It's a strange place. Since the fertility problem is worldwide, you get a lot of ideologies mixing about. There's hardcore CCP folks, free market Mormons, radical Imams, universalist preachers, the whole lot of them. They're all trying to share ideas and jumping on the latest research findings from reputable and crackpot sources.

They're all looking for the recipe to get people to have kids again, and mostly finding nothing.

"Oh it's apartments!"

"Oh it's incentives!"

"Oh it's childcare!"

And then bickering how none of it is real and affects popsquat.

Once some formula is found, then the whole place will fall apart and they'll go back to hating each other again. But for now, it's a nice weird little place.

My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.

I know that's almost tautological. But it's simplicity cuts through the crap. No amount of baby cash, or white picket fences, or coercion, or lack of birth control, or whatever other set of schemes you can make, none of that matters. Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them.

That's a gigantic task, I know. And I don't have the policy recommendations to enact that. I'm just a dweb on the Internet. But that is my take.

We're fine financially, have housing, etc, but at this point why would we go through the stress of raising a child when a masked federal agent might jump out and disappear our friends, family, or nanny who could be watching them?

And that is before we even get into the potentially disastrous child healthcare decisions and regulation rollbacks.

It's an unfortunate time to be trying to grow a healthy family, IMO.

ETA: I already have children.

While economic concerns may be worsening the issue - I don't think they're the root cause as many would like to say.

I think the root cause is that we have outsmarted our biology. Once you give people education on the risks of sex and pregnancy, a focus on consent, easy access to contraceptives, knowledge of the responsibilities of child-rearing, and a world of other activities and pursuits - they simply stop having children at or above replacement rate.

Once given the knowledge and choice, humans do not have enough children to sustain a population.

No one wants that answer because it means we can't just blame it on [[CURRENT_PROBLEM]]. And it means there are no real 'solutions'.

People in their 20's will see peak world population in their lifetime. It will be fascinating to see how society changes over the decades that follow that.

About 11 years ago I went on a bus in Rochester, NY. It was bizarre to me that every person in the bus (about 12-15 people aged between 18-25 maybe) were buried in their phones. No one was talking to each other, not looking outside, nothing. I had the latest iPhone but since America was new for me I mostly spent time looking at the world around me and talking to people. I felt sad that the social world had come to this.

Fast forward to now and this is what I see in India too. Talking to random people in their prime years (maybe 18-30) is now 'weird'. But it's perfectly fine if it's via 'insta' or 'snap'. I can't imagine how much worse it's now in America in that age group. I know my pre teen nephews have withdrawals if I take away their devices here in India.

The moral here is that procreation requires better social skills and strong presence in the world and good parenting will probably create that. In order to raise an offspring, people need to have good mental health and that generally leads to good physical health which in turn improves the mental health and so on which can lead to procreation etc. The scrolling and virtual world is a distraction from reality. Something that keeps away humans from each other. We will only see this getting worse. In India the social world is still good enough to see higher birth rates. But that is also now slowing down. Mental health of people is not great. People complain about being single but there is virtually no way to hold a conversation as getting their attention is impossible. Phones are glued to their eyes and hands even when sitting with you.

I am hoping though things will be different in the future.

So, what exactly are we worrying about? The social security is not sustainable? The medical cost will go through the roof? There's no enough military power? There won't be enough consumption to support the growth (in that case, why do we have to keep growing? Why can't we just stay where we are? Again, not rhetorical questions but honestly curious about the answers)?

And yes, there is a big income disparity in the US. However, the fact that labor has practically doubled is another thing.

My parents married right out of high school, which was pretty much the norm I think. I lived on a dead-end street where nearly every house had kids my age. Dads worked, moms didn't. Moms might babysit, iron, do laundry for others, etc., but moms took care of the house and the kids. The houses were 850 sq ft, most with 3 (small!) bedrooms, a kitchen a living room, and 1 bath. We lived in that house until I was 8 and my sisters were 6 and 2, so 5 of us in 850 sq ft.

My dad worked as a bag boy at Kroger during high school and could: - get married - buy a house after a year married - start a family at 20 - had 1 car for the family - had a boat - had a motorcycle right out of high school. There's no way an unskilled high-school kid could do that today. They'd be lucky to have a car and be able to fill it with gas and have car insurance.

I don't think most people today would consider that lifestyle feasible, but at the time, it was fine. I don't think it's doable today because both parents have to work since inflation over the decades has had a dramatic effect on prices.

The Olympics have really driven home to me how America is truly a melting pot. When you look at the Olympians from say Greece, you can say "oh those are Greek people". When you look at the Nordic athletes, you can say the same. Or the Japanese or Chinese.

But you look at the American team, and they don't have a single physical "look". There is a mix of races and cultures, and they're all American. People complain that America doesn't have a culture, and they're kind of right. We have mix of everyone else's.

It will take decades, if ever, to fix this. Some people from all around the world longed to come to America. Not anymore. Now they are looking elsewhere.

I think our financial/defense systems are not prepared for population decline, so I foresee a lot of turbulence.

The new left will call for more immigration and more globalism to avoid wars, but will have to deal with integration of swaths of immigrants.

The new right will call for closing of the borders and double down on AI doing the work of producing and defending, but will have to deal with the fact that AI will not be ready for that.

It busts many common myths.

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03/03/the-population...

At some point, in first-world society - averaging across different societies and social support systems, and considering the numbers in aggregate - we flipped. Pessimism about the future outweighs optimism. Downstream of that flip, the prevailing trend changed. Here we are.

You can mess with assumptions and see how it projects out the population of any country/continent/the globe (based on 2024 data and trends).

"Loving dogs has become an expression not of loneliness but of how unhappy many Americans are with society and other people. [...] For some owners, dogs simply offer more satisfying relationships than other people do." [0]

[0] https://theconversation.com/americans-are-asking-too-much-of...

Then, people who have a child that young are far, far more likely to have additional children. Outside of the first few years, a sibling often reduces the strain on the parents, and provides additional value. Your life starts to orient around the kid(s), and we get a couple of other hormone boosts so we love them and want more of them.

I am consistently confused that this conversation never seems to touch on just how many births are mostly because two people's biology overrode their judgement and that initial failure results in a feedback loop where you have another child or two. If that poor judgement doesn't happen, you don't kick off that loop, and then you're trying to rationally choose to do something that never made all that much sense in the first place.

What I find amusing about this is that it is roughly equivalent to saying that the United States needs to conquer new territory to survive. Need to bring more people under our thumb.

This is definitely "dying empire" thinking.

Worth saying that I do not agree with this. I think in many ways our cardinal sin is that in the interest of legibility (especially for tax purposes) we've regulated our ability to employee people and to get work to an absolutely insane degree. To such a degree in fact, that much of our economy relies on having a source of "black market" labor and indentured servitude in the guise of immigration.

Where we flirt with danger is that we look at one side of this equation, the immigration side, but not the other, the labor side.

The humans may still think they're in charge. They won't be.

They seem to understand that they can't mitigate the decline, they may be able to provide the same level of service without the need for as many workers. Based on the experiments we have attempted to fix this issue, I think that's actually a smart move.

* kids are and were always born in severely underdeveloped places like Africa and during hard times like famines or wars

* worldwide in the last 100 years and maybe throughout all history the education level and social freedom of woman severely impacts her fertility

Draw your own conclusions about the causes and solutions of the demographic problem

“It takes a village to raise a child” isn’t advice, it’s a policy framework because massive support is needed to rear kids and the majority today have less than their previous generations.

Sure we talk a big game, everything is 'for the children' obviously. However, we publicly divest from schools, we invest in technologies that devalue humans and human labor. Growing up we make people believe they need to be millionaires just to not be swallowed up by the 9-to-5 meat grinder (this is true actually). It's no wonder young people don't value family when every signal in our society is telling them not to.

Going through the process of being pregnant and giving birth is absolutely terrifying to me and most of my friends. How many tech bros do you know who do their blood labs on a yearly basis, or track their blood sugar daily? How many do sports physio to avoid the possibility of a minor training injury, or do any number of peptide interventions to micro-optimise some aspect of their health or physique?

If having babies, for them, was basically a coin toss re: possibly developing diabetes, ripping open their pelvic floor and becoming incontinent, adding 8 points to your BMI, or major sleeping problems, etc., would they still be as mystified about the low TFR? (Of course, many men go through physical hell when raising children too, and I don't want to diminish their contribution, but on average their physical symptoms are less extreme)

Sometimes the knee jerk 'just get a caesarean' and lower maternal mortality numbers mask the reality of how barbaric the process seems, at least from my vantage point as someone who might one day be involved in the process. The number of privileged women who choose the surrogate path alone should suggest how many women might opt out of the physical part of it, if they could; if having babies isn't a social obligation or a biological inevitability without birth control, there's quite a strong argument for putting it off just one more year...

2015 | 1.83

2016 | 1.80

2017 | 1.75

2018 | 1.71

2019 | 1.68

2020 | 1.62

2021 | 1.63

2022 | 1.67

2023 | 1.62

2024 | 1.62

2025 | 1.62

2026 | 1.61

Politizacion of long term trend wont help here.

Having responsibilities and caring for others is actually good for the human soul. Being inconvenienced is a part of real life.

I’m not trying to convince everyone that they need to have a kid. But from my experience, having kids provides a very deep and satisfying purpose. Not the only purpose. But it does provide one. And it helps cut through the craziness and hurt and vanity of this world.

I believe humans and jobs will be able to accomplish more, with less people and have better margins - and thus be able to be paid much more.

I am an optimist that these trends together, when managed and harnessed well, can make us better paid, less stressed, and with more free time.

the real reason is both boring and obvious: a very significant percentage of educated urban people in the developed world don't want children. both sexes have a very high number of very valid reasons for that, and it's very pointless to examine any particular one.

and no, importing uneducated rural people from the undeveloped world won't fix shit, because their children too will be educated urban people. I think our young global leaders are beginning to realize that, hence the very recent shift from ubiquitous antinatalism of the previous decades to frantic nagging about our unwillingness to breed.

it would take extremely dystopian measures to "fix" the birth rates, and no one, not even Russia and China are presently willing to go that far. Russia is, however, rapidly ramping up its authoritarianism to North Korea levels, so I assume it will be them who will be the first to ban contraception - the least insane measure that can make significant difference. and given how eagerly the West has been embracing Internet censorship, political violence against dissidents, social credit, and other hallmarks of authoritarian regimes in the past decade, I assume that after a few years of pearl clutching, they will follow suit.

Atomic theory and evolutionary theory would be the two conceptual frameworks that I would do most to teach to people: the first to understand the world and the second to understand behavior. I believe we have failed, as a society, to teach the second (and possibly the first).

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/27/spain-decree-r...

#1 story on BBC news: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpw052pkvl0o

"We need to flatten the curve..."

(Comedy writing mode OFF: )

You know, to re-quote the powers-that-be and the mainstream news media...

What, no takers?

You know, "flatten the curve... of population increase?" -- what, still not funny?

Hey, I'm just re-quoting what other people said... (a whole lot of people, incidentally!) but in the context of the article, above!

What, still no takers?

You people have no sense of (dark, very dark, let's be completely honest about that!) humor!

:-)

Next steps should be raising the quality of life globally, to make this trend universal.

We are in dire need of housing in these cities. I don’t think we should keep trying to recreate 1920s tenement conditions.

Productivity went up 90% since 1979, and pay went up 30%. We could support 2x the ratio of retirees to workers as 1979 at the same level of comfort. Instead, we build huge houses (for wealthy people) and tear them down, and build a military to kill impoverished foreigners (for our wealthy investors), blow it up, and build it again.

The "demographic crisis" people are a child-sacrificing cult posing as a child-worshipping cult. They want more people to keep the prices of labor down, and they act like that's a concern that you should share. Unless you're in the top 20-40% in the West, you're going to work until you die, or get sick and die in the gutter.

If you really wanted the population to go up, maybe don't engineer society so that all of its wealth lies in the hands of boomers and their failchildren who don't work. Governance would improve instantly and vastly if only people who worked got a vote.

The funny thing is that the right-wing pro-natalist points at wealthy elites and concocts a conspiracy that they want to reduce the population (for unknown, nefarious reasons.) No, they love cheap servants. They spend all of their effort in bombing and sieging poor countries on bizarre pretenses then opening the doors to their own countries to let them rush in. The only difference between the right-wing pro-natalists and wealthy elites is that the elite will happily import the servants from the South to wherever they want to live, and right-wingers (even if they call themselves "liberals") are secretly just doing the 14 words. We don't need more immigrants or more babies, we need to shed parasites.

Illegal immigration exists to suppress wages of both documented and undocumented people. It’s to increase profits. Certain industries will collapse without it.

And as the global hegemonic superpower, imperialism is the highest form of capitalism. Destabilizing other countries is a tool for exploitation.

Immigration has been the only thing propping up population growth.

I honestly see the US collapsing in our lifetimes. The billionaires will flee. Empires don’t die quietly or quickly however. It’s going to be violent and drawn out.

"His administration is focused on delivering on his promise to reduce the immigrant population and argues, despite the protestations of economists, that doing so will mean greater opportunities and wages for native-born workers and will reduce the cost of everything from housing to health care by reducing demand.

“There is no shortage of American minds and hands to grow our labor force, and President Trump’s agenda to create jobs for American workers represents this Administration’s commitment to capitalizing on that untapped potential while delivering on our mandate to enforce our immigration laws,” says Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman."

once that population curve flattens or flips, the risk pooling math just breaks. you can’t underwrite a 30-year health or life liability for a cohort when the generation behind them is 20% smaller. we’re looking at a fundamental failure of the actuarial models we've used since the 50s.

For low density countries like the USA, infrastructure is already a disproportionate burden. Population decline will spark a crisis of crumbling regressions and the loss of economic vitality.

When you have men being forced to pay child support, countries like Australia creating laws to educate men, feminist movement tagging men as the worst thing to live in society, you won't solve population decline.

Add to that, everything costs twice as much nowadays so having family isn't as easy anymore. Men has zero incentive to want to have a family, everything is fighting against them.

The USA is crossing a strong "women/DEI first" phase, look at what is happening, companies going bankrupt, movies/games/services going bankrupt.

You cannot fix a society problem when the base of society is broken.