(Immigration isn’t the answer, their fertility rate also gets depressed just like the native population. All it achieves is to balance the birth/death rate on paper for the year.)
What? The reason low fertility is bad is that you end up with a proportionally small working age population, immigration doesn't "solve" low birth rates but it does solve the problem low birth rates cause. In fact it does it even better, because you have a proportionally lower number of children who are just as unproductive as retirees.
The reason Japan doesn't have much immigration is because they have, shall we say, a strong desire to remain purely Japanese and don't believe immigrants can become truly Japanese.
How about we make it not a PITA to be a mother?
You are seeing these “breeding machine” type posts because people are extrapolating from the current poor success rate of these programs and thinking about what more drastic steps might be taken. (Do note that I don’t approve of forcibly turning women into breeding machines, just like I don’t approve of forcibly turning men into killing machines. I did call it unconscionable.)
Unpopular opinion (and playing devil’s advocate since I have two kids), but is it necessarily a bad thing if people stop wanting to have children and the human race just gradually disappears? There are a lot of other types of potential existential threats on the horizon that might be unsolvable and could entail a significant amount of suffering (e.g. global warming, super viruses, rogue AI)—perhaps it’s better to stop reproducing and just let things end peacefully? I can’t thing of a great argument for forcing societies to continue having children if they no longer wish to do so. Sure, you’ll have some “who will take care of all the elderly in 50 years?” but you could plan a bit for that and the problem would only last for one generation.
The shrinking growth rates are problematic for wealthy old people because they realise that their money represents economic power over other people, but if those other people don't exist, then their economic power will be worth much less than they deluded themselves it is. Indulging in the desires of these special interest groups makes no sense for the continued survival of humanity. If anything it makes it harder for humanity to survive as we run the risk of faster resource depletion. If you believe in mars colonies and so on, you would want our society to survive the next 1000 years and not prioritise the next quarter so an old person can retire from their stock returns.
People can make up their own minds on this, but I don’t think states and governments will want to stop existing.
Prisoner's dilemma, I guess. If everyone stops reproducing, the people who keep at it secure more resources for their offspring.
If fertility rate gets depressed then just keep letting in more people. I don't see how it isn't the answer if your objective is to keep the population at a stable level.
As more and more jobs become obsolete, a country will be able to run just fine on fewer people, so long as there are enough people to do the work that can't be automated.
Yeah, but maybe you want them ;)