[somenameforme]

I don't understand why people, generally on both sides of the issue, just ignore the social effects of it and instead just focus on the personal. I suspect most don't intuit how rapidly fertility shifts population sizes, because it's an exponential. A fertility rate of 1 means each generation decreases by more than 50%, compounding. So after just 5 generations and your generational size is down 97% with your population doing the exact same, staggered out by a few decades.

And fertility determines not only the size of a population, but even the age ratios within that population. Low fertility means you end up with far more elderly than you do working age. Far from this vision of being a society with more for everybody, we'll be creating societies where labor is ever-more scarce, economies are primarily dedicated to helping sustain the elderly and simultaneously collapsing at the same time. It's not going to be pretty.

For these reasons, and many others, I think the social aspect is one of the most important. Self fulfillment and these other things are very important and good, but if we don't have children then we're going to be creating some pretty messed up societies for our descendants. We're likely going to get to see this play out in South Korea during our lifetimes. And I do wonder what their descendants will think of the South Koreans of today.

[lII1lIlI11ll]

Western societies solve that problem by letting in immigrants. I'm not sure what SK or Japan are going to do though.

[somenameforme]

I don't really think immigration is a long-term solution, because of the scale issue - which most greatly underestimate. We're talking about needing a never-ending stream of hundreds of millions of people. And you'd ideally want people that speak the language, have at least some basic skills, and so on. It's not particularly realistic, even before getting into the social chaos that such would cause.

And it becomes even less realistic if you look outward to times when this becomes necessary. Japan is a good example of this issue. Migrating to Japan is not difficult. The only meaningful barrier is learning basic Japanese. Beyond that, after just 5 years of residency you can even apply for citizenship which has a very high acceptance rate. And there are a ton of 'Japanese enthusiasts', many of whom already speak basic Japanese.

And many of them have tried to migrate, but they don't last at all. They quickly realize that a Japan in decline is not the Japan in their minds. Getting paid $1500 a month to work a job with extremely high expectations and demands in a country with a median age of 50 (and increasing) isn't the Japan they thought they were moving to.

[lII1lIlI11ll]

Yes, of course! No one expects a bunch of western weebs to save Japan's demographics. Obviously, Japan will have to change their insular culture and work ethics, if they attempt to deal with the problem by significantly increasing immigration.

Yet there are many western countries where the issue is how to prevent all the people attempting to get in from doing so.

[somenameforme]

The people America is trying to prevent from coming in are largely low skill, low education, generally do not speak the language, and so on. These people are no more a solution than our idealistic weebs. In most cases, they're rather worse off since weebs at least tend to have language and other skills, but are trying to move to a place that doesn't exist.

[lII1lIlI11ll]

> The people America is trying to prevent from coming in are largely low skill, low education, generally do not speak the language, and so on.

US also put a lot of roadblocks in a way of highly skilled immigration. For example, check the waiting time of Indian engineers to obtain Green card.

> These people are no more a solution than our idealistic weebs.

Not sure I agree with this assessment. Unskilled immigrants tend to be over-represented on hard low-paying jobs, both in EU and US. Someone has to build, pave roads, cook, deliver, tend of elderly, etc.

[somenameforme]

You've gotta separate cause and effect, especially when these things will change in the future. For instance decades ago I had family that worked in construction. They were earning about $20/hour in a rural area back when that was quite a lot of money, even in an urban area.

It was enough that, even with the on-off nature of the work (you're not getting paid when nothing's getting built), they could easily raise a large family very comfortably. Now a day construction in the US pays awfully and a big factor is the large number of illegal migrants working in it for sub-market wages. So you're talking about the necessity of solving a problem by expanding the thing that caused it.

It's very difficult to predict what demographic collapse will look like in a place like the US, but one general trend that might inform us is that fertility within places like the US remains strongly inversely correlated with income. Those who are earning a lot aren't having children, those who aren't earning much - are. Pair that alongside fairly low upward mobility, and again I think it's unlikely that significant numbers of unskilled workers will have any real value in the future (or present).

[moi2388]

That solves the problem by removing western society. Which can hardly be called a solution