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

I'm glad. This economic idea of ever expanding people and economy is leading us to climate catastrophe, so we will all be dead from that anyway. I'd rather we petered out than the whole natural world is destroyed. Looks like we need to get robots doing most of the work, which is happening anyway as so many industries are being replaced by robots anyway. We just need government that are will to stop only the richest get all the money.

I'm a millennial and I don't really trust that my pension will happen anyway, I'm assuming it will all be fucked by then, so I'm trying to think up other ways to have money in old age. As it happens, anyone in my generation doesn't expect to retire by even 70, the way things are heading. That's why we prefer piecemeal jobs and we don't do as previous generations do, and work our arses off in the hope we will get to retire soon. We'll still be at the gig economy in our 60s (if the planet hasn't been destroyed by then)

People can’t afford to have children any more and many are realising they can still have wonderful fulfilling lives without them.

To stress, I'm not among the death to humanity brigade, just trying to meet you half way.

Mulling this more:

• lots of posters suggest that humanity dying out would be a good thing (or even an essential one) for the sake of the environment and/or given projections of increasing resource scarcity;

• the human suffering that would likely occur due to population/societal collapse doesn't appear to concern those posters;

• developing countries are (currently) producing new humans at a much higher rate, and are more likely to see increases in emissions (via fossil fuels) as they become more developed,

would the extinction advocates be inclined to think that a swift genocide of the populaces of developing countries might be the way ahead? If you haven't the stomach for mass murders, perhaps through a program of forced sterilization?

Basically, should we play Thanos?

Or does it have to be every human, more gradually over time? (And doesn't that just mean more harm to the planet in the interim?)

I don't see anyone arguing for further population growth - rather, the argument is for stabilizing the current population or for a more managed decline (that is less likely to result in a sudden economic catastrophe or societal collapse and the suffering that may bring).

Incidentally, while it would likely be a boon (at least, initially) for most other species if humanity disappeared, largely because of our environmental impact, I don't think humanity's other moral failings you list (slavery, genocide, torture, manipulation and oppression) are themselves good reason to think the world would be better off without us.

There are many other species who do things that would be considered morally terrible, we just dont hold them to our standards (for obvious reasons).

If, for example, you could run a poll of rodents and birds (well, chickens and turkeys excepted), I imagine they'd sooner get rid of all forms of cat before they got rid of humans.

(Slightly complicated by our role in spreading cats around the world, but you get the point).

There are, too, some foreseeable circumstances in which humans might be the only species capable of saving the planet (for example, from the threat of a catastrophic meteor strike).

I'm also far from convinced that lobbying for humanity's extinction (not least as being the only possible way forward) represents the moral high ground you think it does.

Just to again stress - as one raises the issue of immigration cautiously - that it is not a viable long term solution for addressing the aging population. Even if you are completely neutral on the proportion of immigrants to "natives" (and many are not), the "production line" of available foreign workers is slowing down, just as the domestic one is.

That said, abruptly slashing immigration without even having a vague notion of how to address the aging population crisis is akin to being in a car with no breaks, hurtling towards a wall, and putting your foot on the accelerator.

Me too

Sort of tongue in cheek, yes - although when I qualified 11 years ago the birth rate at our hospital was around 7,000 a year, it's now around 10,000

Yes I think you're probably right. While immigration levels are higher in Canada, and even though illegal immigration is a very small portion of UK immigration, undocument immigrants are an easier scapegoat for vilification (and many people are seemingly largely unable/unwilling to distinguish between it and general immigration).

I do think that Canada is just a little behind the curve, though, and the issue will increasingly come to the forefront.

IKR. Trump saved our asses from Poilievre and his band of jackals with his support of him. He tried a fake out by later endorsing Carney, but it wasn't credible to say the least.

I was actually talking about the flood of illegal immigrants in European countries. Canada is not as easy to get to and not close to areas where there are wars and widespread hunger, so it makes sense that we would have fewer undocumented migrants. However, I am unable to find reliable numbers so I can't back that theory up.

There's no ebb and flow, current trends are unprecedented.

And, again, the issue is not raw population numbers but the demographics of an aging population.

E.g. - say there's a country with a total population of 20m, of which 16m are working age and supporting 4m retirees. The total population then halves, to 10m over time.

If that 10m compromises 8m working age and 2m retirees, then you still have 4 working age people supporting every 1 retiree.

If, though, you end up with 5m working age and 5m retirees, then its a 1:1 ratio. Either retirees have to receive dramatically less support, or each individual working age person has to do more to support them.

Actual numbers aside, that's the core issue - not that the population is declining but what it looks like demographically, and what that means for people's economic security.

And we're not talking about a "one off" shift, birth rates are continuing to fall but life expectancy is not seeing such a dramatic change, meaning the demographic shift has become (and is expected to continue to get) worse with each passing generation.

If there are solutions available, nobody seems willing to think about them, so towards the tipping point for societal collapse we go...

I think these things go in ebb and flow and I can't see a problem with reducing population, smaller classes, room for everyone at long last, no more churning up greenery and maybe a return to a gentler life?

I actually live in Canada, and Canada's birth rate if lower than the UK's and immigration rate per capita is significantly higher in Canada than the UK.

I have started to hear a lot of anti-immigration sentiment (I, seemingly, get a pass as a Brit...) and it is definitely a trend in Canadian politics:

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8rjzr7vexmo

It has been staved off slightly, in terms of election results, by the Trump situation (the irony!).

If the population was (somehow) falling evenly, so there remained a stable proportion of working age vs retirement age people, that'd likely be a good thing.

Of course though, it isnt. An ever-decreasing % of young people are being asked to support an ever-increasing % of older people. It is plainly unsustainable and a recipe for immense suffering.

If we cant find a way to have a stable total population in a way that is environmentally sustainable, then we need to urgently turn our attention to how we manage population decline in a way that does not cause immense suffering and/or societal collapse.

But even if the population does fall, it will be falling from a staggering height. Until the end of the 19th-century, the world's population had always been below a billion. It wasn't until the 20th-century that we reached a billion human beings. After that the world's population exploded. By 1960 it had trebled – trebled!! Today we're at eight billion. In just 130 years, we've gone from below a billion to eight billion. It's unbelievable. And we haven't even peaked yet. We're due to hit ten billion in the next couple of decades, right in the middle of a climate catastrophe. We're cutting down rainforests, emptying the oceans of fish, causing the mass extinction of other species, pumping toxins into the air and water, and changing the f-ing climate and people are worried about the population falling!!😦I only wish it was falling. I wish it was plummeting, frankly. But it isn't. It's still rising.

In sub-Saharan Africa, women still have four or five children on average, and it isn't uncommon for a woman to have six. And whereas in the past many of those children would have died, today most survive. In fact, the population of sub-Saharan Africa is going to double by 2050, just as climate change is causing drought and crop failure. On top of that, when we have things like senolytic drugs and medical nanobots and god knows what else, humans will be living a lot longer. Yuval Harari writes that the conquest of ageing is the great project of the 21st-century. So the old won't be dying and making room.

Yes, I see what you mean. Older people do tend to be more opposed to immigration. It's just not a big thing here in the land of maple syrup because we don't have a flood of people coming in as you do in Europe. So the only people bitching about immigration are the more extreme Tories of all ages. But fuck 'em. They lost the recent election and rightly so.

I’m not sure how you encourage people to have more children? I think family size is due to economic issues or housing shortages, like having one child instead of two because of nursery fees. I think getting people without children to have any children seems the bigger problem, as this seems a cultural shift because people see how hard it is and simply don’t want to do it.

That sadly leaves you with the second option which is slash spending on older people :(

Immigration is a good example in the UK.

We've been using it as a sticking-plaster solution, to offset population decline.

Older voters (as a class - obviously theres diversity in all cohorts) are particularly anti-immigration. Few are keen to give up any of their benefits and yet, at the same time, they want to reduce the pool of people in the workforce who are paying for them (meaning working age people will need to bear a higher tax burden, on a per-person basis).

They might not be entitled on a day to day basis, but they're not willing to bear even a portion of the cost of the policies they support.

Ditto Brexit.

Its predicted to continue to grow for about 50-60 years (largely due to birth rates in developing countries declining more slowly) before hitting its peak and then declining, perhaps dramatically.

Developed countries will be hit far more quickly, though, with a couple already facing down the barrel of societal collapse.

The world population is growing at an alarming rate. That is a bigger problem than anything else IMHO.

I have the the same concerns, though I have not noticed much of the sense of entitlement among elderly people you speak of. Maybe it's a UK thing? I worked in eldercare in my youth and only witnessed a few entitled twits. Most of the people were lovely, very much in need with no ability to pay and heartbreakingly grateful for the help.

So long as we accept that we cannot sustain the same level of social care for retirees, with a dwindling proportion of young people and an increasing proportion of elderly people, sure. Managed population decline requires meaningul personal sacrifice, from a populace that currently wont accept a means-tested winter fuel allowance.

(Unless some other radical solution can be found and successfully implemented - but what we have now is categorically unsustainable in even the short-to-medium term).