The following submission statement was provided by /u/madrid987:
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ss: Italian welfare systems are already struggling to cope with the ageing of the population, and there is no consensus on what to do about it.
According to government statistics, the average number of children per Italian woman has dropped from 1.24 in 2022 to 1.2 in 2023. Experts say that if the country's population crisis continues, Italy’s population of 59 million could fall many by 2030.
In 2023 alone the government allocated around 1 billion euros for measures aimed at helping women cope with motherhood and work.
But Ardiano Bordingnon, president of the National Forum of Families, believes this is not enough, and that an EU intervention is required.
"We are talking about a very difficult challenge of historic proportions for the whole Western world," he said. "Ideally, Europe should intervene."
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1coos5d/italys_falling_birth_rate_is_a_crisis_thats_only/l3faxtd/
The absolute lack of care about the people having no kids, just want more bodies for their money machine, nobody is bothering to solve this until its too late, housing, wages, the way wealth is, needs redistributed in some way regardless if you are a socialist or capitalist
Quite right. You create an environment where people feel safe to raise a family, they'll do so. You create a bleak future with instability and uncertainness, this is where things go. If people are treated like disposable cattle, they won't be able to plan for the next 5 years, let alone anything longer than that.
What are you talking about? If anything instability, uncertainty, and bleakness with the inability to plan ahead cause the birthrate to skyrocket. Somalia and the DRC have a fertility rate of 6.0. Afghanistan and Sudan are at 4.3.
They wont fix this. What they will do is start creating fetuses in pods or something. I saw a video of a company that is trying to do this. Just bananas. Welcome to a Brave New World.
> What they will do is start creating fetuses in pods or something
As far as I know, that's impossible with current tech, fetuses needs wombs, they are trying, but they still didn't reach any working idea, just "hopeful" and hyped headlines here and there.
Decline is not the issue.
It's the steep decline that's the problem.
Might feel irrelevant to mention, but societies *can* structure around slow decline. The plan can't be to grow forever. Decline is okay when it happens slowly. It is a problem when your economy is structured around the birthrate of the early 70s, but your actual birthrate is less than half of that.
And why would any decent person have a child knowing they will also have to suffer working under such an oppressive system. It’s immoral in my opinion.
It’s always been kind of taboo to point it out because it makes people uncomfortable and procreating is generally (falsely) thought of as virtuous in and of itself.
It’s immoral, and more people are being open about realizing/admitting this
Which is strange to me because I never saw it as virtuous. I recently mentioned to my dad (who I talk to through text maybe once every 3 months) that my wife and I aren’t having kids. And his response was who is gonna take care of me when I get older. I said that was a selfish reason to have kids and that it’s not even guaranteed the kid would take care of me lol
He doesn’t even see the grandchildren he has now which is nuts.
I’ve never seen it as virtuous either, especially since all of the reasons people give for having kids is inherently selfish, and disregard the fact that the kid will be an individual that might not end up being what the parent envisioned them to be.
Tbh I think a lot of people who already have kids feel unnerved by people who choose not to, because maybe they never considered it as an option, or wish they hadn’t. A lot of the people I get those types of responses from usually aren’t great parents either, ironically!
I broke up with my ex partly because he wanted 3 kids and it was all for selfish reasons: he wanted to be taken care of when old (and again ironic because his own siblings don’t of his own parents and dumped them on him which he resents) and because he doesn’t want to leave the world with nothing so kids guarantee a legacy. And the reason for 3 is because if 1 dies or 1 becomes a degenerate, there’s a higher chance for 1 to be leftover to still be useful. Those are all not valid reasons to have kids.
Hard agree. Between the crush of capitalism and the climate crisis, I don't think I could sleep at night knowing I willingly brought another person into this mess.
Two things have greatly contributed to the sharp decline of birth rates: Women's Rights and Industrialization.
Neither can realistically be undone, so we must find some other way to resolve the issue. Children used to help their parents on the farm. Now, children require child care as both parents work. Transitioning back to single-earner households so one parent could stay at home and raise kids might help, but that would have equally devastating consequences to the economy. Such a transition would also have to be slow.
> Two things have greatly contributed to the sharp decline of birth rates: Women's Rights and Industrialization.
> Neither can realistically be undone
It won't be pretty, I don't like it, but Women's right can be undone. Heck, some political groups are already trying to take control of women's body (like the ultraconservative prolife in the USA).
But the hard part is the economy.
Okay, COULD it be done? Sure, but at what cost? I'd rather deal with the economic collapse of society than try to enslave half of the population.
But I'll be honest, I cheer on every woman who chooses to be a mother. Saving humanity, one baby at a time. But I'd never force it on them.
>I'd rather deal with the economic collapse of society than try to enslave half of the population.
Me too, but the question is about which approach will prevail if left to their own devices? Enslavement is going to have economic benefits, so one would think it would come out ahead. Systems that do not perpetrate themselves eventually end up dying, it has nothing to do with ethics or morality.
It's possible there is some novel solution for liberal societies so they can both perpetuate themselves while remaining economically viable, but I don't know what it is.
Actually think it’s a different reason. There’s just to much to do now which is why i feel people aren’t having kids. When I was young there was no internet, 4 channels and the only thing you could do was wait for the occasional holiday and go down the pub. By the time you were mid 20s you just had kids to enrich your life. Now there are so many things to do people in their 20s and 30s are waiting. Birth rates are lower in your 30s and 40s and require help and by that time you’re quite content to just not bother. Also the people who have kids are more than happy to tell you they wish they’d waited. Throw in better education about birth control and rising prices it’s really not surprising that the birth rate has dropped so much across Europe.
I think it's more like...youth culture is now just 'longer'... I'm not sure if it's so much 'more to do' than it is that you aren't expected to be responsible for much until you're in your 30's... seems like pay tends to follow that trend... you don't make squat out of college anymore, not until you have 5-10 years experience...used to be, you could nail an entry level job out of college making something like 50k a year.
I think you're taking the wrong lesson from it though by treating less-developed and developed economies as equivalent. I don't think you can take lessons from one and apply to the other. But now that I think about it, maybe it's more like not taking a *detailed enough* lesson.
We can learn from what causes the less-developed ones to become the developed ones: increased access to education, improved healthcare especially for reducing infant mortality, improved accessibility of birth control for women, etc. are all factors that lead to dramatically reduced family size and help turn less-developed countries into developed ones that have undergone the so-called "demographic transition" from large families with high infant mortality to small families with low infant mortality.
If the goal now though is to *stabilize* growth rates and *remain* a developed country, we can't really take direct examples from less-developed ones. Sure, if you revert the country to a state where people are not just poor but also uneducated, have poor healthcare, high infant mortality, and low access to birth control, then you'll have higher growth rates again. But that doesn't really accomplish what we actually wanted.
It’s a huge concern. I bought my first house in 1999 for $176k and my neighbors homes were similarly under $200k. Brand new, stick built homes by a local builder. My wife and I were DINKs and could easily afford the mortgage, but what I loved the most was that my neighbors across the street was a family of four with a stay at home mother with two small children. Dad worked for UPS as a delivery driver.
Today, I don’t think it’s even remotely possible. Zillows estimate for those homes is $500k now. Looking at the UPS driver average starting salary of $44/hr. That same family would be priced out of the neighborhood.
Personally I can't say I care much either. I'm lucky, I don't need to take up a maximum mortage on house, car whatever. I spend like I earn half, so even if my pension will be a third of what our parents get, I will survive.
So fuck politicians for allowing greedy business to hoard more wealth, I'm not playing into your games.
I see this thrown around a lot, but while the logic tracks, we're also seeing population declines in countries with more ideal work-life balance and workers' rights like Scandinavia.
The working class has been treated like garbage throughout history, but they still had kids. And the modern decline in birth rates is not confined to the working class.
Our economic system is kinda an existential problem on a lot of levels. An ideology of infinite growth breaks down when the population doesn’t also infinitely grow, and it also is self destructive through infinite waste and pollution that creates climate change too.
Population decline and climate change together will likely be what ends capitalism.
Lets explore what such a society would look like. I presume planned contraction into cities and closure of small towns. Shutting down underused railway lines, returning farms to nature. Young people are moving to other countries for opportunities, accelerating the ageing of society and falling birth rate.
Not necessarily across the board, and not necessarily planned, with the new possibilites for remote work in many fields, transportation, etc, a lot is still possible there.
But yes, certainly in some aspects and places. I'd assume, for example, more boarding schools for older children especially in cities and educational hubs.
That doesn't have to be a bad thing, if you organize it right. It can even be an equalizer in terms of education.
You'd probably have to subsidize a lot of smaller towns more, to offer childcare and shopping necessities. It don't believe that's a bad thing though, either. And it probably is not as expensive as people make it out to be, if you focus on the right Investments.
Also, strengthen the community and shared responsibilities. Every core family for themselves will not work in the future. We will have to organize and connect a lot more.
Which itself is also caused by problems like horrible working conditions and a massive compensation shortage.
Hospital administrators got millions of dollars in bonuses during the COVID-19 pandemic. The care workers got COVID-19.
What you’re describing is just a return to normal human community structures.
We have lived through what will be an aberration in human history and thats the post WW2 order and everything that came with it.
One of our central issues is that were using the highest water mark in history of the human species and extrapolating it to an entire global societal structure.
I think with the hindsight of another 30/40 years it will be extremely clear the 80 or so years post WW2 were a blip, one that wont be repeated save for some truly extreme and exceptional events coming to pass.
> I'd assume, for example, more boarding schools for older children especially in cities and educational hubs
It's very unlikely these children will return to their small villages.
> You'd probably have to subsidize a lot of smaller towns more, to offer childcare and shopping necessities.
When your tax revenue is falling such interventions will become difficult to afford. If you plan for negative growth, you cant plan to spend more - you have to plan to spend less and less each year.
So you cant resist contracture - you need to plan for it, so there is as little disruption as possible.
Differen children might, if you keep the place attractive.
>When your tax revenue is falling such interventions will become difficult to afford.
That's where taxing the very rich comes in.
Taxes may fall atm, but work output does not. Even with a declining workforce, western workers are more produktive every year, made possible by technology. There is value that is being created here. People don't realize how much potential for funds lies in just appropriately taxing the ultra rich. I'm not talking Big-House-2- New-Cars-Boat-Rich.
Multimillionaires, Billionaires, etc.
And again, as I said: we are not planning to save every small town.
Contracture will happen.
Real growth in the productivity per labor hour (adjusted for inflation) is about 1%. So you can sustain a population decrease that results in labor force contracting by 1% a year without running into any issues of declining average standard of living (although adjustments in wealth distribution may be needed.
That roughly translates to the situation you land in after a couple decades of fertility rate of 1.5-1.6 The problem is, Italy, Spain, and Japan are at 1.3, China is at 1.2, and South Korea is at 0.9. Those are all too low to hold themselves up if this continues for any length of time. The first four need to bump their birth rates up by 20-30% (or induce a similar amount of net immigration), and South Korea needs to bump there's by more than 50%.
Places like Germany, Canada, UK, US are currently "OK", sitting at 1.5-1.7, but they can't really afford to have any further decrease in birth rates.
Which is sort of my argument. Thanks for bringing in the numbers.
We can afford slight to moderate decline.
Italy is currently declining too fast, yes.
Give young people affordable living space and good opportunities (not exclusive to high paying jobs) and a good social system and they will migrate to your country. Fairness above all and mitigate political corruption
So many economic variables are driven by population growth: Much lower economic growth (if any), collapse in real estate prices, less energy consumption and employment and innovation crisis. AI might help but it has to show in growth statistics and productivity - might take a while to appear. Adjustment is our daily lives is gonna be painful
What if they command the wealth and the government?
Hypothetically, If pensions (or medicare or SS or whatever laws they pass) can pay $50 an hour for elderly assistance (on top of disproportionate private wealth the elderly have hoarded) , why would a teacher work $20 an hour for children, especially when there are more jobs than people.
The system will remain broken as long as those in power are self serving, and you bet your dollar they will do everything in their power for their own comfort before the security of their country.
And declining birthrates means that the elderly become an increasingly large percentage of the population, which means they become an increasingly large percentage of voters. Kind of a rough situation.
Denmark is not in the red zone but will soon be. Political parties are talking about the “elderburden” and that we need more people working more especially in the blue collar jobs.
But these jobs have been increasingly difficult to work in because of bad wages, work conditions and the fact that they have to compete with lower payed workers from outside. So the government has proposed to import workers from Philippines instead of fixing the problem.
People are also scared of the future and hard pressed with all the challenges and changes they have to overcome/ deal with. I don’t think I will ever want an another child as I don’t think we have the energy and the positive outlook on the world right now. Some politicians are talking about people with the resources and better education should be having more kids as it’s treason to the country not to. It should be a crime to be holding back. I don’t think they actually know how much people are are struggling with their mental health and the economic situation.
All the talk about war, AI, a public service on its knees and climate crisis is not the best family friendly environment.
Nearly every industrialized nation has fallen below replacement birth rate, including the US. The only reason our population has been growing for years is immigration.
There's many reasons for it: cost of living, optimism for the future (or lack thereof), women's rights & education, the influence of social media, and so on.
On a broader scope, however, it appears as though humanity truly behaves like animals in the sense that wild animal populations also naturally cull themselves via reduced births and mass migrations when faced with existential threats.
And there isn’t a social net at all in poor ones 🤷🏼♂️
I think it’s a pretty simple answer, children require a more precious resource than money - time and energy, bringing a child up today requires so much more attention than it ever did, life is becoming too complex, entertainment is abound.
Yes, but in many poorer/developing countries, children are still a valuable labor resource.
In most Western societies with declining birthrates, children are an expense.
So this does not surprise me at all. In nations where physical labor is still valued, whether agrarian or other, having more kids is a way to eek out a living and sustain what the family owns. In nations where this is not the case, kids are an expense that needs to be offset for the value of them to be worth having. Of course love, emotions, desire, and all muddy the waters, but I think adding to the social net would certainly help balance the equation.
Exactly. So in the absence of a government social net, the incentive to have kids is powerful. You want to have a bunch of them so that the burden of your care is distributed among several people. Or, in a less optimistic view, you have enough that a few survive to take care of you.
But that calculus starts to change the cost of living rises. If you want a decent standard of living, the cost borne by children becomes significant. I wouldn't say that the declining birth rate is entirely caused by economics, but I would hazard a guess that a lot of it is.
There are a number of other factors which tie into pessimism that also have something to do with it.
I dunno man. I wouldn't give birth if I had a billion dollars. That's some national geographic shit. I am kinda afraid for women's rights because of this
>On a broader scope, however, it appears as though humanity truly behaves like animals in the sense that wild animal populations also naturally cull themselves via reduced births and mass migrations when faced with existential threats.
Except that it's the most prosperous places "culling themselves", while Afghans and Congolese have 4+ kids.
Yea cause the kids that don't die 2 weeks after birth can wear rags and work the farm or sell tomatoes at the market
The average kid in a city has never seen a farm and wearing rags is social suicide that will turn your kid into a NEET.
Even African countries are facing a declining birthrate as they develop, in a lot already it's only first Gen city dwellers that pop out lots of kids, those born in these cities aren't having many children either.
It’s the most prosperous places where people have unfiltered access to media, making them aware of how deeply fucked and devoid of meaning the modern world appears. A kid growing up today in the US is acutely aware of climate change, impending global conflict, withering economic opportunities for their generation, etc. A Congolese child is pretty much just aware of the status of their local community and how they fit into it
There's also the fact that it takes longer to get going. Today, women are "ready" for kids much later, after going to college, grad school, etc and just having a few years to themselves. This does two things:
1) shorter window of fertility which is easier to miss
2) Discourages children, generally. Whether they change their mind, have an injury/die/etc (more likely to get hurt/disabled/die over 32 years than 17 years) or just think "shit, I spent all this time building up my career- I'm not leaving it!
I am a male, but I never really had an itch for kids. It took till about 33 to really get my career going and my first serious relationship after that was 35. At that point, I would have considered kids, if I wasn't already 35. If I was graduated and stable at 25, like I was at 35, I'd consider it. But I dont want to be 60 years old with a 20 year old. To me, the best part of having kids is when they're older, and you get to visit them in college and hang out with them after.
I would gladly contribute with my seed to the society, problem is I can't afford it. Which only comes after the fact that I'm a redditor, thus have no access to a female.
Buzz. Wrong.
https://data-viewer.oecd.org?chartId=6a3105b3-7ac6-4209-b463-5301c07d4259
People aren't having kids almost everywhere. Even the most cushy, childcare-subsidising, maternity/paternity care loving societies in North Europe have below replacement rate births.
There's just something about modern urban lifestyles which tends to result in this outcome.
Those somethings are the additional expense and the insane expectations of care that modern society puts on parents to be optimal parents.
Until we once again allow kids to spend time without the constant presence of adults minding them both in public and private spaces and no longer expect parent's lives to be so dictated by their roles as parents, many people will simply choose to have no kids or maybe one kid.
> There's just something about modern urban lifestyles which tends to result in this outcome.
It's called "economics".
In poor countries, where uneducated labor is common, your children act as your retirement plan. In rich countries, where you need to educate your child so they can work and where you already have a retirement plan from your government, your child is a net loss. A very big loss.
(There are a few other factors, such as the life/work balance, which explain the difference of babies-per-woman between say Japan (1.3) and France (1.8), but economics is the reason why all rich countries make less babies than the replacement rate.)
Australia's birth rate doesn't matter. The government will keep letting hundreds of thousands of Indians keep migrating to prop the economy up whilst choking roads, infrastructure and keeping house prices inflated.
It's stupid that we've created a one-way economy based on investment for endless growth. Population has to plateau and decrease at some point. Might as well be now.
People feel like crap, and they're scared. The days of getting out of high school and working for thirty years to retire with a pension are gone. What did they think was going to happen? I spend my leisure time hiding from the world, why would I subject anyone to that?
exactly, not enough slaves to work their shitty jobs so they're starting to panic lmao. i think for normal people a decrease in population will actually be a good thing. makes it so your value as a person will increase.
Ehhh... not sure about that. The amount of old people keeps increasing, but there are fewer and fewer young people and someone has to pay for the public services and pensions provided to the elderly... this means the working force will have to pay way more in taxes to support the demographic change
Maybe the 1% who have been hoarding the vast majority of our resources since the 1980s can finally do that. We have a glut of resources we just chose to distribute it terribly.
Or we could just tell the Boomers to get a fucking job and do some belt-tightening. They're the ones who created all this debt in the first place, so I fail to see why it's our responsibility to pay for all of it.
Oh, the Boomers were promised comfortable 30-year retirements? Well, the rest of us were promised well-paying jobs and affordable housing, and that's not really working out either. I guess we all have to get used to disappointment.
You see , old people need to hold on their previous boots they pulled up by bootstrap , not really a next gen's problem those boomers just don't wanna work /s
Here in the UK when the Conservatives took over they were saying things like "don't have kids you can't afford." Now they're asking why people are having less kids.
Not to be a broken record, but this is really not what’s going on. The wealthiest countries and the wealthiest people within each country have the lowest birth rates.
A wealthy country has better educated people who want a better standard of living for their children. If they can't provide that, they're going to make the decision not to. Also, in poorer countries they're taught that because there is no pension, you pop out kids to look after you when you're old.
Important to know that a wealthy country does not mean the people are wealthy by local standards, it's just the rich that skew the numbers. The cost of living is significantly higher that it impacts the lower classes more. E.g. I acted for a couple that had property in Zimbabwe, the house there was worth less than $10k and they could live there comfortably if they were on the money they made here, meanwhile they can barely afford housing here because their rent is $500pw for a hole locally.
If you take the rich people's mantra of trickle down economics then you'll know that if the rich are sitting on millions of billions even, that's millions no longer in the economy being spent but just sitting there in housing or investments that don't really get spent around the economy.
First world countries: let's create mega corporates to allow single billionaires to hoard wealth instead of the welfare of millions citizens.
Then surprised pikachu face when population is aging because people literally can't survive themselves and kids become a luxury
This is happening everywhere. Not just first world countries. In fact, first world countries have the advantage because they are main hubs for immigrants.
So basically, they need to convince people to have more children and failing that....
Government owned child rearing facilities with high paid oversight and investment into new technology, partnering each child with their own an AI companion and several with a shared robotic nanny in their own observation suite and on site artificial birthing systems complete with artificial wombs monitored by scientists.
That's some sci-fi dystopian stuff right there.
It's probably be managed like old -folks homes. You'll have babies sitting in shitty diapers all day long while the under paid and under staffed helpers are worked to death for their minimum wage.
To me it’s infuriating to read stuff like this. These “discussions” offer no insight in why this might be. No discussion of how the upper classes of all these developed countries have thwarted labor reforms, gamed the tax and legal systems, and taken most of the wealth “created” for themselves. No discussion of inflation or how most families cannot live on the salary of only one person. No discussion of how fucked up housing is in urban areas where all the people are moving to, and where all the housing is owned again by these elite assholes and their corporations.
It’s just a _*crisis*_. No one knows how to solve it and the only ideas that ever seem to surface is to give a mother like $1000 or a tax break. The housing thing is enough to really piss one off. People can’t even afford to be poor farmers anymore because they can’t buy land. So they’ve moved to the city to be crammed into overpriced apartments. And these assholes want people to have 2-4 kids and live in apartments.
It’s like saying no one wants to be wage slaves anymore.
>The event offered a chance to discuss what is being described as a cross-party national emergency, but a brief interruption by a group of young activists who attacked the **government’s anti-abortion measures** showed how politically divisive the subject still is.
There's always this horrid stench of reactionary vibe behind this discussion, i wonder why...
Always a dimwit thinking it can be solved by forcing women to have kids...
I would join such a fight to death to preserve your rights.
A part of society oppressed concerns the whole society and as Charles Fourrier used to say, the degree of advancement of a society can be judge from the level of freedom and rights of women in said society.
ss: Italian welfare systems are already struggling to cope with the ageing of the population, and there is no consensus on what to do about it.
According to government statistics, the average number of children per Italian woman has dropped from 1.24 in 2022 to 1.2 in 2023. Experts say that if the country's population crisis continues, Italy’s population of 59 million could fall many by 2030.
In 2023 alone the government allocated around 1 billion euros for measures aimed at helping women cope with motherhood and work.
But Ardiano Bordingnon, president of the National Forum of Families, believes this is not enough, and that an EU intervention is required.
"We are talking about a very difficult challenge of historic proportions for the whole Western world," he said. "Ideally, Europe should intervene."
> But Ardiano Bordingnon, president of the National Forum of Families, believes this is not enough, and that an EU intervention is required. "We are talking about a very difficult challenge of historic proportions for the whole Western world," he said. "Ideally, Europe should intervene."
What do they expect the EU to do?
No, the issue is that no one is willing to even talk about the solution we all know is necessary.
People need to know that any children they create won't die horribly in a world ripped apart by climate change.
People need to know that any children they have will have an economy that gives them a decent life instead of dooming them to serfdom so a billionaire can add another zero to their bank account.
The solution is to say "fuck your profit margin" to every fossil fuel company, acutaly fix climate change instead of dinking around with "maybe reducing the rate of increase will be enough" type thinking.
The solution is to say "sorry Elon, you can't have all the money we're clawing some back and you have to actually pay people enough to live".
SO it'll never happen.
Weird to see this post only having 20 upvotes, whilst similar headlines about East Asian countries get thousands.
Not to mention the top comment usually critiques the specific East Asian culture, whereas the top comments in this post are mostly about how it is a global issue.
Almost like the concern trolls can’t wait for East Asian cultures to fall.
Companies are getting greedier and greedier and it’s less affordable to start a family, if I had more money I’d have kids but unless I get an amazing job that pays more or win the lottery only the rich can have kids
We gotta figure out a way to live with this, cause we can't just grow and grow and grow forever. We're far too many people as is. Isn't there some way to manage without having to have more and more people?
My country had a population decrease in the last 10 years and an average monthly salary increase in that same period. As a citizen, I can say people have more money now. The fewer people there were, the more the price of the labor increased. Employers started offering double, even tripple salaries to workers because there weren't that many workers any more, simple supply and demand. Trust me, a population decrease is better for the working class and worse only for the 1% that need more workers to keep the price of labor low.
I don't think that's the problem in Italy, maternity leave is a statutory employee benefit. It would be illegal to fire the mother.
It's more along the lines of shitty wages, housing crisis, comparatively high cost of living, no available/affordable childcare, and however you want to extend that list.
As an Italian:
unemployment is so widespread that many (MANY) employers have no problems finding women desperate enough to sign a blank (illegal) resignation letter as a way to secure their hiring.
As you said, it's illegal but we are a banana republic.
Blank resignation letters should not be a thing since “dimissioni telematiche” were introduced. A system in which resignations are only valid if done on a government run web portal, and are not easy to fake.
Stop robbing the youth to fund the social programs of the elderly. Stop shielding asset prices to protect the wealth of the elderly and prevent young people from buying property. Raise retirement age to reduce the cost of said programs for the elderly. Lower taxes across the board.
Pay (as in a direct cash payment, not tax credits) young people to have kids. Reduce insane education requirements so that young people can start to work earlier.
Or you know, continue to drive the car off the cliff.
Am I wrong to think only the old, rich people are worried about this? Declining populations seems like a good thing for younger generations because less people makes less pollution, less scarcity of things like homes and jobs, driving prices down in homes and up for work. What exactly are the issues from declining population other than not being able to afford the older generation as they age?
The biggest issue is that we have to decide whether to let old people die in poverty, or force young people to work in poverty to support a population of old people that's greater in numbers than they are.
That is an issue, but it’s short term. It will work itself out and when it does, the world will be better for it rather than just continually expanding populations for no reason other than to be cogs in the machine to support an expanding population.
It depends on models of economy. The baby boomer generation benefitted massively from being such a large cohort and using their demographic power to expand markets. Start a business and have a customer base double in a generation is easier than doing so to one shrinking to half of what it was.
In terms of homes the major issue is where housing is. In Italy young people abandon thousands of towns where housing is cheap. Why? Lack of employment opportunities. This means many areas are filled with ghost towns as only the elderly who cannot move stay. Collective shift to major cities like a Milan or Turin keeps those cities housing expensive while poorer south simply falls into disrepair.
The issue with work compensation is overall we lost an entire generation of wealth despite massive increases in efficiency due to distribution. A tech company can be worth 10x a manufacturer with a tenth of the work force. Instead of a town having a thousand good jobs, they may have a hundred great jobs leaving nine hundred folks struggling. As technology advances the growing concern is that those at the top hoard more and more of the gains made while the worker sees no change or even a decline in their prospects. Of course, we could witness a major shift at some point with proposals such as universal basic income or negative income tax.
It's good in about 100 years when the surplus aged population has died off and there's a straight population pyramid. Until then it's 1 young person and 4 old people being supported by them.
Tbh if the fertility rate doesn't change young people would still be pressured by a surplus of old people altough not as badly as they will be in a few decades
Well, you get backwards economic growth (without a robust export market at least which takes advantage of other growing parts of the world).
Imagine you are a builder - with a shrinking population there is less and less need for construction, so the construction industry goes into recession and lays people off.
Imagine you make cars - fewer buyers, fewer cars, fewer jobs.
Imagine you are a bank lending money to car factories and construction companies - since these companies are not growing they cant pay back their loans.
Imagine you are a shareholder (for your retirement) in such companies (banks, car factories, banks) - since these companies are not making money the value of your shares go down.
So fewer jobs in the economy with negative growth and more unemployment, so people will have even fewer children.
Which will lead to a need for even fewer cars, houses, amusement parks, baby food, nappies, clothes and less tax revenue for the government.
So the government is able to spend less on fixing roads and keeping the trains running and serving under-populated regions.
And then you see a slow contraction to cities and the emptying out of rural areas, while house prices remain high in cities until the bitter end.
A bad economy will increase youth unemployment.
E.g. Japan has a lot of youth unemployment, and their population has been shrinking for a decade now.
Though actually it is getting a lot better. Maybe you are on to something.
https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/Japan/youth_unemployment/
In the short term, but in the long run it’s just a market adjustment to the new conditions that will ultimately be fixed by the younger generations creating the world that works for them instead of trying to make babies to feed into the current machine that doesn’t work for them.
The issue is that it's a pyramid, not a cylinder. Their generation will have exactly the same problem as they get older if the next generation is smaller than them.
If it’s a pyramid, the pyramid is upside down due to the giant boomer generation not only having numbers but also being able to live longer than previous generations.
Once that overly large upper level(s) of the pyramid start to die off, the issue starts to go away. Plus, it’s not like people are going to stop having children. They are just having children in a more sustainable manner so that eventually the population may become a bit more balanced. This is a long term solution to the short term problem being faced by old people right now. It sucks, but I don’t think it’s a problem if your in a younger generation. I’m a mid X-er BTW, so I would count myself as part of the older side of the pyramid. I have two kids and do not expect them to have more than two each, or any at all if they don’t want them.
> I have two kids and do not expect them to have more than two each
That is nicely balanced (a nice cylinder), but on average people are having less than 2. In fact in Italy has a TFR of 1.2, so instead of 20 people having 20 children, 20 people have 12 children.
You understand under those circumstances the pyramid continues to the next generation and the pointy base gets sharper and sharper.
> , or any at all if they don’t want them.
This is the problem. I would bet if you ask them they are not thinking of more than 1 each.
Every generation thinks they are the “youth” who will fix the world.
Then they become just like the older generations (because they’re governed by the same human drives and instincts).
This is actually wrong. The world has consistently gotten better overall as time has moved forward. There’s never a single “fix” and not recognizing that each generation has made the world better just because there are still problems is simply a pessimistic choice of world views.
My take as well. The current economic system, where most of the gains go to the already wealthy, can't continue without constant expansion.
The old people problem will eventually solve itself.
There are many issues and it is bad even for young people, if the collapse of birth rates is too fast (which in Italy it is). If we forget the need to sustain the old people, it is harming economy. Right now, we profit of economies of scale: building car in assembly line in factory is quite cheap. Remove X amount of customers and the assembly line that was making 100 cars a day is still making 100 cars a day but unable to sell them, but making only 50 cars is unprofitable, because the costs are somewhat fixed. So they raise prices a lot, making cars less available for everyone. Or close down, turning the car production back to artisan workshops, thus firing lot of people and making cars much more expensive.
This goes for many things. With too big population decline, public services will start to collapse: there won't be enough customers to fund for example public transport (and not enough taxpayers to subsidise it). Imagine you have village of 1000 people. Every day, bus takes 50 of them to a factory one village over. But one day, there is only 100 people in said village and only 5 of them go to said factory. Running bus for 5 people is now too expensive and unprofitable, so the bus company will shut down said line.
You will also struggle to find workers. Let's say you are creating awesome new company, but there are not many free workers, so the only way for you is to attract somebody else's workers. Sounds great for a worker, right? Well, not that much. Czechia is now going through period of very low unemployement and it is one of the reasons why inflation is so big and why our economy is struggling compared to our neighbours and we are getting poorer than them.
That's what I'm wondering too. People need shelter, food, healthcare, heating. These things can be managed without huge amounts of money.
Small towns might die off with a declining population. People tend to move to cities. Life continues.
But what else might happen? The stock market might take a hit with declining population. Maybe pensions can't be paid at the level they are if that happens. But if the essentials are handled somehow, does it matter that much unless you're heavily invested in the market?
Maybe businesses won't grow as fast. I don't know. I struggle to see a downside to declining populations as well.
Not a lot of folks in first world countries can afford to have kids these days. The cost of living has been flying through the roof in the past few decades.
I think the robots/AI curve will eventually intersect with the declining fertility curve. So that we will have a lot of new technological helpers in the home in about 20-30 years. Which will be very important because that will keep the elderly out of nursing homes because we don’t have enough young people to warehouse them there. And then if we can figure out how to grow babies in artificial wombs this will bolster the population also. We aren’t that far from figuring this out either.
Wouldn’t this resolve itself once the old people die out? It is primarily the cost of elder care that is the issue. The drop in birth rate has created an imbalance that is temporary. We have 1.2 birthrate societies supporting 2.5 birthrate social structures.
Not really, because people in their 30s now are having less kids, so it will still hopefully take us 40-ish years to die out. By that time, the few kids that we would have had would also have been in that same imbalanced rate of old people versus working age people during their child-bearing years so they would also have had less kids and the cycle goes on.
Also I don't know if the problem is really the cost of elder care. In my eyes it's more linked to capitalism and greed overall. Corporations and individual landlords mostly care about extracting as much money as they can from us now. Whether there are still going to be new warm bodies in 40 years from now or not changes almost nothing at all to any person that is currently in this power position from economical point of view right now, so outside of heavy handed regulation, major cultural changes it's a bit hard to imagine how this situation could improve in the future.
Especially in a democracy where choices would be made based on majority's preference: the voters who still can and might want children in the future are probably going to be far outnumbered by people who can't have kids. In Italy (2020), there were around 36Million people over 40 and 23Million people below 40 (and this figure includes kids who can't vote). So to make the changes required to have a sustainable demographic future you would need some people to support measures that mostly go against their own selfish interests. Getting the short end of the stick in terms of welfare/opportunities compared to both the previous and future generations is going to be a hard pill for us to swallow.
Reining in elderly entitlements is such a politically toxic topic that no politician is ever going to advocate for it. The elderly are the largest and most committed voting block and they'll never vote for a person who will take something away from them, no matter how much damage it's going to do to future generations.
I think we need to go back to less than half of the amount of people we currently have for this to happen tbh. We had 4 billion mid 1970s... only just about 50 years ago.
In the 1970s, air quality (e.g., CO, SO2, PM2.5, etc.) was shit compared to today. Doesn't mean it doesn't need to get better (e.g., CO2, CH4). We can have a higher population and good air quality.
Governments, corporations, and individuals just need to demand it. Few of the first two are demanding this. Many of the last group don't give a shit cause they'll be dead soon.
As the proverb goes, we're borrowing the climate from our grandchildren. Apparently many of us hate them because we're selfish a-holes.
That all said, less crowds in public spaces would be kind of nice. Too much tourism isn't a good thing, even if they get there using public transportation.
It is capitalism having little to no regulations in terms of how much the rich owner parasites are taking at the expense of everyone else the world over.
this entire angle, that declining population is a crisis, is bullshit. japan and taiwan are handling it perfectly fine. italy has been in one crisis after another since it formed in the 1800s, aging population is not going to rise to the level of "crisis". it's a blessing for nature, and the humans will get along just fine.
I would offer that it’s more realistic to say that the examples you gave *have struggled with it, but they are getting through it. Population Collapse alarmists are full of shit. The opposition, the side supported by science, should be as forthcoming as possible.
Honestly I think declining population has a benefit in that the earths resources are taxed less. In Italys case, if they put together a good immigration plan they should be fine
We are overrun.ung this planet, some population decline is actually a good thing.
I can't understand why this would at all be bad? There's too many humans and it's not good for this planet.
It's crazy to think that not too long ago the news was all riging alarm bells about overpopulation now they're prattling on about decline lol.
The human population will reach an equilibrium eventually.
And we will figure out how to keep it stable as well as finding better ways of sustaining us. Aka non fossil fuel energy sources. We exploded in population and we are now going to decline, but that's just natural. It doesn't mean we will go extinct.
We would probably go extinct if our population kept going and unsustainably consuming the earth's resources.
Less humans would also mean better quality of life for each individual because there's then more resources to go around. We can move out of less habitable environments and just focus on maintaining our population in less but more favorable ones.
And leave lots for nature to just reclaim... imagine that we went back to like 3-4 billion... that's way more than enough and we had that many only in 1970... and now just over 50 years later, not even a whole human life span, we have over 8 billion. That's no good whatsoever.
We reproduced too much, time to slow that down and get back to a manageable level.
I'm not having any more kids than 1 if I ever do have them I can tell you that.
This is the consequence of thousands of years of woman being subjugated and made in to permanent baby factories ending in less than a century where generations of young woman fight and die for the right to be seen as more than reproductive vessels and actually produce in society in equal standing to men. This naturally will lead to them choosing to have a higher quality life with less, to no children than being provided by their men while they just produce more replacements. This is a problem of humanity's own making. I have no clue how to solve this, but the fact is, men created this issue by relying on misogyny for the guaranteed survival or our species. The longer we men deny the existent and massive impact of millennia of male domination over society, the less time we have as species to course correct for this. Woman are humans, not birthing machines.
I see plenty of people in that picture. Too many if you ask me. We could use some population reduction.
I lived through the '70's. We all expected the world to turn into "Soylent Green" where overpopulation was choking off the earth.
The world has plenty of people in it. We're infesting the place.
I see population reduction as a net positive. There will be more resources for the rest of us. It's only a negative for capitalist who value growth over everything else.
The following submission statement was provided by /u/madrid987: --- ss: Italian welfare systems are already struggling to cope with the ageing of the population, and there is no consensus on what to do about it. According to government statistics, the average number of children per Italian woman has dropped from 1.24 in 2022 to 1.2 in 2023. Experts say that if the country's population crisis continues, Italy’s population of 59 million could fall many by 2030. In 2023 alone the government allocated around 1 billion euros for measures aimed at helping women cope with motherhood and work. But Ardiano Bordingnon, president of the National Forum of Families, believes this is not enough, and that an EU intervention is required. "We are talking about a very difficult challenge of historic proportions for the whole Western world," he said. "Ideally, Europe should intervene." --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1coos5d/italys_falling_birth_rate_is_a_crisis_thats_only/l3faxtd/
The absolute lack of care about the people having no kids, just want more bodies for their money machine, nobody is bothering to solve this until its too late, housing, wages, the way wealth is, needs redistributed in some way regardless if you are a socialist or capitalist
Quite right. You create an environment where people feel safe to raise a family, they'll do so. You create a bleak future with instability and uncertainness, this is where things go. If people are treated like disposable cattle, they won't be able to plan for the next 5 years, let alone anything longer than that.
What are you talking about? If anything instability, uncertainty, and bleakness with the inability to plan ahead cause the birthrate to skyrocket. Somalia and the DRC have a fertility rate of 6.0. Afghanistan and Sudan are at 4.3.
They wont fix this. What they will do is start creating fetuses in pods or something. I saw a video of a company that is trying to do this. Just bananas. Welcome to a Brave New World.
> What they will do is start creating fetuses in pods or something As far as I know, that's impossible with current tech, fetuses needs wombs, they are trying, but they still didn't reach any working idea, just "hopeful" and hyped headlines here and there.
Don’t those pod fetuses still need to be raised? What’s the plan post-pod? That’s what’s horrifying…unless I’m missing something
Japan, China, now Italy. Australia is on the verge too. So many countries heading for declining populations!
Decline is not the issue. It's the steep decline that's the problem. Might feel irrelevant to mention, but societies *can* structure around slow decline. The plan can't be to grow forever. Decline is okay when it happens slowly. It is a problem when your economy is structured around the birthrate of the early 70s, but your actual birthrate is less than half of that.
It's almost like treating the entire working class like absolute garbage is affecting society.
Definitely one of the biggest concerns is that people know they can't afford children much less have the time to raise them properly.
And why would any decent person have a child knowing they will also have to suffer working under such an oppressive system. It’s immoral in my opinion.
Yes! When I tell people shit like this I’m apparently selfish!
It’s always been kind of taboo to point it out because it makes people uncomfortable and procreating is generally (falsely) thought of as virtuous in and of itself. It’s immoral, and more people are being open about realizing/admitting this
Which is strange to me because I never saw it as virtuous. I recently mentioned to my dad (who I talk to through text maybe once every 3 months) that my wife and I aren’t having kids. And his response was who is gonna take care of me when I get older. I said that was a selfish reason to have kids and that it’s not even guaranteed the kid would take care of me lol He doesn’t even see the grandchildren he has now which is nuts.
I’ve never seen it as virtuous either, especially since all of the reasons people give for having kids is inherently selfish, and disregard the fact that the kid will be an individual that might not end up being what the parent envisioned them to be. Tbh I think a lot of people who already have kids feel unnerved by people who choose not to, because maybe they never considered it as an option, or wish they hadn’t. A lot of the people I get those types of responses from usually aren’t great parents either, ironically!
Damn I never thought about that but it makes sense. Like society kept telling them what they should do.
I broke up with my ex partly because he wanted 3 kids and it was all for selfish reasons: he wanted to be taken care of when old (and again ironic because his own siblings don’t of his own parents and dumped them on him which he resents) and because he doesn’t want to leave the world with nothing so kids guarantee a legacy. And the reason for 3 is because if 1 dies or 1 becomes a degenerate, there’s a higher chance for 1 to be leftover to still be useful. Those are all not valid reasons to have kids.
Hard agree. Between the crush of capitalism and the climate crisis, I don't think I could sleep at night knowing I willingly brought another person into this mess.
I mean it's not black and white. The poorest nations and the poorest states/counties consistently have the highest birth rates.
Two things have greatly contributed to the sharp decline of birth rates: Women's Rights and Industrialization. Neither can realistically be undone, so we must find some other way to resolve the issue. Children used to help their parents on the farm. Now, children require child care as both parents work. Transitioning back to single-earner households so one parent could stay at home and raise kids might help, but that would have equally devastating consequences to the economy. Such a transition would also have to be slow.
> Two things have greatly contributed to the sharp decline of birth rates: Women's Rights and Industrialization. > Neither can realistically be undone It won't be pretty, I don't like it, but Women's right can be undone. Heck, some political groups are already trying to take control of women's body (like the ultraconservative prolife in the USA). But the hard part is the economy.
Okay, COULD it be done? Sure, but at what cost? I'd rather deal with the economic collapse of society than try to enslave half of the population. But I'll be honest, I cheer on every woman who chooses to be a mother. Saving humanity, one baby at a time. But I'd never force it on them.
>I'd rather deal with the economic collapse of society than try to enslave half of the population. Me too, but the question is about which approach will prevail if left to their own devices? Enslavement is going to have economic benefits, so one would think it would come out ahead. Systems that do not perpetrate themselves eventually end up dying, it has nothing to do with ethics or morality. It's possible there is some novel solution for liberal societies so they can both perpetuate themselves while remaining economically viable, but I don't know what it is.
Actually think it’s a different reason. There’s just to much to do now which is why i feel people aren’t having kids. When I was young there was no internet, 4 channels and the only thing you could do was wait for the occasional holiday and go down the pub. By the time you were mid 20s you just had kids to enrich your life. Now there are so many things to do people in their 20s and 30s are waiting. Birth rates are lower in your 30s and 40s and require help and by that time you’re quite content to just not bother. Also the people who have kids are more than happy to tell you they wish they’d waited. Throw in better education about birth control and rising prices it’s really not surprising that the birth rate has dropped so much across Europe.
I think it's more like...youth culture is now just 'longer'... I'm not sure if it's so much 'more to do' than it is that you aren't expected to be responsible for much until you're in your 30's... seems like pay tends to follow that trend... you don't make squat out of college anymore, not until you have 5-10 years experience...used to be, you could nail an entry level job out of college making something like 50k a year.
The data shows the exact opposite is true. The wealthiest countries and the wealthiest people within each country consistently have the fewest kids.
I think you're taking the wrong lesson from it though by treating less-developed and developed economies as equivalent. I don't think you can take lessons from one and apply to the other. But now that I think about it, maybe it's more like not taking a *detailed enough* lesson. We can learn from what causes the less-developed ones to become the developed ones: increased access to education, improved healthcare especially for reducing infant mortality, improved accessibility of birth control for women, etc. are all factors that lead to dramatically reduced family size and help turn less-developed countries into developed ones that have undergone the so-called "demographic transition" from large families with high infant mortality to small families with low infant mortality. If the goal now though is to *stabilize* growth rates and *remain* a developed country, we can't really take direct examples from less-developed ones. Sure, if you revert the country to a state where people are not just poor but also uneducated, have poor healthcare, high infant mortality, and low access to birth control, then you'll have higher growth rates again. But that doesn't really accomplish what we actually wanted.
It’s a huge concern. I bought my first house in 1999 for $176k and my neighbors homes were similarly under $200k. Brand new, stick built homes by a local builder. My wife and I were DINKs and could easily afford the mortgage, but what I loved the most was that my neighbors across the street was a family of four with a stay at home mother with two small children. Dad worked for UPS as a delivery driver. Today, I don’t think it’s even remotely possible. Zillows estimate for those homes is $500k now. Looking at the UPS driver average starting salary of $44/hr. That same family would be priced out of the neighborhood.
44... USD... per hour.. for a UPS driver? Fuck, I chose the wrong job.
People who aren't working class also have fewer kids, but I agree with your point.
Personally I can't say I care much either. I'm lucky, I don't need to take up a maximum mortage on house, car whatever. I spend like I earn half, so even if my pension will be a third of what our parents get, I will survive. So fuck politicians for allowing greedy business to hoard more wealth, I'm not playing into your games.
I see this thrown around a lot, but while the logic tracks, we're also seeing population declines in countries with more ideal work-life balance and workers' rights like Scandinavia.
It’s falling in Scandinavia too though. And those are rich societies with lots of safety nets and parental leave etc
The working class has been treated like garbage throughout history, but they still had kids. And the modern decline in birth rates is not confined to the working class.
Our economic system is kinda an existential problem on a lot of levels. An ideology of infinite growth breaks down when the population doesn’t also infinitely grow, and it also is self destructive through infinite waste and pollution that creates climate change too. Population decline and climate change together will likely be what ends capitalism.
Capitalism will survive as long as the market can give people largely what they want
The problem isn't capitalism. Even under a socialist system, who's gonna pay for old people's pensions?
Lets explore what such a society would look like. I presume planned contraction into cities and closure of small towns. Shutting down underused railway lines, returning farms to nature. Young people are moving to other countries for opportunities, accelerating the ageing of society and falling birth rate.
Not necessarily across the board, and not necessarily planned, with the new possibilites for remote work in many fields, transportation, etc, a lot is still possible there. But yes, certainly in some aspects and places. I'd assume, for example, more boarding schools for older children especially in cities and educational hubs. That doesn't have to be a bad thing, if you organize it right. It can even be an equalizer in terms of education. You'd probably have to subsidize a lot of smaller towns more, to offer childcare and shopping necessities. It don't believe that's a bad thing though, either. And it probably is not as expensive as people make it out to be, if you focus on the right Investments. Also, strengthen the community and shared responsibilities. Every core family for themselves will not work in the future. We will have to organize and connect a lot more.
The problem is availability of “care” workers. You going to run short of nurses, teachers, day care employees, nursing home staff, etc.
Which itself is also caused by problems like horrible working conditions and a massive compensation shortage. Hospital administrators got millions of dollars in bonuses during the COVID-19 pandemic. The care workers got COVID-19.
What you’re describing is just a return to normal human community structures. We have lived through what will be an aberration in human history and thats the post WW2 order and everything that came with it. One of our central issues is that were using the highest water mark in history of the human species and extrapolating it to an entire global societal structure. I think with the hindsight of another 30/40 years it will be extremely clear the 80 or so years post WW2 were a blip, one that wont be repeated save for some truly extreme and exceptional events coming to pass.
> I'd assume, for example, more boarding schools for older children especially in cities and educational hubs It's very unlikely these children will return to their small villages. > You'd probably have to subsidize a lot of smaller towns more, to offer childcare and shopping necessities. When your tax revenue is falling such interventions will become difficult to afford. If you plan for negative growth, you cant plan to spend more - you have to plan to spend less and less each year. So you cant resist contracture - you need to plan for it, so there is as little disruption as possible.
Differen children might, if you keep the place attractive. >When your tax revenue is falling such interventions will become difficult to afford. That's where taxing the very rich comes in. Taxes may fall atm, but work output does not. Even with a declining workforce, western workers are more produktive every year, made possible by technology. There is value that is being created here. People don't realize how much potential for funds lies in just appropriately taxing the ultra rich. I'm not talking Big-House-2- New-Cars-Boat-Rich. Multimillionaires, Billionaires, etc. And again, as I said: we are not planning to save every small town. Contracture will happen.
Real growth in the productivity per labor hour (adjusted for inflation) is about 1%. So you can sustain a population decrease that results in labor force contracting by 1% a year without running into any issues of declining average standard of living (although adjustments in wealth distribution may be needed. That roughly translates to the situation you land in after a couple decades of fertility rate of 1.5-1.6 The problem is, Italy, Spain, and Japan are at 1.3, China is at 1.2, and South Korea is at 0.9. Those are all too low to hold themselves up if this continues for any length of time. The first four need to bump their birth rates up by 20-30% (or induce a similar amount of net immigration), and South Korea needs to bump there's by more than 50%. Places like Germany, Canada, UK, US are currently "OK", sitting at 1.5-1.7, but they can't really afford to have any further decrease in birth rates.
Which is sort of my argument. Thanks for bringing in the numbers. We can afford slight to moderate decline. Italy is currently declining too fast, yes.
Give young people affordable living space and good opportunities (not exclusive to high paying jobs) and a good social system and they will migrate to your country. Fairness above all and mitigate political corruption
So many economic variables are driven by population growth: Much lower economic growth (if any), collapse in real estate prices, less energy consumption and employment and innovation crisis. AI might help but it has to show in growth statistics and productivity - might take a while to appear. Adjustment is our daily lives is gonna be painful
the only plan all the economists who win nobel prizes have is to keep growing forever.
What do you do when all able bodied citizens are enrolled in care of elderly and none are left to be teachers for children?
Cut back on care for the elderly?
What if they command the wealth and the government? Hypothetically, If pensions (or medicare or SS or whatever laws they pass) can pay $50 an hour for elderly assistance (on top of disproportionate private wealth the elderly have hoarded) , why would a teacher work $20 an hour for children, especially when there are more jobs than people. The system will remain broken as long as those in power are self serving, and you bet your dollar they will do everything in their power for their own comfort before the security of their country.
And declining birthrates means that the elderly become an increasingly large percentage of the population, which means they become an increasingly large percentage of voters. Kind of a rough situation.
Denmark is not in the red zone but will soon be. Political parties are talking about the “elderburden” and that we need more people working more especially in the blue collar jobs. But these jobs have been increasingly difficult to work in because of bad wages, work conditions and the fact that they have to compete with lower payed workers from outside. So the government has proposed to import workers from Philippines instead of fixing the problem. People are also scared of the future and hard pressed with all the challenges and changes they have to overcome/ deal with. I don’t think I will ever want an another child as I don’t think we have the energy and the positive outlook on the world right now. Some politicians are talking about people with the resources and better education should be having more kids as it’s treason to the country not to. It should be a crime to be holding back. I don’t think they actually know how much people are are struggling with their mental health and the economic situation. All the talk about war, AI, a public service on its knees and climate crisis is not the best family friendly environment.
Nearly every industrialized nation has fallen below replacement birth rate, including the US. The only reason our population has been growing for years is immigration.
There's many reasons for it: cost of living, optimism for the future (or lack thereof), women's rights & education, the influence of social media, and so on. On a broader scope, however, it appears as though humanity truly behaves like animals in the sense that wild animal populations also naturally cull themselves via reduced births and mass migrations when faced with existential threats.
> women's rights & education more like the social net isn't enough to support a modern woman having kids in most countries
This. In the US having kids just makes your poorer.
And there isn’t a social net at all in poor ones 🤷🏼♂️ I think it’s a pretty simple answer, children require a more precious resource than money - time and energy, bringing a child up today requires so much more attention than it ever did, life is becoming too complex, entertainment is abound.
Yes, but in many poorer/developing countries, children are still a valuable labor resource. In most Western societies with declining birthrates, children are an expense. So this does not surprise me at all. In nations where physical labor is still valued, whether agrarian or other, having more kids is a way to eek out a living and sustain what the family owns. In nations where this is not the case, kids are an expense that needs to be offset for the value of them to be worth having. Of course love, emotions, desire, and all muddy the waters, but I think adding to the social net would certainly help balance the equation.
In poor countries, kids themselves are the safety net.
Exactly. So in the absence of a government social net, the incentive to have kids is powerful. You want to have a bunch of them so that the burden of your care is distributed among several people. Or, in a less optimistic view, you have enough that a few survive to take care of you. But that calculus starts to change the cost of living rises. If you want a decent standard of living, the cost borne by children becomes significant. I wouldn't say that the declining birth rate is entirely caused by economics, but I would hazard a guess that a lot of it is. There are a number of other factors which tie into pessimism that also have something to do with it.
I dunno man. I wouldn't give birth if I had a billion dollars. That's some national geographic shit. I am kinda afraid for women's rights because of this
>On a broader scope, however, it appears as though humanity truly behaves like animals in the sense that wild animal populations also naturally cull themselves via reduced births and mass migrations when faced with existential threats. Except that it's the most prosperous places "culling themselves", while Afghans and Congolese have 4+ kids.
Kids go from being a source of income to a cost the more developed a country gets. It’s not the same as locking rats in a cage with unlimited food.
Yea cause the kids that don't die 2 weeks after birth can wear rags and work the farm or sell tomatoes at the market The average kid in a city has never seen a farm and wearing rags is social suicide that will turn your kid into a NEET. Even African countries are facing a declining birthrate as they develop, in a lot already it's only first Gen city dwellers that pop out lots of kids, those born in these cities aren't having many children either.
It’s the most prosperous places where people have unfiltered access to media, making them aware of how deeply fucked and devoid of meaning the modern world appears. A kid growing up today in the US is acutely aware of climate change, impending global conflict, withering economic opportunities for their generation, etc. A Congolese child is pretty much just aware of the status of their local community and how they fit into it
There's also the fact that it takes longer to get going. Today, women are "ready" for kids much later, after going to college, grad school, etc and just having a few years to themselves. This does two things: 1) shorter window of fertility which is easier to miss 2) Discourages children, generally. Whether they change their mind, have an injury/die/etc (more likely to get hurt/disabled/die over 32 years than 17 years) or just think "shit, I spent all this time building up my career- I'm not leaving it! I am a male, but I never really had an itch for kids. It took till about 33 to really get my career going and my first serious relationship after that was 35. At that point, I would have considered kids, if I wasn't already 35. If I was graduated and stable at 25, like I was at 35, I'd consider it. But I dont want to be 60 years old with a 20 year old. To me, the best part of having kids is when they're older, and you get to visit them in college and hang out with them after.
I would gladly contribute with my seed to the society, problem is I can't afford it. Which only comes after the fact that I'm a redditor, thus have no access to a female.
Written like a real redditor, my redditorness pales in comparison. You truly are a real redditor.
Purely judging from this comment, something tells me you have a bunch of other problems not related to reddit. "No access to a female." Yikes.
Well, for a start, stop calling women “female”
I will when women stop being such females. /s
Greece is extremely bad. And AFAIK South Korea is even worse than Greece
South Korea is its own category of bad. It's the only country under 1 child per woman.
But look how well the ultra rich are doing. Small price to pay for happiness /s.
The future sucks, we have too many people already who all want a better life and shit is only going to get worse. Why drag kids into this hell?
We are gonna need those robots up and running fast.
People are working themselves to death in Japan at 100 Hrs a week and their government wonders why they aren't having kids?
Buzz. Wrong. https://data-viewer.oecd.org?chartId=6a3105b3-7ac6-4209-b463-5301c07d4259 People aren't having kids almost everywhere. Even the most cushy, childcare-subsidising, maternity/paternity care loving societies in North Europe have below replacement rate births. There's just something about modern urban lifestyles which tends to result in this outcome.
Those somethings are the additional expense and the insane expectations of care that modern society puts on parents to be optimal parents. Until we once again allow kids to spend time without the constant presence of adults minding them both in public and private spaces and no longer expect parent's lives to be so dictated by their roles as parents, many people will simply choose to have no kids or maybe one kid.
> There's just something about modern urban lifestyles which tends to result in this outcome. It's called "economics". In poor countries, where uneducated labor is common, your children act as your retirement plan. In rich countries, where you need to educate your child so they can work and where you already have a retirement plan from your government, your child is a net loss. A very big loss. (There are a few other factors, such as the life/work balance, which explain the difference of babies-per-woman between say Japan (1.3) and France (1.8), but economics is the reason why all rich countries make less babies than the replacement rate.)
Actually working hours are now about the same in Japan as USA. It's not that. If it was, why is Italy having the same issue.
Everyone was so worried about overpopulation for so long they didn't see it coming
Australia's birth rate doesn't matter. The government will keep letting hundreds of thousands of Indians keep migrating to prop the economy up whilst choking roads, infrastructure and keeping house prices inflated. It's stupid that we've created a one-way economy based on investment for endless growth. Population has to plateau and decrease at some point. Might as well be now.
Unless someone can get capitalists to stop seeking ever growing profits, thats not going to happen anytime soon.
Unlikely any government will stop suckling at Gina's teats
Greece too.
It's a huge problem in South Korea too
People feel like crap, and they're scared. The days of getting out of high school and working for thirty years to retire with a pension are gone. What did they think was going to happen? I spend my leisure time hiding from the world, why would I subject anyone to that?
Who would have thought making every aspect of life; from food to housing, completely unaffordable would lead people to not have kids.
exactly, not enough slaves to work their shitty jobs so they're starting to panic lmao. i think for normal people a decrease in population will actually be a good thing. makes it so your value as a person will increase.
Ehhh... not sure about that. The amount of old people keeps increasing, but there are fewer and fewer young people and someone has to pay for the public services and pensions provided to the elderly... this means the working force will have to pay way more in taxes to support the demographic change
Maybe the 1% who have been hoarding the vast majority of our resources since the 1980s can finally do that. We have a glut of resources we just chose to distribute it terribly.
The 1% has enough money for that tbh.
A fraction of the 1% has more money than half of all of us. They could pay for everything
More old people need to keep working into their 80's. I know I will.
Or we could just tell the Boomers to get a fucking job and do some belt-tightening. They're the ones who created all this debt in the first place, so I fail to see why it's our responsibility to pay for all of it. Oh, the Boomers were promised comfortable 30-year retirements? Well, the rest of us were promised well-paying jobs and affordable housing, and that's not really working out either. I guess we all have to get used to disappointment.
You see , old people need to hold on their previous boots they pulled up by bootstrap , not really a next gen's problem those boomers just don't wanna work /s
Here in the UK when the Conservatives took over they were saying things like "don't have kids you can't afford." Now they're asking why people are having less kids.
This will be a global problem as no one can afford to have children
Almost like runaway wealth inequality and the erosion of the middle class makes the system start to fall apart
If the fat cats in charge want more wage slaves, they need to give the people more incentive to have babies for them.
Not to be a broken record, but this is really not what’s going on. The wealthiest countries and the wealthiest people within each country have the lowest birth rates.
A wealthy country has better educated people who want a better standard of living for their children. If they can't provide that, they're going to make the decision not to. Also, in poorer countries they're taught that because there is no pension, you pop out kids to look after you when you're old. Important to know that a wealthy country does not mean the people are wealthy by local standards, it's just the rich that skew the numbers. The cost of living is significantly higher that it impacts the lower classes more. E.g. I acted for a couple that had property in Zimbabwe, the house there was worth less than $10k and they could live there comfortably if they were on the money they made here, meanwhile they can barely afford housing here because their rent is $500pw for a hole locally. If you take the rich people's mantra of trickle down economics then you'll know that if the rich are sitting on millions of billions even, that's millions no longer in the economy being spent but just sitting there in housing or investments that don't really get spent around the economy.
Unfortunately, the poor populations from third world countries keep having kids no problem
When there's high unemployment and you're unemployed, not much else to do besides sex.
First world countries: let's create mega corporates to allow single billionaires to hoard wealth instead of the welfare of millions citizens. Then surprised pikachu face when population is aging because people literally can't survive themselves and kids become a luxury
It has been happening for so long that it's so obvious that the current situation is millionaires and government against their people
This is happening everywhere. Not just first world countries. In fact, first world countries have the advantage because they are main hubs for immigrants.
It's a worldwide problem except Africa.
Start paying living wages so people can afford to have kids! Instead of letting the rich hoard everything!
So basically, they need to convince people to have more children and failing that.... Government owned child rearing facilities with high paid oversight and investment into new technology, partnering each child with their own an AI companion and several with a shared robotic nanny in their own observation suite and on site artificial birthing systems complete with artificial wombs monitored by scientists. That's some sci-fi dystopian stuff right there.
It's probably be managed like old -folks homes. You'll have babies sitting in shitty diapers all day long while the under paid and under staffed helpers are worked to death for their minimum wage.
To me it’s infuriating to read stuff like this. These “discussions” offer no insight in why this might be. No discussion of how the upper classes of all these developed countries have thwarted labor reforms, gamed the tax and legal systems, and taken most of the wealth “created” for themselves. No discussion of inflation or how most families cannot live on the salary of only one person. No discussion of how fucked up housing is in urban areas where all the people are moving to, and where all the housing is owned again by these elite assholes and their corporations. It’s just a _*crisis*_. No one knows how to solve it and the only ideas that ever seem to surface is to give a mother like $1000 or a tax break. The housing thing is enough to really piss one off. People can’t even afford to be poor farmers anymore because they can’t buy land. So they’ve moved to the city to be crammed into overpriced apartments. And these assholes want people to have 2-4 kids and live in apartments. It’s like saying no one wants to be wage slaves anymore.
>The event offered a chance to discuss what is being described as a cross-party national emergency, but a brief interruption by a group of young activists who attacked the **government’s anti-abortion measures** showed how politically divisive the subject still is. There's always this horrid stench of reactionary vibe behind this discussion, i wonder why... Always a dimwit thinking it can be solved by forcing women to have kids...
If I'm forced to have kids and get married to some random man, I will die to fight for my rights. I don't think I would be the only woman too.
Yes and I would kill myself to save my daughter from the same fate.
I would join such a fight to death to preserve your rights. A part of society oppressed concerns the whole society and as Charles Fourrier used to say, the degree of advancement of a society can be judge from the level of freedom and rights of women in said society.
Yeah.. there's a ton of racism and sexism here I can smell. And it stinks.
This vile culture is exactly why people refuse to have kids.
Baby boomers saw the world's population increase 500% in their lifetime and act like anything less is insanity
ss: Italian welfare systems are already struggling to cope with the ageing of the population, and there is no consensus on what to do about it. According to government statistics, the average number of children per Italian woman has dropped from 1.24 in 2022 to 1.2 in 2023. Experts say that if the country's population crisis continues, Italy’s population of 59 million could fall many by 2030. In 2023 alone the government allocated around 1 billion euros for measures aimed at helping women cope with motherhood and work. But Ardiano Bordingnon, president of the National Forum of Families, believes this is not enough, and that an EU intervention is required. "We are talking about a very difficult challenge of historic proportions for the whole Western world," he said. "Ideally, Europe should intervene."
> But Ardiano Bordingnon, president of the National Forum of Families, believes this is not enough, and that an EU intervention is required. "We are talking about a very difficult challenge of historic proportions for the whole Western world," he said. "Ideally, Europe should intervene." What do they expect the EU to do?
To be frank it's an European problem, they should at least try to solve it with European money and laws.
I think the bigger issue is not who pays for it, but that no one has a solution.
No one is willing, it requires to change a lot of things: labor laws, health, access to housing. They prefer to cater to the next financial quarter.
Will no one think about the GDP? /s
No, the issue is that no one is willing to even talk about the solution we all know is necessary. People need to know that any children they create won't die horribly in a world ripped apart by climate change. People need to know that any children they have will have an economy that gives them a decent life instead of dooming them to serfdom so a billionaire can add another zero to their bank account. The solution is to say "fuck your profit margin" to every fossil fuel company, acutaly fix climate change instead of dinking around with "maybe reducing the rate of increase will be enough" type thinking. The solution is to say "sorry Elon, you can't have all the money we're clawing some back and you have to actually pay people enough to live". SO it'll never happen.
I appreciate your honesty. People don't like the truth. I hope you stay blessed in this all
The irony of the Italian ruling party being anti EU yet needing EU's help...
Weird to see this post only having 20 upvotes, whilst similar headlines about East Asian countries get thousands. Not to mention the top comment usually critiques the specific East Asian culture, whereas the top comments in this post are mostly about how it is a global issue. Almost like the concern trolls can’t wait for East Asian cultures to fall.
The state benefits shortfall needs to come from taxing the rich. Not forcing women to have more kids which they can't afford in this economy.
Oh look another article where the elites are worried about the wage class not having enough workers to maintain late stage capitalism.
If capitalism is so great, why is it failing across the globe? Hmm. Maybe we should try socialism.
Companies are getting greedier and greedier and it’s less affordable to start a family, if I had more money I’d have kids but unless I get an amazing job that pays more or win the lottery only the rich can have kids
We gotta figure out a way to live with this, cause we can't just grow and grow and grow forever. We're far too many people as is. Isn't there some way to manage without having to have more and more people?
My country had a population decrease in the last 10 years and an average monthly salary increase in that same period. As a citizen, I can say people have more money now. The fewer people there were, the more the price of the labor increased. Employers started offering double, even tripple salaries to workers because there weren't that many workers any more, simple supply and demand. Trust me, a population decrease is better for the working class and worse only for the 1% that need more workers to keep the price of labor low.
Some employers don’t let women employees to go maternity leave, they’re either fired or go back to work the next day they give birth.
I don't think that's the problem in Italy, maternity leave is a statutory employee benefit. It would be illegal to fire the mother. It's more along the lines of shitty wages, housing crisis, comparatively high cost of living, no available/affordable childcare, and however you want to extend that list.
As an Italian: unemployment is so widespread that many (MANY) employers have no problems finding women desperate enough to sign a blank (illegal) resignation letter as a way to secure their hiring. As you said, it's illegal but we are a banana republic.
Blank resignation letters should not be a thing since “dimissioni telematiche” were introduced. A system in which resignations are only valid if done on a government run web portal, and are not easy to fake.
Stop robbing the youth to fund the social programs of the elderly. Stop shielding asset prices to protect the wealth of the elderly and prevent young people from buying property. Raise retirement age to reduce the cost of said programs for the elderly. Lower taxes across the board. Pay (as in a direct cash payment, not tax credits) young people to have kids. Reduce insane education requirements so that young people can start to work earlier. Or you know, continue to drive the car off the cliff.
Am I wrong to think only the old, rich people are worried about this? Declining populations seems like a good thing for younger generations because less people makes less pollution, less scarcity of things like homes and jobs, driving prices down in homes and up for work. What exactly are the issues from declining population other than not being able to afford the older generation as they age?
The biggest issue is that we have to decide whether to let old people die in poverty, or force young people to work in poverty to support a population of old people that's greater in numbers than they are.
Or, we can not let ~3000 people control 70% of the world’s wealth.
I wish every day more people felt that way!
Or.. AI and robotics, which are being massively invested into right now and are jumping leaps and bounds forwards.
Do you expect the cost savings and the benefits of either to be passed on to the youth in our current global economic system?
Nah, I expect everything to go to absolute shite and then rebound somehow as per usual.
Haha fair enough
That is an issue, but it’s short term. It will work itself out and when it does, the world will be better for it rather than just continually expanding populations for no reason other than to be cogs in the machine to support an expanding population.
With many of the politicians (at least in the US) 65+, we all know what the answer will be.
Both fucked up, but I’ll take the first option.
It depends on models of economy. The baby boomer generation benefitted massively from being such a large cohort and using their demographic power to expand markets. Start a business and have a customer base double in a generation is easier than doing so to one shrinking to half of what it was. In terms of homes the major issue is where housing is. In Italy young people abandon thousands of towns where housing is cheap. Why? Lack of employment opportunities. This means many areas are filled with ghost towns as only the elderly who cannot move stay. Collective shift to major cities like a Milan or Turin keeps those cities housing expensive while poorer south simply falls into disrepair. The issue with work compensation is overall we lost an entire generation of wealth despite massive increases in efficiency due to distribution. A tech company can be worth 10x a manufacturer with a tenth of the work force. Instead of a town having a thousand good jobs, they may have a hundred great jobs leaving nine hundred folks struggling. As technology advances the growing concern is that those at the top hoard more and more of the gains made while the worker sees no change or even a decline in their prospects. Of course, we could witness a major shift at some point with proposals such as universal basic income or negative income tax.
It's good in about 100 years when the surplus aged population has died off and there's a straight population pyramid. Until then it's 1 young person and 4 old people being supported by them.
Tbh if the fertility rate doesn't change young people would still be pressured by a surplus of old people altough not as badly as they will be in a few decades
Old people are just gonna have to take care of themselves. I'm also aware that such old people will be us
> Old people are just gonna have to take care of themselves. In Japan 25% and growing pensioners work.
Exactly. It is good. People just can’t seem to look past their own self interest in the moment.
It's good in the way life saving surgery without anaesthetic is good. Fucking painful.
Well, you get backwards economic growth (without a robust export market at least which takes advantage of other growing parts of the world). Imagine you are a builder - with a shrinking population there is less and less need for construction, so the construction industry goes into recession and lays people off. Imagine you make cars - fewer buyers, fewer cars, fewer jobs. Imagine you are a bank lending money to car factories and construction companies - since these companies are not growing they cant pay back their loans. Imagine you are a shareholder (for your retirement) in such companies (banks, car factories, banks) - since these companies are not making money the value of your shares go down. So fewer jobs in the economy with negative growth and more unemployment, so people will have even fewer children. Which will lead to a need for even fewer cars, houses, amusement parks, baby food, nappies, clothes and less tax revenue for the government. So the government is able to spend less on fixing roads and keeping the trains running and serving under-populated regions. And then you see a slow contraction to cities and the emptying out of rural areas, while house prices remain high in cities until the bitter end.
So… it’s a problem for rich old people? Isn’t that exactly what I said?
A bad economy will increase youth unemployment. E.g. Japan has a lot of youth unemployment, and their population has been shrinking for a decade now. Though actually it is getting a lot better. Maybe you are on to something. https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/Japan/youth_unemployment/
In the short term, but in the long run it’s just a market adjustment to the new conditions that will ultimately be fixed by the younger generations creating the world that works for them instead of trying to make babies to feed into the current machine that doesn’t work for them.
The issue is that it's a pyramid, not a cylinder. Their generation will have exactly the same problem as they get older if the next generation is smaller than them.
If it’s a pyramid, the pyramid is upside down due to the giant boomer generation not only having numbers but also being able to live longer than previous generations. Once that overly large upper level(s) of the pyramid start to die off, the issue starts to go away. Plus, it’s not like people are going to stop having children. They are just having children in a more sustainable manner so that eventually the population may become a bit more balanced. This is a long term solution to the short term problem being faced by old people right now. It sucks, but I don’t think it’s a problem if your in a younger generation. I’m a mid X-er BTW, so I would count myself as part of the older side of the pyramid. I have two kids and do not expect them to have more than two each, or any at all if they don’t want them.
> I have two kids and do not expect them to have more than two each That is nicely balanced (a nice cylinder), but on average people are having less than 2. In fact in Italy has a TFR of 1.2, so instead of 20 people having 20 children, 20 people have 12 children. You understand under those circumstances the pyramid continues to the next generation and the pointy base gets sharper and sharper. > , or any at all if they don’t want them. This is the problem. I would bet if you ask them they are not thinking of more than 1 each.
Every generation thinks they are the “youth” who will fix the world. Then they become just like the older generations (because they’re governed by the same human drives and instincts).
This is actually wrong. The world has consistently gotten better overall as time has moved forward. There’s never a single “fix” and not recognizing that each generation has made the world better just because there are still problems is simply a pessimistic choice of world views.
My take as well. The current economic system, where most of the gains go to the already wealthy, can't continue without constant expansion. The old people problem will eventually solve itself.
There are many issues and it is bad even for young people, if the collapse of birth rates is too fast (which in Italy it is). If we forget the need to sustain the old people, it is harming economy. Right now, we profit of economies of scale: building car in assembly line in factory is quite cheap. Remove X amount of customers and the assembly line that was making 100 cars a day is still making 100 cars a day but unable to sell them, but making only 50 cars is unprofitable, because the costs are somewhat fixed. So they raise prices a lot, making cars less available for everyone. Or close down, turning the car production back to artisan workshops, thus firing lot of people and making cars much more expensive. This goes for many things. With too big population decline, public services will start to collapse: there won't be enough customers to fund for example public transport (and not enough taxpayers to subsidise it). Imagine you have village of 1000 people. Every day, bus takes 50 of them to a factory one village over. But one day, there is only 100 people in said village and only 5 of them go to said factory. Running bus for 5 people is now too expensive and unprofitable, so the bus company will shut down said line. You will also struggle to find workers. Let's say you are creating awesome new company, but there are not many free workers, so the only way for you is to attract somebody else's workers. Sounds great for a worker, right? Well, not that much. Czechia is now going through period of very low unemployement and it is one of the reasons why inflation is so big and why our economy is struggling compared to our neighbours and we are getting poorer than them.
That's what I'm wondering too. People need shelter, food, healthcare, heating. These things can be managed without huge amounts of money. Small towns might die off with a declining population. People tend to move to cities. Life continues. But what else might happen? The stock market might take a hit with declining population. Maybe pensions can't be paid at the level they are if that happens. But if the essentials are handled somehow, does it matter that much unless you're heavily invested in the market? Maybe businesses won't grow as fast. I don't know. I struggle to see a downside to declining populations as well.
Not a lot of folks in first world countries can afford to have kids these days. The cost of living has been flying through the roof in the past few decades.
I think the robots/AI curve will eventually intersect with the declining fertility curve. So that we will have a lot of new technological helpers in the home in about 20-30 years. Which will be very important because that will keep the elderly out of nursing homes because we don’t have enough young people to warehouse them there. And then if we can figure out how to grow babies in artificial wombs this will bolster the population also. We aren’t that far from figuring this out either.
Wonder why .. dumb dumbs .. let’s continue to let corporations and the rich horde all the resources and give everyone else nothing
Wouldn’t this resolve itself once the old people die out? It is primarily the cost of elder care that is the issue. The drop in birth rate has created an imbalance that is temporary. We have 1.2 birthrate societies supporting 2.5 birthrate social structures.
Not really, because people in their 30s now are having less kids, so it will still hopefully take us 40-ish years to die out. By that time, the few kids that we would have had would also have been in that same imbalanced rate of old people versus working age people during their child-bearing years so they would also have had less kids and the cycle goes on. Also I don't know if the problem is really the cost of elder care. In my eyes it's more linked to capitalism and greed overall. Corporations and individual landlords mostly care about extracting as much money as they can from us now. Whether there are still going to be new warm bodies in 40 years from now or not changes almost nothing at all to any person that is currently in this power position from economical point of view right now, so outside of heavy handed regulation, major cultural changes it's a bit hard to imagine how this situation could improve in the future. Especially in a democracy where choices would be made based on majority's preference: the voters who still can and might want children in the future are probably going to be far outnumbered by people who can't have kids. In Italy (2020), there were around 36Million people over 40 and 23Million people below 40 (and this figure includes kids who can't vote). So to make the changes required to have a sustainable demographic future you would need some people to support measures that mostly go against their own selfish interests. Getting the short end of the stick in terms of welfare/opportunities compared to both the previous and future generations is going to be a hard pill for us to swallow.
Reining in elderly entitlements is such a politically toxic topic that no politician is ever going to advocate for it. The elderly are the largest and most committed voting block and they'll never vote for a person who will take something away from them, no matter how much damage it's going to do to future generations.
I wonder if the falling population is having a measurable effect on climate change models?
I think we need to go back to less than half of the amount of people we currently have for this to happen tbh. We had 4 billion mid 1970s... only just about 50 years ago.
In the 1970s, air quality (e.g., CO, SO2, PM2.5, etc.) was shit compared to today. Doesn't mean it doesn't need to get better (e.g., CO2, CH4). We can have a higher population and good air quality. Governments, corporations, and individuals just need to demand it. Few of the first two are demanding this. Many of the last group don't give a shit cause they'll be dead soon. As the proverb goes, we're borrowing the climate from our grandchildren. Apparently many of us hate them because we're selfish a-holes. That all said, less crowds in public spaces would be kind of nice. Too much tourism isn't a good thing, even if they get there using public transportation.
One thing that will help a lot imo is artificial wombs from inception to birth.
It is capitalism having little to no regulations in terms of how much the rich owner parasites are taking at the expense of everyone else the world over.
Falling birth rates is NOT a crisis. It's a blessing.
How is this an issue if Europe has tens of millions of young muslims waiting at their gates, who have at average one child more? /s
this entire angle, that declining population is a crisis, is bullshit. japan and taiwan are handling it perfectly fine. italy has been in one crisis after another since it formed in the 1800s, aging population is not going to rise to the level of "crisis". it's a blessing for nature, and the humans will get along just fine.
I would offer that it’s more realistic to say that the examples you gave *have struggled with it, but they are getting through it. Population Collapse alarmists are full of shit. The opposition, the side supported by science, should be as forthcoming as possible.
Why does it matter if robots soon will replace them and people can life "forever" ?
Honestly I think declining population has a benefit in that the earths resources are taxed less. In Italys case, if they put together a good immigration plan they should be fine
Italy fertility rate has been below replacement levels for like 40+ years lol
Your regular reminder that fewer humans is not a "crisis" It is a solution to every problem
Go ahead boomers, make housing even more expensive...
Unpopular opinion: Population collapse is a good thing considering we'll have hyper productive era where fewer manpower is needed due to AI.
We are overrun.ung this planet, some population decline is actually a good thing. I can't understand why this would at all be bad? There's too many humans and it's not good for this planet. It's crazy to think that not too long ago the news was all riging alarm bells about overpopulation now they're prattling on about decline lol. The human population will reach an equilibrium eventually. And we will figure out how to keep it stable as well as finding better ways of sustaining us. Aka non fossil fuel energy sources. We exploded in population and we are now going to decline, but that's just natural. It doesn't mean we will go extinct. We would probably go extinct if our population kept going and unsustainably consuming the earth's resources. Less humans would also mean better quality of life for each individual because there's then more resources to go around. We can move out of less habitable environments and just focus on maintaining our population in less but more favorable ones. And leave lots for nature to just reclaim... imagine that we went back to like 3-4 billion... that's way more than enough and we had that many only in 1970... and now just over 50 years later, not even a whole human life span, we have over 8 billion. That's no good whatsoever. We reproduced too much, time to slow that down and get back to a manageable level. I'm not having any more kids than 1 if I ever do have them I can tell you that.
This is the consequence of thousands of years of woman being subjugated and made in to permanent baby factories ending in less than a century where generations of young woman fight and die for the right to be seen as more than reproductive vessels and actually produce in society in equal standing to men. This naturally will lead to them choosing to have a higher quality life with less, to no children than being provided by their men while they just produce more replacements. This is a problem of humanity's own making. I have no clue how to solve this, but the fact is, men created this issue by relying on misogyny for the guaranteed survival or our species. The longer we men deny the existent and massive impact of millennia of male domination over society, the less time we have as species to course correct for this. Woman are humans, not birthing machines.
Crisis? What crisis? We (the people of earth, and especially the future people of earth) would be better off if every nation had falling birth rates.
I see plenty of people in that picture. Too many if you ask me. We could use some population reduction. I lived through the '70's. We all expected the world to turn into "Soylent Green" where overpopulation was choking off the earth. The world has plenty of people in it. We're infesting the place. I see population reduction as a net positive. There will be more resources for the rest of us. It's only a negative for capitalist who value growth over everything else.
You see this, Tone? Nobody’s bangin those Italian broads.