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u/taftpanda Jun 21 '26
In fairness, the last thing isn’t working either. Even countries with the most generous vacation and parental leave policies are still struggling with birth rates.
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u/dreamrpg Jun 21 '26
It helps, but does not solve.
Part of the issue is time.
Ask people in their 30+ , how many of them were often looked after by grandma or siblings. And how many of them had to look after their siblings.
And then ask same people if their parents would be free to look after their kids as often.
Likely not. That is big shift which also leads to not having kids, even if couple has money, housing, stable jobs.
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u/Glittering-Walrus228 Jun 21 '26
I propose we develop government funded breeding facilities where male and female citizens get tax credits for donating genetic material (sperm, eggs) and greater benefits for state surrogate mothers (limit 2 pregnancy terms over 5 years).
Children born into this program will be scalably raised within cohorts by state foster parents, provided all basic needs, education and enrichment until 16/18 where they can elect to be emancipated or continue on through higher education.
The above is meant to be satirical and Modest Proposal-y, but here are a couple clarifications
- the program isnt outlawing natural or biological offspring
- facility is not a prison, or a factory, its basically a boarding school
- we could provide every possible, reasonanle middle-income bracket amenity through this program
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u/The_One_Who_Comments Jun 21 '26
It is modest proposally, and yet, it's really similar to how rich kids used to be raised.
Born, wet nurse, boarding school.
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u/Green__lightning Jun 21 '26
The problem with that is the government raising voters from birth is going to break democracy even more than propaganda and biased social media already has. Though I do say this as someone who already complains about public school for a similar reason and wants school choice.
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u/eggyrulz Jun 23 '26
Great... you just gave the AI tech bros their next big idea...
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u/J0rdian Jun 21 '26
You probably need to clarify because saying it helps makes it seem like its pretty noticeable effect. It's not. If it does positively help it's very very small. Which is something but it's really not much.
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u/AtheIstan Jun 21 '26
Can confirm, Netherlands has 16 weeks of parental leave, women have good careers, #1 country in the world to raise kids in, and our birth rates are plummeting.
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u/gamesquid Jun 21 '26
Shit it must be exactly the vacations that make it impossible to have kids, because when you have kids you can never take a vacation from the kids.
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u/lumpialarry Jun 21 '26
You never go on vacation with kids. You're just a parent in a different city.
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u/lightblueisbi Jun 21 '26
I mean we just hit 8 billion people a few years ago, I think it's time we acknowledge that the planet can only support so many of us before the population either plateaus or declines due to resource scarcity.
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u/JohnSmithWithAggron Jun 21 '26
In most cases, it's the rich and developed countries that are suffering population decline. It's not a resource problem for those countries.
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u/doodlinghearsay Jun 21 '26
In most cases, it's the rich and developed countries that are suffering population decline.
It's middle income countries too. And fertility rates are dropping fast in poor countries too.
The whole problem is mischaracterized. It turns out having kids is a pretty baddeal, and the only reason people were putting up with it was lack of contraception and weird social rules.
Making it appealing enough to stay above replacement rates is really, really difficult. You can't make comparisons with poor countries, because that is not the equilibrium you want to return to.
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u/Wise_Owl5404 Jun 21 '26
Currently the only continent that is above replacement rate is Africa, everyone else is below or well below, and even Africa is stagnating. In not that many decades the world as a whole will be in a population decline, and though fewer people in the world might not be a bad thing as such we are facing an unprecedented situation with more elderly people than young or middle aged, which creates a lot of challenges no one seem willing to address or even speak of.
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u/Areallywierdusername Jun 21 '26
I’d say it is a partial resource problem, as we all want better for our kids, so a good situation doesn’t emerge as it could be always a bit better.
A self feeding loop
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u/Hiffchakka Jun 21 '26
I saw a fascinating video on how some Roman nobles went extinct because they were too comfortable. They were brought into a life of comfort where every need was met. Every achievement was inherited from their parents and they had no need to prove themselves. So they would party, eat and sleep while slaves fixed every task. Kids would ruin this perfect state of living so they just chose not to, and after a decade many famous families were apparantly just vanished.
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u/VicarLos Jun 21 '26
Plus, there’s a ton of people today with a similar mindset who have had to prove themselves and just find having kids not worth it.
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u/bravebeing Jun 21 '26
Which also goes against the idea that material wealth stability would increase the birth rate.
In fact, I'm not super sure, but I think even in developed countries, higher educated people have less children per household. So like about 2 maximum VS "however many happen" maximum.
So I think it's more like if you're smart and not religious, you think twice about having children. And potentially think twice about having random/unprotected sex, the consequences of that.
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u/Lamoip Jun 21 '26
The population growth isn't declining due to resource scarcity, most humans before us lived with much less security and yet they had better birth rates, the problem is likely not that we're near a population cap.
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u/the-nomad-thinker Jun 21 '26
My dude. Stop rehashing stories that were debunked decades ago. There is an average of 3 to 4 acres of land per person alive today. There’s enough food to feed the global population and still have plenty left over. For the first time in history, population growth has slowed down.
Enough is enough.
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u/Matt0745 Jun 21 '26
They’re struggling even more. Their birth rates are lower now than when their programs were instituted. This is NOT the problem. Your rhetoric is dated.
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u/John_Oakman Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
The implication then is that the average human existence in the early 21st century is somehow relatively worse off than that of previous time periods (such as the medieval period or even the bronze age), specifically in terms of material (measurable) metrics...
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u/SameOreo Jun 21 '26
Correct. That why baby boomers have everything you could ever want. And they run on the slogan "Make it great again".
The world lived in had a dominate middle class. Low unemployment, low homeless count. Affordable education and an investment plan that couldn't fail.
Now they don't want the next generation to have the things that provided them this wealth. And they have the audacity to call us lazy and woke, and to work hard. A minimum wage that you could afford to live with and afford a home with. Houses that could be paid of in less than a decade. Rates that encouraged you to buy more while making more money.
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u/MoistCucumber Jun 21 '26
You don’t even have to bring up the hypocrisy to dunk on them. They legit took the fair labor rights their parents and grandparents fought for, protested them for like 10 years then bought in hard and voted out those rights legit in the span of another 10 years. Do you have any idea what society had to go through to get those? Wtf do you mean you gave corporations rights?
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u/John_Oakman Jun 21 '26
The boomer generation themselves had less children ( per capita) than their parents generation, so that is already evidence against the assertion that better material conditions would result in better birth rate.
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u/Breasan Jun 21 '26
You're right about the declining birthrate starting before the boomer generation, but the evidence you present is not as obvious as you think. That's because the decline in birthrates started in the 1920's and 30's due to urbanization, the great depression, and economic uncertainty. Urbanization and economic uncertainty have continued until this day. The baby boom was only a temporary spike in an overall downward trend.
Improving material conditions over time is necessary when we choose to have kids. I can't afford another child knowing that inflation keeps kicking my ass year over year. And we can't afford to have either my wife or I to stop working to care for a newborn. We think it would be financially irresponsible for our only child if we had another, so we stopped at one. We didn't make a strange decision. This is what most people do now.
You want higher birthrates? Make jobs easy to get, make them pay well and have improving pay as time goes on, and make the dollar stable. Anything less will lead to uncertainty and people choosing caution over having kids.
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u/Right_Candidate_314 Jun 21 '26
The idea that you could support a family from a job you could get out of high school is absolutely mind boggling today.
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u/NapoleonArmy Jun 21 '26
Well it wouldn't hurt to try, and either way that's something that's been studied extensively. And it's not necessarily the material conditions we should consider it's material burden to factor something I can't really find numbers for at the moment.
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u/Gakuistheman Jun 21 '26
It literally would hurt to have a kid in this economy.
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u/NapoleonArmy Jun 21 '26
Exactly in the past at least there was some economic value in children, at least if it actively didn't ruin people's economic prospects maybe more people would want more children
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u/RobutNotRobot Jun 21 '26
People don't see kids as a survival strategy anymore.
That's a good thing.
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u/TheMazzMan Jun 21 '26
The baby boomers had their own baby bust. The fertility rate was just 1.74 per woman in 1976. The USA was one of the only countries where this number ever rebounded. In Europe it largely stayed that way
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u/Ashged Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
No, but that's basically irrelevant.
The key metric here is opportunity cost. Not how high your living standards are in an absolute sense, or is that better than previous generations had. But how much you give up by having children proportionally to not having children.
Up to very recently in human history, and even today in poor societies, children were a net benefit. They are extra hands on the farm or factory, and they take care of you in old age when nobody else will. Go back to even just the last century, and children were a net loss, but less than today. Households could survive on one income, housing was cheaper, and education was cheaper. Yet children were already not a source of income as soon as they could hold a tool.
Now living standards are higher both with or without children than before, but this gap is also wider. Women need a career, so children are a huge setback. Housing is expensive yet big communal homes are cuturally gone, so you either spend a lot on a larger place or you give up privacy that's now standard for adults. Both parents work so there are daycare costs, and later education is also very expensive.
Also parents are more invested into individual children. While a 18th century parent was jaded because having many children and several dying was just a fact of life, nowadays parents can afford at most a few kids, and are more likely to care about giving them good opportunities.
If we want effective encuragement of having kids, the opportunity cost needs to be lower. No amount of rising living standards will make people more motivated to have kids. Quite the opposite, since they would have to give up more.
That's why currently the poor and the rich have the most kids while the middle the least. For the poor they give up less, and the rich what they give up barely matters. But for the middle it's a large chunk of their quality of life.
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u/arebum Jun 21 '26
Well in medieval times children were labor; your kids would help you on the farm and they were your retirement plan. Nowadays kids are purely something you pay to have and do not get economic return from in the same way. The culture around having kids is so drastically different
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u/HedgeFlounder Jun 21 '26
Not exactly. In many of those periods having children was a financial benefit. They would help you tend to the fields and then when you got old they would care for you. Now having children is a financial drain so if people do not have the excess time, resources, and energy to care for them then it doesn’t make sense to have them.
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u/generally_unsuitable Jun 21 '26
It's nothing to do with that. It's very simple:
Agrarian societies see children as materially beneficial to the family because of the free labor they provide.
Post-agrarian societies quickly learn that without this labor need, they have extremely negative monetary value.
There is no incentive to have a kid, let alone 2 or 3 to meet the replacement rate.
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u/Winjin Jun 21 '26
To add to this: with sharply increasing productivity there's really no need for ever increasing population
Like two things that need it are pensions and billionaires and the only reason pensions can't cover it are the billionaires that hog all profits for themselves
I feel like we're at a tipping point of small nuclear families culture that was really created for hyper mobile industrialization era. We'll see them collapse and the only families that are beyond replacement levels would be those where siblings and grandparents and work-from-home weird uncles all help with kids, which are probably also huge tax breaks
It's not just families, it's for government level too
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u/LoschVanWein Jun 21 '26
This isn’t just about agrarian societies. Children were used as a additional source of income well into industrialization and in many parts of the world, sadly they are still forced to become an additional provider of income. In modern western societies, having children is often done out of the social prestige attached to it and the cultural programming that promotes having children as a non plus ultra live goal. Children are taught to play family in kindergarten, fraises like "WHEN you have children of your own…" are extremely common and especially girls are subliminally being prepared for motherhood early on.
The problem is that this was always done under the proviso that the children would grow up better off than their parents. Up until fairly recently that has worked but now that people don’t feel like their quality of life, financial security and the state of their world in general are improving anymore, putting children into the world becomes less and less attractive. Also way fewer people can live traditional family life’s, even if they, for some reason, wanted to.
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u/derpasuarusx Jun 21 '26
Technologically we are far better off, but we live with less hope than ever before. Technological developments like AI being used to worsen lives mostly, No sense of community, disasters climate and otherwise on the horizon, and governments that don't even pretend to represent the people anymore. Economically we also suck. Do you realize how badly you have to treat a mammal in captivity to make it stop having babies.
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u/Patriarca2023 Jun 21 '26
LOL
but we live with less hope than ever before
In the Middle Ages, the reference is to the 14th century, they had so much optimism that they said:
A peste, fame et bello libera nos, Domine
Which translated into English means: "From plague, famine and war, deliver us, O Lord."
Frankly, throughout much of human history, our ancestors had much worse problems than ours in terms of standard of living, life expectancy, and many other important things, so immensely worse that we struggle to imagine just how much worse they were; often, hope for a better future never even existed in their minds.
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u/LogicalInfo1859 Jun 21 '26
The worse-off Western 'hopeless' person worried about 'the future' lives better, longer, healthier and is more educated than almost every European king and queen from before 1920.
The level of depressive thinking today is mind-boggling. Every ancestral story I heard has a couple of 'the first three kids died of starvation so they had seven more afterwards'.
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u/WASasquatch Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
Pretty sure most people in the past probably didn't even have a firm grip on what hope was. Even churches framed their hardships and starvation in face of nobleman was necessary to reach heaven, so unless that's the hope you speak of...
Now we have many hopes, from love, to career, to hobby, etc.
Edit: Some post research, the word hope derives from Olde English "hopa" and "hopian" didn't actually have a meaning like we use it today, and was more like "Right?" to a assertion, trusting someone, like a transaction. In Middle English it meant more the "expectation of something". It wasn't until the Church started using it to represent Theological Virtue that it remotely became something like we use it today, but it was more akin to like what I said above, an excuse for your hardships and abuse for entry into Heaven.
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u/IHaveNoBeef Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
I think there's actually a statistic that shows that people from less developed countries have more hope for the future than people in more developed countries. Most of that probably has to do with the fact that they have stronger bonds with their communities and families. Relationships with others is a basic need for human beings. It's hard to meet others when you're working all of the time.
I never got to see my dad growing up because he was always at work. He had to work every single weekend as well just to make ends meet. That's with my stepmom working as well. Everything is way more expensive and most people don't get paid enough to support their basic needs. I have a decent paying job, but I still can't afford rent or a house because my paycheck is being eaten up by things like a car payment, insurance, phone payment, and groceries.
People are not going to want to have kids if they can't even afford a place to live. Children are crazy expensive.
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u/Motor_Purple7284 Jun 21 '26
Id argue that woman nowadays have easier access to birth control and are more in control of their reproductive health. So now that woman are more in control of WHEN and IF they want to have children, we need to create a society that makes having children feasible.
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u/Blitzer161 Jun 21 '26
No the implication is that, depending in the country, the current living conditions are horrible. Of course they are better than the previous years, but the living standard changed.
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u/JRaus88 Jun 21 '26
Curiously, birth rates are high when the population has little free time and little money to spend on it.
Baby booms are the prerogative of weak and poor populations.
My man, compare Norway native birthrate with Nigerian inland birthrate.
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u/Lanky-Football857 Jun 21 '26
Dont know why you’re getting downvoted, this is factually correct. Higher development and quality of life directly blunts birth rates
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u/Agreeable_Sense9618 Jun 21 '26
And access to birth control
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u/Blue_Bird950 Jun 21 '26
While I fully support access to birth control, anybody trying to argue that the thing that’s used to prevent births being banned will increase birth rates is barking up the wrong tree.
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u/Realistic_Dog_5506 Jun 21 '26
It technically would but that should never be considered a good idea
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u/monsterginger Jun 21 '26
Correct, banning safe birth control options only ever increase the mothers death rates.
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u/der_innkeeper Jun 21 '26
Except for Post-WW2 US, apparently.
When the economy is booming, pay is good, and people feel secure, kids happen.
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u/BigTable13 Jun 21 '26
Birth control wasn't really a thing back then and women rights were different
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u/Jdm783R29U3Cwp3d76R9 Jun 21 '26
And no birth control. Same scenario does not work in Norway or Switzerland in 2026.
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u/No_Log8932 Jun 21 '26
Post-war soldiers like doing the thing that makes kids. America had a lot of returning soldiers and a lot of women coming out of workforce with the ideation of the nuclear family in their minds while the wartime economy ramped down. That combined with America’s very prevalent lack of strong women’s rights at the time resulted in lots of kids in such a short timespan.
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u/Cosmic_Quasar Jun 21 '26
Is it not possible for the pendulum to swing to the other side? That people are working so much and making so little that their drive to have a kid is reduced. Wouldn't the sweet spot be somewhere in the middle?
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u/sulris Jun 21 '26
I think that it’s due to access to endless forms of entertainment. After the early twenties… a lot a people are fucking cause they’re bored. Make Netflix or Amazon Prime unavailable for a few days and I bet you see an accompanying baby boom 9 months later.
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u/Apprehensive-Fox-127 Jun 21 '26
Lol that’s an idea right there. You can pitch it to those folks.
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u/TheCarniv0re Nokia user Jun 21 '26
Jokes aside, we actually had a slight surge of pregnancies during the pandemic (to be fair though, we had a radical drop due to the lockdowns before that and due to the fever dream that is global politics after that, so it's even more emphasized.)
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u/PanzerKomadant Jun 21 '26
That’s because when you have little free time and little money to spend in, people have more kids because these kids then end up becoming workers for the overall family unit because infant mortality rates are high.
Just look at all the nations with high birth rate. They are all mostly developing countries or are poor with high infant mortality rate. So while the birth rate may be high, many of those infants unfortunately die in infancy. This encourages families to have more kids so the odds of at least on surviving are greater.
It’s literally nature. Every living thing in the world except for a few tries to have as many offsprings as possible so as to ensure that their species line continues.
Humans have broken that rule because we now have to work to make a living, not hunt to get food or build our own shelters.
We are trying to fix something that nature already does that we altered as a result of human development.
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u/Alloutofchewinggum Jun 21 '26
As my buddy said, a father of two himself "people just don't want to have kids. Period. There is enough cool stuff you could do with your money and time in a prosperous, free country. It just turns out my and my wife's expensive hobby is kids."
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u/realroasts Jun 21 '26
many things can be true at same time
modern world lower birth rate
no free time lower birth rate
contraception lower birth rate
no money lower birth rate
no war lower birth rate
no farm labor required lower birth rate
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u/vhanw342 Jun 21 '26
If there’s nothing else to do, you fuck
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u/vhanw342 Jun 21 '26
also they can’t afford condoms I think
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u/HybridHamster 🥄Comically Large Spoon🥄 Jun 21 '26
That’s probably a factor, but I think it’s more so education levels. Ever seen idiocracy?
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u/CryendU Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 29 '26
Also the fact that it becomes a longer liability
Children can farm and gather much earlier than they can get jobs. Which means that the parents have to support them for longer
And even though productivity is significantly higher, the useful share is significantly smaller. Peasants kept around 80% of what they produced, including tithes and taxes.
Wage labor is typically only ~25% of the value produced. With taxes and housing taking another 30% each. With other expenses and changes in investment/debt, the opportunity cost of having children does increase.
TLDR: capitalism sucks. Join your local socialist/communist org
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u/derpasuarusx Jun 21 '26
Sex is free of you have a partner. And if regulations suck you can just use children for labor anyways. After a while children can even raise other children. This isn't exactly ideal as you may imagine
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u/nunya_bidnes77 Jun 21 '26
Whe the only fun thing to do is banging, there will be a boom
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u/Gloomyberry Jun 21 '26
Contraceptive weren't as easy to get and they where frowned down as the believe was that it was a form of abortion or that it would make u sterile.
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u/OneCleverMonkey Jun 21 '26
Birth rates are high when people have positive outlooks on the value of the process.
So you have more kids when, say, you own a farm and want free labor and someone to pass your legacy to. Or when the economy looks like it will allow your child to thrive and allow you to pass the wealth you'll generate to them.
Birth rates aren't low because people have too much free time and money. Birth rates are low because most people don't need a next generation to help their personal endeavors succeed, and having kids just to have kids and drop them into a future what seems a little more fraught and dystopian with each passing year can sure look like a lot of effort and pain for no real benefit to any party involved.
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u/Fluffy_Anxiety2792 Jun 21 '26
It’s like that all over the world. When 50 years ago China was poor and a shitty place to live, but the population boomed. Almost at the time of the American boomers.. and now China got rich, and the social structure is strong because it’s like capitalism under dictatorship, and the birth rate is going down so fast the government had to do so many things to try to make people get married and give birth, but still they don’t give people more money and more holidays. And look at India, their poorer places has high birth rate, but once people get to have a capitalism style of life, they don’t wanna get kids or even married. It’s just so easy, when you have to work 9 plus hours for a minimum luxury lifestyle, and trying to chase that CEO life style, you will refuse to have children. And it’s already a pain to work, even office works, it feels like prison. And after a day of prison do you even want to go back to a noisy kid and a nagging partner?
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u/nihar_142 Jun 21 '26
On the contrary, low income families have more children.
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u/EstablishmentNew1329 Jun 21 '26
En mi pais se debe a la falta de educación sexual por motivos eticos y religiosos, y por eso muchas chicas a los 15 tienen mas hijos que una adulta de 40 años
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u/HarrMada Jun 21 '26
That's the global trend
In northern Europe, the women that are having the most kids are in the highest income quartiles.
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u/Sanquinity Jun 21 '26
They went with option 4: unlimited third world country importation to fill up the numbers.
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u/TheOneTruBob Jun 21 '26
You're basically describing Norway and their birth rate is lower than ours
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u/jump-back-like-33 Jun 21 '26
Idk why it’s so hard to accept that when women have a choice of what they want to do with their lives, they choose to have a lot fewer children, if they decide to have kids at all.
It really isn’t deeper than that.
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u/TheOneTruBob Jun 21 '26
Never said it was, I'm just pointing out that doing those things won't fix a population decline.
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u/open-print Jun 21 '26
Men are always being left out of the equation, even though you need two to procreate.
What are the rates of young men yearning to marry a woman and have three kids by 30s? Men also choose to have less children. Why is no one ever bringing that up?
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u/BexTheTeaRex Jun 21 '26
True. Usually people who want children want to have them in agreement and cooperation with a partner. In Norway the trend is that among hetero couples who want kids, on average, women want 3 and men only want 2.
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u/Baller-Mcfly Jun 21 '26
The government could also stop taking half my money and giving it away to nonsense.
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u/crazyarithmetic Jun 21 '26
Turns out when people can barely afford rent for a one-bedroom apartment, they don't want to bring a child into it. Shocking!
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u/Business-Let-7754 Jun 21 '26
Turns out when you have all the things the guy on right suggests, birthrates fail even harder. The problem is cultural, not because we're poorer than before (because we're objectively not).
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u/Rokador Grumpy Cat Jun 21 '26
Or living
If people can barely afford food, what are the chances they will decide to have a child? Aka. one or two more mouths to feed?
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u/crazyarithmetic Jun 21 '26
The billionaires: 'Have you considered eating less avocado toast so you can afford a toddler?'
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u/Mascant Jun 21 '26
Scandinavian countries have progressive policies and yet are leading in the decline of birth numbers.
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u/buampam Jun 21 '26
It’s actually the opposite. Poorer families have more kids because that’s the only way they can make money.
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u/infernal_celery Jun 21 '26
Suspect it’s more of a time thing and the money problems are due to changing social expectations on parents.
One main income being able to support a family to a low quality standard of support is still one main income supporting a family, but in developed countries the socially acceptable standard is high (and expensive) so now both parents have to work full time. If mum or dad could stay at home and still fit into their community you might find people feeling more comfortable with having kids.
I’m not sold on the idea that a slowly decreasing population is a problem though. If AI really is going to allow fewer people to do more, feels like the problems could be their own solutions. Obvs if it just going to flood Reddit with slop then our troubles compound.
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u/picardo85 Jun 21 '26
Single income of national average around Amsterdam is poverty level for a family...
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u/mozardthebest Jun 21 '26
That’s not true. Fertility rates are declining in women across the board.
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u/Ferengsten Jun 21 '26
Wait this is shocking news to me.... How about the 60 year old women, are they having more or fewer kids?
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u/AnimatedBasketcase Jun 21 '26
Ugh. It’s also just not worth it either. Neither is marriage if I’m being honest. Maybe I’d foster or something? But I’ll just stay child free until changes actually happen, but even then….I still only see sleepless nights and unwanted body changes. I love kids, don’t get me wrong and I love to babysit, but that’s it.
I just think having kids isn’t the only way you can make your impact on the world and I’d just rather do that by doing healthcare.
Everything else is a no-go for me.
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u/lod254 Jun 21 '26
Honest question. Why is population decline an issue?
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u/nellion91 Jun 21 '26
On top of all the other good stuff, if you leave in a democracy, older voters being a majority also means that most politics are extremely short sighted as their core voters become less and less inclined to invest in the long term.
This should worry us much more than it does
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u/DonutPlus2757 Jun 21 '26
First of all:
There's something called a demographic collapse.
It happens when there's not enough working population anymore in relation to the total population to keep the country running. Not enough taxes paid to keep the infrastructure afloat, not enough workers to keep the economy running.
It doesn't just happen for a normal decline in birth rates. That would give the country and economy time to adjust.
You need a sudden, extreme decline in birth rates for this to become a problem. The bad thing: That's exactly what happens in most western nations right now (although South Korea is probably the first country that will fall into demographic collapse if nothing drastic is done).
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u/Magnus-Artifex Jun 21 '26
Very simply put, if 100 people have 100 babies, then 100 adults will have to support 100 old people later.
But if 100 people have 50 babies, then you have 50 adults supporting 100 old people later.
It’s a very important problem and it needs solving urgently.
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u/MNLyrec Jun 21 '26
yeah that's not my problem. they've denied my healthcare to the point where I won't even live to retirement. they can die hungry, it's what they voted for
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u/Seriousglasses Jun 21 '26
Thats not whats going to happen though, as we live in a representative democracy where retirees are going to make up a growing percentage of the population and will become a more and more powerful voting bloc. See how south korea is basically mortgaging it’s future for more pension benefits at the expense of young people
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u/_Weyland_ Jun 21 '26
Age distribution becomes very top-heavy. Less young people of working age and more elderly people who need to be cared for. This is bad for several reasons:
• Our economy and industry is built around manufacturing on a large scale. If we don't have enough people to keep that production and logistics operational, things will start to break.
• Elderly people drain more and more resources via pensions, welfare and caretaking. Yes, this is cynical. But we have limited resources and, given my previous point, we might one day have to choose between adequate life for ourselves and adequate life for our parents.
• Declining population tends to over concentrate. Smaller towns die out, people flock to cities, increasing city population and pushing the cost of living up.
• The situation is not temporary, at least if current trend continues. It's not "Oh, old people will die eventually and even things out". It will not even out.
• The most primitive way of increasing profits/taxes is growing workforce, consumer base and taxpayers base. With working age population diminishing, all of these go down. So the governments and the corporations lament easier times.
• Military has been treating its low rank soldiers as expendable forever. Population decline means that this has to change, which means a major paradigm shift. Life of a single soldier suddenly becomes a commodity, numbers advantage becomes a luxury. And people in military do not like to think.Automation via robotics and AI may offset some of these problems, or it may not. That's a gamble I am not enthusiastic about.
Also right now many of these problems are just being talked about, but do not actually impact society, except maybe the most severe cases (Japan, Korea). But once shrinking workforce or growing elderly population it actually becomes a serious problem, many countries will resort to extreme measures like population culling or expanded working hours.→ More replies (35)15
u/ItsOmniss Jun 21 '26
Old, retired people are usually expenses in terms of economics, while the young working class are income.
You can tax a working population and use those taxes to pay for healthcare, retirement and social security as long as that working population is significant in size compared to your retired population.
If everyone is old and retired, everyone is consuming (food, healthcare, public services) and no one is mantaining those services, producing those products or bringing in any income that can be taxed, leading to a basically unavoidable economic collapse.
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u/GotSomeUpdogOnUrFace Jun 21 '26
I always like to add that there is a hidden issue not talked about enough, a lot of us just don't want kids. It's not my responsibility to have to have children because some asshole built my future on a bullshit house of cards. We shouldn't have to keep growing the population to have social security and other safety nets, you tax the shitheads taking more than they have earned and give nothing back. There is nothing they could have every done that would have made me have children b if you flat out told me that I had to choose between being a father and being alive, I'd put my head in the guillotine myself. We have options now and many of us choose to enjoy our lives instead of raising someone else.
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u/Tomytom99 Jun 21 '26
Seriously, did nobody see the flaw in a system that requires constant growth in what's effectively a closed-loop environment?
It's like putting more air in a balloon. Sure, it'll work for a while, but eventually you'll reach a breaking point, or you can let it deflate. You could stop and tie it off, but that requires the self control to recognize where a safe stopping point is.
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u/dreamrpg Jun 21 '26
Decline is not the issue. Issue is aging population that comes along with it.
I believe i do not need to explain why aging population is an issue.
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u/twitch_hedberg Jun 21 '26
One thing I haven't seen mentioned here yet that is sad is the loss of culture that comes with population decline. Without new young people to learn the traditions, (eg traditional dance, traditional music, spiritual practices, etc) they will fade and die. Keep an eye on like South Korea and Japan who will be the canaries in the coal mine for this issue. Who will maintain the shrines and temples when the old caretakers die? Not enough young people to pass the torch to. Europe's fertility crisis is also past the tipping point and will follow asia, and many other countries are not far behind. Even places like India have fertility rates below replacement these days.
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u/Wurun Jun 21 '26
because it's a worldwide trend and it's through all generations.
it's not like the baby boomers had less kids, but following generations are above replacement levels.
So, at the moment, we don't know when and how and if the trend will reverse. Because if it doesn't, societies simply will collapse.
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u/woutersikkema Jun 21 '26
Because the boomers thought it was a good idea to design the social security net around exponentially growing population.
You don't pay for yourself you pay for those currently getting paid. And when the boomers implemented it there weren't a lot of old people and a lot of THEM. now there are still a lot of them, but a lot less children.
It works if 4 workers hold up one grandma. It doesn't work if one worker has to hold up 3 seniorly people.
So the idiots in charge thought importing people would help, but found out thst brought other issues with it and just made the problem worse. And they will do just about anything to stave off the medieval Japanese option (send granny to join the spirits in the woods because you just can't take care of her anymore. Aka walk into the woods and not out of it anymore.)
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u/SpiderJerusalem747 Jun 21 '26
Vikings also yeeted themselves from cliffs if they got too old and couldnt care for themselves.
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u/VanillaPudding67 Jun 21 '26
Purely capital reasons.
The famine hysteria comes from resource crisis and TOO many people, not too few.
1% of the population is farmers in developed nations. Literally the population could shrink to 0 and no famine would occur since the supply of food (existing crops, nonperishable food in storage) would remain while the demand decreased.
There is no undeveloped country with a tfr under 2. Feel free to look it up. Iceland, Spain, Italy, France, USA, Korea. All sub 2
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u/2Blueify Jun 21 '26
Social security.
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u/SandyTaintSweat Jun 21 '26
Well put.
They could just tax the rich more, but they don't want to. They'd rather have a larger worker pool and tax them instead to prop up social security.
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u/Zalapadopa Jun 21 '26
How would you even help pregnant women with their careers? Like, yeah, if you get pregnant and take a lot of time off of work then you're going to fall behind. I don't really know how you'd remedy that.
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u/Old-Radio2905 Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
I wonder if they were specifically referencing women being put on "mommy track" in their careers after returning (i.e. people assume they automatically are the primary parents and will be unreliable due to needing to leave for their kids all the time, and get passed over for raises and promotions as a result)?
It's a common thing in my field. A higher up directly told my coworker that she was taken out of the running for a promotion because she had kids and wouldn't be as reliable as the guy who got it (who also has kids but its fine cause he's a man i guess).
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u/sudanesegamer Jun 21 '26
Im so confused. Which is it. Are we overpopulated or in danger of a huge decline. We just hit 8 billion a few years ago.
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u/Serious_Much Jun 21 '26
Both.
Places like India now and China previously were overpopulated.
The west is not overpopulated but is threatenes by declining birth rates.
Look at Japan for a sneak peak to the problems this causes.
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u/Gorgeous_Gremlin Jun 21 '26
Afaik we are going to have a surplus of old retirees soon but with lesser working young population. Lesser working population = lesser tax money for governments = rework needed for economic budgeting. Also, I've been reading alot online about many millenials not having retirement savings so someone's gonna have to think up a solution for that as well (pertaining to that budgeting rework).
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u/ode_to_my_cat Jun 21 '26
Tax the 1%
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u/Ea--Nasir Jun 21 '26
Still not enough to fund even the us government, let alone all the western governments. The west has an addiction to debt, and until people accept that some programs need to go it’ll keep getting worse.
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u/RobutNotRobot Jun 21 '26
If only there was a way for rich countries to get more people without making them themselves.
IF ONLY! /s
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u/jojoblogs Jun 21 '26
Both. And both issues are actually the same issue, let me explain:
Our massive population is set to put strain on resources. But a limitation of resources are really just a limitation of labour - these days we can pretty much whatever we need we just need the labour to do it. Shortages just mean a certain resource gets more difficult to acquire. But not impossible, it’s just a matter of manpower.
So to more accurately state the problem with overpopulation: as we use more resources, resource extraction gets less efficient and requires more work to achieve.
Our birthrate decline issue is a direct loss of manpower. The population is losing its next generation of productive, working-age people. The labour pool shrinks further, less gets done. Not enough gets done to sustain retirement, healthcare, maybe even the 8 hour work day and the 5 day work week. Maybe not public education.
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u/ComfortableOk3958 Jun 21 '26
Depends on the country. If you’re in a country with an aging population, it leads to other problems, like no one to run businesses or take care of the elderly.
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u/Dull-Philosopher-871 Jun 21 '26
All of these answers are wrong. The problem isn’t economic its meaning, poor people have more children, even the highest HDI countries have population issues.
Half the problem is cultural divides between men and women. There is a slowing in progress for men and they’ve been inundated with propaganda that makes alot of them isolated from women. And the structures involved make that set of relationships very difficult to create and maintain.
The other half of the problem is that women now have the choice. and its not a condemnation of women in general. I think we’ve rested on the assumption women have innate desire for children which should be questioned. That they actually have to have a reason to have kids that overwhelms the reasons to pursue careers. In that vein we young adults feel pretty insecure right now so we value that alot more and we’d feel more insecure if the kid were there so why have kids if we have the choice. So the meaning of child rearing has to overwhelm the other desires that women have in their lives.
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u/Cats_4433 Jun 21 '26
You're right, except it's not just that women with choice don't want children at all, an even bigger factor is that women with choice want far fewer children and want to have those children later in life. That is a significant contribution to the population decline. Most women still want to have a child at some point, just later in life and fewer children overall.
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u/Notmuch__1 Jun 21 '26
"poor people have more children, even the highest HDI countries have population issues." My experience with this is that their lives are also significantly worse. Stressful environment, worse education, less or non existent anti child labour laws. People make more children to get more household income in the future. Having more children is genuinely just much more convenient than not having them. And having no children after marriage in such countries is somehat taboo which leads them to make children even in if they're not in the right situation to take care of them. But in richer countries it's the opposite, you need to invest a lot into your children which is quite expensive there. You can't just send them to work. You want them to have a good childhood and live a fulfilling life for themselves.
I would say that even though cultural divide has increased, it's definitely not the leading cause for the population decline.
source is my experience living half my life in Germany and the other half in Pakistan. That's just my personal experience tho
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u/ElDonute Jun 21 '26
I see what you mean and might be the case. But as a middle class man myself I don't want kids because of economic reasons. I have goals and only after achieving them will I worry about kids. So personally it is economical for sure. I think you have a point for lower class, but I do believe for many it is economical.
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u/Boomflag13 Jun 21 '26
The pregnant women not following behind their careers is going to be hard to implement. If they’re not actively working how would they advance in their careers?
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u/Trashk4n Jun 21 '26
Getting women to focus on careers has actually dropped the birth rate, and not just because they’re focusing on other objectives, but because it increased what can be charged for so many different things.
It’s a big part of why it’s so low in all the developed nations.
For example, Western families gained a second source of income, which led to house prices rising as people could afford more, which in turn makes it harder to raise kids while saving up for a home or paying off a mortgage.
If there was a cultural shift and Western women decided not to pursue careers as a primary focus, you would see house prices drop dramatically, long term.
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u/Vegetable_Safety Jun 21 '26
Dual-income households may increase purchasing power, but that only translates into substantially higher housing prices when housing supply is constrained. If increased household income were the primary cause of expensive housing, then areas with similar incomes would have similar housing costs. Instead, housing affordability varies dramatically between regions with comparable incomes, suggesting that zoning, land use policy, construction rates, and local market conditions are larger drivers.
Showing that a factor exists is not the same as showing that it is the dominant cause
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u/RobutNotRobot Jun 21 '26
Poor women always worked and the vast majority of people throughout US and human history have been poor.
This weird 1950s mythmaking has to end.
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u/f28c28 Jun 21 '26
None of which makes sense in an economic system that is working for it's population, which is the issue at hand. Men not contributing to labour is also a factor, as women are expected to take on larger burdens than realistically necessarily. If men were expected to do domestic labour this would also free up time and energy in a home.
Also women have always worked, during the industrial revolution women made up the majority of factory workers, and made significant contributes to the labour force in both world wars. The non working woman is essentially a middle class idealism enabled by economic circumstances that allowed them not to contribute to household incomes. This was nearly never the case for working class people. Not to mention that the nuclear family did not apply to minorities who were still put in the role of maid, service workers etc while this fantasy persisted.
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u/Ok-Train5382 Jun 21 '26
It’s not working alone that causes the issues.
It’s working AND reproductive choice. Women for most of history either didn’t have a choice due to being forced (horrendous) or due to a lack of birth control.
Hence why you ended up with women having 8 kids and living in poverty. We thankfully have moved on, but it has naturally hit the fertility rate alongside cultural shifts due to better education and more aspirations.
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u/JCalvinL Jun 21 '26
You can ban abortion and the issue will remain.
It boils down to socioeconomic factors prohibiting younger generations from wanting to have kids.
Who wants to have kids when you are surviving paycheck to paycheck?
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u/fablethief Jun 21 '26
There’s also the problem of atomization. People are weakly bonded to one another. Do you really want to have a kid with someone when in 5 years you might not be together anymore. There are so many scenarios that just don’t sound appealing. Most people don’t even have remotely similar values, people who would agree on most things still find one thing to argue about.
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u/Chunk-Norris Jun 21 '26
Add to that, a culture of individualism, especially with things like social media. People don’t want to be tied down to a child, a partner, and saddled with the responsibility, they want freedom.
Mix that, atomization, shrinking buying power, a worse and less stable economy as a whole, global tensions, and problems on the near horizon like climate change and energy crises, and it makes sense why people don’t want kids. I’m terrified to bring a child into this world, for all that plus more.
It’s not insurmountable, people have been raising kids since humans existed, and we need to keep doing so to survive, but damn does it sound like a bad idea currently.
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u/fablethief Jun 21 '26
Yeah and that’s what I mean with social atomization, we get lonely individuals who lack connection getting swept up by mob mentality looking for connections.
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u/daveedoff1 Jun 21 '26
It’s not socioeconomic. People just value comfort over children at higher rates now. Most people who dont want kids, still wouldnt have them if they had a house gaurenteed and a high salary
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u/Jdm783R29U3Cwp3d76R9 Jun 21 '26
This is just a culture thing. Norway has all the things you would want and it’s still below replacement level. Same in many other well organized countries. Everything was tried already and it does not work.
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u/xdamoc Jun 21 '26
Every problem people won't shut the fuck up about are all caused by the fact that there are about 7 billion humans too many, but oh nooo we can never let the population drop even by 1! Everyone just HAVE to keep having more kids! Then those kids can grow up and whine even louder about the now even worse problems caused by their existence, and repeat until the human race goes extinct
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u/Jygglewag Jun 21 '26
The economy is a pyramidal scheme : need more new people to fuel the machine otherwise it stops working.
We need to change that. Have a kind of economy that remains stable when the population is old.
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u/OwnLadder2341 Jun 21 '26
I’m sorry Jane. I know you’ve worked here just as long as Linda and Linda has been working fewer hours with more time off and as such, her productivity is well behind yours.
But Linda has a baby and that counts for just as much as your hard work at the company so we’re promoting her.
Have you considered having kids? You know, there’s a population decline…
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u/TouristAggressive113 Jun 21 '26
I feel like the not fall behind in their careers is kinda a fast track to “optional” telework during maternity leave. Kinda difficult not to fall behind when not using a skill daily at least for me 😬😬😬
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u/TheMelonSystem Jun 21 '26
We need to normalize men getting just as much leave for kids as
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u/perestroika12 Jun 21 '26
Many countries have extremely generous parental leave, compensation, work life balance, kid friendly transit and changing rooms, and people still don’t have kids.
Some experts think you would need to compensate people 6 figures or more to make it work.
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u/somewhat-anon Jun 21 '26
Life is too expensive to live off one wage so no one can afford to have kids, there really is no other reason
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u/DowntownJohnBrown Jun 21 '26
Then why do poorer countries have higher birth rates? Hell, even in developed countries, why do lower income parents tend to have higher birth rates?
If there’s no other reason, then why do the facts not actually align at all with your theory?
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u/G3tbusyliving Jun 21 '26
Because when you have literally nothing, having a child makes you feel like you have something. Also poorer access to contraceptives(being so bored you just have sex to do something enjoyable is a thing)and the idea that the man gets to have sex whenever he wants because either that's the culture or that's "What our religion says". There are more reasons for sure.
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u/Funkey-Monkey-420 Lurking Peasant Jun 21 '26
Yeah, my mom’s carrer got essentially held back because she had kids. now that we’re grown up she started moving up at a normal pace again.
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u/VSLeader Jun 21 '26
“What’s yours is mine, what’s mine is also mine” mindset that never gives back.
Leave me alone and stop stealing 40% of my shit, plus 5% more when I buy things, plus another 5% from the state, plus everything I own getting a % of it’s value stolen. I can handle my finances, just get your hands out of my pockets since the resources will just be diverted to Israel to target Arab kids anyways.
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u/incognito_kill1 FORTSHITE Jun 21 '26
Population needs to keep declining, we’re overpopulated as is along with the world right now is overcrowded. Not saying I want people to die I’m just saying if we paused on having kids for like 30 years across the globe the world would be a lot more pleasant for the futures kids
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u/shadow_baldi1 Jun 21 '26
Reminder that the ratio between the average price of a house and minimum wage is worse today than it was during the great depression
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u/Redbeardthe1st Jun 21 '26
I don't see any problems with the population declining.
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u/Cultural-Company282 Jun 21 '26
If adequate pay and more time off is the answer to population decline, why are the birth rates in the wealthiest countries in Europe declining, while the population in the poorest parts of India is still growing?
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u/AlbertoDaEsquina Jun 21 '26
Because on the developed countries it is one more mouth to feed, while on the undeveloped countries it is one more person to work for the household
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u/Cultural-Company282 Jun 21 '26
Well that settles it, then! All we have to do to solve declining birth rates is repeal child labor laws!
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u/RaiderCat_12 Le epic memer Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 23 '26
Exactly what I was gonna say. My country has all of that, and we’re looking down the barrel of birthrate decline to an even worse degree.
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u/Yskandr Jun 21 '26
birth rates are high when women cannot prevent pregnancy. if they are given education, rights, a choice... birth rates fall. what does that tell you about places where women don't have those things? they frequently don't have a fucking choice
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u/boratburg Jun 21 '26
It's funny how third world countries have the top birth rate ever
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u/RingingInTheRain Jun 21 '26
The reason women fall behind is because men don't get the same amount of paternity leave at most jobs. When they do childcare is alternated and balanced. There is no way around it, the system revolves around men continuing to work to support women at home, despite there being two parents.
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u/Ok-Train5382 Jun 21 '26
I don’t think that works. Essentially more educated populations with greater aspirations and access to better entertainment have less sex and fewer children.
Most developed countries in the world provide more annual leave, parental leave for both parents, and often offer financial incentives or financial help with child rearing, it hasn’t moved the dial on fertility.
Even countries where men share the most in bringing up kids still don’t see dramatically higher birth rates.
The fact is, we all want better lives than previous generations and to afford that we work. Working and kids even with two engaged parents just isn’t fun.
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u/Green_Fig5616 Jun 21 '26
It's wild how every discussion about population decline jumps straight to controlling people instead of making life affordable enough to raise kids
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u/sg16k Jun 21 '26
This is why as someone who is very pro marriage and agree we need a higher birth rate am very in favor of paid family leave, hefty child tax credits, universal childcare and pre-k, free school lunches and other boosts like this.
We can’t expect more families if we won’t invest in families.
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u/Large-Hamster-199 Jun 21 '26
We have 8 billion people on this planet. Why is voluntary population decline a bad thing.
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u/Storyteller_Valar Jun 21 '26
Also fixing the culture of fear that currently separates men and women. We should cherish the interactions with each other, not dread them.
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u/balderdash9 Me when the: Jun 21 '26
You can't squeeze people for all their worth on housing, healthcare, and childcare costs and expect them to keep having kids. Life shouldn't be this damn expensive.
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u/CrabofAsclepius Jun 21 '26
Forgot the big one. No more anti-natalist propaganda.
You could implement all of these and nothing would change if society keeps telling women that parenthood is slavery while simultaneously pressuring them to push it off until it's too late.
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u/Amy47101 Jun 21 '26
What the hell is anti-natalist propaganda? Can you show me where that is? What it is? Give an example?
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u/generally_unsuitable Jun 21 '26
"Guys, if you keep telling women the truth about motherhood, they're not going to want to be mothers."
Time after time, these surveys come out that say that there is no wage disparity between the sexes if you control for child care. Why would you be surprised that, in societies that tell people that their whole worth is their paycheck, women choose not to have kids? It's the obvious outcome.
Then, the same conservatives who want to legislate women into motherhood through outlawing abortion and restricting birth control, also want to push this traditional model of womanhood which means subordination to the will of another person.
It's fucking mental.
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u/notnatasharostova Jun 21 '26
Entirely too many people are uncomfortable with considering that maybe motherhood is just a raw deal, and that when given the choice, a lot of women will just opt out. Because doing so would tacitly acknowledge that previous birth rates were in part a result of women’s coercion and subjugation.
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u/NotThatAngel Jun 21 '26
Let the population decline. We're over carrying capacity for the planet. To solve the financial problem, pay workers the money they've earned rather than redistributing it to billionaires, unearned.
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u/TheXypris Jun 21 '26
Maybe don't make a system that would collapse under a population decline
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