If things don't change, those in power in the US will succeed in making the second a reality.
There is a "replacement" crisis but it's being addressed by pearl clutching and those advocating for forced birth.
Having children is expensive all the way around. And women's reproductive rights have enabled them to (rightfully) make their own choices about motherhood.
To state the obvious: children literally are the future of humanity and we need to address the issue accordingly. A lot of it would be via changing the economics of having a child, and the rest would be by making the world a "village to raise a child".
This is all eminently doable. We just need to agree on what that looks like and how to best invest in it.
There is no will to change the necessary policies, nor is it likely there will there be in the next 5-10 years (affordable housing, better working conditions, universal healthcare, robust support systems for parents, etc), locking in the fertility trap trajectory.
Even Scandinavian countries and France, with generous parental benefits, have not materially increased their fertility rates.
At least in the US, protecting agency and autonomy that might be challenged is easily solved with the second amendment for defense.
I'm from the west coast and oregon has always seemed to have large populations of retirees in the more rural areas. My grandparents considered moving there when I was young.
Also seems that oregon has a large "self-selecting" population where folks move there from out-of-state
Yeah, they keep stating how "% counties" also qualify but they're almost all rural sparsely populated counties. Must be a retiree thing or "I grew up here and not leaving" thing.
Florida being on that list made so much sense lol.
Adults born before computers, the public internet and the later appearance of so-called "tech" companies on the internet, will outnumber those born after computers, the internet and so-called "tech" company intermediaries
Some people have a massive ecological footprint. For instance, somebody who uses a private jet ~daily.
Other people have a negative ecological footprint: their actions either actively improve the ecology of the world or act to reduce the ecological footprint of others.
The difference between the two is many orders of magnitude. A world-wide population of 100 million daily private jet users likely has a larger ecological impact than 10 billion low-impact humans.
Population change takes decades or centuries for the ecological impact to happen.
Shifts in the ecological footprint of significant populations can cause shifts over a small number of years.
Energy is very easy to produce cleanly (nuclear, and solar is looking better and better). The barriers to doing so are political and financial, not technical. They will be made worse by having an aged-heavy population, which is less innovative, less willing to invest in the future, and less willing to try new things. And it makes a poorer society, obviously.
Malthus has been proved wrong at every juncture. Lack of children is about to bite us very, very hard.
But remember: the uber-rich are allowing millions to immigrate to the rich world, to prevent precisely this. (I'm not commenting here on whether immigration is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing, simply noting that large-scale immigration brings wages down, and that the low birthrate is consistently stated as its main driver.) Also, remember that paying for all those unproductive old people will consume enormous amounts of wealth, something that didn't apply during the Black Death.
Each marginal person does not produce more environmental benefits than they consume. It's dramatically the opposite. My butt is not a carbon capture device.
It's a problem to the economic model, too, but of course no one cares about more than a couple fiscal quarters in the future. The looming ecological disasters will irreversibly destroy the global economy in some of our lifetimes if nothing happens to stop it pretty soon.
> As the population has grown poverty has decreased.
This is like comparing apples to oranges to find a correlation, and arriving at an incorrect causation.
Falling populations are largely due to better education, specifically of women, as well as integration of women into the workforce, which has been one of the bigger drivers in curbing poverty. The latter is so significant in the west and the far east (double income households mean rising costs of living, meaning SAHM households become unviable in the West for the middle class), resulting in a significant population decrease.
But in places such as the Middle East or Africa, ever increasing populations have only meant even more financial trouble for those economies. Case in point Pakistan and Egypt. In other economies such as India (which I assume is one of the "couple countries" you mentioned), overall birth rates are falling significantly to near replacement level, and in the few states/regions with high birth rates, poverty is rampant and the people reliant on subsidies from other more prosperous regions.
The problem with most of the world is that while we are able to sustain a huge population as a whole globally, most of the population growth is extremely localized, resulting in population sparsity in some comfortable regions (Canada, the US, Central Asia, southern Russia) and population unsustainability in other regions completely unsuited to population growth (sub-Saharan Africa, Indonesia, the Middle East).
Just try it for 1 fucking year and then see if you still wish that hell upon anyone.
I swear I'm starting to wonder if that's a take pushed by ultracapitalists so they can have an endless supply of labor and consumers, like the bans on abortion etc.
No, corporations want people without children, since they have more disposable income to spend on the pointless tat they want to sell you, and are willing to work longer hours to make rich people even richer.
Not a single country has a fertility rate of 6 children per woman. And the highest middle eastern country is Yemen at 4.3. The next highest is Iraq at 3.1.
I don’t get this, doesn’t proof of an aging global population imply that overpopulation is solving itself? Also is it really that big of an issue? I’ve only heard bill gates talking about it, not sure what it’s got to do with that geezer tbh
It's a titanic issue. Old people are expensive. They tax the young to pay for themselves. Now the system is running out of young to tax.
And that's the situation in rich and prosperous nations. I live in a developing country that has managed to be relatively poor and have a declining birth rate. It's so absurdly pathological it's not even funny. Symptoms include, for example, increased retirement ages. We will work well into our 70+ years of age, and we will be happy. Newer generations are already coping, they've already internalized the fact they will never actually retire. This is the stuff revolutions are made out of.
Yes, because the aging population increases healthcare spending to support them while the working age population shrinks, eroding the tax base. This is currently happening in Japan right now.
There are, like, two countries where TFR is even close to 6. And there’s about 20 where it’s higher than 4. And since those countries also tend to have sky high infant-mortality rates, the global average population growth rate is somewhere like 1-1.2% and dropping fast.
Killing USAID probably put a drag on that slowdown by reducing access to family planning resources, but we’ll have to see exactly how much in the coming years.
It's so frustrating that Social Security reform became the "are you a good progressive?" litmus test in the early 00s. We've had our wages tithed for our whole lives - money that would be actually worth something in retirement if invested - to go into a Ponzi scheme that will go bust before we're retirement age. You could see it coming decades away, and political infighting ensured nothing would be done about it until the discourse tired and started arguing about pronouns instead.
We could actually hold our elected officials accountable for gutting Social Security instead. Then we wouldn't have to add "stock exchange expert" to our ever-growing list of job titles.
Western society is limping forward with a "yes, but me first" mentality.
We absolutely need an abundance agenda if we want people to have children. Reject the zero-sum investment thesis of NIMBY protectionism. Invest in density, efficiency, and antitrust. This is one of the most openly obvious self-owns in history. It's genuinely absurd.
We are all in this together. Make financial security easy for young people and we'll actually get children.
Yes. A massive implosion in aggregate consumer demand due to shrinking population will hit real estate, stocks, tax revenue, and therefore the ability to meet debt repayment obligations.
Frustratingly, (and counterintuitively), it won't help housing prices, because shrinking populations retreat to city centers. Spain, Italy, Japan, and Korea are full of $5,000 houses. Meanwhile, Madrid, Rome, Tokyo, and Seoul are more expensive than they've ever been.
It's not about existence it's about what drives the flows. People are born, work and save, and retire. Part of the savings enters as institutional money, and is consumed in retirement.
Sounds like the who age verification debate will just solve itself. Just wait until there aren't any more children and then we don't need to worry about protecting them.
I agree that the ultra-rich living on permanent fake debt backed by their stocks / real estate need to contribute more, but I'm tired of seeing people throw "we can tax the rich" as a panacea.
Productivity is growing much more slowly than the retiree-to-worker ratio. Workers are producing slightly more every year, but there are a lot more retirees to take care of every year. If this does not change, we will eventually see a collapse of social safety nets. Policy can only accelerate or delay that collapse.
Pray tell, what do you mean by "the rest of the world"? Surely it's not Western Europe, which is already being strangled by the cost of the welfare state?
Why would I want to turn the country at the forefront of technology and innovation into a stagnating socialist welfare state like the countries you are holding up as role models?
It will be interesting to see how South Korea holds its borders 5 generations from now. That population will have shrunk substantially. Perhaps a robotic workforce and a drone military will finally deliver luxury capitalism to them. Or they will simply lose their control of their borders.
Countries with larger populations will see these guys commit civilizational suicide with enough time to recover one can hope. We won’t be funding USAID when the majority of Americans are drawing from Medicare though.
Keep building these bike lanes and 15-minute neighborhoods. So that people don't even think about having children. Make sure people have no personal space and no personal time.
(a) non-walkable neighborhoods with big houses, big roads and cars everywhere, versus
(b) smaller houses or apartments but fewer cars, walkable neighborhoods, and bikes (and other small mobility devices that small kids can use)
I can tell you where being a kid seems more fun. And I’ve personally been to both sorts of places recently and observed how the kids behave.
Sure, with big lots, kids have lots of space in their own backyards. And big cars make soccer-momming easier. But, when kids can easily and safely get somewhere else approximately on their own, the whole situation seems better.
And yes, I really did recently observe a pretty big family in one of the latter types of places. How does one parent herd a pile of kids from their small (but not that small) apartment to some destination without a giant car? They tell the bigger kids where they’re going and they take the smaller kids, and maybe the bigger kids get their ahead, and everyone gets to experience an appropriate amount of independence for their size.
As the others have said, to me it seems to be the opposite. I went to Switzerland recently and was shocked at how kid friendly it was (very walkable, kid section in trains, parks with fun toys instead of shitty plastic statues).
I also saw a whole lot of families and children.
As I'm getting older and looking in the coming years at having children, the value of a tight, walkable community has risen exponentially to me.
For what it's worth, Switzerland's fertility rate (1.59 births per woman) is still well below the replacement rate, and has been for decades.
I think "make society more child-friendly" is a good idea, but one that doesn't seem to have increased fertility that much. To me it seems that educated people living comfortable lives with access to birth control simply don't want to have that many children. If you look at the country stats, the most proven way to increase fertility is to take away education, women's rights, or birth control. And imo, the western world should adapt to low birth rates, instead of trying to prop them up.
Well personal space and personal time were not in abundant supply in our times of growth. It is true that urban areas have far fewer children than rural areas and that this is a worldwide property. It’s a pity since I like the ability for kids to walk to places and take the bus or train and I’ve grown up in a rural place (pythons and peacocks, cows and birds, scorpions and cobras!) and in a highly urbanized environment and they both have their advantages.
I personally think it’s just opportunity cost. Children seem like a big deal with unclear benefit and so as people get the chance to substitute with other things they do so. For my part, we put a lot of work into having kids and we live in SF. If we leave, it’ll be because my daughters don’t have mobility here because crime and cars impede their independent movement.
Our expanding economies and improving quality of life depend on young people and a growing population. So it brings up an interesting question.
In 20 years, will countries start to compete for young people? Tax breaks, benefits, etc. Will some countries thrive while others die off completely? The proportion of young people will be a huge issue regarding military strength, innovation, etc.
Yes, but the inverse implication of countries heavily competing is that young people will be severely restricted from leaving as well. An incredibly underrated future possibility is that it becomes much harder to get a passport.
That’s very idealistic opinion. The reality is that for example German government does everything for retirees and their votes. Young people as a minority are successfully ignored.
>As the ratio of working-age adults (18–64) to older adults falls from about 3.4 today toward roughly 2.4 by 2060, the arithmetic that supports those programs tightens, all else equal. On this reading, the chart is an argument for some combination of higher productivity, longer working lives, higher fertility, or higher immigration to widen the working-age base.
Gettimg mixed signals. "Modest proposal" indicates satiricsl suggestion, but the words "this is going to be flagged to hell" indicates a serious proposal that is controversial.
I might overthinking it, but some clarification either way would be nice.
To be completely honest with you, it's a bit of both. I realise that this idea is somewhat obnoxious, hence the gallows humour. At the same time, I genuinely don't think we have a way out of this that does not involve reforms we today would consider obnoxious.
Sounds like a gross society justified by what seems to be inflating the intent of a population. 'Demand to be funded' is some inadequacy you have being projected onto target population.
Or maybe societies could instead make the prospect of having children less onerous? It's not an uncommon story in America that a couple will choose to stay unmarried when having children so that the mother can qualify for benefits like childcare (which, if you haven't had children yourself, is staggeringly expensive when it's available at all).
To think that the solution here is to penalize women even more is insane.
This is the extremely marketable "solution". Easy to sell to voters. The problem is that it does not work whatsoever. There is no evidence anywhere that transfers to mothers increase birth rates, or that transfers to women increase pairing rates (the upstream problem of birth rates).
It isn't just about bringing a bunch of cells to term.
But if you want to oversimplify, why not government fund gestation vat technology? The main blocker for progressing on those right now appear to be self imposed.
A great point, but I don’t think those policies should go after the (relatively tiny) wealth that boomers et al currently hold. As another commenter alluded to, the money is going to have to come from much bigger fish; there’s literally nowhere else to get it from!
Parents and Grandparents might not be interested in starting families, but they're interested in their (grand)children starting families. Ideally, that's where their wealth would go, except that it's being completely obliterated by retirement and end-of-life care.
If that were true, US policy and trends would reflect that. Instead, as groups, we are seeing earning potential decreased in the young and wealth increase in the old. This is a dysgenic shift. Coupled with AI, which when viewed as a force against labor is a product that reduces the earning potential of the young cohort as a group, this is not sustainable. The lack of stability and opportunity for young people is the sort of stuff that leads to revolution.
I hate to tell you, but no generation is particularly interested in starting families at this moment in history. This is the closest thing the world has gotten to a general strike to force capitalism to slow its roll.
I think it’s time to bite the bullet and raise the retirement^W elder benefits eligibility age and peg it to life expectancy at birth minus 15 years or some structure like that. It’s fine that my generation will have to eat the loss - having paid for the past one but not benefiting as much from the coming ones. Some generation has to, and better us than them.
As we get better at healthcare and life, we should expect to be productive and care for ourselves for longer. I hope that as I age I remain in favour of succeeding generations over my own self. Plant the tree whose shade we won’t see etc.
> peg it to life expectancy at birth minus 15 years
That would lower the retirement age for me. I was born in the mid-80s.
I know that was just a suggestion. We could go with something like "life expectancy at birth minus 5 years", which would raise the retirement age for me, but we're basically just admitting that retirement isn't a thing anymore if we do that. Hopefully the wealthiest nation on Earth can do better.
I think, whatever we do, we should recognize that the current retired generation holds more wealth than any other generation. If we want more kids in our society, maybe we need to get some of that wealth into the hands of people who can have more kids.
What even is retirement age and what practical impact would changing it have on society? People can retire or keep working at whatever age they want as long as they can afford to
Retirement age is usually tied to various benefits. In the UK it's the age at which you can collect the state pension (currently around £12K per year, if you worked for 30-35 years). Changing the retirement age therefore affects the state's finances, quite dramatically in fact: https://obr.uk/box/the-fiscal-impact-of-increases-in-the-sta...
In some countries you can reach retirement age, get a pension and keep working. So you profit more. It's complicated as maybe you've paid to your pension since 18yrs of age and you should get some money back, but many pensions aren't based on those actual savings but on tax payers actively funding that pension. Is double dipping ok then?
In this case, I presume they're taxed on their continued employment and so they're still paying into the pension they're receiving benefits on? I don't see a problem if that's the case. They contributed to the pension with an agreed payment date and followed the process correctly. I can understand how you feel that it's unfair, but I really don't see a problem unless they stop paying into the pension or stop paying taxes on their continued employment.
The double-dipping unfairness is mostly perceived when there is high unemployment in youth, and we're allowing, via tax rules, for retirement aged persons to have decent returns on their work. They get a living-rate pension AND a job.
Like others note, UBI is a fair solution. Let's have everyone, regardless of age, be able to have a baseline. Then allow extra income form those who enjoy, or value, additional work and income.
Ah this is not a universal term. I see. I will edit. I meant “age of eligibility for elder age benefits and pensions”. E.g. social security eligibility age, state pension age, etc.
I suppose we could pay everyone about $1.2k/mo and that would exhaust the entire current federal budget but that would eliminate the 60% or so of the federal budget dedicated to the aggregate of all social welfare programs. The tax increases required would be substantial to keep Medicare, Social Security, Health services, Education, and so on.
Without more productive capacity the extra $1.2k/mo would cause enormous inflation. Just a question of what the country is optimizing for, I suppose, but I think people would be unhappy with the result.
Let’s consider this logically:
What kind of people will not wanting children likely select for?
At least two kinds come to mind:
1) People who love children and are willing to have them regardless of the impact on their financial situation.
2) People living in societies where women (and likely some men) lack a say in whether or not to have children.
The first kind could be very good.
The second is definitely not something we should look forward to.
If things don't change, those in power in the US will succeed in making the second a reality.
There is a "replacement" crisis but it's being addressed by pearl clutching and those advocating for forced birth.
Having children is expensive all the way around. And women's reproductive rights have enabled them to (rightfully) make their own choices about motherhood.
To state the obvious: children literally are the future of humanity and we need to address the issue accordingly. A lot of it would be via changing the economics of having a child, and the rest would be by making the world a "village to raise a child".
This is all eminently doable. We just need to agree on what that looks like and how to best invest in it.
There is no will to change the necessary policies, nor is it likely there will there be in the next 5-10 years (affordable housing, better working conditions, universal healthcare, robust support systems for parents, etc), locking in the fertility trap trajectory.
Even Scandinavian countries and France, with generous parental benefits, have not materially increased their fertility rates.
At least in the US, protecting agency and autonomy that might be challenged is easily solved with the second amendment for defense.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48733976 (citations)
If anybody was curious, the states that already had this prior to 2020 are:
Maine, Vermont, and Florida
Since 2020: Delaware, Hawaii, Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and West Virginia now also qualify.
Montana is a bit of a surprise there... so is Oregon for me.
Source: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/older-ad...
I'm from the west coast and oregon has always seemed to have large populations of retirees in the more rural areas. My grandparents considered moving there when I was young. Also seems that oregon has a large "self-selecting" population where folks move there from out-of-state
Yeah, they keep stating how "% counties" also qualify but they're almost all rural sparsely populated counties. Must be a retiree thing or "I grew up here and not leaving" thing.
Florida being on that list made so much sense lol.
This is exactly what I was wondering, thank you! They kept saying 11 states already have this, but I couldn't figure out which 11.
Adults born before computers, the public internet and the later appearance of so-called "tech" companies on the internet, will outnumber those born after computers, the internet and so-called "tech" company intermediaries
So a lot of problems will be solved by 2049 (overpopulation) and probably many others will arise (we never had worldwide decreasing demographics.)
Population is not the primary problem.
Some people have a massive ecological footprint. For instance, somebody who uses a private jet ~daily.
Other people have a negative ecological footprint: their actions either actively improve the ecology of the world or act to reduce the ecological footprint of others.
The difference between the two is many orders of magnitude. A world-wide population of 100 million daily private jet users likely has a larger ecological impact than 10 billion low-impact humans.
Population change takes decades or centuries for the ecological impact to happen.
Shifts in the ecological footprint of significant populations can cause shifts over a small number of years.
Overpopulation is not a problem.
Maybe in a couple countries. But not for the world, and not for the west and definitely not for America.
As the population has grown poverty has decreased.
Yep, absolutely right.
Energy is very easy to produce cleanly (nuclear, and solar is looking better and better). The barriers to doing so are political and financial, not technical. They will be made worse by having an aged-heavy population, which is less innovative, less willing to invest in the future, and less willing to try new things. And it makes a poorer society, obviously.
Malthus has been proved wrong at every juncture. Lack of children is about to bite us very, very hard.
> Lack of children is about to bite us very, very hard.
Could it have an effect like the Black Plague, where labor becomes more expensive?
All things being equal, probably yes.
But remember: the uber-rich are allowing millions to immigrate to the rich world, to prevent precisely this. (I'm not commenting here on whether immigration is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing, simply noting that large-scale immigration brings wages down, and that the low birthrate is consistently stated as its main driver.) Also, remember that paying for all those unproductive old people will consume enormous amounts of wealth, something that didn't apply during the Black Death.
> As the population has grown poverty has decreased.
True, but not obviously a causal relationship.
It is a problem, because all these people want a good standard of living which strains the environment.
Each marginal person produces more than they consume. As a whole, everyone is better off for having more people.
Only if you average it all out. The over 65 crowd does not produce more than they consume.
> The over 65 crowd does not produce more than they consume.
So that's the end goal our species should aspire to?
Produce™ and Consume™?
Eternally without relent?
Each marginal person does not produce more environmental benefits than they consume. It's dramatically the opposite. My butt is not a carbon capture device.
Technically your mouth is.
It's a huge problem, it's just not a problem to economic model, but the ecological one.
It's a problem to the economic model, too, but of course no one cares about more than a couple fiscal quarters in the future. The looming ecological disasters will irreversibly destroy the global economy in some of our lifetimes if nothing happens to stop it pretty soon.
> As the population has grown poverty has decreased.
This is like comparing apples to oranges to find a correlation, and arriving at an incorrect causation.
Falling populations are largely due to better education, specifically of women, as well as integration of women into the workforce, which has been one of the bigger drivers in curbing poverty. The latter is so significant in the west and the far east (double income households mean rising costs of living, meaning SAHM households become unviable in the West for the middle class), resulting in a significant population decrease.
But in places such as the Middle East or Africa, ever increasing populations have only meant even more financial trouble for those economies. Case in point Pakistan and Egypt. In other economies such as India (which I assume is one of the "couple countries" you mentioned), overall birth rates are falling significantly to near replacement level, and in the few states/regions with high birth rates, poverty is rampant and the people reliant on subsidies from other more prosperous regions.
The problem with most of the world is that while we are able to sustain a huge population as a whole globally, most of the population growth is extremely localized, resulting in population sparsity in some comfortable regions (Canada, the US, Central Asia, southern Russia) and population unsustainability in other regions completely unsuited to population growth (sub-Saharan Africa, Indonesia, the Middle East).
> Overpopulation is not a problem.
That is such a privileged first-world take.
You haven't lived in overpopulated places.
Just try it for 1 fucking year and then see if you still wish that hell upon anyone.
I swear I'm starting to wonder if that's a take pushed by ultracapitalists so they can have an endless supply of labor and consumers, like the bans on abortion etc.
No, corporations want people without children, since they have more disposable income to spend on the pointless tat they want to sell you, and are willing to work longer hours to make rich people even richer.
Ah but you're forgetting the lucrative Education™ pipeline that conveniently funnels everyone into a lifetime of debt :)
Well usury is another problem entirely :-D
Overpopulation is not solved. Many African and Middle Eastern cultures continue to have half a dozen children per wife.
> Overpopulation is not solved. Many African and Middle Eastern cultures continue to have a dozen children per wife.
It will be (eventually) when the worldwide birth rate drop below replacement. And it's close to that now: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN.
Not a single country has a fertility rate of 6 children per woman. And the highest middle eastern country is Yemen at 4.3. The next highest is Iraq at 3.1.
I don’t get this, doesn’t proof of an aging global population imply that overpopulation is solving itself? Also is it really that big of an issue? I’ve only heard bill gates talking about it, not sure what it’s got to do with that geezer tbh
> Also is it really that big of an issue?
It's a titanic issue. Old people are expensive. They tax the young to pay for themselves. Now the system is running out of young to tax.
And that's the situation in rich and prosperous nations. I live in a developing country that has managed to be relatively poor and have a declining birth rate. It's so absurdly pathological it's not even funny. Symptoms include, for example, increased retirement ages. We will work well into our 70+ years of age, and we will be happy. Newer generations are already coping, they've already internalized the fact they will never actually retire. This is the stuff revolutions are made out of.
In the same way that a drought solves a flood. Technically yes, but it introduces an equally as dangerous and possibly worse problem.
It depends on whether we take care of them at the cost we currently are in the west.
> is it really that big of an issue?
Yes, because the aging population increases healthcare spending to support them while the working age population shrinks, eroding the tax base. This is currently happening in Japan right now.
There are, like, two countries where TFR is even close to 6. And there’s about 20 where it’s higher than 4. And since those countries also tend to have sky high infant-mortality rates, the global average population growth rate is somewhere like 1-1.2% and dropping fast.
Killing USAID probably put a drag on that slowdown by reducing access to family planning resources, but we’ll have to see exactly how much in the coming years.
[dead]
In the US, despite the .fr domain.
It's already true in France. Over 65s are 22.5% of the population and under 18s are 17%. And the difference is rapidly widening.
US's birth rate are actually way higher than Europe and China, not as high as Africa, but still better than most other areas in the world.
We're on the path to putting Augustine's City of God theory of population to the test.
what's that theory?
It's so frustrating that Social Security reform became the "are you a good progressive?" litmus test in the early 00s. We've had our wages tithed for our whole lives - money that would be actually worth something in retirement if invested - to go into a Ponzi scheme that will go bust before we're retirement age. You could see it coming decades away, and political infighting ensured nothing would be done about it until the discourse tired and started arguing about pronouns instead.
We could actually hold our elected officials accountable for gutting Social Security instead. Then we wouldn't have to add "stock exchange expert" to our ever-growing list of job titles.
Western society is limping forward with a "yes, but me first" mentality.
We absolutely need an abundance agenda if we want people to have children. Reject the zero-sum investment thesis of NIMBY protectionism. Invest in density, efficiency, and antitrust. This is one of the most openly obvious self-owns in history. It's genuinely absurd.
We are all in this together. Make financial security easy for young people and we'll actually get children.
You’re like we need an abundance
Of stack and packs lol
> We are all in this together.
When’s the last time I heard that one
This has to slow stock market growth, right? Less young people buying, more older people selling.
Yes. A massive implosion in aggregate consumer demand due to shrinking population will hit real estate, stocks, tax revenue, and therefore the ability to meet debt repayment obligations.
Frustratingly, (and counterintuitively), it won't help housing prices, because shrinking populations retreat to city centers. Spain, Italy, Japan, and Korea are full of $5,000 houses. Meanwhile, Madrid, Rome, Tokyo, and Seoul are more expensive than they've ever been.
Most stock market trades aren't made by people, but by institutional money. That ain't going nowhere.
The institutions exist for people to do things like retire.
Undoubtedly they will continue to exist once the people they serve seize to exist.
It's not about existence it's about what drives the flows. People are born, work and save, and retire. Part of the savings enters as institutional money, and is consumed in retirement.
Ha, this has some serious There Will Come Soft Rains energy.
In the US, not the world
Sounds like the who age verification debate will just solve itself. Just wait until there aren't any more children and then we don't need to worry about protecting them.
You jest, but I'd think it really is the opposite. Hard to care too much for a child if you've got five spare ones.
Do you have children? Because I've never heard a parent think that way
> the arithmetic that supports those programs tightens, all else equal
We can tax the rich, we're post scarcity, time to take a look at the rest of the world an come up with a better social safety net.
I agree that the ultra-rich living on permanent fake debt backed by their stocks / real estate need to contribute more, but I'm tired of seeing people throw "we can tax the rich" as a panacea.
Productivity is growing much more slowly than the retiree-to-worker ratio. Workers are producing slightly more every year, but there are a lot more retirees to take care of every year. If this does not change, we will eventually see a collapse of social safety nets. Policy can only accelerate or delay that collapse.
We should probably spend some time making sure that _existing_ taxes are being used efficiently before we start funneling in even more.
The real problem aging societies face is not a shortage of money but a shortage of people.
Pray tell, what do you mean by "the rest of the world"? Surely it's not Western Europe, which is already being strangled by the cost of the welfare state?
Why would I want to turn the country at the forefront of technology and innovation into a stagnating socialist welfare state like the countries you are holding up as role models?
Some day you might need the welfare. Not everyone is infinitely healthy for their entire lives.
This will have significant consequences for the military.
It will be interesting to see how South Korea holds its borders 5 generations from now. That population will have shrunk substantially. Perhaps a robotic workforce and a drone military will finally deliver luxury capitalism to them. Or they will simply lose their control of their borders.
Countries with larger populations will see these guys commit civilizational suicide with enough time to recover one can hope. We won’t be funding USAID when the majority of Americans are drawing from Medicare though.
Autonomous and semi-autonomous systems address that.
In that they'll have to act like a competitive employer?
It'll be fine, Nick will pay for it.
Median age in Africa is 19.5 years.
Africa doubled it's population in the last 28 years.
Keep building these bike lanes and 15-minute neighborhoods. So that people don't even think about having children. Make sure people have no personal space and no personal time.
That's how we reduce the Earth's population!
Given a choice between:
(a) non-walkable neighborhoods with big houses, big roads and cars everywhere, versus
(b) smaller houses or apartments but fewer cars, walkable neighborhoods, and bikes (and other small mobility devices that small kids can use)
I can tell you where being a kid seems more fun. And I’ve personally been to both sorts of places recently and observed how the kids behave.
Sure, with big lots, kids have lots of space in their own backyards. And big cars make soccer-momming easier. But, when kids can easily and safely get somewhere else approximately on their own, the whole situation seems better.
And yes, I really did recently observe a pretty big family in one of the latter types of places. How does one parent herd a pile of kids from their small (but not that small) apartment to some destination without a giant car? They tell the bigger kids where they’re going and they take the smaller kids, and maybe the bigger kids get their ahead, and everyone gets to experience an appropriate amount of independence for their size.
As the others have said, to me it seems to be the opposite. I went to Switzerland recently and was shocked at how kid friendly it was (very walkable, kid section in trains, parks with fun toys instead of shitty plastic statues).
I also saw a whole lot of families and children.
As I'm getting older and looking in the coming years at having children, the value of a tight, walkable community has risen exponentially to me.
For what it's worth, Switzerland's fertility rate (1.59 births per woman) is still well below the replacement rate, and has been for decades.
I think "make society more child-friendly" is a good idea, but one that doesn't seem to have increased fertility that much. To me it seems that educated people living comfortable lives with access to birth control simply don't want to have that many children. If you look at the country stats, the most proven way to increase fertility is to take away education, women's rights, or birth control. And imo, the western world should adapt to low birth rates, instead of trying to prop them up.
Well personal space and personal time were not in abundant supply in our times of growth. It is true that urban areas have far fewer children than rural areas and that this is a worldwide property. It’s a pity since I like the ability for kids to walk to places and take the bus or train and I’ve grown up in a rural place (pythons and peacocks, cows and birds, scorpions and cobras!) and in a highly urbanized environment and they both have their advantages.
I personally think it’s just opportunity cost. Children seem like a big deal with unclear benefit and so as people get the chance to substitute with other things they do so. For my part, we put a lot of work into having kids and we live in SF. If we leave, it’ll be because my daughters don’t have mobility here because crime and cars impede their independent movement.
What an odd thing to say. Have you traveled internationally much?
I speak 5 languages, lived in several countries, and got my first car at the age of 30.
15-minute neighborhoods with bike lanes are exactly the kinds of places good for raising kids in.
This is what the policy wonk idealists say, but the undeniable evidence going back hundreds of years is that dense cities are fertility shredders.
In theory. In practice, dense urban neighborhoods have very low birthrates, and always have. Cities are population sinks
No, they're not. They are places where cities go to die.
Walk in Tokyo and try to find children there.
there's a new urbanist community, walkable, bikelanes, etc.. in my part of the midwest and it's teeming with children.
Our expanding economies and improving quality of life depend on young people and a growing population. So it brings up an interesting question.
In 20 years, will countries start to compete for young people? Tax breaks, benefits, etc. Will some countries thrive while others die off completely? The proportion of young people will be a huge issue regarding military strength, innovation, etc.
Could get very ugly.
Yes, but the inverse implication of countries heavily competing is that young people will be severely restricted from leaving as well. An incredibly underrated future possibility is that it becomes much harder to get a passport.
That’s very idealistic opinion. The reality is that for example German government does everything for retirees and their votes. Young people as a minority are successfully ignored.
...in the US
>As the ratio of working-age adults (18–64) to older adults falls from about 3.4 today toward roughly 2.4 by 2060, the arithmetic that supports those programs tightens, all else equal. On this reading, the chart is an argument for some combination of higher productivity, longer working lives, higher fertility, or higher immigration to widen the working-age base.
Or spend less.
Not gonna happen.
[flagged]
Gettimg mixed signals. "Modest proposal" indicates satiricsl suggestion, but the words "this is going to be flagged to hell" indicates a serious proposal that is controversial. I might overthinking it, but some clarification either way would be nice.
To be completely honest with you, it's a bit of both. I realise that this idea is somewhat obnoxious, hence the gallows humour. At the same time, I genuinely don't think we have a way out of this that does not involve reforms we today would consider obnoxious.
A way out of what?
Sounds like a gross society justified by what seems to be inflating the intent of a population. 'Demand to be funded' is some inadequacy you have being projected onto target population.
I met a guy just recently who separated from his gf because she wanted to have children. He didn’t.
If you’re advocating consequences it should apply to both sexes.
Or maybe societies could instead make the prospect of having children less onerous? It's not an uncommon story in America that a couple will choose to stay unmarried when having children so that the mother can qualify for benefits like childcare (which, if you haven't had children yourself, is staggeringly expensive when it's available at all).
To think that the solution here is to penalize women even more is insane.
This is the extremely marketable "solution". Easy to sell to voters. The problem is that it does not work whatsoever. There is no evidence anywhere that transfers to mothers increase birth rates, or that transfers to women increase pairing rates (the upstream problem of birth rates).
Why only women?
Can't exactly help out with childbirth if you don't have an uterus.
It isn't just about bringing a bunch of cells to term.
But if you want to oversimplify, why not government fund gestation vat technology? The main blocker for progressing on those right now appear to be self imposed.
Last I checked virgin birth remains in the realm of religion, not science.
Male genetic material is easier to come by than working wombs, I guess.
Not all childless people are childless by choice.
Why would we choose a world where we have to decide who to give healthcare for? Why can’t we take care of both?
Ah yes, put the entire burden on women, coerce them into having kids, let men do whatever. Sounds great, totally sane.
What a unique opinion! Why do you think it is controversial?
To me the ratio just looks like an underdamped vibration of the baby boom. Boomer parents had more kids than the steady state.
GOOD. We’ve done well to keep everyone alive. All that’s left is to implement sensible economic policies that allow normal folk to start families
But the people disinterested in starting families (boomers, genx) are going to be the majority of the voting base?
We've already seen 20 years of policy driven by people who don't care about families being started.
They still wanna be grandparents or great grandparents
A great point, but I don’t think those policies should go after the (relatively tiny) wealth that boomers et al currently hold. As another commenter alluded to, the money is going to have to come from much bigger fish; there’s literally nowhere else to get it from!
Parents and Grandparents might not be interested in starting families, but they're interested in their (grand)children starting families. Ideally, that's where their wealth would go, except that it's being completely obliterated by retirement and end-of-life care.
If that were true, US policy and trends would reflect that. Instead, as groups, we are seeing earning potential decreased in the young and wealth increase in the old. This is a dysgenic shift. Coupled with AI, which when viewed as a force against labor is a product that reduces the earning potential of the young cohort as a group, this is not sustainable. The lack of stability and opportunity for young people is the sort of stuff that leads to revolution.
>(relatively tiny) wealth that boomers et al currently hold
Their wealth is not liquid, but it's not relatively tiny.
>$93 trillion in assets[1]
>Total wealth: $167.26 trillion[2]
[1]https://investor.visa.com/news/news-details/2026/Visa-Resear...
[2]https://smartasset.com/financial-advisor/wealth-by-generatio...
What? If boomers and genx weren't interested in starting families, where did the generations after them come from?
I hate to tell you, but no generation is particularly interested in starting families at this moment in history. This is the closest thing the world has gotten to a general strike to force capitalism to slow its roll.
I think it’s time to bite the bullet and raise the retirement^W elder benefits eligibility age and peg it to life expectancy at birth minus 15 years or some structure like that. It’s fine that my generation will have to eat the loss - having paid for the past one but not benefiting as much from the coming ones. Some generation has to, and better us than them.
As we get better at healthcare and life, we should expect to be productive and care for ourselves for longer. I hope that as I age I remain in favour of succeeding generations over my own self. Plant the tree whose shade we won’t see etc.
> peg it to life expectancy at birth minus 15 years
That would lower the retirement age for me. I was born in the mid-80s.
I know that was just a suggestion. We could go with something like "life expectancy at birth minus 5 years", which would raise the retirement age for me, but we're basically just admitting that retirement isn't a thing anymore if we do that. Hopefully the wealthiest nation on Earth can do better.
I think, whatever we do, we should recognize that the current retired generation holds more wealth than any other generation. If we want more kids in our society, maybe we need to get some of that wealth into the hands of people who can have more kids.
Ahhh I’m a terrible communicator I meant “the current value of the reported metric life expectancy at birth”.
What even is retirement age and what practical impact would changing it have on society? People can retire or keep working at whatever age they want as long as they can afford to
Retirement age is usually tied to various benefits. In the UK it's the age at which you can collect the state pension (currently around £12K per year, if you worked for 30-35 years). Changing the retirement age therefore affects the state's finances, quite dramatically in fact: https://obr.uk/box/the-fiscal-impact-of-increases-in-the-sta...
In some countries you can reach retirement age, get a pension and keep working. So you profit more. It's complicated as maybe you've paid to your pension since 18yrs of age and you should get some money back, but many pensions aren't based on those actual savings but on tax payers actively funding that pension. Is double dipping ok then?
That's not what double dipping means.
In this case, I presume they're taxed on their continued employment and so they're still paying into the pension they're receiving benefits on? I don't see a problem if that's the case. They contributed to the pension with an agreed payment date and followed the process correctly. I can understand how you feel that it's unfair, but I really don't see a problem unless they stop paying into the pension or stop paying taxes on their continued employment.
The double-dipping unfairness is mostly perceived when there is high unemployment in youth, and we're allowing, via tax rules, for retirement aged persons to have decent returns on their work. They get a living-rate pension AND a job.
Like others note, UBI is a fair solution. Let's have everyone, regardless of age, be able to have a baseline. Then allow extra income form those who enjoy, or value, additional work and income.
Ah this is not a universal term. I see. I will edit. I meant “age of eligibility for elder age benefits and pensions”. E.g. social security eligibility age, state pension age, etc.
We should establish UBI and universal health care, not tied to age, and then the concept of "retirement age" can go away.
I suppose we could pay everyone about $1.2k/mo and that would exhaust the entire current federal budget but that would eliminate the 60% or so of the federal budget dedicated to the aggregate of all social welfare programs. The tax increases required would be substantial to keep Medicare, Social Security, Health services, Education, and so on.
Without more productive capacity the extra $1.2k/mo would cause enormous inflation. Just a question of what the country is optimizing for, I suppose, but I think people would be unhappy with the result.