I live in one of the largest metro areas in the U.S.
Community is gone.
> Community is gone.
Let me guess: you're in the urban core of one of the more expensive cities.
An outlier in many places, but not most. Only in the Western first world is this now normal.
you might look at the birth rates in china or almost any other Asian country, and see how your vague rant holds up.
You personally are right, it has never been safer health wise to have children. It has never been more expensive either, win some, lose some.
That's not bad. It's fine that people expect more and want to be able to provide more before having children (and I do agree the commenter who argued this is somehow confined to the Western world is way out there).
But we need to understand that across most of the developed world - there will be exceptions in pockets here and there - it is not the ability to afford children that has dropped, but that we're not willing to give up what we have to have children at a living standard that was considered good before.
E.g. when I grew up we always had food, but the food we had was dictated by cost in a way I never think about, and wouldn't want to deal with. We lived in less space, and I want more space, not less. Our living standard when I was a kid was fine; far above average for most of the world, about average for where I grew up. But if what it took to have more kids was to go back to that, I wouldn't.
The commenter above can call that soft all they want - I don't feel bad for wanting to enjoy life more than I want more children (I have one son; I might well have another child, but because I'm at a stage where my girlfriend and I can afford it without sacrificing our standard of living and that does place me in a privileged position)
And that's just one among a vast array of lifestyle differences. Now a days the worst case scenario is that you end up on government assistance and have a less pleasant life. As for Asia, don't make the mistake of conflating Asia with just China/Hong Kong/Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea. Asia's big, and those places are outliers in terms of fertility, with China's issues being entirely self inflicted. The average fertility rate across Asia is 2.3 [2], which is not great - but at least sustainable.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feed_sack_dress
[2] - https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/sites/c416afed-en/index.html?i...
The point here being the rate is actively crashing pretty much globally. The outliers would be anywhere it's not.
It ain't just us, my friend. Births Per Woman:
1.64 USA
1.34 Japan
1.28 China
0.84 Korea
Now that women are part of the formal economy and everyone has options for entertainment other than unprotected sex, the mechanism by which the formal economy used to offload the entire cost of child rearing while reaping all of the benefits no longer functions.
We have two paths: dust off the shitty exploitative playbook of yesterday, or build a new playbook for tomorrow.
There are lots of factors, of course, and the trend isn't limited to only the west. Though it has certainly become a more normal trend in developed and developing countries than those with a higher level of poverty and poor.
I still contend however that it has never been easy. My grandparents had four children starting at age 20. My grandfather's first job was sweeping floors in a factory at age 13, making $0.30 an hour. When he asked for a raise, he was fired. He said he didn't have two nickels to rub between his fingers.
His father before him went into World War 1 at 15 years old. And his father (my great-great grandfather) falsely signed the documents affirming that he was 18 years old, to allow his own 15 year old son to go to war.
They struggled, but didn't complain. Some part of it is cultural expectation, and that has changed greatly over time. In spite of all odds my grandparents raised four fairly middle class children in these circumstances, but had a good few decades of strife. Whether or not they would create a family and procreate was taken for granted. It was assumed, at their own economic expense. But long-term family wise, today my grandfather has a tree of descendants who love him.
I think today we are more conscious of the economic equation. We ask whether or not we can afford to provide for children, rather than letting them exist and then asking how we can provide for them. There is an aspect of this that I appreciate, but I worry that it's mixed with some amount of narcissism. Though I am an atheist, there is some unreason to our existence in the first place, and there is hope in the continuance of ourselves that we should value beyond economics. There is a romance and some type of spiritual value in being able to put aside the cost-benefit analysis and simply bear new life that is part you, to have and to hold, to love, teach, and reciprocally learn from.
We have so much bounty today that the idea of "sacrificing" ourselves for something that only has potential value is an alien concept. As our material wealth has increased, and as our understanding of personal economy has evolved, I think we've lost a bit of our primal, but beautiful, nature that wants ourselves to persist at a biological, cosmic level.
You, here, right now reading this are the absolute last leaf, the most extended branch, the most outstretched and sun-bleached arm of a tree of life that has been proceeding for four billion years. You are the last link in a chain that has not been broken for four billion years. Can you believe that? Every time I consider that, I think of my parents. And I ask, who am I to be so conceited that all of that history, that fourth of a fraction of the universe, should end with me?
I'm not sure where I'm going with this, and, I will confess that I got a little tipsy for the super bowl. Don't judge me too harshly. But life is beautiful, and beauty is always difficult to sustain. We do it because beauty contains a truth and a promise for the future. And I think that's something we need to put effort into re-evaluating, and re-valuing, in our current world.
One line of inquiry might be why there is a correlation between bounty and the general wealth of an economy, and the fertility rate. Many parts of the world that are poorer are more fertile, and reproduce more unquestionably. Korea is rich and the rate is 0.84. In the Congo the rate is 6.21. It is not about economics. And if you counter that it is about poor education or care, I don't believe that's the reason either. It's culture, and values.
Paul Revere had 15 children. 5 of them died young, and he still had 10. He had a horse and a rifle and a small wooden house you can still tour in Boston. Today we have DINKs, and people who are in what is considered to be the low-income range with multiple rooms in big cities, an education, and combustion-engine vehicles who say it's too expensive to have children. Maybe your tastes are too expensive. Maybe you've been raised softly, and don't know how to set yourself aside to rear and participate in a family that is spiritually worth more than just yourself.
One of the other comments said I ranted so I thought I'd actually provide one. Sorry HN, I hope I made some sense here.
It's 3.7 billion, not four.
More importantly it's a vast tree of life, not a chain and not a hierarchy with humans at an upper lever with only royalty, priests, and God above.
If the sapiens go the stromatolites will still remain, with a lineage far older than apes.
Humans aren't about to go extinct but it's high time their population numbers stabilised, perhaps even reduced a bit.
The case can certainly be made by those that care that should the human branch be pruned the remaining mass of the tree of life on earth might very well thrive and surge in breadth and depth after a rather large number of other prunings at the hands of humankind.
Humans will not go extinct (I hope), but HN is full of some of the smartest people and these are their trends, and I hope that of the people who do reproduce, the techno nerds are among them. The future will need them.
I worry that the Great Filter is not about technology at all, but that in every planet with a species that has evolved into a higher intelligence, that at the cusp of being able to seed their galaxy, they willingly do not pursue it, because the level of analytical thinking required to achieve it also leads them to disinterest and abstinence.
In regards to your last sentence, that is true. But I would ask, who would be around to appreciate that fact?
There's little evidence to support the theory that at some point in the future, little girls will all suddenly decide to buck the trend set by their mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, and all the adult women they see around them in the world, and have 2.1 children themselves.
But, if they do not all do this, if only some of them decide to buck the trend, they those girls would need to have 3 or 5 or 8 to make up for those who do not.
If neither of these things happen, population cannot stabilize. Mathematically, there has to be an average of 2.1.
Fertility rate declines are future extinction. They've run the experiments, and the results are always the same... despite having all the food and water and entertainment they might want, the mice either do not fuck or they just murder whatever offspring they do (rarely) have. And it happens more quickly than one might expect, because the rate of decline increases with each generation.
> the human branch be pruned the remaining mass of the tree of life on earth might very well thrive and surge in breadth and depth after a rather large number of other prunings at the hands of humankind.
And why should any human ever give a shit about whether these non-human organisms thrive, especially when hypothesizing a future where humans no longer exist? Sounds like some death cult nonsense. Will you be one of those lamenting how you think the most beautiful planets of all are those with no life whatsoever to "mar their beauty"?
What nonsense.
The very evidence you seek is right here, right now, all about us - a world in which men and women have a reproduction rate lower than than their grandparents and great grandparents. They have clearly bucked the trend of those in times past. Q.E.D.
BTW, this focus you have on breeding "little girls" is distasteful to say the least.
> those girls would need to have 3 or 5 or 8 to make up for those who do not.
Only if the world is to return to the present 8+ billion after a fall below.
Should numbers slowly decline down to, say, 1950s world population levels and mean reproduction rates go to 2.1 then things will stabilise.
> If neither of these things happen, population cannot stabilize.
Faulty logic, as already explained.
> And why should any human ever give a shit about whether these non-human organisms thrive
My response was to a human who was waxing lyrical about 3.7 billion years of life, an infintesimal number and tonnage of which was actual humn life ... you should ask them why they care about other lifeforms.
You might perhaps ask yourself why you do not.
From the graph I saw the total fertility rate in the US has been falling since 1800 (start of the graph). It briefly improved after WW2 for a bit and then started falling again. There was another brief increase at the end of the 90s and it's been dropping to historical lows ever since. It's not just two generations - it's 200 years and possibly longer.
The graph: https://infogram.com/20221003_gygi_vanessa_calder_fertility-...
Unlike the other commenter who has claimed that once a rate has been set it cannot change.
Are you daft? If fertility rates were high in the past, if they were 6 or 8 or 9.7... they could fall for a long time with no decline in population.
But once they dip below the magic number of 2.1, then population declines. That's how this works. That's the number of children a woman (every woman, on average) must have for population to remain the same from one generation to the next.
I don't know any other way to explain it. You probably think you're intelligent. You followed the teacher's instructions and got an A on math, but you never really understood it. If you follow the recipe, it just poops out correct answers... but here we have a novel problem, and you just can't get it.
> Only if the world is to return to the present 8+ billion after a fall below.
No. For the population to plateau out and stay the same, they'd need that many. It's how fucking averages work.
Either all of them have 2.1, or if only half have children, then they need to have 4.2.
And this isn't for the population to grow again. It's for it to plateau out and remain the same as it is.
> Should numbers slowly decline down to, say, 1950s world population levels and mean reproduction rates go to 2.1 then things will stabilise.
That's the fucking point. If population declines, it's already below 2.1
And if it's below 2.1, that becomes the norm and it never goes back above 2.1. No little girl grows up in a world of childless adults, of the rare "only child", and "only child" herself and says "I think I will do what ever woman I ever knew wouldn't do, and have 2.1".
It's a simple fucking idea.
> You might perhaps ask yourself why you do not.
Because I don't belong to a death cult that hates humanity. I mean, I shouldn't have to say it out loud, but there it is.
No. I still recall studying population dynamics, predator | prey cycles, etc as part of non linear dynamics in mathematics classes back in the 1980s.
> But once they dip below the magic number of 2.1, then population declines.
That magic number can change.
It's relatively easy for anyone to find observational examples of populations with adaptive reproductive rates.
> I don't know any other way to explain it.
Perhaps you might try studying mathematics.
> Because I don't belong to a death cult that hates humanity.
The question was about life on earth, not specifically humanity, the notion that you belong to a humanity hating death cult is frankly one that would not occur to most people .. but here you are going straight there.
Which goes back to my original comment, where I talk about for it to change, the little girls of the youngest generation have to grow up and choose to have more children than their parents. They all have to choose this simultaneously, or the few that do choose it have to choose to have far, far more than 2.1 themselves.
Both of these scenarios are so outlandish, that you keep dancing around it, pretending that I'm describing it incorrectly. You don't want to think about it, or don't want others to think about it, or you just aren't capable... I can't tell which.
It'd be laughable, if I didn't think you were an enemy of humanity.
There is some speculation - and some data which may or may not support it - that fertility may follow a "J" curve where it declines sharply with increased development and then slowly rises again above a certain level.
There is also some data to suggest that within a population, if a subset sees an increase in wealth, it can predict an increase in fertility within that subset.
Combined, a suggestion that does not seem unreasonable is that we develop certain expectations based on societal expectations, and as they increase it becomes harder and harder to justify additional children, but when people find themselves able to meet those expectations, the number of children goes up.
If that holds, then that would suggest the rate can be brought back up with sufficient societal assistance, which may or may not come as fertility rates becomes enough of a political issue. Whether that will actually work remains to be seen - we've already of course seen some pretty significant attempts, such as the escalating Hungarian family support scheme (total support for 3+ children amounts to over 300k Euro, of which about 1/3 is a non-refundable grant and the rest subsidized house loans), so we should start to get an idea of what a realistic cost to drive the rates back up will be, if it is viable, over the coming couple of decades as more countries experiment.
I do fear that Idiocracy might be a little accurate though. The people reproducing currently are the ones who do not consider their future or economics, while the smart ones who do, have less children.
You weren't watching the magician's hands closely enough.
The role is fulfilled by tax dollars that come from the youngest working generation. Might be tech involved, but the revenue still pays for the tech.
It's the machines that actually pay for most things we enjoy today.
The keyboard you're typing your responses on, display you're reading this message from and virtually everything else in our silicon worlds* were not touched by human hands during production. Money is just an accounting method to allocate the production output.
Interestingly even the keyboards don't need that much of a human touch to type these days.
* other notable examples are almost 100% of the energy we use (electricity, hydrocarbons), majority of the global human caloric intake (grains, fats, sugars, potatoes, etc.), most raw materials (metals, fibers, hydrocarbons again, etc.), tools
And for the remainder, at this point it's just a matter of time before Humans Need Not Apply
The country that has the machines, wants cash. Where will you tax the revenue from? Are you hoping for some sort of technological charity? The Chinese will just ship us 10 million ass-wiping robots for the nursing homes for free, because they're a kind and benevolent people?
I understand things perfectly well.
If the country isn't self-reliant, no big deal... as long as they can pony up the cash. And your country can't do that either. Do you have any arguments that aren't pure sophistry?
Immigration is zero sum and soon everyone will be competing for the same pool of people.
We convert them to childlessness faster than they can replace the children we're not having. Less than 25 years away from universal below-replacement fertility.
Nobody will remember us in just 100 years. Nobody.
> Maybe you've been raised softly, and don't know how to set yourself aside to rear and participate in a family that is spiritually worth more than just yourself.
Is it really worth more, though? I always wondered if having kids is just so that somebody finally listens to you at an age where your peers really only listen if they're deep friends, or if you have something actually exceptional to say. And to relive childhood, and then again when you have grandchildren. You don't get these two things if you don't have children. But they're not that deep, you can e.g. teach to actually intelligent peers, research deep topics, and relive childhood curiosity in different ways. For the benefit of all of society, not just your little gang.
For liberalism, perhaps. If the capitalists can't figure out how to grow new worker-slaves in vats or perfect AGI, future society will be very different. Might be mostly Amish and Orthodox Jews, etc. after the population crash.
Many people mention housing and real estate as a problem, well, if there was a population problem, we'd see loads of available empty homes and falling prices of real estate - we're not, so this is a clear signal from the society truthfully voting with their wallets (no matter what they misleadingly signal verbally) that we have more than enough people.
It's similar to some industries saying that there aren't enough workers - if there was an actual shortage, we'd see loads of unfilled vacancies together with noticably rising salary offers for these positions, and if we aren't, that's a clear signal from that industry truthfully voting with their wallets (no matter what they misleadingly signal verbally) that they actually do have more than enough potential workers.
While "everybody knows that they're losing population", South Korea and China haven't even started shrinking (they've stopped growing, and have been at approximately 0 population change for the last few years, it's technically negative but the change is insignificantly tiny) so obviously any self-correction mechanisms wouldn't apply at all yet.
Japan's population reached its peak in 2010 and as of 2016 the shrinking was quite low - so we're talking about just like 7 years of actual shrinking and that's not that much time to cause any socioeconomic changes triggered by population reduction, it would seem reasonable to look at the generation which grows up in a shrinking-population regime to see how it affects them, when they actually have real estate that gets significantly cheaper due to lack of population and scarcity of workers pushing up the bargaining position of labor; Japan's demographics is "leading the world" in this regard, but even they aren't there yet. And they have time to see how it works out - Japan's population is still far above its e.g. 1950 population, and continuing the current population trends it would be as long as 2075 to reach the 1950 level (which isn't bad!) again.
But you’re right, more drastic measures will be taken in political and economical senses once absolute numbers start ramping up. It’s fairly obvious our current system isn’t the best for aging population with not as many children. Unfortunately, we just haven’t come up with anything better that gives some sort of stability and peace.
The alternative being horrible.
I'm a guy and I'd never want that if I were a woman.
Nowadays even if you have good jobs it really depends on a lot of circumstances if you can afford such a life (albeit mostly with more luxury and vacations) with two incomes.
Effectively the worth of income nearly halved.
> Effectively the worth of income nearly halved.
At least the worth that reaches the worker after taxes etc.
That's the whole point. Now we have two solutions:
- make the playbook less exploitative, leaving to time and resources being shared more equally among people
- get back to a caste system where half of mankind is barred from non-family-related activities.
China is seeing a population decline not caused by famine for the first time in modern history.
India's fertility rate is at or below replacement at this point, and India is a couple of decades from population contraction unless they increase immigration.
Having 3 children at a young age is an outlier in the vast majority of the world at this point.
For those who don't understand why 1.5 is so much worse than 1.9, it's because fertility is an exponential system. Every generation's (~20 years) size is (fertility_rate / 2) times as large as the one prior that gave birth to them. So after 5 generations (~1 century), a fertility rate of 1.9 would see the next generation's size go from 100 to 77 (100 * (1.9/2)^5). A fertility rate of 1.5 would go from 100 to 23. South Korea, at 0.78, would go from 100 to 0 - extinct, in a century.
And most people, across the world, do have children at what you'd call "young" ages. Female fertility rates start to decline rapidly as they age, obviously hitting zero at menopause which tends to happen in their 40s. Even when successful, an older parent results faces exponentially increased odds of seeing a variety of issues with the child, such as Down Syndrome.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_fer...
You can use metrics from different groups and slice and dice sections and find ways of getting above 2.1 (replacement), sure, but it's not affecting my main point at all, which was that it's not contained to the Western world, and that 3 kids is now an outlier in most of the world.
To your specifics:
South Asia is listed as 2.2. But India has hit 2.1 and is declining, and Bangladesh and Nepal are even further below replacement - the World Bank metric is I presume buoyed by Pakistan, which has hit 3.1 (3.47 in the 2021 numbers on Wiipedia), and is declining, and Afghanistan, which is in even steeper decline - the other countries in the region are mostly rounding errors in terms of population.
It's a difference of whether it's already hit replacement as a region already, or will within 2-3 years at most. I'm perfectly happy to accept the World Bank numbers for the sake of this argument, as it's not relevant to the argument.
With respect to MENA and the Arab World, you're double-counting. The bulk of the countries that are part of the Arab World vs Middle East /North Africa are the same.
The largest non-Arab MENA countries are Iran, which is well below replacement (1.7) and Turkey, at 1.9.
The Arab World also includes several countries considered sub-Sarahan by some or all of other groups (Somalia, Mauritania, Sudan) which pulls it up, and MENA curiously includes Sudan in some statistics, even though it's considered sub-Saharan and/or East Africa by other groupings.
Once you actually exclude the sub-Saharan countries from those groups, the rate lowers significantly. Taking Sudan alone out of MENA brings MENA close to replacement. If you choose to look at the Arab World alone, then, sure, even excluding the sub-Saharan countries they're still above replacement. I'm again, fine with choosing to slice the numbers that way - they do not affect the argument I was making in any meaningful way, because then the remaining MENA countries are below instead.
What we're left with no matter how we slice it, is that roughly half the worlds countries are below replacement, accounting for well above half the worlds current population (but that balance will shift rapidly), and leaving the world average at ~2.3 and declining even by World Bank numbers.
> And places like Latin America are in decline, but still in the realm of realm of being saved at ~1.9.
There's no "being saved" here. Short of economic collapse, we don't know of any reliable measure to drive these numbers back up again, and they've been consistently trending down since the 1960's. China appears to be poised to be the country likely go hardest in trying, now recommending 3 children per family, and given an extremely restrictive immigration policy. That's fine - they don't need to be "saved".
> The only places currently in catastrophic collapse at the EU (1.5), North America (1.6), and East Asia (1.5).
I was not, and is not, and will not be, arguing any "catastrophic collapse" - to me at least that notion is meaningless to most people other than "great replacement" type people.
The world as a whole is headed for a relatively gentle flattening of population growth, and a period of decline, but no "catastrophic collapse" in population. But we are headed for a fairly dramatic shift in politics and economic development as this happens and the countries facing the steepest drops become more dependent on actually courting immigration as a consequence. There will still be enough growth to do that for decades to come.
Seriously, it's wild visiting South Korea and having a tour guide jokingly beg people to immigrate and make babies.
#JokingNotJoking
They've liberalised a lot since, but it'll take a long time for them to develop a reputation as somewhere people will think of as a destination to migrate to.
You know something that's really weird to think about? In 1950 Africa's population was 227m! [1] The US at the time had about 160m, nearly as many people as the entire African continent! Fertility rates are hard to intuit because they're not only exponential, but systems where the effect is delayed from the cause by several decades, but then once it starts - it starts rocketing off uncontrollably, be that in loss or gain of population.
The world's population may start to level off at some point, but sub-replacement rates will cause Western nations to start losing population at an exponential rate. It will be the equal but opposite of what happened to Africa over the past century. And this doesn't level out or even slow down, except when people start having children again. So for instance many people know Japan now has > 10% of its population over 80, but I think a lot of us have this sort of concept that 'Well sure, but as they start to die off - then things will probably start to look a bit more sane.'
In reality, it's the exact opposite. As this group dies off, they're going to be replaced by an even larger group of 80+ year olds, leaving Japan in an even worse state, as one can immediately see just glancing at Japan's population pyramid. [2] Right now Japan's losing about 1 in 200 people per year, and this will never stop until either they go extinct or they start having children again. And it will actually get substantially worse until they hit their 'fertility equilibrium point' where all living generations have/had comparable fertility rates (picture the sides of the population pyramid having a constant slope). And that's what's waiting for the entirety of the Western world, if we don't turn things around.
And this is also likely a vicious cycle because as age ratios and demographics get all screwed up, economies will start to collapse, which will make it even more uncomfortable to have children.
---
[1] - https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/africa-popula...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan#/media/F...
We can already see some differences quite starkly.
E.g. Italy's fertility rate hasn't been above replacement since ca. 1975, and started seeing population decline a few years ago and is already back at the population level it was at around 2007, because it struggles to attract (and want to attract) enough immigration.
Meanwhile, the UK dropped below replacement in 1972, and yet UN projections suggest the population is unlikely to decline until the 2050's at the earliest, and isn't projected to drop down to present-day levels at any point this century, largely buffeted by a far more aggressive immigration policy (including by politicians claiming to want the opposite - neither of the major party in the UK believes in reducing immigration, but some of their voters do, and that is likely to become a rising conflict).
So while I agree some nations probably will see rapid falls, it really comes down to in part to what extent they are able to open their doors and find means of becoming attractive to immigrants fast enough while finding ways of integrating them in a working way.
And this will reshape the political and cultural landscapes both within countries, and international influence.
(one minor example, since we've discussed the UK and Africa: The UK is likely to soon drop from the 2nd to 3rd largest native English-speaking population worldwide - both India and Nigeria already have far more people speaking English as their 2nd or 3rd language, but Nigeria seems to be more rapidly closing the gap to have more people who speak English as their 1st...)
> And this is also likely a vicious cycle because as age ratios and demographics get all screwed up, economies will start to collapse, which will make it even more uncomfortable to have children.
Well, we may unfortunately in that case get to test whether fertility is inexorably linked to poverty or whether once it's declined it won't rise again.
The other option is that as fertility becomes even more of an issue, we'll see a significant escalation in measures like the Hungarian (ramping up grants and subsidised house loans for families that get more children), but of course we don't yet know whether - or at what level - that will work... But I suspect many desperate attempts.
Also, expect reproductive rights to become an issue, with more countries seeming movements to push back on abortion rights etc. using fertility rates as a reason.
But I'd say here that you're not carrying forward that same reasoned skepticism when offering immigration as a solution. Because the exact same holds true. There are countless examples of mass migration throughout history, and they generally don't come with a happy ending. Rome, over the centuries, became an empire of immigrants, in some ways akin to the United States. Yet it was also ultimately destroyed by immigration. The Goths, fleeing the Huns, were take in as refugees by the Roman Empire. Those same refugees would ultimately go on to destroy the Roman Empire.
In the present day, mass migration doesn't seem to be fairing much better. Prior to the migrant crisis throughout Europe, many expected that the migrants would integrate, become part of the normal mass of people, and it'd ultimately be a win-win situation for everybody. That belief was not well supported by history, and ultimately proved to be false. And in the US today, cities that express an extremely positive attitude towards immigration tend to rapidly express a different view once faced with large numbers of immigrants.
And immigration on the scale we're talking about would be absolutely massive, and never-ending. And I'm not even getting into the countless social/cultural/political problems this would all entail. I'm merely focusing on the most extreme - would this destroy the countries engaging in such? And it seems to me that the most probable answer is simply yes. Well actually in modern times I don't think it'd destroy them. The most likely outcome is what we're seeing happen in much of Europe - parties that oppose the immigration would rapidly come to power, and end up working to mitigate the damage, and end such a population strategy.
It's like comparing the average migrant or refugee with ISIS.
> Prior to the migrant crisis throughout Europe, many expected that the migrants would integrate, become part of the normal mass of people, and it'd ultimately be a win-win situation for everybody. That belief was not well supported by history, and ultimately proved to be false.
I've seen nothing to "prove it false", but there's also a very significant difference a rushed an chaotic acceptance of refugees vs. planned migration programs, and either takes time to shake out.
> And in the US today, cities that express an extremely positive attitude towards immigration tend to rapidly express a different view once faced with large numbers of immigrants.
And yet the US managed to successfully do it before. Several of my own ancestors families lived in Brooklyn at a time where it was so full of Scandinavian migrants that it had several Norwegian language newspapers, and my great grandmother lived there a decade without ever learning English because all her neighbours and shopkeepers etc. spoke Norwegian. I've spent a lot of time looking at US censuses because for the sake of genealogy, and the US censuses of that era are astounding for the way whole streets were nothing but immigrants.
Somehow the US is still there, as much as one might joke about the state it is in.
> The most likely outcome is what we're seeing happen in much of Europe - parties that oppose the immigration would rapidly come to power, and end up working to mitigate the damage, and end such a population strategy.
Then they will crater their economies, and soon enough get thrown out of office. People are quick to support anti-immigran rhetoric until it starts hitting their wallet when eg. employers struggle to hire. These anti-immigration parties fortunes tends to be tightly linked to unemployment levels.
Compare Italy to e.g. the UK, where despite the anti refugee rhetoric and historically high immigration, people fleeing the Tory party are not going to the anti-immigrant right-wing parties but to Labour - the UK, unlike Italy, has low unemployment and regular newspaper stories about employers struggling to find workers. Once Italy's population decline bites a bit more, this will change rapidly.
But you know, I'm not sure this line of discussion is even meaningful. If I convince you the Goths were nothing even remotely like like ISIS, is that going to change your mind on anything? Obviously not. So why bother? What I am curious is what would change your mind.
So if you look at this from my perspective, you're talking about a scenario where a government of a country would be basically endeavoring to replace its own domestic population, with a foreign one, all while somehow presumably trying to maintain some of the value that makes people want to migrate to the country in the first place. I think we could both agree that there's no historic precedent for this, immigration on a far smaller scale has shown a tendency to result in problems, and so on. Yet you seem confident enough in assuming that it might work, to simply assume it. This, to me, is pretty weird!
What, if anything, could ever possibly convince you that such a scenario might not be particularly likely to succeed in anything like a desirable fashion? And, vice versa, how could you sell somebody like me, who is skeptical of such, on it? I'm more than open to the concept, but you'd need a pretty solid argument.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_War_(376%E2%80%93382)#B...
> What I am curious is what would change your mind.
A line of argumentation that isn't based in tropes usually used by far-right extremist racists. I'm not saying that is your motivation, because I can not tell, but what I can tell is that those are the circles I see these arguments used by. When they are then further based in characterisations about failure I don't recognise from what I have seen myself, then you have provided nothing to give me any reason to trust any of what you've said.
When you now start talking about replacement, you're playing further into that.
I'm an immigrant myself, and I've seen enough variety between immigrant groups that the moment someone starts treating all immigration the same, and conflating handling of refugees and immigrants, that suggests to me someone who has preconceived notions and is coming at it with an agenda.
> I think we could both agree that there's no historic precedent for this
No, we most certainly would not. I pointed out the US to you as an obvious example. I find it funny that you flat out ignored that I've already pointed it out.
> Yet you seem confident enough in assuming that it might work, to simply assume it. This, to me, is pretty weird!
Define "work". I'm confident there will be all kinds of problems. I'm also confident it will happen, because, I'm even more confident that the alternative is a level of economic and societal collapse that will lead to violently overthrown governments, so I see it as entirely moot whether it will go smoothly or not. People will make it happen and manage the results because the alternative is turning into a third-world country.