Comment by thrown_22 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thrown_22 | Hacker News Reader

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A 60 year old woman can't give birth. It doesn't matter what incentives governments will give in 20 years: you can't beat biology. The women who can give birth in decades need to be born today. Yet birthrates are at their lowest levels ever. _Every_ developed country and most developing countries have committed suicide already, it's just that it will take 40 years for anyone to notice.

The West is betting that immigrants will keep magically appearing whenever needed. The problem is that outside of a few countries torn apart by civil wars _nowhere_ are birth rates constant or let alone increasing. To put it in perspective: Bangladesh is below replacement fertility levels today. 40 years ago it had 8 children born per woman. Let me repeat that: Bangladesh today has fewer children born per woman than the US did in 2009.

The west doesn't need other nations to have high fertility rates, it just needs other nations to have people who want to immigrate to the west. Populations keep increasing for many years after the birthrate falls below replacement rate due to population momentum (people individually have fewer kids, but there are more people having kids than there used to be). And even after the population truly stops growing, people will still leave for wealthier areas in search of higher quality of life. If people keep emmigrating from a country with a sub replacement birth rate, eventually the population will get so low that there's no one left, but that would take many decades if not centuries. For example bangladesh has a net migration rate of -0.2%/yr and a birthrate 5% below replacement rate. Even if we ignore population momentum and assume bangladesh's population will immediately start falling, if they keep their current birth rate and migration rate it will take about 250 years for the population to halve, at which point it will still be about the same number of people that Germany has today.

Not sure this is true. Nigeria has population growth of 2.5% and fertility rate of 4.6. I think other African countries are similar. Africa will be the main spawn point for new humans this century.

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

Ethiopia 2.6%

Congo 3.2%

Pakistan 2%

How accurate is that reporting? Honestly, it sounds more like the ability of statisticians to access accurate data than such a drastic shift in culture.

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