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

I keep reading on here it's a one off bulge.

It's not - every generation since 70s in UK had fewer kids than one before - my entire life the population been below the replacmnet level - my kids generations smaller than mine.

Immigration, automation and changing job market and not housing building enoughf or decades masks that I think. Partly why the birth rate is as high as it currentlky is thanks to immigration - it takes a generation for immigrant populations to revert to national fertlity levels - and I think it's one in three births has one parent not born in UK.

So there will likely remain an older voting block - which posters on MN will become - even after the post war -60s bulge is no longer around.

Plus when you have a bulge of young people who get a demographic dividend - you have more workers to tax for decades - it's how many countries like China got rich. So a lot of the economic wealth comes as a result of having big population of working age - usually countries get rich before that flips - Japan did - China less so. It's why many are predicting african countries like Niger may well become encomic growth centers in decades coming.

We're just at start of the downside of that for many countries- exacerbated by the good news story of longer life expectancy - so the workers retire and become a cost where as for decades they were wealth generators.

I thought of this when I read the post!

Marvellous isn’t it. A one-off demographic bulge meaning one section of the population has been able to engineer society to suit their own special path-of-least-resistance for the past sixty years, and they're still hard at it.

How? How do politicians face down the grey vote in a democracy ? Some other politicians will just come along promising to do whatever a really significant voting demographic want, and they'll be the ones elected. Once again, I refer you to the WFP.

Ideally, I suppose you'd taper it carefully so that population decline was as gradual as possible.

Because at the moment politicians and the media are in a state of denial.

I saw an intevriew with a reporter who worked on housing issues - she said it only started to get media attention when it started to affect the DGC/children of the editors.

We need to talk about housing: how to humanely persuade older people under occupying large houses to move- having suitable housing for them to move into would be a good start. Blocks of decent sheltered apartments run by not for profit entities would be good.

This is a big reason why our parents didn't downsize. There was a lack of suitable properties - and it's a risk will new property need work. Heard a repondent to money box of radio 4 that did downsize found unexpected costs and it really didn't free up much money at all - and then retrired they spend more time in their house than ever before.

IL have only a upstrias bathroom and really steep narrow stairs - wouldn't be allowed now - and they looked and stayed and FIL fell down said stairs - ending up in in hospital for months. They sort of shurg and say they'll get a stair lift but I don't think they'll find that's possible - so it will be an emegecy that we'll likely have to step in and help with.

Dmum house is much better for old age but location in village with few services is bad - she won't move now till she needs sheltered accomodation.

There's a lot that could be done to make town centers more acceisbel and elder friendly - which owuld benfit more than that demographic - takes money and it's not liek highstreets been doing well lately but people are looking.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/25/improving-with-age-how-city-design-is-adapting-to-older-populations

Do you want to keep increasing the population?

How do you deal with it as those people added get older?

It would certainly be one way of responding to the climate crisis.

Somebody, eventually, is going to have to grasp the nettle , stop kowtowing to the grey vote, and open up an honest conversation about our ageing demographic. Because at the moment politicians and the media are in a state of denial.

We need to talk about housing: how to humanely persuade older people under occupying large houses to move- having suitable housing for them to move into would be a good start. Blocks of decent sheltered apartments run by not for profit entities would be good.

We need to talk about benefits: there's a widespread narrative in the media about parents, young people, disabled people being "benefit scroungers", while retired people on pensions "have earned it". Pretty cruel and discriminatory given that the kids growing up in poverty on meagre benefits now will be facing a heavy tax burden as working adults to support pensioners. Some acknowledgement of that rather than the constant demonisation would be nice.

And we need to talk about immigration: if you want to enjoy a comfortable retirement, both being directly cared for and indirectly supported by the taxes of those of working age, we are going to have to import some foreigners, many of them brown or black, so maybe stop putting out, devouring and parrotting all this hysterical anti immigrant propaganda?

It used to be most NHS spending is done in last 18 months of life - I think that holds true for whatever age the death occurs.

https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/news-item/over-80-of-healthcare-cost-in-the-final-year-of-life-spent-on-hospitals

The figures reveal that the UK public purse spends five times the amount supporting people in the final year of life as hospital inpatients than it does supporting them with primary, community health and hospice care

That is a big thing the government is apparently looking at - if we can avoid hospital admissions and provide more other cheaper care. Certainly most people don't want to be in hospitals and most don't want to die in them yet despite that most do at the minute.

There are fears euthanasia could take away resources from end of life care - but I think that will depend on the implementation.

One thing that will likely happen is longer working ages - so there legistalation that means state pensions age can be raised till it hits 70. I suspect we'll see more of the USA model - retriement but p/t flex work during it in early years. I know DH uncle doing driving deliveries in his retriement - he's 70+ but still taking on some shifts (and providing childcare for GC). This doesn't tend to go over well on MN when mentioned though. Also impacts family help for child care.

Japan done well with it's aging population but it has led to high government debt - they manage as a lot held by it's own citizens. It could be a contibuting reason behind our increasing debt as well.

One big problem is once you hit an increase in older dependents it's actually hard to add kids - as they are dependents for decades - so they'd just add to government and families burdens - you'd get a U curve so added pressure on working population both ends. Immigration helps mitigate that - tends to be working age people but they age and stay and it adds pressure onto services and resources such as housing - making competion in working population even higher and decreasing fertlity levels - as well as more cultural problems.

There are no good solutions out there so we'll just have to manage the population decline.

We've raised retiment ages - added more mothers to working population - push more onto individuals - with long NHS wait lists, more private care and pensions. We're in a much better position than countries that haven't raise retirment ages as quickly.

To answer my own question - lower pension age and not being kept with dementia sounds good to me.

I suppose it would be a majority choice in my age group (35-45)

I can't agree that the global population not growing or even shrinking a bit would be bad on it's own.
Yes, the economy is totally unprepared for that, and even now the voters don't require their politicians to pay attention to this topic.

I see the biggest issue in prolonging the living age without prolonging healthy age enough.

Mental experiment. Imagine everyone could choose for themselves between higher pension age with current life prolonging medical approach, or 5 years lower pension age with signing up for "voluntary euthanasia" to be delivered once the health conditions deterioration meets some agreed threshold. What would you choose?
If you don't mind stating your age group/how do you think you would have thought in different life stages, that would be even more interesting.

I think this is a very pragmatic, logical solution. Unfortunately it ignores human emotions, or rather the emotions of the rich white people paying the bills. We seem to have no problem with monthers leaving their young children and babies back in the Philippines (or wherever) and basically never seeing them but heaven forbid we shouldn't be kept close to our elderly. The young child deprived of its mother is much worse imo.

The answer is actually not immigration, but emigration of the elderly to care homes in Nigeria, etc.

It makes no economic sense to import low-value workers to the UK, and quite a lot of sense to build these establishments where the workers actually are, and it would rebalance both populations in age terms and help develop those economies to boot.

Thing is, we are a democracy. If the number of older voters, voting in there own interests (which they (as a group) absolutely do, look at the outrage about WFP compared to when that education support allowance was taken away from the poorest 16 - 18 year olds) generational unfairness will get worse, not better. I really would not be surprised if at some point in the future some sort of national service was introduced for the young that involved looking after the elderly.

It’s not just endless consumers the western governments want, but an endless supply of cheap and cheaper labour. The destruction of women’s rights would also be a bonus to those in power in Britain at least, and I guess the US have similar issues (in England the destruction of women’s rights is part of the class issue and goes back to the founding of the early modern state, and the founding therefore of modern work patterns).

Lower populations are in no way a threat to ‘civilization’. There are and have been many civilisations that function better with fewer numbers. I do not believe in the religion of ‘immigration is essential’ - I might be more impressed if considerations of the cost of living for working people were equally important, or if serious discussions of numbers were attached. Given the millions we’ve taken in over the last few years I think any concern about current working age populations ought to be allayed by now. Unless all those millions of immigrants were pensioners?

The age burden is a problem but some of that is due to very deliberate policies providing for the entitlement and convenience of the current elderly over everyone else, and intergenerational inequality.

@MuckFusk
Okay but it seems to me that your conclusions are that:

1. We have to preserve Earth in conditions idyllic for humans (I fully agree this is a very high priority worthy of drastic means including managed population decline)

2. Humans ceasing to exist would be a good way to achieve 1)

3. Human suffering and death is bad

and

4. Extinction is what humanity deserves

And I'm just saying... I think there are some logical fallacies / inconsistencies there.

A bit like saying we have to preserve the Mona Lisa by locking it in a sealed box and throwing it to the bottom of the sea forever where noone will ever see it again. The means defeat the objective, or make it relatively meaningless. Maybe you feel that in those circumstances, the art piece that cannot ever be observed or appreciated isn't less meaningful than one which can. But I disagree.

Likewise, it's hard to reconcile your feelings that human beings deserve extinction and that would be a good thing to happen, but also that human suffering and death is bad, when these are pre-requisite to human extinction.

Lastly, philosophy kind of does matter if you want to meaningfully engage in any topic that contains value judgements about what matters, what is good or bad, or about "deserving". These are philosophical matters.

Nail on the head. There are workers working to pay for even "passive" income - it doesn't grow itself - it relies on a functioning prosperous economy.

We can’t just keep on having more humans like a population Ponzi scheme. Western governments love more and more endless consumers but it inevitably will not be for the good of humans or the planet.
Less humans is good. We need to lower our demand for the things humans produce, most of which is unneeded for our wellbeing and allow assisted dying on demand to reduce the burden on younger populations.

And keep doing so as people age? Just go up with numbers

It all reminds me of this conservative/liberal heatmap, where the fundamental divide is whether your dearest are also your nearest, or whether you care most for all life no matter how remote.

I was amazed to open this thread and find Mumsnet so firmly jammed at the Extremist Liberal end of the spectrum. How’s that happened?

Also, even more reason to be encouraging migration into our country, even working to attract people.

Oh wait. We are doing the opposite.

🤷

Living with a teen is the greatest contraception ever.