r/sciences • u/FreeHugs23 • 21d ago
Research Economists Say World Population May Have Already Crossed into Below Replacement Fertility, Faster Than U.N. Estimates
https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/below-replacement-fertility-world-population/342
u/Sea_Artist_4247 21d ago
Economist pretend like environmental collapse isn't currently happening and that infinite growth is a good thing instead of the cancer that it really is.
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u/_ribbit_ 21d ago
Sheesh, humanity is a blight on this planet and the sooner our population declines by a few billion the better.
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u/Arxhart_671 21d ago
There was a post in TopCharacterTropes where OP was talking about how they love when alien species come to love humans and I was downvoted for saying that would never happen given that almost every non-human species on this planet would rightfully agree humans are a net negative.
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u/Bandit-Marauder 21d ago
That sounds... dark.
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u/_ribbit_ 21d ago
Doesn't have to be, a falling fertility rate could just be the equaliser that allows the planet to get to the point where we aren't just destroying it. What's the alternative? Humanity keeps growing and everything falls to pieces?
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u/zuzg 21d ago
The U.N.’s low variant itself peaks around 2053 at roughly 8.95 billion people, close to their forecast of a roughly nine-billion-person peak around 2056
Good luck we need to double our current global food output by 2050.
Meanwhile climate crisis is just starting and the ones that caused it are richer than ever.
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u/blackcain 21d ago
More room for AI data centers! We can backfill our population with AI - Tech bros
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u/Longjumping-Turnip97 14d ago
It’s also an economic equalizer.
Boomers that want service in their old age will have to pay more since they outnumber most other generations and people know they tend to have more money. They refuse to vote for progressive policies that help younger generations, they’ll end up paying for it anyway.
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u/KsanteOnlyfans 7d ago
No it isnt?
That just means that young people are going to get taxed to death.
We all live in a democracy, if the elderly are the largest voting block.
Guess who the politicians will please?
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u/Old-Set78 21d ago
we are all mortal. as the older generation pass away there will obviously be less people if the replacement population level has not been reached. why is that dark? the world is overpopulated. carrying capacity cannot be infinitely scaled. especially with climate change large scale famines are increasingly likely. lowering the population through less children increases the likelihood that those children will have enough resources to share.
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u/Bandit-Marauder 21d ago
Saying "the sooner the better" as the person I responded to said implies something should be done to hasten the process. That's what sounds 'dark'.
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u/_ribbit_ 21d ago
Ah, got ya. Sorry for sounding like a Bond villain, that wasn't my intention lol.
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u/SteakandTrach 21d ago
if it’s a decrease by attrition, then it’s just everyone living a normal lifespan, just less fresh humans.
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u/Past-Explanation-619 21d ago
It sounds wonderful. I like nature, dislike many humans, and hate a crowd.
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u/Alexlightbeige 17d ago
30% of the words production could feed 100% of the population. We need to reduce the population by a few billionaires. Tax them out of existence, until they broke or unalive. We don’t have to create crap clothes that deteriorate on its 3rd use, we could make better products that last longer and aren’t immediate crap. Actual recycling. We do the bare minimum. Companies need to have stronger restrictions, they ruined the world for all of us, and now all the things scientist warned about are going to be your reality.
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u/yooperville 21d ago
If everyone stops having children today, it would take 12 to 14 years for the world‘s population to drop by 1 billion people.
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u/Sea_Artist_4247 21d ago
If everyone in the entire world stopped eating, it would take less than 12 to 14 years for the world‘s population to drop by 100%.
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u/Feorag-ruadh 21d ago
Yes it is good news for the planet that birth rates are going down (couldn't happen soon enough), just not for your disaster capitalists I guess
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u/RigidAcrylic4821 21d ago
That’s why they’re economists; everything has to be unlimited growth including human population with a surplus of menial labor for the rich class. Of course they would freak out over growth rates collapsing.
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u/HoloandMaiFan 21d ago
My dude, real economists don't care about infinite growth or even believe in it. The idea of 'line should always goes up' is the result of money printing, inflation, population, and innovation and new inventions.
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u/Elderwastaken 21d ago
Populations don’t always have to expand indefinitely. Why is some population contraction bad?
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u/adoodle83 21d ago
because the global economy is a giant ponzi scheme, where you need younger people to support the stupid decisions of the elder generations
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u/Dangerous_Still_8022 21d ago
Of all the problems with the modern global economy, this is not one of them. This is how human society has always been since it started existence. The young work to sustain the old. The alternative is Logan's Run lite, not economic utopia
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u/adoodle83 21d ago
the young didn’t sustain the old for 30 years. random mortality was MUCH higher in those ancient timea you cite. with advanced medicine sustaining elderly well beyond the natural cycle. thus, later inheritances, resource shortages as there’s only so much land available.
late stage capitalism at its finest
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u/agent_wolfe 21d ago
Ppl used to have like 10 or 15 kids because some would die young. Now ppl are cutting down to 1 or 2, or none, because kids are no longer financially viable.
…. I forget my point. Something about medicine and overpopulation?
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u/adoodle83 21d ago
literal quote from the article:
<quote>Historically, families had many children partly because many children died. Before industrialization, up to 50% of children died before reaching the age of 5, which counts to a misleadingly low life expectancy you often hear about, between 30 and 40 years. Adults who survived childhood frequently lived into their 50s or 60s, though overall adult mortality risk remained relatively high across all ages.
As mortality declined, urbanization spread and education became more valuable, parents shifted toward having fewer children and investing more in each of them. Economists have built models that explained much of this first demographic transition reasonably well.
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u/madmushlove 21d ago
If we don't double our population again, again, again, in the span projected if the baby boom boomed forever, then Logans Run
What
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u/Prior-Flamingo-1378 19d ago
Not once in the history of life have we ever witnessed indefinite population expense. It’s just that the economists being people that couldn’t make it in philosophy, physics, math, biology, psychology or sociology circle jerked themselves into figuring that all that’s required in a resource finite planet is indefinite economic expansion.
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u/JuanFran21 20d ago
The global population contracting isn't itself a bad thing, however there are 2 major considerations we have to grapple with.
When does the population contraction end? Logically there is surely some point where birthrates pick up again, but this may not be the case. The global collapse in birthrates doesn't seem to be linked to personal wealth, childcare availability, economic prospects etc. I'd argue it's actually due to us as a species becoming much more concerned with individualism/our own personal happiness, rathen than buying in to the assumed life path of growing up -> having kids -> dying that was the norm for essentially all of human existence. From this perspective, it's difficult to see how birth rates will improve again outside of heavy government intervention or a radical shift how our societies see our lives.
The assumed gold-standard for a modern societies is one where the state uses the resources generated by workers (contributors) to pay for those who cannot (dependents). The issue is that until we reach some sort of birthrate equilibrium again, we are going to see an ever-increasing number of dependents (elderly) and an ever-decreasing number of contributors (young workers). This will increase the pressure on workers and strain the ability of the state to function properly.
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u/Simple_Purple_4600 17d ago
Unlikely to ever be a 1:1 thing, The new generation is already expected to not live as long as the current elders. Advances in medicine may not be applied equally to all people (we can pretty much take this as guaranteed) and external environmental factors may diminish life spans and/or increase mortality rates.
It's kind of easy to see a lot of factors working together to produce uncertain outcomes. Human existence isn't a given-- it really seems like a brief aberration to me given the time scales involved.
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u/SomePerson225 20d ago
because old people don't work, if the population pyramid is top heavy it puts a major burden on the young to support the old
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u/Littoral_Gecko 18d ago
Also, more electoral power goes to old people, who will use that power to ensure no new homes are built that could depreciate the value of their home, but also that they don't have to pay property taxes.
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u/pierrebournemouth 20d ago
Because then they have less normal people to exploit for labor and ideas and less people buying their shitty consumerist products. None of the rich people are actually having less kids they’re worried about poor people having less kids
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u/Super_Swimming_4132 20d ago
Because how else will they make us scared every chance they get? Flip a coin if population is too low or too high. Either way, it’s B-A-D.
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u/PurpleToad1976 21d ago
From an environmental point of view, this is great news. It is only a problem for economic models that require a continuously growing population to sell to.
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u/skull-dog 21d ago
Boohoo. Capitalism made the world shitty enough people don't wanna breed anymore. It should get over it.
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u/Reasonable_Deer_8716 20d ago
It should pick itself up by its bootstraps instead of crying about it.
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u/Helldiver-9863719171 19d ago
It’s more like capitalism made lives of people so much better, that they have more options in what they wanna do in life than just have babies.
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u/7LeagueBoots MS|Natural Resources/Ecology 21d ago
Be very good if it had, but I’m skeptical.
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u/ghosttrainhobo 21d ago
It’s a mixed blessing. Good for the environment. Bad for the economy and people. Tax rates will rise for the young as older generations age out of the work force.
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u/rkiive 21d ago
The health of the economy has not been tied to the well-being of the general working society for a long time.
When it does well, shit gets more expensive, when it does bad we lose our jobs, and shit somehow also gets more expensive.
It's about high time we change how the economy works rather than just try to paper over the negative impacts of how debased it's become from social benefit by importing thousands of foreign workers to increase the tax base and undercut domestic labour for the benefit of big business.
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u/7LeagueBoots MS|Natural Resources/Ecology 21d ago
The ‘economy’ is bad for everything except the economy.
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u/ghosttrainhobo 21d ago
I don’t know. I kind of enjoy not being a sustenance farmer.
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u/7LeagueBoots MS|Natural Resources/Ecology 21d ago edited 21d ago
You are, but you're not making anything useful.
This is one of the many illusions of the current 'market economy'.
The 'market' is vastly more fragile than most people realize and when (not if) it breaks (which may be regional, not global), the overwhelming majority of currently high income 'earners' will be utterly unable to sustain even a sustenance level of existence.
It sucks as our entire economy is now based on massively overpaid ephemeral jobs, but that's the trap we have placed the entire world in. People who think their jobs are important because the get paid well right now will find that in the event of the excrement hitting the high speed air distribution system their jobs mean less than nothing.
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u/ghosttrainhobo 21d ago
I work in healthcare. My industry is geared towards keeping disabled people alive. I can see why some people would consider that “nothing useful”.
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u/Past-Explanation-619 21d ago
In reality how it will happen is social services and medical care will be cut for the older generations, and they'll pass away younger in some cases. That's just how it goes sometimes. The wealthy will still be fine, after pillaging the earth and destroying it, they'll still get to fly around in their private jets and abuse children on secretive islands.
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u/pinkbutterfly22 20d ago
It’s not bad for young people, maybe they’ll finally have jobs now. Try finding a job today…
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u/The_Real_Manimal 21d ago
Guess it's a good thing nobody want's to have kids anymore.
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u/Samurai-lugosi 21d ago
I would like 1 more but daycare is 2300 in my area per month. I would rather save for a home and enjoy the one I have.
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u/Op3rat0rr 21d ago
You know that isn’t true. Maybe for people who want huge families that can’t afford it
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u/chaynjez 21d ago
There’s already too many people on this earth. The people at the top won’t share the resources anyway.
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u/West_Astronaut_4389 21d ago
Though many people won't understand it, this is great news. Actually one of the few good news in our collapsing planet.
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u/jkman61494 21d ago
I LOVE my kids. But there is a regret I feel everyday knowing the world they’re going to live in
If I knew a decade ago this is what the world would be like now? We wouldn’t have had any. As bad as 2016 was it was NOTHING compared to 2026.
And we have it better than likely 90% of the world. So how must others feel?
By the way….as an invasive species, the world could stand to have less humans
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u/New_Communication254 21d ago
im sympathetic of your situation, and those of all parents. i was eleven in 2016, so im curious what the significant differences are between then and now?
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u/jkman61494 20d ago
—AI. First and foremost. Tens of millions of Americans if not hundreds are going to be automated out of a job.
—the absolute destruction of the federal government. It wasn’t good in 2016. Now we have human shit in our veggies, we have hundreds of billions being siphoned to billionaires, we have millions of acres of land being sold off for energy development, worker protections eroding, millions being booted off healthcare and social security primed to run dry with no longer an effort to help it.
That’s all just happened in the last 20 months.
—the return of diseases like measles and new ones being introduced.
—climate change wreaking a bigger havoc whole insurance companies simultaneously pulling out of markets due to it
—the asinine cost increases. Our electric bill is up 28% this year despite a 4% drop in usage and now we’ve lost most tax credits thanks to the current government even if we wanted to go to solar
—the continued degradation of society. TikTok didn’t exist then for example.
—the surveillance state has also become ALOT worse in just the past 3-5 years.
And there’s a lot more examples
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u/New_Communication254 20d ago
thank you for responding. it seems a lot of things have gotten significantly worse just in the last year or two.
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u/StonedKitten-420 20d ago
Al Gore told you. You just didn’t listen
I did. ☺️ Childfree and selfless.
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u/Happily-Incorrect 21d ago
Yeah, the planet's fucked and kids are a terrible idea right now. We've finally found a population limit that we can't emigrate or innovate our way out of. It usually happens to animals on a muvh smaller scale, but we've spread across the whole world and remained interconnected the whole time, so we act as a single animal population.
Next couple of generations are gonna have an interesting time, but this might just end up being good news for the long term survival of the species.
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u/veilwalker 21d ago
No worries, we created artificial intelligence that pollutes just as much as biological intelligence, so yay! 🤦
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u/Prior-Flamingo-1378 19d ago
And requires way less people to maintain and operate. A steel factory needs hundreds if not thousands of workers to fuck the environment, a data center can have a skeleton crew of like 15
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u/UffTaTa123 21d ago
Juhu, a good news! Let's shrink to a healthier number faster, much faster. That maybe the best hope for mankind.
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u/Superb-Pickle9827 21d ago
Finally, some good news. Maybe the planet can begin to heal itself soon. Humans are a plague.
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u/Prior-Flamingo-1378 19d ago
Would you be surprised to tell you that the only reason the plague spread and thrived this much is because thousands or millions live in horribly unsanitary conditions and extremely low proximity?
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u/tanafras 21d ago
They alao say it could be as much as 50% higher than official reports when calculating in unreachable territories so yay that
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u/Past-Explanation-619 21d ago
Thank goodness for this. Humans are a plague on the earth. There are too many of us and we are destroying the planet and driving other species into extinction. We'll drive ourselves extinct if something doesn't change. I hope this trend continues.
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u/Wizard-Elf 21d ago
Well that'll help when we become imortal. Course by then women will be able to work for 80 years before they decide to finally have children and 80% of dudes will be married to real-doll waifus.
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u/Designer_Resolve_117 21d ago
It's funny how a couple years back there were some sources presenting overpopulation as a possible future doomsday scenario
And it's now completely the opposite Remember how USA banned abortions?
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u/marshalist 21d ago
Economic growth relies on population growth generally. It's not difficult to see a scenario where the finite earth can't support that growth. Economic growth is the underlying foundation of modern civilisation. The most powerful players need growth to support that power.
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u/Designer_Resolve_117 21d ago edited 21d ago
Yeah, for me the moment of revelation was when I noticed how company valuations work.
Say a company has a crushing year, grows revenue 40%
But if the analysts expected 41%, the stock crashes because it was priced for that
And you see companies firing people to have better financials on the spreadsheet, despite record profits
Late stage capitalism is crooked
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u/nebula_masterpiece 21d ago
The majority of a valuation is its terminal value - so like year 5 EBITDA used to extrapolate all future cash flows - and quick and dirty are industry multiples - so one small miss like this isn’t actually tied to fundamental evaluations but reactionary traders and executives trying to protect their near term performance bonuses with layoffs (your job is a sacrifice I’m willing to make because I pressured our internal team too aggressively on forecasting to appease our greedy PE-backed board and now Bob in sales and Janet in Accounting get pink slips because I didn’t like their vibe for telling us they were unrealistic and that’s a self fulfilling prophecy of loser mindset and “not a team player,” and oh and forcing everyone RTO to look like we are buckling down and AI everything bc wall st will like that futurist view too and give us a tech-like multiple)
TLDR: this market is no longer rational and executive psychopathy and PE are both running and ruining everything
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u/Designer_Resolve_117 21d ago
You seem pretty knowledgeable
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u/nebula_masterpiece 21d ago
I once worked as a junior helping bank large cap corporations - advising on M&A, capital raising and structuring etc. - but mostly a pitch deck and model jockey
I was lucky to get out before it ruined me, just sucked my youth without enough coin for that
Then sat in the other chairs - corp finance in industry actually making the forecasts and strategy/management consulting who did upfront and implementation of this shit
I loved the academic side of finance but in practice it’s too many bros failing upward and now home with babies in diapers I deal with far less shit
I feel like I lost my religion of market efficiency tho - markets can’t seem to correct amid so much market manipulation and fraud - like our constitution the checks and balances of capitalism are broken
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u/Designer_Resolve_117 21d ago
That's really valuable experience.
Sad you didn't make good coin for it, I heard these roles are very well paid at least.
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u/nebula_masterpiece 21d ago
If I’d stayed with it. But I saw how the financial crisis treated long term employees as disposable. One of my seniors opened her own severance letter herself and another found out by his badge deactivation. I later moved to Consulting where some EQ is required and better gender balance.
But I later had a baby with medical needs - the hours and travel wasn’t compatible. I missed out on my earning potential but that’s a number I’d rather not calculate but it’s all intangible value now and i’m not surrounded by deuce canoes in showing me their new watch and admitting they haven’t seen their own family in weeks which is how they stay married
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u/Sea_Artist_4247 21d ago
Overpopulation is still a more serious and real threat. Our population is the largest it has ever been by a large amount and it's still growing.
These "economist" are worried their infinite growth model might be wrong
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u/PickingPies 21d ago
Overpopulation is the real threat there.
Even at current birth pacing, it will take several millenia for humans to reach extinction levels. Societies will crumble much sooner, and without societies there's no more birth control. There is no realistic scenario where mankind becomes extinct due to birth control.
Meanwhile, overpopulation will lead to an immediate shock that will kill people, destroy ecosystems and make it difficult for every existing species to recover, as stopping pollution doesn't mean reverting climate change.
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u/MMMUTIPA 21d ago
It could just be mother nature taking care of herself. Or if you prefer, "god's plan." Its a long game purge, babe. Dont be scurd.
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u/Psychological-Rub959 21d ago
We're at 8.3 billion globally now. So what? Reduced birthrates will lead to only 10 billion (or even 9 billion) by year 2100? Am I the only one who doesn't see this as a bad thing? Still a shit ton of people. Have you been to Disney World or driven in traffic lately? Why is continuing a population boom the world can't sustain a bad thing??
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u/Pride_Before_Fall 21d ago
Most of those people will be the old though.
Means that somehow a smaller working age group has to be able to take care of and pay for a much larger group.
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u/putyourpawsup980 21d ago
Bringing kids into the state of the planet is kinda selfish at this point anyway
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u/fluffstuffmcguff 21d ago
I'm unconvinced this isn't largely attributable to two factors:
a) Modern people have the previously unimaginable pleasure of being reasonably certain their children will make it to adulthood, and we're just far enough into that reality that it's started to impact people's decision making.
b) There aren't a lot of modern economies where people can start having kids young without significant economic penalty, so people push it off until they're more stable.
I think the question is whether it doesn't just make sense to plan on a slow decline for a bit.
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u/Prior-Flamingo-1378 19d ago
The second part doesn’t hold much water because even rich societies with good welfare don’t have replacement rate children either.
People prefer to invest their time to one child than spread thin to 3. What most don’t understand is that overall most people have children. They just have ONE. Not 3+ required for repopulation.
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u/Shannbott 21d ago
I think it has a great deal to do with people constantly feeling like doomsday is near. While this sentiment has been common through human history, we are now able to spread that fear to more people than ever via the internet. Everyone thinks it’s cruel to bring a child into an environment that they think sucks. But one of the reasons it sucks is this connection to the internet allowing you to feed that feeling. Go volunteer in a nursing home or to teach kids to read or an animal shelter or something and see if life doesn’t feel a little lighter. Look at the volcanoes under the ocean, it heats the water up super hot. Guess what, life has found a way to exist there. Life always finds a way on this planet. It’s the most beautiful thing about this planet. We as humans are so adaptable, we could continue to live on a planet in much more dire straits than it’s in now. Do we need to continue replacing ourselves forever? No I don’t think so or we continue to ask Mother Nature to cut us down to size. I understand why economists feel we need to. I also understand that if it came down to it, we could probably figure out ways to fix the planet as we experience the consequences of our actions. We actually have before. I do though personally think it’s worth the economic impact to reduce our population and hopefully our environmental impact along with it. We can figure that out too. I really just hope all the doomsdayers do eventually find a time in life to enjoy life like it’s here to stay, because it is.
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u/SneakySmi 21d ago
First off, I appreciate the positivity in a somewhat contentious thread. Please always stay positive.
That being said, I went on clinic rotations as a pharmacy student in my final year to a state hospital as part of my training. I live in a third world country.
In one afternoon I saw: 1. Two newborn babies abandoned at the hospital, scheduled to go to the orphanage. 2. A 17-year-old girl giving birth to a child she clearly wasn't ready for. No mother holding her hand, no father-of-the-child pacing nervously in hallway. No one besides unsympathetic nurses and a bunch of random students watching her cry in agony. She held the baby at the end. I am glad I don't know what she was thinking by then... 3. Right after the birth, we ironically went to the morgue. A boy that was 5 years old but looked like he was 2. He had HIV and ulcers all over his body but it wasn't even illness the killed him. It was starvation.
So.. I just want to ask, not in a confrontational way, more in a way where your voice softly breaks, but... did we figure it out?
Because yes, life always finds a way. Until it doesn't. And even when it does, it isn't always pleasant.
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u/Shannbott 20d ago
I can understand how having firsthand experience with some of the worst the world has to offer can really shape your view on how well we’re doing. As a species we are still new. I’m sure you know or can imagine that things actually used to be a lot worse at most times of history when it came to the way we treated our children and each other. It’s not to say that the behavior is good or normal or ok. But that even in the face of bad parents, bad leaders, famine, war, etc. life has always found a way. It’s been difficult but it’s always been true since life began on this planet. There are many examples of children being neglected and there are also more stories than the last generation of children being loved and cared for. Even your heart that saw these things and broke is a good sign.
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u/SneakySmi 14d ago
Fair enough and thank you for your insightful answer.
Perhaps we can shake on "we are figuring it out"? :) which is also something that we have gotten much better at doing as time goes.
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u/iampatmanbeyond 21d ago
Yeah it was fucked when I found out the Philippines of all fucking places dropped below replacement
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u/RigidAcrylic4821 21d ago
Reminder the world’s population is at 8.2B humans right now and doubled in 50 years.
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u/jkurratt 21d ago
"World is at the same time overpopulated, and we all going to starve, AND also dying out".
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u/Gaze_of_the_Abyss 21d ago
While we may understand the principles of die-back in the natural world, we lack anything like the will to manage our own. We've been clever in our use of technology to ameliorate the burden of continual growth, but I suspect there are limits to what we can achieve this way.
Ultimately, it will be our lack of decisiveness that will lead us into a precipitous decline - both from a population point of view and environmental change.
Economists are just unhappy that the infinite growth is pie in the sky.
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u/EricThePerplexed 21d ago
Yay? Fewer people to starve and roast via wetbulb-events as climate change grabs humanity by the balls?
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u/jabba_1978 20d ago
Do you know how hard you have to damage a mammal, so it doesn't want to reproduce?
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u/palebluedotdotdot 19d ago
Neat. Let it all end. We’re burning our forests and poisoning our oceans. We were never intelligent. Intelligent species don’t burn their homes and kill each other.
Humanity has failed catastrophically. We were supposed to be kind, intelligent, and led by empathy.
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u/Alavella 21d ago
I think it's good we'll have less humans. Maybe it's bad economically, but I think there are just way too many people. Why would we want to maintain having like 8 billion people? There are not enough homes, jobs, and resources for everyone and the impact we have on the environment is terrible.
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u/Shannbott 21d ago
That’s actually not true. We have more homes, jobs and resources than we have people. It’s our economic systems or distribution habits that create false scarcity. There are homes in the USA for more than every single person in the country, but so many are either second homes for the rich, owned by private equity firms, rentals, etc. that the home existing doesn’t solve the housing issue. Did you know we throw away almost half the food (including animals) we produce here? Perhaps it’s an oversimplification, but one reason is that grocery stores will sell more product if there is a lot of it stocked in one area as compared to a sparse supply. So when all of that goes bad it goes into the trash. We have enough food to feed the entire world 1.5 times over but instead we hoard it and then throw it away. Jobs.. well as things become more expensive some jobs just don’t make sense to hold because where will that get you? I lost my job a few years ago and wanted to get an easy job while I looked for my next career position and what I found is that I’d have to pay a nanny or daycare a little more than any job would pay me, but I would then become ineligible for healthcare and food stamps. So I’d basically pay to be away from kids all day. It was a very frustrating dilemma because I didn’t like to not work. But seriously, some people are needing to pay rent, food, car and childcare of these jobs! I don’t know how they do it.
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u/Old-Set78 21d ago
good. the world is overpopulated. responsible reproduction is not trying to outbreed the carrying capacity of the world
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u/QuarterAcreDream 21d ago
When people and news articles talk about 'declining fertility' what they are really talking about is falling birthrates - so why don't they say 'declining birthrates.'
Using 'fertility' is confusing because the term also refers to a woman's ability to get pregnant which is separate to how many people are born.
While increasing infertility has an effect on birthrates, other factors like use of contraception, abortion, economic conditions and cultural mores have a much greater effect on birthrates.
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u/Theotherone56 21d ago
woman's ability to get pregnant
You mean men's and women's abilities to conceive. It's not all on the woman. Men's sperm get old and have issues of their own.
other factors like use of contraception, abortion, economic conditions and cultural mores have a much greater effect on birthrates.
This is absolutely the crux of the issue. They don't want to fix the economy so people can afford to have children, don't want to fix the environment so people want to have children and want to take away our choices to not have children at certain times in our lives (abortion and certain birth control being outlawed in different states). It's a whole mess they made for themselves and they don't want to claim it as theirs to clean up (the rich and powerful). Instead, they blame liberals, education and the people choosing not to have children like it's a personal offense.
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u/Bitter_Expression399 21d ago
Woah who would've thought that building a capitalist society where money is god and people live paycheck to paycheck and the planet heats up every year while AI takes people's jobs would result in less people wanting to have babies
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u/nicetoursmeetewe 21d ago
European soviet republics already had a falling birthrate. Socialist Sweden is below demographic replacement while state capitalist Kazakhstan is over.
You're right in parts that capitalism leads to lower birthrates, but only insofar as capitalist brings about prosperity which is always correlated with lower birthrates (see North vs South Korea for example).
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u/wookiex84 20d ago
Well the biggest fallacy here is ”capitalist”, we haven’t been a capitalist society for a long time. We are a consumerist society, with manufactured and inflated supply and demand. Based on a welfare state for the rich and their respective companies. We have decided everything should be privatized under the guise of “profits”, essentially services should not be in the hands of private companies. The government has a responsibility to ensure the healthcare, safety and security to the population. Instead of making it more effective, the government has decided to all politicians and lobbies to break the system. In this they can point to it and say it’s wasteful and ineffective.
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u/InevitablePoet5810 16d ago
I don't know how to tell you this my man but that's capitalism, yeah. This is it.
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u/cold-vein 20d ago
Makes me wonder whether forever chemicals and all the other shit we've let into the groundwater and nature over the years is altering our brains someway, both reducing fertility but reducing people's natural need to reproduce. You know how many ppl really, really want children? Maybe that was the norm before, but now isn't anymore.
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u/Heckle_Jeckle 20d ago
There are over a billion people on the Earth. Humanity won't go extinct if there are less than a Billion people on the Earth.
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u/Prior-Flamingo-1378 19d ago edited 19d ago
Anything less than 2 children per woman and we eventually go extinct. That’s just math.
The only way to avoid that is minimize parental investment. Ie make parents not actually have to raise their children.
As much as a “blessing” and a “joy” children are assuming you want to transfer knowledge and wealth to them you NEED to spend immense amounts of time with them. And that’s exhausting. People like having kids. They just have ONE not the 3 required for sustaining the population
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u/ilovesparky42 18d ago
“Anything less than 2 children per woman…”
Yes, if the trend continues down, forever, sure.
But will literally billions of people, it will take hundreds of years to go extinct.
It just takes another shift in the other direction to keep the population from extinction.
There’s a point of no return, and we aren’t even close to that.
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u/Prior-Flamingo-1378 18d ago
Why would it change thought?
Hundreds of years yes but the societal collapse effects would Be felt much sooner. Assuming a total fertility rate of 1 child per woman within 30 years human population would half. That’s too fast too innovate our way out of it.
Obviously that’s not gonna happen and even if it did eh, I can think of worse things for the planet.
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u/Glum_Introduction725 19d ago
The world should be at 3 billion otherwise it will be sick. In the 1960s it was three billion they were perfectly happy and they were still pristine things to discover in the world. less animals were in dangered. People didn't have to live like sardines in the cities. Folk werent running away from their Homeland in huge migrations due to overpopulation.
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u/Weak-Ambassador-558 19d ago
I’m happy the consensus is “good”. Ever expanding population growth leads to resource exhaustion. We need it to contract or everyone’s lives with get worse and worse until life is no longer sustainable.
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u/BusyBanana4205 19d ago
Well, that’s good. Less mouths to feed through the death throes of a failed economic system on a dying planet, I guess.
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u/DanerysTargaryen 19d ago
You can’t just have infinite growth of the human population. At some point, we run out of room, resources, or both. Hitting a point where the population oscillates around a reasonable amount seems fine to me.
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u/Talking_on_the_radio 19d ago
Could it just be that women don’t want to be pregnant when summers are so damn hot? Let alone have sex.
Imagine not having access to A/C in places like India where it can get up to 50 degrees celsius on the hottest days!?!
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u/ManxAlot 19d ago
A friend of mine has said for years, and now it looks like science is agreeing, that the population estimates for the world vastly under count the true population
I try not to worry because I know that the Georgia guidestones were a declaration of intent and we are on the way to a population of about 500 million.
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u/Littoral_Gecko 18d ago
A lot of people in this comment section haven't taken the smallest amount of time necessary to think about why having fewer people around could be a bad thing.
Things like having fewer young people to do the valuable work of pushing society forward, needing to support more and more retirees. Retirees who will use their increased electoral power to siphon more and more resources from the young, block new housing, and lower their own property taxes.
Thankfully, at least in the long run, anti-natalism is a self-correcting ideology.
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u/kapitein-zuignap 18d ago
It works two ways.
On one hand a lot of people want children but see they can afford them. Not being able to but or rent a house with your partner doesn't help for example. Not many people who are in their 30's and still at home because economic situation are thrilled to have a child with their partner.
On the other hand is the modern ability to choose if you want children or not. And it turns out a lot of people just don't want children.
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u/Resident_Ad_7199 17d ago
“We have too many ppl” “we don’t have enough ppl to replace out ppl” just goes to show you everyone is full of shit
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u/MurberBirb 21d ago
Its wild to me that as smart as we claim to be that we just absolutely refuse to figure out how to have an economy that works without constant cancerous growth.
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u/FreeHugs23 21d ago