US births decline for fourth year in a row, CDC says

Daily reminder that in an evolutionary context, the last 200 years are the blink of an eye.

I'll paste a comment I made there: "If an antibiotic doesn't wipe out its target, then its target's numbers will be devastated in the short-term, but in the long-term, its target will evolve immunity to the antibiotic and ultimately recover. If you think about it, contraceptives are extremely similar to an antibiotic whose target is human beings. We're still living in the short-term when the antibiotic seems to be effective."

[1] "The heritability of fertility makes world population stabilization unlikely in the foreseeable future" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109051381...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20360626

People can't afford kids. Not enough time, not enough income, even hiring help is out of most people's budget.

People are being squeezed and the middle class is shrinking. No wonder they don't want kids whose lives will be worse than their own.

Perhaps we have changed our environment in such a great way that it is impossible to avoid it?

We have the(correct) climate change narrative that makes people think declining population is a good thing, instant communication and very rapid dissemination of information and tools which enable a "winner takes all" situation(which means 1% of the population has the means to comfortably raise 100 children, which they won't, while 99% can only raise 1.X children, which they are doing), birth control, anonymous and tolerant societies where it is ok to be childless(and it really is ok), pursuit of happiness(which was never a thing in human history), non-religiousness(all major religions value having children), long working hours, "good parenting"- which is a good thing for the children, but it makes raising children incredibly expensive in money and time, both of which most people don't have, the fall of monogamy, the ridiculous real estate prices, the rise of mental dissorders -- all of which lead to below replacement birth rates.

Don't count on subgroups to save the day, their higher birth rates will plummet as soon as we hook them up to our values and we free them of their oppressive values.

You have some catching up to do.

I'd imagine that by then, there will be more individuals advocating for increased automation and (hopefully) society will become increasingly 'techno-optimist' as a result

A solution to both of these problems is increasing total factor productivity (aka doing more with less). The big rise in living standards during the post-war boom was largely a result of a huge increase in total factor productivity.

This has petered out since the 1970s and a lot of the 'zero-sum' mentality/nostalgia for a 'Great America'/fighting over a fixed economic pie in the US today is because we haven't been increasing productivity (i.e. there hasn't been enough technological innovation and disruption) at a fast enough rate.

You can't eat money. The problem is not financial, it is economic. Ignoring the few durable things that can be stockpiled, the money retirees spend, whether it comes from savings or taxes can only be spent on goods and services produced at the time the money is spent, by the labor force available then. The smaller this labor force, the higher the wages, the less purchasing power money has. Retirement saving becomes a positional good, it's not enough to save enough, you have to save more than the other retirees, because you're all competing for the same scarce resource: labor.

If that doesn't make sense, try thinking about it from a purely physical point of view. Retirees need physical goods and personal services (e.g. nursing). Both of these require humans to produce. The fewer producing people there are (young and middle age adults), compared to consuming people (retirees) the less there is per person, regardless of who you tax or how.

The birth rate declining is normal in terms of industrialized countries... people educated enough to use birth control and who have availability tend to have fewer kids. The rest of the world hasn't caught up yet, and probably won't in time to avoid problems.

The birth rate isn't declining because "America is in decline"... it's declining because people are choosing not to have children. The wisdom of that choice is open to discussion, of course.

There's a strong argument to be made that the Romans existed as a political entity for 2000 years and that the final end wasn't until the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The last thousand years are mainly a story of slow decay which is why they get lopped off in all the simple narratives about the fall of Rome. If there's anything to be learned from Rome, it's that an advanced civilization can survive almost anything.

The world is getting progressively safer, by the numbers.