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

[plantsdieinmyhouse]

We’re in a ‘global fertility crisis’.

I’m astounded that global (even UK/European) fertility decline to below the replacement rate of 2.1 (thought to have happened now) isn’t in the forefront of most people’s radar. There are barely even any politicians acknowledging it let alone devising policies to tackle it.

Thee are even people who still think we’re in the 70s/80s/90s and ‘overpopulation’ is still an issue.

Once everyone who’s alone now is dead the human race will be in terminal decline.

Nothing else matters if there’s none of us left!

Even on a personal level a large proportion of women don’t have the number of DCs they expect to.

https://www.thetimes.com/article/43a9bd63-25c9-4941-bc99-fc9f7e42c12a?shareToken=29bf27cb9dafe9af7a006bc25355e411

You're right. They aren't up for it and we all need to put pressure on them to do it. The equivalent to the Labour party here (Canada) seems to be sincere, but they've never been in power federally, so who knows.

'It's not that deep'

Seriously? It's the MOST important thing - the continuation of humanity, the future of our children and grandchildren and any generations after them.

Are you happy for them to suffer?

The PP's post was level headed, the "you need to calm down" just seems like a bad faith way of declining to address the point.

I think humans are the worst thing for the planet…nature will still be important and amazing and awe inspiring even if there is no-one to bear witness to it

though in the meantime, pensions will be a disaster.

Agree 100%.

Maybe people can say where the population would feel comfortable. 5bn global?

UK reduced down a bit too

Naturally of course

I was talking about how the poster directed it at me personally. "You" this and "you" that. It came across as angry to me.
I did address the point. The poster accused me of wanting poorer people to pay, which was untrue. I have stated repeatedly how I think this should be solved and it certainly didn't involve making poor people pay more.

Happy? No. I'm unhappy about all the current options but accept the human population can't just keep on increasing. There's a lot of shit options and I hope that we find a tolerable way through the mess we've made

I think it may be behavioural sink

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink

This. In the UK at least, it's not just an ageing population but one that is a lot less healthy than previous generations. There are always going to be horrible diseases and bad luck but a lot of people could have a much healthier 50-80+ by living a healthier lifestyle, which is bloody difficult with all the junk food outlets everywhere.

My eldest doesn't want children. He's 21 and both him and his GF are talking about getting sterilised. I think that getting more common.

It's the discussion itself that's not that deep, not the problem. We are strangers on the internet having a casual conversation, not world leaders at a summit on falling birthrates.

You have posed a begging the question fallacy, so your question can't be answered under those conditions. If you rephrase it without the false assumptions baked in I can answer. The continuation of humanity may well be the most important thing to you, but assuming that because I prioritize the planet first means I don't care whether people suffer is tugging on the wrong end of the stick. Quite the opposite.

Indeed. That nonsense about being happy about suffering was a trollish question which doesn't really deserve an answer actually.

There's two options, either the population can keep increasing, or it can decrease to a manageable level. The people who want it to keep increasing are the selfish ones, as sooner or later natural resources run out and people start to starve, die of thirst or asphyxiate due to lack of breathable air.

@MuckFusk Fair point. There were too many 'yous' going on.

I had got a bit aerated. I think we're on the same page, but whilst I'd love the very rich to pay more, at the moment it's not them paying.

It is the working poor paying more as a percentage and it is poorer people who are doing care work.

It is also true that those who are poorer and doing manual work are more likely to die younger. I see people round me working in hard public sector jobs die before they reach pension age - mostly women and yet the people we care for (and their relatives) are often demanding more of everything and seem absolutely affronted to be asked to pay any contribution at all - even when it is very very clear that they have more than enough to do so.

Agree. They are either failing to see or failing to care about the direct relationship between population and the decline of habitat and resources.

There are plenty of people in the world. Too many. Plenty of people are still being born. It’s fine.

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).

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.

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

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.

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.

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 :(

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.

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.