then ask GPT-5 to estimate its population. Also, compare for yourself vs. a place like Shanghai. (Reportedly just 20% more populous, but also visibly denser and roughly an order of magnitude larger.)

Many other countries in the region, like Nigeria, are much the same way. The population numbers don't line up with satellite imaging.

Then there are obvious economic measures, etc.

The unavoidable conclusion is that the numbers for Africa are maximally unreliable. There are various reasons for this that we can speculate on (foreign aid dependent on population numbers, etc.), but, anyway, at least take 'em with a grain of salt.

Ironic as it may sound, coming from a childfree millennial, I'm kind of puzzled how the system will survive. Both my grandparents died in their 90s, and spent over 30 years are retirees - mainly living off their state pension.

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.

The selection effects of this transition will be really fascinating to see after the fact. The species has spent a long time under selection pressure for "having more kids", but is being subjected for the first time to "having more kids while extreme prosperity and modern telecommunications exist" which is a very different thing.
Paul Ehrlich was almost exactly wrong about everything, but he continues to frame the discourse to a ridiculous degree. I'm not sure what the magic pixie dust is that allows people to be this wrong and still have credibility.
Everything is hostile to having kids. High consumer prices and house rents, media and celebrities advertising short term pleasures, big city way of life in anonymity entertaining alone until death, latest social trends in gender roles, low state financial support to families.

There must take place fundamental social reforms in order to reverse this path. The most important is to create working mothers and not dynamic but single women.

I remember when I was younger being constantly told that the earth was destined for overpopulation. That if we didn't do things soon to curb fertility there was going to be mass starvation and death. That this was just an inevitability, a certainty unless something was done. There were so many visions of the future based on overpopulation and the problems it would bring. Now we've switched to the opposite side, I never even got to enjoy the apparently brief moment when things were exactly right.

I say all this not to say that this article and all the worries about demographic decline must be fake/overstated, but I don't like the certainty that we just switched our worries from one extreme to the opposite.

Little mention of automation in the labor discussion. Also, no real discussion of the consumerism aspect of the economy when talking about worker productivity.

Depopulation shouldn't be a big deal when it's decades away and will be a slow decline.

This trend doesn't bode well for the long term survival of the social welfare state.
The complaining about fertility rates, mostly done by the chunk of the population hoarding more and more of the wealth, will continue until people's ability to afford rent and children improves.
I feel like slide 39 would have gotten you chased out of polite society 10 years ago.

A lot of western countries economies are built on sustained mass migration. Australia, Canada, New Zealand. Arguably the United States where both parties champion it (turn the other check to illegal migraiton of the democrats VS mass H1B visas of the republicans).

As this study points out, it's not sustainable.

Link to the keynote presentation, fills a lot of the gaps in the slides: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7_e_A_vFnk
When I posted the same result a few weeks ago, it got [flagged] in short order: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44520297
one small thing = https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/BFI_WP_2...

and haha on “The “rebound” in future fertility for low-fertility countries is consistent with an expectation of continued progress toward gender equality and women’s empowerment and improving social and economic opportunities for young people and families.”

if humans stop age and live for thousands years, then there is no need for specific replacement rate.

Alternative, make it possible to have kids without heavy burden on the woman body.

Alternative, make it possible to become pregnant at 50-60 years.

This is all research vectors that we should work on, and not doom on hypothetical what ifs in the future!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_horse_manure_crisis_of_1...

We must act IMMEDIATELY to secure london from this great tidal wave of horse manure.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7_e_A_vFnk

Recorded talk for the slides in this post.

> Don’t we care about output per capita?

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.

The point on p. 39 about immigration is important for everyone to understand:

> 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-...

I'm quite tired of this topic being brought up all the time. What's the solution? We've seen that economic incentives won't do, so what? Force women to have children? Punish celibates? Let's not kid ourselves (pun intended), the "solutions" to this "crisis" are worse than the outcome.

Look on the bright side, a declining demography makes human activity that much more sustainable, and maybe our descendants won't even have to worry about restricting their carbon emissions to keep the planet inhabitable.

In the meantime, we'll have to take a cut to our way of life, which I can live with. We don't need to travel to the other side of the globe yearly, we don't need three cars per household, etc.

It's quite telling that the people most concerned with this usually self-label as "pro-markets libertarians". Is market health more important than bodily autonomy? What happened to freedom?

I think it's gonna be fine. The capital per person (capital deepening) will be great. Things that prove hard to automate will suffer — maybe elder care can't be automated and will go to shit — but a lot of stuff can be automated.
This is all well and good, but population dropping will only impact our civilization a little. I think this is an issue only because the "very rich" may actually see their standard of living fall. For the poor, it will have no real impact.

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.