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

In 2019 the ONS had the tfr in this country at 1.66, in 2023 it was 1.44. It is dropping at a rate of knots.

The birth rate has been declining since the 60s and your mum still manages to find a gardener and cleaner. Many young people are out of work and the birth rate is still 1.5ish per woman.

Well that is going to happen isn’t it? So many jobs will go the way of AI so there will be a natural switch to reduction in jobs so the required workforce will be smaller and the jobs available will be more manual. In a way the reduction in population occurring now is happening at exactly the right time as what will happen otherwise when there are too many people and too few jobs?

take for example in my office. The finance department 25 years ago had 20 people in it. There are now 4.

They need people to be doctors, dentists, working in shops, delivering their shopping, driving buses, servicing cars. I don't just mean personal care.
My mum doesn't need personal care but she would struggle a bit without a cleaner, gardener and all of those things I mentioned above.

I mean if everyone agrees to wind down the human population, they can cut back on lots of those jobs or maybe AI can do it?

Why do people need people looking after them when they are old? Most don’t need any help. It is a completely fallacy that every old person goes into care or has long term illnesses or can’t take care of themselves. Some do, but the majority don’t. Out of all the older people who have sadly died in my family, not a single one needed any sort of medical care until right at the end for a short period. I honestly think if people ensure they take out private pensions and have a decent income when they retire then this crazy catastrophe of an aging population will not happen. Japan seems to be coping ok and they have had this problem for a while

Assuming your children are Millenials they can expect to live to 79. Until people are 80 only about 21% require care of any sort. Hopefully they will never need it.

The shortage of care staff currently isn't a population/birthrate issue. It's an ongoing problem due to low pay, poor working conditions, and a lack of career development opportunities. Unless this is addressed the problem won't be solved by your children having children.

Who do they see looking after them when they grow old?
I don't mean that their kids should do it, but if having kids becomes less common then where will the young people come from to support society?
I am hoping my teenagers will have a good life. One of mine wants kids, the other doesn't. They are both plenty young enough to change their minds.

If I ask them who will look after them, they are both convinced that science/medicine will be so advanced that no one will ever be sick.

The trouble is, when someone has worked for 35 or 45 years already and have built up enough on which to live comfortably. How can you motivate them to work longer? Why should they work longer? I live very moderately, frugally perhaps and certainly not in luxury by anyone's standards. No amount of money would encourage me to work.

Retirees paid taxes for decades and continue to pay fuel tax, VAT, Council Tax, road tax, income tax on pension payments, stamp duty etc etc.

They use businesses and keep many workers in employment. Also, it's worth noting, that if retirees did not volunteer in their millions (8.6 million currently) many organisations and charities would cease to function.

Why keep older people in the workplace when so many young people are leaving school with no work?

I don't know how old you are or what kind of work you do @BoldGreenDreamer but I did a manual job all my life and when I came to retire I was knackered. I was an aging woman lifting heavy machinery and working physically all day outdoors in all winds and weathers. I had enough money. I'd had enough work. I could not have carried on. I needed a rest.

We need to live within our means and contribute, but the answer to this is by all expecting less in terms of material wealth, looking after ourselves and the environment better and by investing in the future.

If humanity were to die out by choice because nobody wants to have babies, what is the problem with that? It’s a choice!

Not that I think for one moment that will happen. A rebalancing of numbers is far more likely.

I don't think for a second humans are heading for extinction. I believe we'll find a way to cling on but population growth and expectations are unsustainable so there has to be less of us to have a decent standard of living. Yes, it'll be shit and hard for a while but most of human history has been shit and hard. I'm just sorry that this is the legacy we're leaving the generations that follow us

Well I for one care far more about rhinoceros or elephants than the Sistine Chapel. No man made creativity can rival nature. So you are wrong IMO.

It isn’t just that. The country feels crowded. For instance 100 years ago London was green fields with small hamlets and space. There was space to raise children. now London is high rise, and children are being raised in flats. Green space is low. We can’t increase the land mass. Quality of life is better in some ways but worse than others. We can say ‘oh we need to build more housing’ but every house build takes away a bit more green space or a bit of sky gets lost. People don’t want to raise children in crowded conditions. They think their own childhood and the freedom they had and now they look around them and think there is too much traffic, there are too many people, there is too much crime. I can’t get my kid in the local school etc. there is no solution to this as we can’t make more land

Anybody thinking the answer to saving humanity is to have more children when the planet is burning, people are starving, seas are rising, flora and fauna are becoming extinct on a frightening scale, we’re seeing mass immigration etc, etc is bonkers.

But the alternative to avoid what you have said is exponential population growth as there always needs to be more people to pay the older generation. It can’t go on forever. The end result would be the end of humanity because there won’t be enough resources to go around.

"Without the youth we have no chance of getting out of this mess".

err, you think anyone has the answers, yuh think we have ANY chance of getting out of this mess, at ALL? 🤔

And many children these days don't want to have children. I'm not surprised really. Their parents have told them how lucky they are to have what they have, their parents have instilled in them how hard the parents had ti work to facilitate it all. Kids think: no thanks. Hardly surprising.

They can't get on the property ladder, cost of living crisis means few people have any spare money anymore: not much money spare to go off enjoying yourself. Why bring a kid into this. Makes sense, sadly.

You were an adult in 1945 ? So born in the '20's- the greatest generation ? Fair play to you, you owe the rest of us nothing. As the DOC says to Marty in Back to the Future " it's your kids, somethings got to be done about your kids" ( eg those born 1945-1965) that is the richest generation that has ever lived, they are now reaching retirement age and haven't paid in anything like enough to pay for their health and social care.

If you start from a false premise it doesn't help. The global population is still growing: World Population by Year - Worldometer https://share.google/yeNOMKUfCgDIPrecl.

The world would much more comfortably support 1 billion than 8-9 billion. The competition for resources and space is terrible already, and the impact on our planet is unsustainable, so the global population needs to drop quickly. A bubble period of older population is only an issue for a brief period, and we need different strategies to deal with it given that modern technology will reduce the number of jobs in many industries anyway. Governments remain obsessed with GDP when the metric stopped reflecting living improvements for the population nearly 20 years ago. Better tracking of population happiness would least to different statements about population size.

We either need more young people, or slash state spending on older people.

Look how well means testing winter fuel
went down! 😆

@NJLX2021 Excellent post.

It's scary tbh, we already have more over 65s than under 15s. Now a smaller population is a good thing but it's about demographics. A population with too many older people is not sustainable without heavy immigration which isn't always popular...

Nobody really wants to acknowledge it though so politicians ignore it.

No country has managed to use incentives to increase birth rates.

People are richer and more capable now than almost any point in human history... the managed kids during times of war, yet can't manage them now?

• Great, those fulfilling lives won't last long, if there isn't a young population to keep society going. Good luck being fulfilled in your later years, if there aren't young workers keeping the systems going.

I wish I had got to this post earlier.. so much awful illogical information in the first page.

Couple of key things:

1 - The issue with depopulation is not less people = bad. It is less young people = bad. When you end up with 20, 30, 40, 100 retired elderly people to 1 young workers, your society fails. No ifs or buts, unless there is an AI miracle, you cannot support a society without capable workers. No society = no modern life, no food, wars, system collapse etc.

So yes, in theory if you could go from 8bn people to 4bn people, keeping the ratio of old-young the same = a great thing for the planet, and those 4bn would probably be happier and the whole world would be better.

But that isn't happening. You are going to go from a healthy split of 8bn, to a 4bn that is heavily skewed towards the elderly, and cannot sustain itself.

2 - Wouldn't it be better if we all died out. Better for who? For the planet? A ball of molten iron and rock floating aimlessly through space? So what. This idea that its better if we die out is just 100% virtue signaling crap. If you actually believed this, you would do certain things that would be highly immoral and unreasonable.

3 - it is ok because we have immigration. No. Those countries also have falling birth rates. Most of the world is now bellow replacement, and everywhere is trending down. Once those populations fall, where will your migrants come from?

4 - it is natural for animal populations to rise and fall... yes, usually at great suffering and cost. Most falls in animal populations come from starvation, famine, predators, conflict, natural disasters etc. Just because it is natural, doesn't mean that it is desirable to live through the effects of rapid population decline.

5 - But the climate??? Every new child born is a new brain that can potentially help the scientific world invent new technologies and solve the climate crisis. Without the youth we have no chance of getting out of this mess. I would argue that a gradual decline away from the energy and inventive nature of young populations, and towards a smaller, but gradually aging and tired population, is one of the worst outcomes for the environment.

For me, population decline is like climate change was 20 years ago.

Early 2000s, if you said that you were worried about the climate, no one really cared. Global warming was a widely understood idea, but no one actually cared and you were often laughed away for proposing any real change. Today it has penetrated the mainstream and we understand its a big threat.

Population decline will be the same. The numbers, logic, research on it is very very clear. But it hasn't really penetrated the mainstream yet, Give it 20-30 years, when populations are falling in some countries, bigger problems are happening in Korea/Japan, pensions are under a lot more pressure, schools are closing at a faster rate, and migrant flows are being impacted by countries not wanting to loose their young workers - and then it will probably be something most people understand.

Millennials receiving a pension by the time they're 70 would actually be on the optimistic side...

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2024/feb/05/uk-state-pension-age-will-soon-need-to-rise-to-71-say-experts