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

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.

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!).

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?

The sub Saharan fertility rate is falling so fast it will drop below 2 (sub replacement rate than causes population decline) in a decade.

The billions we had in the 20th century were mostly young healthy economically productive people of working age.

the billions alive in a few decades will be 1/3 elderly.

that’s very different global village.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNTFRTINSSA

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...

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.

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.

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

Me too

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.

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.

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?)

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

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

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)

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

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.

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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.

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.

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.

@NJLX2021 Excellent post.

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

Look how well means testing winter fuel
went down! 😆

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.

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.