We need to start talking about population decline

[user4567890754]

The first signs of it are starting to show in the UK, with primary school closures. Secondary school closures will follow.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/11158f12-0133-11ee-a364-04e704863f75?shareToken=5ef47b2b4776be376153089146c8bacf

Italy is a few years ahead of us.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/01/plunging-birthrate-threatens-italian-schools

Japan shows where every country is headed - towards a crisis where they are on the brink of being unable to maintain social functions.

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/04/13/asia/japan-population-decline-record-drop-intl-hnk/index.html

And yet there are still people who think that we have a problem with overpopulation. It’s the opposite.

Most of the new generation in fertile years who doesn’t wish to have kids, doesn’t tend to want kids because they are barely surviving as it is, so the idea of bringing kids into what seems like an even more bleak future in the hope that they might fix something that’s broken (and in doing so actually adding to the problem) doesn’t seem appealing and even rather cruel (to the kid(s) in question). The fact that we do have an overpopulation issue and that not having kids might help climate change (making the prospects of people who are currently alive possibly a little less bleak) just makes that choice a little easier.

Rubbish. The fewer of us there are (up to a point I guess) the better. Or do we keep breeding until every blade of grass is covered over by housing estates?

There’ll be fewer 90 year olds going forward though. Problem solved.

Great.

The human race is a failed experiment. Sooner humans die off, the better for everything else.

Actually, this is probably accurate.

I agree OP, it is going to be a huge shock for western countries first, followed by the whole world.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-53409521

Not a shock

That's what immigration is FOR

And why fucking Brexit is so fucking shit !

It's only hard, lonely and expensive outside of extended family structures.

Perish the thought that families stayed within the same communities in order to raise their children and care for their elders as a cohesive unit...

That's for thick and backwards people. We have evolved since such things were acceptable. We are much more sophisticated these days.

We have only children and place our parents in nursing homes.

Individualism is king, after all.

Well, until the machines make us all obsolete anyway.

Presumably there will be a migration of people from places that due to climate change are quickly becoming inhospitable to human life which in turn mean nearby countries will have greater pressures on resources, so the west should accept more immigrants to fill the gaps rather than looking to breed more.

Third world countries tend to have huge families due to lack of contraception/good sex education. In first world countries, the issue is the imbalance between pensioners and the working population. There are more elderly people requiring care than younger people who are working or will work. I roll my eyes at the ‘but climate change’ people. I hope you don’t have children, pets, use a car, use an aeroplane or eat imported/out of season food. If you do then you are a hypocrite.

Climate change is going to make refugees of many millions of people. We could try welcoming them instead of cheering them drowning.

Other than that even if we pretend capitalism was once a good system we need a new one now that focuses on human needs and how to meet those needs, instead of how to exploit people to service 'the economy'.

This.
the planet needs to come first before the need to sustain future generations of retired people. We shouldn’t be breeding purely for tax purposes.

There are 20 million more people in this country than there were 100 years ago - around a third extra. I think there’s room to decline.

We can take in some of the 1 billion climate refugees that will exist by 2050😁

Obviously joking. Just mean we are fucked from all angles in the coming decades… climate change, overpopulation, depopulation, artificial intelligence…

Immigration won’t solve the problem forever. Eventually every country is going to be putting in measures to hold on to their own citizens. There’s also an ethical question about accelerating depopulation in other countries by “stealing” their citizens.

And this does not solve the problem of overall global decline. unless we’re going to “close down” some countries and redistribute all the people. Even if we did that, Once the world population starts to fall, how are we ever going to get it back to replacement rate? In the longer term humanity will shrink and disappear, with increasingly hard and isolated lives for the survivors. I happen to think that the human race is a valuable and interesting part if planet Earth and we need to think about how we will protect it!

In the shorter term, Our entire economic and social structure is based on a growing population. It is going to have to adapt.

Just take housing, as one example. In Japan, there are right now many empty houses, indeed whole abandoned villages. This means house prices go down. In Italy they are selling houses for 1 euro. Great if you want to get on the property ladder, but what happens to those communities? What happens to the shops and cinemas and services now that there’s no one to staff them? And now we’re no longer building new houses. What happens to the construction industry? And how much of your pension is invested in housing or construction? What happens to people who bought their houses before prices collapsed? And that’s just one industry. Imagine this repeated across all industries and the kind of economic and social devastation that will result.

A falling population is the future. This is going to happen and we probably can’t stop it. We need to be planning now for how we’re going to adapt.

We are absolutely doomed OP. Our current economic system is based on infinite growth, on a finite planet with a falling population. It’s never going to work and no one seems to realise.

Populations and societies rise and fall, they have done throughout history. There are 8 billion people in the world. That they aren’t spread out evenly and there is population decline in a number of countries, doesn’t change the fact that there are massive amount of humans in the world.

it’s about managing the impact a fall in population will have, and maybe moving away from systems that depend on ‘paying it forward’. The problem with pyramid schemes is that they invariably collapse, and taking measures to delay the inevitable doesn’t in fact solve the inherent issues with them.