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

Thing is, we are a democracy. If the number of older voters, voting in there own interests (which they (as a group) absolutely do, look at the outrage about WFP compared to when that education support allowance was taken away from the poorest 16 - 18 year olds) generational unfairness will get worse, not better. I really would not be surprised if at some point in the future some sort of national service was introduced for the young that involved looking after the elderly.

The answer is actually not immigration, but emigration of the elderly to care homes in Nigeria, etc.

It makes no economic sense to import low-value workers to the UK, and quite a lot of sense to build these establishments where the workers actually are, and it would rebalance both populations in age terms and help develop those economies to boot.

I think this is a very pragmatic, logical solution. Unfortunately it ignores human emotions, or rather the emotions of the rich white people paying the bills. We seem to have no problem with monthers leaving their young children and babies back in the Philippines (or wherever) and basically never seeing them but heaven forbid we shouldn't be kept close to our elderly. The young child deprived of its mother is much worse imo.

Germany has already done this in Poland.

Most NHS spending is on older people. Over 85s cost £7k per year each average in health spending.

it isn’t just about formal care costs, a population with mostly older people is very inefficient and environmentally unfriendly. Eg a widow in a big old bungalow, taking up lots of land space, high fuel useage, high use of local services.

a family of 4 in a car is much more efficient than one older person in a car.

older people use more state services but dont spend as much on businesses- this effects the viability of businesses set up by young people - they need consumers- not older people who ‘have everything’.

going on cruises/ holidays abroad isn’t helping our economy!

https://www.icaew.com/insights/insights-specials/the-future-of-tax-and-public-spending/more-people-are-living-longer-how-much-will-it-cost

I can't agree that the global population not growing or even shrinking a bit would be bad on it's own.
Yes, the economy is totally unprepared for that, and even now the voters don't require their politicians to pay attention to this topic.

I see the biggest issue in prolonging the living age without prolonging healthy age enough.

Mental experiment. Imagine everyone could choose for themselves between higher pension age with current life prolonging medical approach, or 5 years lower pension age with signing up for "voluntary euthanasia" to be delivered once the health conditions deterioration meets some agreed threshold. What would you choose?
If you don't mind stating your age group/how do you think you would have thought in different life stages, that would be even more interesting.

To answer my own question - lower pension age and not being kept with dementia sounds good to me.

I suppose it would be a majority choice in my age group (35-45)

It used to be most NHS spending is done in last 18 months of life - I think that holds true for whatever age the death occurs.

https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/news-item/over-80-of-healthcare-cost-in-the-final-year-of-life-spent-on-hospitals

The figures reveal that the UK public purse spends five times the amount supporting people in the final year of life as hospital inpatients than it does supporting them with primary, community health and hospice care

That is a big thing the government is apparently looking at - if we can avoid hospital admissions and provide more other cheaper care. Certainly most people don't want to be in hospitals and most don't want to die in them yet despite that most do at the minute.

There are fears euthanasia could take away resources from end of life care - but I think that will depend on the implementation.

One thing that will likely happen is longer working ages - so there legistalation that means state pensions age can be raised till it hits 70. I suspect we'll see more of the USA model - retriement but p/t flex work during it in early years. I know DH uncle doing driving deliveries in his retriement - he's 70+ but still taking on some shifts (and providing childcare for GC). This doesn't tend to go over well on MN when mentioned though. Also impacts family help for child care.

Japan done well with it's aging population but it has led to high government debt - they manage as a lot held by it's own citizens. It could be a contibuting reason behind our increasing debt as well.

One big problem is once you hit an increase in older dependents it's actually hard to add kids - as they are dependents for decades - so they'd just add to government and families burdens - you'd get a U curve so added pressure on working population both ends. Immigration helps mitigate that - tends to be working age people but they age and stay and it adds pressure onto services and resources such as housing - making competion in working population even higher and decreasing fertlity levels - as well as more cultural problems.

There are no good solutions out there so we'll just have to manage the population decline.

We've raised retiment ages - added more mothers to working population - push more onto individuals - with long NHS wait lists, more private care and pensions. We're in a much better position than countries that haven't raise retirment ages as quickly.

Somebody, eventually, is going to have to grasp the nettle , stop kowtowing to the grey vote, and open up an honest conversation about our ageing demographic. Because at the moment politicians and the media are in a state of denial.

We need to talk about housing: how to humanely persuade older people under occupying large houses to move- having suitable housing for them to move into would be a good start. Blocks of decent sheltered apartments run by not for profit entities would be good.

We need to talk about benefits: there's a widespread narrative in the media about parents, young people, disabled people being "benefit scroungers", while retired people on pensions "have earned it". Pretty cruel and discriminatory given that the kids growing up in poverty on meagre benefits now will be facing a heavy tax burden as working adults to support pensioners. Some acknowledgement of that rather than the constant demonisation would be nice.

And we need to talk about immigration: if you want to enjoy a comfortable retirement, both being directly cared for and indirectly supported by the taxes of those of working age, we are going to have to import some foreigners, many of them brown or black, so maybe stop putting out, devouring and parrotting all this hysterical anti immigrant propaganda?

It would certainly be one way of responding to the climate crisis.

Do you want to keep increasing the population?

How do you deal with it as those people added get older?

Because at the moment politicians and the media are in a state of denial.

I saw an intevriew with a reporter who worked on housing issues - she said it only started to get media attention when it started to affect the DGC/children of the editors.

We need to talk about housing: how to humanely persuade older people under occupying large houses to move- having suitable housing for them to move into would be a good start. Blocks of decent sheltered apartments run by not for profit entities would be good.

This is a big reason why our parents didn't downsize. There was a lack of suitable properties - and it's a risk will new property need work. Heard a repondent to money box of radio 4 that did downsize found unexpected costs and it really didn't free up much money at all - and then retrired they spend more time in their house than ever before.

IL have only a upstrias bathroom and really steep narrow stairs - wouldn't be allowed now - and they looked and stayed and FIL fell down said stairs - ending up in in hospital for months. They sort of shurg and say they'll get a stair lift but I don't think they'll find that's possible - so it will be an emegecy that we'll likely have to step in and help with.

Dmum house is much better for old age but location in village with few services is bad - she won't move now till she needs sheltered accomodation.

There's a lot that could be done to make town centers more acceisbel and elder friendly - which owuld benfit more than that demographic - takes money and it's not liek highstreets been doing well lately but people are looking.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/25/improving-with-age-how-city-design-is-adapting-to-older-populations

Ideally, I suppose you'd taper it carefully so that population decline was as gradual as possible.

How? How do politicians face down the grey vote in a democracy ? Some other politicians will just come along promising to do whatever a really significant voting demographic want, and they'll be the ones elected. Once again, I refer you to the WFP.

Marvellous isn’t it. A one-off demographic bulge meaning one section of the population has been able to engineer society to suit their own special path-of-least-resistance for the past sixty years, and they're still hard at it.

I thought of this when I read the post!

I keep reading on here it's a one off bulge.

It's not - every generation since 70s in UK had fewer kids than one before - my entire life the population been below the replacmnet level - my kids generations smaller than mine.

Immigration, automation and changing job market and not housing building enoughf or decades masks that I think. Partly why the birth rate is as high as it currentlky is thanks to immigration - it takes a generation for immigrant populations to revert to national fertlity levels - and I think it's one in three births has one parent not born in UK.

So there will likely remain an older voting block - which posters on MN will become - even after the post war -60s bulge is no longer around.

Plus when you have a bulge of young people who get a demographic dividend - you have more workers to tax for decades - it's how many countries like China got rich. So a lot of the economic wealth comes as a result of having big population of working age - usually countries get rich before that flips - Japan did - China less so. It's why many are predicting african countries like Niger may well become encomic growth centers in decades coming.

We're just at start of the downside of that for many countries- exacerbated by the good news story of longer life expectancy - so the workers retire and become a cost where as for decades they were wealth generators.

We could just make it slightly easier for people who want more kids to have them - for every 2 kids born in UK a third is wanted but not born.

World wide people in fertile years are citing social and ecomic barriers to more kids - if we worked on those it would slighly increase fertlity rates - not get to replacement level - no-ones managed that yet - so we'd get a slump not a cliff. That seems to be what latest UN report was suggesting governments consider.

A falling population is only a threat to "civilisation" because it will collapse the ponzi scheme of the Western developed countries where ever increasing numbers of workers are needed to pay for the care and pensions of the ever increasing number of older people. Once we deal with that problem, a steady or falling population isn't really a problem nor "threat" to civilisation at all. We just need a new form of economy that isn't a ponzi scheme.

But our oppositional form of gov is the problem. I find K Badenoch embarrassing when she leaps to criticise every comment from the gov. At last Labour are trying to cut benefit spending but everyone is running around screaming -but it has to happen or maybe they are hoping for another covid to wipe out half the population which would also solve it.

A lot of people are mentioning the affordability of children, yet countries that still have growing populations often have a lot less than we do. They don't have concerns about paying for childcare, that isn't what they do with their children.

They aren't worrying about workers paying for state care because they don't have that anyway. In most countries where the population continues to rise, there's no such thing as a state pension for all, or state provided elderly care.

The problem isn't affording to have children, the problem is what we expect our children to have. Expectations that countries with healthy birth rates frankly don't all have.

The trouble is, most of the solutions to the western birth decline rely heavily on finding ways to meet the requirements of the modern parents.

And the fact is, we can't. It costs a lot more to have children here because nobody wants to bring 6 kids up in two rooms, etc.

In a lot of the developing countries where birthrates are still high, even the basics like education are still a luxury.

Obviously it's not wrong to want our children to have a decent living standard, as well as ourselves. Anyone can 'afford' to have children. Millions of people around the world living in abject poverty are still having children.

We aren't willing to do that, here. And before I get jumped on, I am not saying we should be, but the reality is it is impossible to facilitate an increased birthrate in a society that is used to a much higher standard of living without massive increases in taxation, which we have seen on enough threads, people aren't willing to do.

@ObelixtheGaul

The problem isn't affording to have children, the problem is what we expect our children to have.

Not really. The problem is that we expect both parents to work, so wages are lost during pregnancy and a few months after birth, then have to pay through the nose for childcare so that they can get back to work. It all comes back to high housing costs. Costs of clothes, toys, prams, etc are chicken feed compared to loss of wages and several hundred pounds per week for nursery costs.

Go back a few decades when a couple could afford a house on one wage meant one parent could stay at home, thus not incurring ruinously expensive childcare costs.

It's noticeable that lots of "high child numbers" families are on benefits - i.e. they get paid more for more children and aren't suffering loss of wages due to maternity leave, generally aren't paying for housing costs, and don't need to pay for children as they're at home to look after the kids anyway.

I'd say that the UK's small army of multi child benefit claimants are more akin to your mention of developing countries, i.e. in both cases, there's no "Need" for both parents to work to pay for stupidly inflated housing costs!

Yes, I dont know why people are under the impression its a one off bulge. If we suddenly elevated the birthrate to something close to the replacement rate, and maintained that THEN it would be a one-off bulge.

That doesn't seem within the realms of possibility though, with birth rates continuing to trend lower (which has been the case for well over half a century now).

The issue looks like it will become more and more acute with each generation.

No I don’t agree with that at all. The countries where populations are increasing massively and ‘don’t expect much for their children’ in a saintly way are often countries where people are more dependent on the land to live, have low women’s rights and male status involved in how many women and kids they own, and dont really seem to have any care about the future of their environments or the ability of all their children to survive and thrive in the future.

They are not living in a structured organised society that needs kids to have good education because it expects kids to become useful workers in high tech computing, nuclear, engineering, or energy sectors. Our ‘expectations’ for our kids would be substantially different if our vision of their future was to split the family farm between a couple of oldest males and kick the girls out to marry and produce endless babies too.

We live in a society where workers are told ‘can’t feed don’t breed’, and then the ability to feed is restricted more every year, not ‘any child is a blessing and shows how big your dick is’.

^ Forgot to add, then in those countries they start wars , often genocidal, then cry for charity from us in the west for their man-made famines - and get it.

Who’s going to give us charity? Will Sudan feed our people for nothing and give us medical aid when our soils exhaust themselves or the flooding gets worse?