Western countries are trying to prevent super aged societies via mass migration. Of course 1) Most of the source countries are themselves low fertility and 2) the more mass migration you have the less attractive the target country becomes.
It's just kicking the can down the road.
inb4 "wHaT aBoUt AfRiCa"? West Africa is about what the western world was post war, and is on the exact same trajectory - declining every year.
I think it's worth keeping in mind that immigration is arguably the reason an administration this repugnant was able to get into power democratically. It's the one issue on which a small but critical mass of liberals have similar negative experiences as compared to most conservatives.
The US has one of the most generous LEGAL immigration policies in the world and there never seems to be a lack of people around the world who are willing to fill available slots.
The current administration is trying to make it so fewer people will want to violate our laws and sneak into our country.
Those two things actually have very little to do with each other. That is why some of the biggest supporters of border enforcement are those who came here through legal channels.
We know that better living conditions (health, income, education etc) lead to lower fertility. In a world that you have both developed and developing countries, the stable equilibrium seems to be world suffering.
> In a world that you have both developed and developing countries, the stable equilibrium seems to be world suffering.
I think that's the wrong read.
All sorts of animal population follow a sigmoidal growth pattern where there's exponential growth, some degree of overshoot and then a return to a steady level somewhat below that peak.
I think it's more likely, drawing from biology, that we end up at a stable global population level without having to worry about moving backwards along the metrics of education, income or contraceptive access.
Remember it was just a few years ago everyone was absolutely terrified that we would grow to the point where the world simply couldn't hold us all and we'd die off -- and now we're terrified the population will zero out. In reality, neither is very likely. We're probably just going to chill around 8 billion or so until/if we go multi-planetary.
It's very dangerous to try and compare human behavior to any pattern seen in nature— particularly human behavior in aggregate. While humans are animals like any other, we are also very much not simple beasts beholden to environmental conditions.
To wit: the current human population is beyond the natural carrying capacity of the places we live. The only reason we can sustain 7bn people today is because we've artificially increased local carrying capacity through artificial fertilizer. If we lost that technology today, a majorty of humans alive now would starve to death.
There's really no reason to assume any environmental factors that don't physically preclude human occupation will have any effect on overall population numbers. We can artificially extend our ecosystem to support essentially unlimited people. The only real hard limit is space to physically put bodies and the amount of energy our society can use without boiling the oceans with waste heat.
If population growth levels out, it won't be for any natural reason because we are already well beyond any natural limit.
I think the real problem is the age structure of the population is increasingly skewing older and this problem becomes worse the lower the birth rate. I don't know how we're going to keep supporting more and more people getting past the retirement age and collecting benefits on a shrinking working age population being squeezed harder by taxes. Either retirement spending goes down maybe with higher retirment age or increased healthspan, or we become much more efficient at taking care of the elderly with fewer resources, or the working class gets squeezed harder & harder.
> I think it's more likely, drawing from biology, that we end up at a stable global population level without having to worry about moving backwards along the metrics of education, income or contraceptive access.
There's absolutely no inherent equilibrating force that will stabilize global fertility rates at replacement. Many countries have blown by replacement (the USA included) and continue on a downward trend year over year.
And if even cultural norms were reversed to pro-birth, it wouldn't be enough to reverse the trends, as the decline is compounding, and the increase of average age produces other complications (hard economic issues for starters, making people even more hesitant).
Yea my crackpot theory is it’s genuinely something that’s inherent which is causing these declines. That’s why no attempts to reverse them have been successful. I think like you’re saying we’ll end up at some equilibrium.
>All sorts of animal population follow a sigmoidal growth pattern where there's exponential growth, some degree of overshoot and then a return to a steady level somewhat below that peak.
Animal populations usually decline because they lack food or have predators and other external factors. Not usually because of a lack of will to reproduce due to social or economic reasons.
I don’t think we’re going to find a number and stay there. Too many factors impacting population size are changing. Healthcare, climate, food science, etc. It’s likely to always fluctuate, and it’s likely to continue to be something people worry about.
The economy depends on some level of growth, so if we can't accomplish that with a stable or shrinking population then it's gonna be a bad time for a while.
EDIT: I did not think I'd have to state this explicitly, but:
yes, I am in fact talking about the capitalist economy the western world currently operates under
By "economy", I presume you mean things like real estate speculation.
Japan is a good example of a country where the population has been in steady decline for a long time now. The economy has stagnated, but it has not collapsed.
The more worrisome part of what we're seeing in Japan is the total hollowing out of the countryside as the young systematically pack into the three large cities that increasingly dominate all economic activity, namely Tokyo, Osaka and Fukuoka.
>Japan is a good example of a country where the population has been in steady decline for a long time now. The economy has stagnated, but it has not collapsed.
Give it time. Japan only crossed the point of deaths > births about 20 years ago, which was also the time it reached peak population (as recorded by a census around that time).
Give it 20 years for the peak kids to grow above 40 and it will be a dystopia.
Increasing the high-density urban population leads to even lower fertility.
"We find a robust association between density and fertility over time, both within- and between-countries. That is, increases in population density are associated with declines in fertility rates, controlling for a variety of socioeconomic, socioecological, geographic, population-based, and female empowerment variables."
Are they producing less food? Migration from the country to the city has been going on for a long time. You just don't need as many people to produce food as you used to.
The economic paradigm that evolved during the exponential portion of population growth depends on it. It's not the only model that can possibly exist, and it looks like we'll be meeting new ones.
The economy we were born into, the level of material production, business, amenities etc and how we run things, does.
It can find an equilibrium at some point, but it will be blood and people who think they should have robot servants and food delivery wont like it. As for the time it will be achieving that equilibrium, it will be painful.
All economies do not inherently rely on growth. It's just that capitalists have brainwashed themselves into believing capitalism is the only type of economy possible and that growth can go on without bound literally forever.
Actually growth patterns of animals vary wildly. There's a whole set of animals that get "unstable" growth - Cats are famous for this, for example. That means that cat numbers in specific areas actually grow to the point that cats die out in the next generation, destabilizing the entire food chain in the process (happened in Australia, for example)
The problem with this instability is that the numbers bounce around wildly. Up and down, by a lot, in as little as 2 or 3 generations. But there's a process that stops the bouncing: hitting zero.
I am a top 15% earner in my area, have been for 7 years, and I'll be able to afford a home maybe in another 5-10 years.
If you consider starting a family with no hope of ever getting out of renting, as landlords constantly raise monthlies, you might reconsider children.
On top of the issues with people working so often and so hard that they rarely have time to meet anyone outside of work; no wonder people aren't marrying.
> If you consider starting a family with no hope of ever getting out of renting, as landlords constantly raise monthlies, you might reconsider children.
Generally the less money you make the more kids you have. It's really a question of prioritization. People say they're holding off on kids for X or Y reason but I think this is more of an expressed vs revealed preferences situation. They would rather chase material wealth for themselves than have kids, and to be clear I'm not judging just observing. Through most of human history mud huts weren't a blocker to having kids.
That’s because people pulling a nice paycheck have gotten a taste of stability and don’t want to risk losing it, and this is intensified when the economy is turbulent. People making less never had stability in the first place and don’t have as much to lose.
Aside from that, it's merely observations/anecdotes, but from what I’ve seen people who have managed to achieve a massive uplift in economic status (say from minimum wage in their mid-20s → net worth north of $500k-$1m in their mid-30s) are more likely to have children than people who’ve always been wealthy. I would theorize that such individuals feel a greater degree of economic freedom, having lived at the bottom and being able to make more effective use of what they have.
Right, I think we’re running into the limitations of a scarcity-based system here. Even many well compensated couples would face having to make major tradeoffs with their economic stability, careers, time spent with the kids, retirement, quality of life, etc, and are accordingly choosing the path of least risk.
Even the most generous countries aren’t fully compensating for the costs of raising a family, and the assistance offered by many is less than pocket change. It’s only natural that incentive is going to be low.
> We know that better living conditions (health, income, education etc) lead to lower fertility. In a world that you have both developed and developing countries, the stable equilibrium seems to be world suffering.
Alternately: in the past, dying was a lot easier, and society adapted to that by creating extra people, and we've reached a point where that isn't as necessary. That doesn't mean it wouldn't be awesome to improve things for the number of people we do have, or that those improvements are easy, but it's not obvious to me why the assumption would be that quality of life only changes if the population continues changing. In other words, it sounds like you're measuring two different things, noticing one of them slowing no longer increasing, and trying to make inferences about the other one without actually establishing how exactly that connection works.
> We know that better living conditions (health, income, education etc) lead to lower fertility
How do you come to this conclusion. We're seeing that our oh so clever selves have used chemicals/plastics in these nice living conditions to the point they have negative consequences on our health. Having a nice place to live with a job with a nice salary while lending to better health does not lower one's fertility. Maybe these people with the nice jobs and nice places to live are choosing not to have kids which become the reason they can't have nice things. I think you've jumped to an incorrect conclusion
This trend has been going on for much longer than the current worries about microplastics and whatnot. Lower fertility doesn’t necessarily mean lower physical fecundity. It can also just mean that generations of kids have been raised to believe having kids early ruins your life, and should only be done much later after you graduate university and your career is well established (by which time you’re in your latter 20s and your fertility is naturally lower.)
Another possibility is that a third factor is causing both better living conditions and lower fertility, not that better living conditions inherently cause lower fertility.
I believe lower fertility is most closely associated with education for women. Women with an education sometimes find interests other than being a baby factory.
Perhaps it’s Mother Nature desperately trying to tell humans that current capitalism and the pursuit of endless growth is unsustainable. Other species die out when they reproduce too quickly for the environment to support it. Humans modify the environment right up until they can’t to continue to pursue growth.
I've been hearing for a long time in Australia that we have an enormous aging population. It could be that birth rates hadn't kept up with previous birth rates, or it could be that birth rates have sort've normalised.
Either way, we supposedly have a large aging population and as such death rates are going to increase due to old age etc
It's taken as gospel that the Brave New World automated human gestation centers would be A Bad Thing, but frankly the number of problems that would be solved with this scheme are huge.
I think the first country to do it will be scolded heavily, but only until everyone else figures out how they did it and are able to copy them.
I don't see there being any orphanages, you could simply have babies on demand for anyone who wants to adopt them. There are enough couples with fertility problems, women who can't carry a pregnancy to term for medical reasons, etc etc. The adoption process is currently unworkable: couples will routinely spend tens of thousands for a chance at adopting, and the birth parent can reverse the adoption at any time and you've simply set a five figure sum on fire.
You could also incentivize couples to adopt up to the point that the (augmented) fertility rate hits replacement level. That's the ultimate problem to solve here, you're not trying to grow the population, simply put a floor under it to stabilize and prevent demographic collapse.
With how little we prioritize education versus other things it’d be a disaster. They’d be factories for neglected and traumatized children who would have a high likelihood of growing up to be criminals or homeless.
If human gestation centers are ever proposed in a country, I would hope the countries of the world would declare war on that country for the sole purpose of stopping it
Beyond demography, Much of this depends on public policy and execution. Will more of us live in conditions that prevent a oidable death or injury? Or another way?
Importantly, in the US, and before counting immigration.
Still a significant milestone though.
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Fertility rate of India is below replacement.
Western countries are trying to prevent super aged societies via mass migration. Of course 1) Most of the source countries are themselves low fertility and 2) the more mass migration you have the less attractive the target country becomes.
It's just kicking the can down the road.
inb4 "wHaT aBoUt AfRiCa"? West Africa is about what the western world was post war, and is on the exact same trajectory - declining every year.
https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf
The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 - August 2025 (400 comments)
In what sense?
It's a sarcastic way of saying "there is a lot of Indian immigration".
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I think lot of people will keep wanting but will be not be able to if current regime continues.
I think it's worth keeping in mind that immigration is arguably the reason an administration this repugnant was able to get into power democratically. It's the one issue on which a small but critical mass of liberals have similar negative experiences as compared to most conservatives.
The US has one of the most generous LEGAL immigration policies in the world and there never seems to be a lack of people around the world who are willing to fill available slots.
The current administration is trying to make it so fewer people will want to violate our laws and sneak into our country.
Those two things actually have very little to do with each other. That is why some of the biggest supporters of border enforcement are those who came here through legal channels.
What kind of weird equilibrium is this.
We know that better living conditions (health, income, education etc) lead to lower fertility. In a world that you have both developed and developing countries, the stable equilibrium seems to be world suffering.
Wtf.
> In a world that you have both developed and developing countries, the stable equilibrium seems to be world suffering.
I think that's the wrong read.
All sorts of animal population follow a sigmoidal growth pattern where there's exponential growth, some degree of overshoot and then a return to a steady level somewhat below that peak.
I think it's more likely, drawing from biology, that we end up at a stable global population level without having to worry about moving backwards along the metrics of education, income or contraceptive access.
Remember it was just a few years ago everyone was absolutely terrified that we would grow to the point where the world simply couldn't hold us all and we'd die off -- and now we're terrified the population will zero out. In reality, neither is very likely. We're probably just going to chill around 8 billion or so until/if we go multi-planetary.
It's very dangerous to try and compare human behavior to any pattern seen in nature— particularly human behavior in aggregate. While humans are animals like any other, we are also very much not simple beasts beholden to environmental conditions.
To wit: the current human population is beyond the natural carrying capacity of the places we live. The only reason we can sustain 7bn people today is because we've artificially increased local carrying capacity through artificial fertilizer. If we lost that technology today, a majorty of humans alive now would starve to death.
There's really no reason to assume any environmental factors that don't physically preclude human occupation will have any effect on overall population numbers. We can artificially extend our ecosystem to support essentially unlimited people. The only real hard limit is space to physically put bodies and the amount of energy our society can use without boiling the oceans with waste heat.
If population growth levels out, it won't be for any natural reason because we are already well beyond any natural limit.
I think the real problem is the age structure of the population is increasingly skewing older and this problem becomes worse the lower the birth rate. I don't know how we're going to keep supporting more and more people getting past the retirement age and collecting benefits on a shrinking working age population being squeezed harder by taxes. Either retirement spending goes down maybe with higher retirment age or increased healthspan, or we become much more efficient at taking care of the elderly with fewer resources, or the working class gets squeezed harder & harder.
There’s also the option of raising corporate and high-net-worth-individual tax rates!
> I think it's more likely, drawing from biology, that we end up at a stable global population level without having to worry about moving backwards along the metrics of education, income or contraceptive access.
There's absolutely no inherent equilibrating force that will stabilize global fertility rates at replacement. Many countries have blown by replacement (the USA included) and continue on a downward trend year over year.
And if even cultural norms were reversed to pro-birth, it wouldn't be enough to reverse the trends, as the decline is compounding, and the increase of average age produces other complications (hard economic issues for starters, making people even more hesitant).
Yea my crackpot theory is it’s genuinely something that’s inherent which is causing these declines. That’s why no attempts to reverse them have been successful. I think like you’re saying we’ll end up at some equilibrium.
>All sorts of animal population follow a sigmoidal growth pattern where there's exponential growth, some degree of overshoot and then a return to a steady level somewhat below that peak.
Animal populations usually decline because they lack food or have predators and other external factors. Not usually because of a lack of will to reproduce due to social or economic reasons.
I don’t think we’re going to find a number and stay there. Too many factors impacting population size are changing. Healthcare, climate, food science, etc. It’s likely to always fluctuate, and it’s likely to continue to be something people worry about.
The economy depends on some level of growth, so if we can't accomplish that with a stable or shrinking population then it's gonna be a bad time for a while.
EDIT: I did not think I'd have to state this explicitly, but:
yes, I am in fact talking about the capitalist economy the western world currently operates under
growth = economic growth
By "economy", I presume you mean things like real estate speculation.
Japan is a good example of a country where the population has been in steady decline for a long time now. The economy has stagnated, but it has not collapsed.
The more worrisome part of what we're seeing in Japan is the total hollowing out of the countryside as the young systematically pack into the three large cities that increasingly dominate all economic activity, namely Tokyo, Osaka and Fukuoka.
>Japan is a good example of a country where the population has been in steady decline for a long time now. The economy has stagnated, but it has not collapsed.
Give it time. Japan only crossed the point of deaths > births about 20 years ago, which was also the time it reached peak population (as recorded by a census around that time).
Give it 20 years for the peak kids to grow above 40 and it will be a dystopia.
Why is rural depopulation worrisome? Young people, as one would expect, want to be located near other young people and jobs.
Increasing the high-density urban population leads to even lower fertility.
"We find a robust association between density and fertility over time, both within- and between-countries. That is, increases in population density are associated with declines in fertility rates, controlling for a variety of socioeconomic, socioecological, geographic, population-based, and female empowerment variables."
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34914431/
These young people will be middle aged people located near old people, with a huge average age - and the flee to the cities will increase that.
Because that's where the food comes from.
Are they producing less food? Migration from the country to the city has been going on for a long time. You just don't need as many people to produce food as you used to.
"bad time" is relative. Perhaps the lifestyles of the West are simply fundamentally unsustainable.
The economic paradigm that evolved during the exponential portion of population growth depends on it. It's not the only model that can possibly exist, and it looks like we'll be meeting new ones.
Why does the economy require growth? Biological systems can find equilibria, why can't an economy do the same?
Economy in general doesnt require growth.
The economy we were born into, the level of material production, business, amenities etc and how we run things, does.
It can find an equilibrium at some point, but it will be blood and people who think they should have robot servants and food delivery wont like it. As for the time it will be achieving that equilibrium, it will be painful.
Because bigger number, obviously.
All economies do not inherently rely on growth. It's just that capitalists have brainwashed themselves into believing capitalism is the only type of economy possible and that growth can go on without bound literally forever.
It's exactly as stupid as it sounds.
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Capitalism requires growth. If your sales aren't growing your stock price goes down.
The economy does not depend on population growth. It depends on productivity growth.
Actually growth patterns of animals vary wildly. There's a whole set of animals that get "unstable" growth - Cats are famous for this, for example. That means that cat numbers in specific areas actually grow to the point that cats die out in the next generation, destabilizing the entire food chain in the process (happened in Australia, for example)
The problem with this instability is that the numbers bounce around wildly. Up and down, by a lot, in as little as 2 or 3 generations. But there's a process that stops the bouncing: hitting zero.
Cats are kind of crazy as an invasive predator: they can be sexually mature after 6 months and have litters of up to 6 kittens every 3 months.
Obviously that's more at the upper end, but for an obligate carnivore that is an amazing multiplier.
They are small carnivores, I imagine their wild ancestors were kept partly in check by even larger carnivores eating them?
I am a top 15% earner in my area, have been for 7 years, and I'll be able to afford a home maybe in another 5-10 years.
If you consider starting a family with no hope of ever getting out of renting, as landlords constantly raise monthlies, you might reconsider children.
On top of the issues with people working so often and so hard that they rarely have time to meet anyone outside of work; no wonder people aren't marrying.
> If you consider starting a family with no hope of ever getting out of renting, as landlords constantly raise monthlies, you might reconsider children.
Generally the less money you make the more kids you have. It's really a question of prioritization. People say they're holding off on kids for X or Y reason but I think this is more of an expressed vs revealed preferences situation. They would rather chase material wealth for themselves than have kids, and to be clear I'm not judging just observing. Through most of human history mud huts weren't a blocker to having kids.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
That’s because people pulling a nice paycheck have gotten a taste of stability and don’t want to risk losing it, and this is intensified when the economy is turbulent. People making less never had stability in the first place and don’t have as much to lose.
Aside from that, it's merely observations/anecdotes, but from what I’ve seen people who have managed to achieve a massive uplift in economic status (say from minimum wage in their mid-20s → net worth north of $500k-$1m in their mid-30s) are more likely to have children than people who’ve always been wealthy. I would theorize that such individuals feel a greater degree of economic freedom, having lived at the bottom and being able to make more effective use of what they have.
Right, I think we’re running into the limitations of a scarcity-based system here. Even many well compensated couples would face having to make major tradeoffs with their economic stability, careers, time spent with the kids, retirement, quality of life, etc, and are accordingly choosing the path of least risk.
Even the most generous countries aren’t fully compensating for the costs of raising a family, and the assistance offered by many is less than pocket change. It’s only natural that incentive is going to be low.
> We know that better living conditions (health, income, education etc) lead to lower fertility. In a world that you have both developed and developing countries, the stable equilibrium seems to be world suffering.
Alternately: in the past, dying was a lot easier, and society adapted to that by creating extra people, and we've reached a point where that isn't as necessary. That doesn't mean it wouldn't be awesome to improve things for the number of people we do have, or that those improvements are easy, but it's not obvious to me why the assumption would be that quality of life only changes if the population continues changing. In other words, it sounds like you're measuring two different things, noticing one of them slowing no longer increasing, and trying to make inferences about the other one without actually establishing how exactly that connection works.
> We know that better living conditions (health, income, education etc) lead to lower fertility
How do you come to this conclusion. We're seeing that our oh so clever selves have used chemicals/plastics in these nice living conditions to the point they have negative consequences on our health. Having a nice place to live with a job with a nice salary while lending to better health does not lower one's fertility. Maybe these people with the nice jobs and nice places to live are choosing not to have kids which become the reason they can't have nice things. I think you've jumped to an incorrect conclusion
This trend has been going on for much longer than the current worries about microplastics and whatnot. Lower fertility doesn’t necessarily mean lower physical fecundity. It can also just mean that generations of kids have been raised to believe having kids early ruins your life, and should only be done much later after you graduate university and your career is well established (by which time you’re in your latter 20s and your fertility is naturally lower.)
Another possibility is that a third factor is causing both better living conditions and lower fertility, not that better living conditions inherently cause lower fertility.
I believe lower fertility is most closely associated with education for women. Women with an education sometimes find interests other than being a baby factory.
Perhaps it’s Mother Nature desperately trying to tell humans that current capitalism and the pursuit of endless growth is unsustainable. Other species die out when they reproduce too quickly for the environment to support it. Humans modify the environment right up until they can’t to continue to pursue growth.
Can you expound on this? It makes sense to me that global wealth inequality would drive conflict.
I've been hearing for a long time in Australia that we have an enormous aging population. It could be that birth rates hadn't kept up with previous birth rates, or it could be that birth rates have sort've normalised.
Either way, we supposedly have a large aging population and as such death rates are going to increase due to old age etc
Does that mean employers will value their employees again?
No
It's taken as gospel that the Brave New World automated human gestation centers would be A Bad Thing, but frankly the number of problems that would be solved with this scheme are huge.
I think the first country to do it will be scolded heavily, but only until everyone else figures out how they did it and are able to copy them.
Running what are functionally massive orphanages seems like it'd be harder than the purely technical problem of automated gestation.
I don't see there being any orphanages, you could simply have babies on demand for anyone who wants to adopt them. There are enough couples with fertility problems, women who can't carry a pregnancy to term for medical reasons, etc etc. The adoption process is currently unworkable: couples will routinely spend tens of thousands for a chance at adopting, and the birth parent can reverse the adoption at any time and you've simply set a five figure sum on fire.
You could also incentivize couples to adopt up to the point that the (augmented) fertility rate hits replacement level. That's the ultimate problem to solve here, you're not trying to grow the population, simply put a floor under it to stabilize and prevent demographic collapse.
With how little we prioritize education versus other things it’d be a disaster. They’d be factories for neglected and traumatized children who would have a high likelihood of growing up to be criminals or homeless.
Who raises these farmed embryos? What is the thought here beyond just more infants?
Copper top batteries would be one use even if that's a different story line
With 8 billion people on the planet, we are at no risk of running out any time soon.
If human gestation centers are ever proposed in a country, I would hope the countries of the world would declare war on that country for the sole purpose of stopping it
Why? I don't understand why they would be bad? Some people can't naturally have children. It is a risk to a woman to be pregnant.
Perfect timing with AI and Robots soon slated to take over most jobs. Not sure if I should add a /s to this.
This right here, not sure about "most jobs", but I'm optimistic that this will bring things into balance.
Pretty sure not sure equals, "sure!"
If you don't, how will our Friend the Computer know that you're being sarcastic?
Might wish to add it in ultraviolet, though.
I'll worry about depopulation the very instant my rent ever goes down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_argument
Statistically, we're most likely to be born when the world population is at its peak.
Beyond demography, Much of this depends on public policy and execution. Will more of us live in conditions that prevent a oidable death or injury? Or another way?