AIBU The global fertility crisis is the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced?

If voting had been from 16 in the idiot Brexit referendum, we wouldn't have left. Also there is only an illusion of democracy under the present system.

In a different topic I've just taken out a mortgage that I'll be repaying until 71 on a very low income.
Bring on the assisted dying! No need to force continuing life on those who no longer want it

Money is just is concept to distribute (or not) wealth.

I honestly couldn't give a toss. The rhetoric about the economy is valid, but it's not insurmountable with proper intervention. For example, the 5-day working week is a relic of the previous industrial era. Implementing a shorter working week could help maintain employment levels and keep economies moving, avoiding mass unemployment and keeping individuals engaged in the labor market. While this may lead to lower profit margins for business owners, who might need to pay more people for the same amount of work, these costs could be offset by gains in productivity. Government support through tax incentives or wage supplements could ease this transition to a more sustainable economic model.

We simply don't need to work as much as we do. Think about your own working day; I bet you could identify several tasks that just waste time. Take me, for example. I'm a lecturer at a university and today I'm participating in a 2-hour meeting, with at least 15 other people, in which each of us will summarise our individual written plans on a topic, which have been published for months, because one person near the top of the food chain won't read them. I will have approximately 15 minutes of participation in this meeting. This happens all the time, everywhere.

I’m not sure we can do this well. There’ll be so much volatility. Better to start reversing sooner

The UN projects world population to peak in 2080 at 10.3 billion.

https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/population

We hit 8 billion in 2022.

Let it go into terminal decline. Humanity is the most destructive being ever to.evolve on this planet. Fertility is also in decline and affecting men and women in reproducing. We can't be so arrogant to expect humans to not possibly go extinct after the pollution, devestation and cruelty we have inflicted on this planet. My family have an incurable genetic illness. I never had children but my sibling had 3 and all at risk. People are choosing childfree lives for various reasons. The fact adults are struggling on once decent wages to support themselves let alone a child or 2 is also a factor. The universe will not even exist one day. You seem worried about a distant furture we will not be part of.

I'm not sure I really follow how much of that relates to the topic of the thread, but wealthy countries don't generally give aid out of pure altruism, there's usually a significant degree of self interest involved.

I'm not sure how things look in the US now, after all the recent cuts, but pre-Trump, about 25% of foreign aid spending was domestic (e.g. subsidizing US business for produce to be shipped overseas). Tbf, that likely does contribute to soil erosion, in the same way that capitalism often comes at a resource cost.

When aide is spent in developing countries themselves, that's usually economically beneficial, too. The US (and the UK) essentially use aide money to invest in a developing country so that, as it becomes more stable and affluent, they have a new market to sell to. About 40% of US/UK export revenue comes from developing countries.

Its hard to put an exact number on it, but even lower estimates tend to say that the US doubles its money on foreign aid spending - its a profitable investment.

Obviously, poorer countries generally dont have the means to make similar investments in richer ones.

I'm not, by any means, suggesting that foreign aide is purely exploitative, but the economics of it largely explain why its a one-way street, and I don't think it should be viewed as an "unreturned favor".

(Obviously, national security interest, disease control, general soft power, etc, are all benefits of foreign aide too, which likely have economic value, albeit harder to calculate).

I'm not sure about the last few questions but I agree on rewilding generally and stopping the incessant increase in population and depletion of nature.

There aren't really many countries that do have population growth that I think would qualify as "massive", any more.

The highest birth rates are in Sub Saharan Africa, but their rates are dropping rapidly too (and more rapidly than was forecasted only a few years ago).

The region's birthrate was already on a downward trend at the turn of the century (at about 6 births per woman) and has since dropped to a hair above 4. The region is also now expected to drop below the 2.1 replacement rate in about 50 years time.

Worth bearing in mind, too, that the region has the world's highest childhood mortality rate. If you adjusted the birth rate to show "births of children who survive into adulthood", that'd bring it down to about 3.

Still significantly higher than in most of the world but not by as much as would have been the case a couple of decades ago, and they are trending in the same direction.

And the main reasons why they and other countries do still have relatively high birth rates is due to reduced access to education (particularly for women) and contraception, not how society views the affordability of child-rearing.

I’m not familiar with the state of their soils tbh. I am familiar with the eroded condition of ours and in the US, and how the nutrient content of food is falling due to massive overuse, in a way that no artificial fertiliser can put back. That’s why there’s talk of rewilding. We have one of the most natire-depleted countries, especially considering our population, on the globe. Much of the damage has been done in these last 20 years of mass immigration.

We need to cut our population to keep our ecology for our own survival, as many pp’s said upthread. We understand ecology - at least some of us do - thanks to our organised society with learning at its heart. There are peoples in Africa complaining about ‘western evils’ for the amount of plastic they throw in their rivers, or the coastal mangroves they chop down.

If you prefer, I’ll ask instead - where’s the aid convoys from Pakistan when our floods strike? When our people have no power and have to leave their homes and repair the sewage content for years after? Do they call their own people racist for not providing this aid?

Checking out the men on dating apps may be even better.

Absolutely right.

No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying we've done it to ourselves by destroying the planet, not that we deserve it. What's happening to the ecosystem is very much biological, and that's my concern, not whether we deserve to die out or not. I don't care about that, it is what it is and we just need to A) do something to slow it down and B) accept that it's our fault instead of acting like victims of forces outside ourselves, because that may serve as motivation to do something to slow it down. That's my stance.
To your questions;
I think humanity is a mixed bag.
I don't know if you're bad as I don't know you. I don't think I am. But then nobody thinks they're bad, do they. It's hard to be objective about that.

Wouldn’t Sudan’s soils be in trouble before ours? Due to geographical location

^ Forgot to add, then in those countries they start wars , often genocidal, then cry for charity from us in the west for their man-made famines - and get it.

Who’s going to give us charity? Will Sudan feed our people for nothing and give us medical aid when our soils exhaust themselves or the flooding gets worse?

No I don’t agree with that at all. The countries where populations are increasing massively and ‘don’t expect much for their children’ in a saintly way are often countries where people are more dependent on the land to live, have low women’s rights and male status involved in how many women and kids they own, and dont really seem to have any care about the future of their environments or the ability of all their children to survive and thrive in the future.

They are not living in a structured organised society that needs kids to have good education because it expects kids to become useful workers in high tech computing, nuclear, engineering, or energy sectors. Our ‘expectations’ for our kids would be substantially different if our vision of their future was to split the family farm between a couple of oldest males and kick the girls out to marry and produce endless babies too.

We live in a society where workers are told ‘can’t feed don’t breed’, and then the ability to feed is restricted more every year, not ‘any child is a blessing and shows how big your dick is’.

Yes, I dont know why people are under the impression its a one off bulge. If we suddenly elevated the birthrate to something close to the replacement rate, and maintained that THEN it would be a one-off bulge.

That doesn't seem within the realms of possibility though, with birth rates continuing to trend lower (which has been the case for well over half a century now).

The issue looks like it will become more and more acute with each generation.

@ObelixtheGaul

The problem isn't affording to have children, the problem is what we expect our children to have.

Not really. The problem is that we expect both parents to work, so wages are lost during pregnancy and a few months after birth, then have to pay through the nose for childcare so that they can get back to work. It all comes back to high housing costs. Costs of clothes, toys, prams, etc are chicken feed compared to loss of wages and several hundred pounds per week for nursery costs.

Go back a few decades when a couple could afford a house on one wage meant one parent could stay at home, thus not incurring ruinously expensive childcare costs.

It's noticeable that lots of "high child numbers" families are on benefits - i.e. they get paid more for more children and aren't suffering loss of wages due to maternity leave, generally aren't paying for housing costs, and don't need to pay for children as they're at home to look after the kids anyway.

I'd say that the UK's small army of multi child benefit claimants are more akin to your mention of developing countries, i.e. in both cases, there's no "Need" for both parents to work to pay for stupidly inflated housing costs!

A lot of people are mentioning the affordability of children, yet countries that still have growing populations often have a lot less than we do. They don't have concerns about paying for childcare, that isn't what they do with their children.

They aren't worrying about workers paying for state care because they don't have that anyway. In most countries where the population continues to rise, there's no such thing as a state pension for all, or state provided elderly care.

The problem isn't affording to have children, the problem is what we expect our children to have. Expectations that countries with healthy birth rates frankly don't all have.

The trouble is, most of the solutions to the western birth decline rely heavily on finding ways to meet the requirements of the modern parents.

And the fact is, we can't. It costs a lot more to have children here because nobody wants to bring 6 kids up in two rooms, etc.

In a lot of the developing countries where birthrates are still high, even the basics like education are still a luxury.

Obviously it's not wrong to want our children to have a decent living standard, as well as ourselves. Anyone can 'afford' to have children. Millions of people around the world living in abject poverty are still having children.

We aren't willing to do that, here. And before I get jumped on, I am not saying we should be, but the reality is it is impossible to facilitate an increased birthrate in a society that is used to a much higher standard of living without massive increases in taxation, which we have seen on enough threads, people aren't willing to do.

But our oppositional form of gov is the problem. I find K Badenoch embarrassing when she leaps to criticise every comment from the gov. At last Labour are trying to cut benefit spending but everyone is running around screaming -but it has to happen or maybe they are hoping for another covid to wipe out half the population which would also solve it.

A falling population is only a threat to "civilisation" because it will collapse the ponzi scheme of the Western developed countries where ever increasing numbers of workers are needed to pay for the care and pensions of the ever increasing number of older people. Once we deal with that problem, a steady or falling population isn't really a problem nor "threat" to civilisation at all. We just need a new form of economy that isn't a ponzi scheme.

We could just make it slightly easier for people who want more kids to have them - for every 2 kids born in UK a third is wanted but not born.

World wide people in fertile years are citing social and ecomic barriers to more kids - if we worked on those it would slighly increase fertlity rates - not get to replacement level - no-ones managed that yet - so we'd get a slump not a cliff. That seems to be what latest UN report was suggesting governments consider.