To tell you that if a UK woman has not had her first child by 28, there is a 50% probability she will never have children.

[RetiredMan]

I just watched the documentary linked below, about falling birth-rates, released on Youtube yesterday, by the guy who did the research.

(The fact in the subject is from an interview, the documentary itself only give the statistic for Japan, where the equivalent age is 26.)

Some factoids for those who won't watch the video (some are from the documentary, some are from two interviews with the maker that I've also watched.)

Birth-rates are below the level needed to keep population stable everywhere except sub-Saharan Africa. (It looks like only a matter of time until it's true there as well.)

That the invention of the pill is causing this is disproved by the fact that rates fell suddenly in Japan 20 years before the pill became legal there. They fell at the same time as birth-rates in multiple other countries, so it's not that Japan has a different cause.

Women who do become mothers are not having fewer children than before, the issue is that suddenly a large chunk of women are having no children at all. In other words, the problem is not smaller families, the problem is fewer families. (If I remember rightly, Japan went from 1 in 30 women childless to 1 in 5, in the space of three years. It's now 1 in 3.)

I think I caught a statistic somewhere that 40% of US women are now destined to be childless. (Presumably that is among those becoming adult now. But I might be wrong about this statistic, may have misheard/misunderstood.)

One reason childlessness is a problem is that 4 out of 5 women who never have children are biologically fertile and would have liked to have had children, but just never made it happen. Obviously there will also be economic issues, if each 20-year-old entering the job market has to generate enough economic output to support multiple 70-year-olds.

Even though birth-rates are falling. generations already born before births peaked will caused older age brackets to have increasing numbers of people, so for a few decades, overall population will still increase despite births decreasing.

The birth-rate of a population can be 90% predicted by the average age at which a women has her first child. The exact figure has not yet been researched, but it appears to be the case that population will inevitably decline if women who want children do not have their first child by their mid-twenties.

Immigration will not be able to solve the economic problems caused by falling population. There will be nowhere with a people surplus for them to come from. (There was a jokey interview claim that India already has ghost villages, they need immigrants!)

The cause of the decline seems to be a failure of couples to get together in time to have children. The data shows a big drop in birth-rates every time there is a major economic crisis. In response to the crisis, people postpone having children, but once society has shifted to aiming to have children at an older age, it never shifts back to having them at the original age.

A metaphor that explains why couple-formation is down. Imagine you live in a village with a dance-hall that is open for three hours on a Saturday evening. Every young person is there for the whole three hours, and gets to see every other person they could potentially marry had have children with. Now imagine the opening hours are changed to six hours, but most people still only have the energy to go for three hours. Some people leave before the person they should have met and married arrives. Some people are half-way through getting to know one person when another person enters and catches there eye, one courtship is interrupted by a new possibility. Perhaps this disruption kills one potential relationship. If the time-period during which most men and women think they need to mate has changed from maybe as little as five years to as long as 20 years, the likelihood that any potential pair will be on the same page at the same time goes down.

You know what actually disturbs me is how confidently you've both called me both a racist and factually incorrect, spouting a far roght lie.

I'm not far right and I've made every effort to do detailed research on this topic, to ensure im not spouting lies.

Regional ethnic diversity - GOV.UK Ethnicity facts and figures https://share.google/jFcbqvfZnwSj81gaw

This shows that the proportion of white British people in London is 36.6%. But of those, the age profile is massively skewed to the older population, because inward migration has mainly been the past 30 years.

The liars are the ones in the far right promising some kind of reversal is possible. That ship sailed long ago. Im afraid the population has changed whether they like it or not. 🤣

@anon666

Had I called you a racist you would be right to be disturbed. But I didn't - I asked why you chose to parrot a far-right lie, something else entirely. The myth of the "extinction" of white British people being one of the more prominent lies favoured by the far right. So, why did you?

You claimed that 90% of London primary school children have mothers born abroad. You haven't subsequently posted a link that proves your claim, because it's a statistic that doesn't exist. Your claim is factually incorrect.

The link you posted doesn't back up your subsequent assertion that the age profile (of white British) in London is "massively skewed" to older cohorts. The link you posted doesn't look at age. If you wish to assert this as being factually correct, you're going to have to do the research and find the statistics that prove it.

Neither does your link tell us anything about what proportion of London's population is British nationals, born in the UK. It's rather odd to implicitly assert, as you did in your OP ("if it weren't for this ability to attractpeople from overseas, the capital would be a ghost town"), that the 63.4% of London residents who don't define as "White British" are all non-British recent migrants, don't you think?

@SuffolkSun ignoring anon's specific claims about 90%, do you deny that the white British population in London is falling rapidly, and that this is particularly visible in primary schools and younger age groups?

The conversation about whether or not people have naturalised or were born here to parents who aren't white British is not relevant to answering this very specific question.

Youre determined to pick a fight over this one, by splitting hairs. The main point wasn't about London or white British people or even non-white British people. It was about a visible impact of the low birth rate in London.

I wasn't making any point about London other than that it would be a ghost town if left to the birth rate of the white British population.

And FYI I live in London, quite happily, alongside people of all ethnic origins, and all countries of birth. We're clearly building something new here, an affluent global city, out of the legacy of the white British people that originally inhabited this city.

But they are no longer in any way a majority of the growing population, and, like it or lump it, that's a fact, not a far right lie. 🙄 Its not changing, its never changing. The far right are living in a terrifying cloud cuckoo land.

There are positives of falling population though. Personally, I think the positives out weigh the negatives. And yes, I do understand about nobody around to pay for or look after the elderly. I will be one of those elderly.

Falling population sure, but falling how fast? Is there an amount that would be too fast for you? X% drop per year/decade/generation

I find this topic endlessly fascinating. As others have pointed out above, it is the speed at which the fertility rates have dropped, combined with the dramatic increase in life expectancy on the other end of the spectrum that lead us to this political/social pickle. It is an economic problem where old age pension systems set up with 10 workers to one retiree now have 3 workers to one retiree, and that ratio is moving in the wrong direction. Countries like Japan got there first, but the rest of the developed world is close behind with a shrinking population outside of migration and more old than young.

How do we support a bunch of old people when there aren’t a bunch of young?

How do we shift our economy to something else after centuries of a continuous growth model?

I don’t have answers, but these are problems for politicians and economists. This is not a problem for women to solve. It is not our problem, and we are not the solution.

It is time to accept that we need to build a different system than the one we have had up until now.

Ugh, in the current climate I now feel like I have to make an excessively obsequious apology in case I've genuinely upset my fellow Londoners of other ethnicities. My intentions aren't to hurt feelings, they're to present the somewhat dramatic reality.

I'm in two minds on this. I really don't want to add fuel to the far right narrative. On the other hand, I've done loads of analysis out of my own curiosity, because the change in population has accelerated in the time I've lived in London (30 years), and even more in the past 4 years since the 2021 census. And I was genuinely curious because of what I see in my children's schools, and at the other school gates. I find the left wing narrative so out of date. They're still talking as if we're taking in the world's poor huddled masses, 🙄 when in fact we seem to be taking in the world's most incredibly wealthy, talented, educated hardworking individuals. Because I'm living in this reality in a relatively affluent suburb of London, it can be invigorating rather than threatening, as long as you can accept that we're moving into a new reality that bears little resemblance to the past.

Equally I can see that the disjoint between London and the rest of the UK is reaching worrying proportions. And increasingly, London just isn't recognisable from any of the cultural artefacts being produced like TV shows, print media, even social media. It's left the building.

From the underlying demographic change suggested on this thread, I'm considering that we're incredibly lucky we've been able to attract such a rich mix of people from abroad? London was in terminal decline 40 years ago in the 80's. Look at it now! The rocketing house prices since then are a reflection of the booming economy and population growth.

@anon666 I don't think you need to apologise. We should be able to acknowledge and agree on basic facts.

The question about what to DO about birthrates or immigration rates (which includes the possible answers "do nothing" or "keep going even faster") is separate from the question of what they currently ARE!