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India's fertility rate has already fell to about 2.2 children per woman (in 2021). That's already replacement rate.

India is one of the few countries with a favorable demographic future right now. The United States and France are also doing ok too (with immigration).

But most of Europe and Asia (especially China, Singapore, South Korea and Japan) are facing huge problems: a halving of the population from its peak. And more importantly than the total number of people is the demographic pyramid structure is lost and is difficult to rebuild without a big baby boom (unlikely to happen in those countries).

For India to become a superpower in 2100 (no guarantees it will be) it shouldn't ruin its demographic outlook (like China famously did).

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I don't understand why a population decrease should be resulting in "huge problems". I am sure it's possible to maintain or even increase happiness and relative wealth while growing smaller.

For earth in total, it would be great to see a smaller number of humans.

who pays for all the old people?

Isn't it a classic rate equation? If all young people die immediately, sure, we're in deep shit. But with increasing productivity and improved health care a graceful decrease should be possible.

Increasing productivity in geriatric care basically means robots taking care of people.

I am not saying that it is impossible, but it is definitely hard. Which means psychologically hard, too. Without contact with living people, you are likely to go mad in your bed, even if your physiological needs are taken care of.

> increasing productivity

Is it, in any real terms?

> and improved health care

Doesn’t this make the problem worse? I.e. longer lifespan for the aging population, and even more demand for healthcare professionals from the limited set of younger workers.

I'm talking about "health span" and not "life span".

They aren’t independent. Also you said ‘healthcare’. If healthcare produces health span, then it is still being consumed.

Worse, who takes care of all the old people.

So far, we have increased our lifespans up to 85 or even 90 years, but our healthspans are significantly shorter and those last 10-15 years are spent in state of partial or complete dependency on others.

Unless we can do a lot more in the longevity field and stretch healthspan of old people significantly, we won't be able to meet the total demand for workforce in care.

It is a trade-of, as it always is. If you have fewer people involved, you will have to use more machines.

By the time I am in an old fokes home I don't need somebody to carry me to the toilet, I can just activate my drone and fly there. That should help with the pressure.

Or so I hope.

From what I learnt when my 90 y.o. grandma was slowly approaching her death, getting to the toilet and wiping afterwards are two significant challenges for someone with bad arthritis. So that drone better be rather versatile - or our medicine a lot better in prevention and treatment of arthritis.

There is some evidence that stem cells can alleviate arthritis, so we may yet benefit from better treatments thereof.

I am sorry to hear about your grandmother.

I would assume the drone would move me and then we would finally have a bidet/toilet combo to fix the rest.

I don't mean that drones will be able to fix every problem, just that they will be one component in helping older people stay mobile and reduce the care necessary.

A population decrease certainly doesn’t have to be counter productive to the economic status quo. But in today’s paradigm it is..

Our paradigm is all mixed up. It’s upside down.

Why do casinos earn billions while exploiting the vulnerable, meanwhile hospitals struggle to get funding? Why do tobacco companies earn billions and poison the population while schools struggle to provide chalk for their teachers? Why does an executive for a superfluous cosmetics or designer clothing company get paid 1000X while we struggle to find enough social workers to try to relieve the massive mental health crises in the west?

Why is it difficult to get paid well in an environmental startup, but easy to get paid well in online betting startup? Why does top talent build products that inflict immeasurable damage to children, teenagers and adults, rather than attempting to solve the ecological crisis we face?

The juxtapositions I have used I believe are completely solvable by a realignment of the way we govern economic policy and what we as a society value. I don’t think it’s a utopian vision, but rather a realistic and a needed realignment.

Realignments need to be made, because what I see today is that our world economy is a destructive debt machine that ultimately is failing the planet and it’s inhabitants

Keep in mind that revenue is higher for both schools and hospitals/healthcare, costs are just also dramatically higher.

Also, social work mostly sucks. It pays terribly, sure, but even without that it’s some of the most exhausting and potentially soul destroying work you can do.

I agree that alignments and incentives need to be adjusted, but I wouldn’t claim to know how.

I believe the problem in any society is that the older generation relies on the younger to care and/or subsidize costs of said care for the older as their health declines. That breaks down when population starts declining.

It’s not. It’s just stupid ideas about never ending unchecked growth.

As the population declines, and it should, technology and policy will change to make things work. Better use of automation, better end of life care policies, managing death instead of “doing everything you can”, etc.

>India is one of the few countries with a favorable demographic future right now.

India is not meeting / maintaining 8% growth to just keep up with employment. Current TFR is going to generate 100s of millions of excessive idle / impoverished workers that's going to drag on development. It's a demographic curse not dividend, which are already milked in their most productive states from memory. And they will not be able to develop via manufacturing because automation/geopolitics means world will not concentrate global production in one country again. Their future looks like 1.7B with major proportions trapped in subsistent agriculture and informal economy.

In China even after family planning averted 300M births, country still has 600M barely above middle income and significant proportions in agriculture + informal system, but at least much of country has increasing per capita wealth to better weather demographic bomb and problems being addressed. Difference is most of India doesn't look like it will develop beyond relying on population pyramid to manage growth, which will eventually hit carrying capacity constraints. By 2100, PRC is going to be a somewhat wealthy per capita country with ~900M population & 80%+ urbanization rate. A big middle-income Japan. India is going to be a poor per capita country with 1.7B population, with significant numbers trapped in rural areas. A bigger but still poor India.

The fertility rate of the state in question might be more relevant here which seems to be about 3.0 [0].

These conversations miss the fact that the actual distribution of the people in the country is very relevant. If you have ever been to UP, you would know how it is overflowing with people.

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

High TFR + high density of population + not enough resources = a recipe for future disaster. Kudos to the Uttar Pradesh authorities for tackling the problem.

Yes, Alaska or Estonia could live with a TFR of 3.0 for a while. Uttar Pradesh not so much. 200 million people crowded in a state smaller than Germany is already on the edge.

How do you factor climate change into this long term outlook?

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