birth rates continue stunning decline worldwide (2025 estimates)

People living in agrarian communities have lots of children because there is a net benefit in having additional free labor to support farm work. When people move to urban areas, children become a cost because they cannot work until they are 16 and most will just do odd jobs for gas money while they are in school. As many urban areas have turned into mega-cities with skyrocketing cost of living, people are having fewer children and more and more are just skipping having a family as it is crazy expensive to get housing in a good school system or to pay for private school. And everything else you buy and do for your kids is crazy expensive from child care to sports to health care to entertainment. Then, most people have to have both parents working and can barely get two weeks a year for vacation. Family life with kids is beyond a struggle in most big metro areas.

In a capitalist economy, maintaining a replacement level birth rate is important because everything goes to hell if you do not have enough people who are working and spending their money. Japan is the prime example of the effects of demographic collapse. Demographic collapse can be managed by immigration. Spain is a good example. They have an extremely low birth rate but have opened immigration to Spanish speaking countries in South and Central America. These immigrants quickly assimilate and support economic growth.

Then there is the debate about whether the planet can sustain endless population growth. That really ends up becoming more of a question of whether the planet can sustain consumption patterns in the Global North. In the Global South, poor countries in Africa, S. and C. America, and parts of Asia, people consumer very little. But population levels are not sustainable because their economies are not developed and their agricultural practices are often very primitive and inefficient. So, everyone is poor. Population growth in the global south just exacerbates poverty. In the Global North, people are ravenous consumers to the point of putting stress on global supplies for food and natural resources. Population growth in the Global North is far more destructive.

Ok. That’s a bet that the future of society depends on

Not when you’re 85

Birth rates are collapsing even in places without a strong state.

Countries that get richer offer a lot of other things to do besides having kids. There’s a an opportunity cost when life has more to offer than subsistence agriculture (and birth control is available)

Theres certainly a social aspect as well. There’s some good articles that discuss why Mongolia and Kazakhstan are the only places to reverse birth rate declines by conferring big social status on mothers with many kids - when everyone around you is having less or more kids, most people make the choice to fit in.

This is probably the defining social problem of the next 50 years. There’s not a simply explanation or a simple solution.

Extremely good news we need much less people around not more. Cost of living is likely a huge factor plus women work and have careers these days; having and raising children is not their only reason for being around any more in most nations. From a health-care perspective we should be investing billions and billions of dollars into curing aging/curing chronic diseases. In terms of retirement benefits, I don't mind working another decade or two longer if I am healthy and I will probably get better at my job with the experience gained.

Cure the aging process and add another decade or two to the working life.

A lot of factors go into this:

-people the world over have less free time

-less financial security

-more uncertainty

than they did decades ago. If other needs aren't met, you can't expect people to desire families.

At the same time people have more opportunity for travel, education, and career advancement than they did decades ago. This means the opportunity cost of having children has risen.

Eventually, when the population gets low enough, governments will incentivize having children and the caclulus will change. Humanity will see cycles of negative and positive birth rates in the modern age.

Maybe Ozempic will reverse the fertility trend

I think a big factor is how much wealth is controlled by a small number of people, combined with people having access to birth control and not being farmers. People having kids might be something society needs, but who is going to pay for it when it means going into poverty? So we import immigrant labor. I'm basically a Democratic socialist, and I see the issue with the "import more immigrants because it's cheaper and quicker" strategy to fill our labor needs. It doesn't make me hate immigrants. The immigrants are willing to raise children in poverty because it's better than where they came from. The right has been fighting a war against socialist policy since FDR, despite the fact that the last time America was "great" was under all those policies. People need to feel valued and they need to feel secure if you want them to multiply, unless they are very poor, and then it just seems to happen out of ignorance or despair or a kind of nihilistic hope.

Show your math at what date you think we will hit 70% retired population.

In Tom Clancy’s book Rainbow Six from 1998, an extreme environmentalist group code named “The Project” creates a highly infectious Ebola strain called Shiva with the aim of wiping out most of humanity. They also create a “vaccine” with the aim of wiping out many others who don’t succumb to the initial virus. Conspiracy theorists would argue that nation states might have created the COVID virus and released it in order to relieve the burden of older generations on government entitlement programs and used the vaccine to decrease fertility among younger generations.

Great. What’s your solution if that isn’t possible?

I don’t think obesity or diabetes is a driving factor here, but it may have a small effect

By 2070 there will be 120 retirees for every 100 workers in South Korea.

South Korea is not an outlier. They’re just a decade or so ahead of the curve.

An innovative way to address this would be to end the war with North Korea and build senior living quarters in Pyongyang. It would provide economic stimulus to the North Korean economy and interconnect their economies leading to peaceful relations between the two countries. And for North Koreans, it would be better than being sent to Siberia to cut trees or to Ukraine to act as cannon fodder.

There are basically No places without a strong state left.

Just overlay the goverment expenditure % of gdp with the birth rate.

The countries with lowest % still have the highest rates.

But you dont need correlation to come to this conclusion. Getting kids costs you a Lot of opportunity in life. Why do this If family does Not stay together forever either way and you can relie on the goverment in retirement?

Family is substituted by the strong state. Kids are not needed.

Dating apps are a problem, too. 80% of the women go for the same 20% of guys (6ft, 6 pack, 6 figures). In the end, many men have given up on dating.

On the flipside, these 20% of men will not commit and then women remain childless.

Dating apps are a problem, too. 80% of the men go for the same 20% of girls (slim, double D, 6 figures). In the end, many women have given up on dating.

On the flipside, these 20% of women will not commit and then men remain childless.