[throwuwu]

I’m amazed you haven’t heard of this before now. The entire West has had a fertility rate below replacement for decades and now even China has joined the party and India is going to be there really soon. The way Africa is developing they probably only have a few decades left. If we don’t find a way to turn this around then all of our golden years are going to spent desperately trying to prevent the global economy from collapsing.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_states_and_union_ter...

[BlueTemplar]

I guess I read "population collapsing" overly dramatically - the reduction of the fertility rate is a good thing, as the population size has overshot what is deemed to be sustainable for at least half a century now, so we'll have to reduce it at least by half anyway, one way or another. (And economic collapse has been pretty much baked in at this point, you can thank the boomers for that : the first generation to be aware of these issues, but chose to be selfish instead.)

And I still don't see how more longevity would help (aside from helping to kick the can further while our situation worsens even more) - women have a fixed number of gametes they acquire before birth - increasing their longevity is not going to postpone menopause !

Furthermore, so far extra longevity and a better quality of life (and especially education of women, as already theorized by Malthus) has been correlated with a reduction in fertility rate - again, something that is typically seen as a good thing !

[throwuwu]

No, a good thing would be at the least holding steady at replacement levels (2.1). Where we’re at and the rest are heading, we’re seriously fucked. If you don’t think so then answer this:

how are we going to get fertility rates back up to replacement or higher once all countries have dropped below?

Everything you can think of off the top of your head has already been tried and failed.

By longevity tech I mean we need some scifi level inventions like extending lifespan and healthspan by >50% so we can move the retirement age to 120 or higher while we work on the other solutions like perfecting cloning, artificial wombs, or creating artificial eggs, or the really hard sociological problem of getting people to reproduce when they don’t want to.

Saying we need to reduce our population by 50% is ghoulish and shortsighted, it’s like saying you need to reduce your number of limbs by 50% to lose weight. It’s about as much a solution as suicide.

[slothtrop]

> how are we going to get fertility rates back up to replacement or higher once all countries have dropped below?

Some of this is contingent on issues that can already be resolved through policy (e.g. work-life balance, affordability, daycare). AI could help but it's redundant.

Even if there were a decline in population globally for a few decades, it will be working backwards from 10+ billion. Who cares?

[throwuwu]

The things you mentioned have been tried in several wealthy countries and they don’t work. Even if they did, they require a lot of societal wealth to implement and once the global population starts declining so will the economic output and consequently tax revenues, that’s a 1-2 punch for living standards which will also fall. Our economy is 100% dependent on healthy young people which means no kids, no economy. If fertility rates get stuck at 1 or below 1 then the population will halve with each generation and the only thing that will stop it “naturally” is the complete collapse of global civilization and a return to tiny feudal states ruled by probably religious fundamentalist warlords where 99.9% of people are subsistence farmers. Even if you like that outcome for some demented reason consider that there will still be the rusting leftovers of our technology for the idiot barbarians to play with.

[slothtrop]

> If fertility rates get stuck at 1 or below

There's no reason to believe they would be "stuck" into perpetuity.

Right now, young people comparatively want fewer kids than the previous generation. That's owing to both life stresses (as they say it) and cultural shift, neither of which are written in stone. The fertility rate has stagnated with prosperity, but the U.S. was also quite developed by the end of the world wars, and we then had the boomers.

> they require a lot of societal wealth

Scandinavian countries aren't particularly wealthy compared to the U.S., Germany, France, Japan and others.

[throwuwu]

You must mean total wealth rather than per capita because most scandinavian countries are more wealthy than Germany, France and Japan per capita and are quite close to the US. They’re all below replacement rate and headed lower anyways.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(no...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and...