In any case it won't be a catastrophy as life in North Korea.
Our "plague" "kills" the young and productive - by their never being born in the first place. We are headed for something we have never seen, ever: a society dominated by old people in pure numbers terms.
The worry is that it is a design for stagnation and decay rather than greater strength. (There won't be money or people to maintain infrastructure because the elders will demand healthcare.)
I don't know what will happen and nor does anyone else really.
South Korea and Hungary (among many others) have tried paying people to have children, without success. It pulls a few births forward in time, but then the birth rate declines again.
There is something more fundamental going on.
Edit: I'm undecided if it's capitalist ownership class, or a "late stage socialism running out of other people's money". Still undecided. It's probably both, which is why we're doomed.
I actually think they pay their workers too much though - for not working.
I think standard unemployment on full salary is 2 years, even if you quit your job yourself!
Generous benefits invite abuse…
I think three of these claims are wrong
https://www.arbeitsagentur.de/arbeitslos-arbeit-finden/arbei...
You get 60% of last salary, not full salary.
You get it for up to 12 months not 24.
You lose 3 months of unemployment money if you quit rather than being fired.
People attribute it to empowerment of women, but I wonder if it's more correlation than causation. Women empowerment happened in the same time frame there was a large shift towards urbanization. The situation across the world before was like ~80% of people living in rural areas, and ~20% living in cities. Now those proportions are approximately flipped in many places. IIRC cities appear to be a net population sink for most of history, counting on an steady stream of people moving from the countryside each generation to replenish sub-replacement numbers. Raising children "free-ranging" is more straightforward in the countryside. In cities they demand a lot of micromanagement and resources from parents, because car-infested, cramped urban landscape is expensive and hostile to children. So perhaps the causation arrow flows from accelerated urbanization to both women empowerment and sub-replacement fertility rates, not necessarily from women empowerment to sub-replacement rates.
> Most demographers now say the population bomb has largely fizzled, and some predict that the long-term trend toward a smaller global population, with fewer consumers and a smaller human footprint on the planet, could benefit the environment.
> There appear to be other upsides to declining fertility. Along with growing individual freedom and economic empowerment of women, the U.N. study also found a rapid drop in the number of girls and teenagers giving birth.
> "The decline of the adolescent birth rates has been, I would say, one of the major success stories in global population health over the past three decades," said Vladimíra Kantorová, the U.N.'s chief population scientist.
United Nations World Fertility 2024 Report - https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.deve...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41225389 (additional citations)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40982392 (additional citations)
(scholar of the global demographic system; urbanization is certainly a component in a declining fertility rate, but the primary driver is women choosing to have less children, delay having them, or not having them at all, while having the means to assert those choices)
This i highly doubt. Humans are able to increase per capita (resource) consumption at a far faster rate! Old age care/consumption can also grow to infinity
Fertility fall in rural Africa is far faster than its rate of urbanization
As a quick primer. falling births seem to correlate/caused by:
a. increasing urbanization b. increasing atheism c. increasing women empowerment/education d. increasing incomes
These factors re-enforce each other, and are scale free (we see the same effect at $1/day, $10/day, $100/day etc)
Before going to far down the rabbit hole, have a look at the fertility rate of TSMC employees. TSMC employees make up 0.3% of Taiwan’s population, they are responsible for 1.8% of all babies born in Taiwan. [0]
The average TSMC woman is highly educated and highly paid, which eliminates most of the usual reasons touted for low the fertility rates in OECD nations. "All" TSMC does is make it possible for their female employees to have a career and raise a family, mostly by providing child care in-house and flexible working hours.
To pull that off TSMC must have a culture than prioritizes families and child raising over profit. In most industries with not be possible. Either their higher costs would lead to them being eaten alive by their competitors, or bought out by PE because their employees could be squeezed to pay out more profit to their owners. There isn't going to be a rash of companies with TSMC style family policies breaking out any time soon.
But a government policy could made it happen, which is another way of saying if a society or country decided they didn't want to wither away to nothing because of low birth rates, it could be done. They could mandate every company adopts TSMC style policies, or they could raise taxes and provide free child care (like they do for education), or more likely some mix that has the same effect. Everyone would have to be willing to be a bit poorer of course, because you are forcing people to spend less on fast cars and big houses, and more of child care.
But does seem like it could be done, so if South Korea (or any of the OECD) had the will, there is a way.
[0] https://www.boomcampaign.org/p/on-the-higher-fertility-of-se...
So the problem is really capitalism run rampant.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/israels-birth-rate-remains-hig...
> In 2020, the total fertility rate among ultra-Orthodox women in Israel was 6.6, while the rate among Arab women was 3.0, and among secular women, it was 2.0— still well above the OECD average— according to a report from the Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research.
(dopamine and doomscrolling are just as bad as religion and traditional values, for different reasons, imho)
> Researchers have variously estimated the Muslim population of France at between 8.8% and 12.5% in 2017, and less than 1% in 2001,[64][65] making a "replacement" unlikely according to MacKellar.
> While the ethnic demography of France has shifted as a result of post-WWII immigration, scholars have generally dismissed the claims of a "great replacement" as being rooted in an exaggeration of immigration statistics and unscientific, racially prejudiced views.[12] Geographer Landis MacKellar criticized Camus's thesis for assuming "that third- and fourth- generation 'immigrants' are somehow not French."[63] Researchers have variously estimated the Muslim population of France at between 8.8% and 12.5% in 2017, and less than 1% in 2001,[64][65] making a "replacement" unlikely according to MacKellar.[63]
The assumption being made is that they’ll ditch the religion after four generations? I don’t see data for that assumption, maybe it is not 100%, but its certainly not as low as 20% apostacy.
Thus I would take serious issue with that statement, it is evidence of an ethnic or religious replacement.
And the actual numbers still don’t show a majority shift. Even if every Muslim in France kept their religion, they’d be ~10% of the population — far from "replacement".
Also, you missed the point entirely if the topic is “the population of x has gone from 1% to an estimated upper of 12.5% in 20 years” and your answer is “its below 10% right now”.
Not only are you potentially immediately wrong, since the number today could exceed 10%, it also doesn’t speak to how those demographics might be shaped by disparities in birthrates or continued migration.
But, you know that, you’re just trying to argue for some reason.
Either that’s a strong coincidence or vote manipulation is rife here.
Also anglicism is like, catholicism without a pope... also it was created by the king, not imported from another continent.
That’s an oversimplification. Dying of old age and being murdered both end in death, but we both know they’re not the same.
> Why grasp so tightly to a genetic window a handful of centuries old?
I believe I explained that in my first comment.
Current net immigration inflows into Germany are below 0.5% of population.
The big immigration waves of the last 20 years can be directly linked to devastating wars: Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine.
How many generations did it take for the Germans to become Americans in the US? Did it make Americans disappear?
It's not a question of generations. There were a lot of German-speaking towns in the US, but World War I-driven xenophobia pushed them to Americanize.
Estonia for example had quite a lot of investment, you’d be surprised what a regime will invest in to ensure that the optics are positive.
Not saying that happened here, but it is something that has happened.
USA/EU might be putting money into SK.
Both to “prove to the other side” that their ideology is the right one.
And funded what looks like ~USD$35B in post-war economic assistance. (Plus other UN funding)
For that, South Korea went from being devastated by 2 wars to around the 13th largest economy in the world. Not a bad return.
China and Russia were welcome to invest in North Korea...
South Korea's population was 25 million in 1960, it is 54 million now.
We need to stop going over the top with claims of "population collapse". The 20th century to this day was abnormal at historical scale in that human population exploded like never before, and perhaps like never again and probably for the best considering how we have brought the planet to its knees.
We need to embrace and adapt to a decrease in population because the explosion that has happened is unsustainable and so are current global population levels. That's the best, if not only, way to both get rid of poverty globally and to preserve the climate and environment.
This does not mean that population should or will collapse to extra low levels...
Its just math showing the trend and it's not worthless as it should give you something to think about.
>> We need to embrace and adapt to a decrease in population
Of course, but it will be painful.
>> That's the best, if not only, way to both get rid of poverty globally and to preserve the climate and environment.
That simple math, which you deem worthless also tells you this is impossible. There will be a small number of young active people having to support a big group of elderly. They will not have the time to solve world problems. In fact a lot of knowledge will be lost as economy will contract and there will be less people available for specialization.
We need to embrace this and use existing and new technologies to cope. We have AI, automation, robots progressing fast, this is exactly what we need in addition to investing in education.
The alternative is to keep pushing for an ever growing population and to end up in Soylent Green / Blade Runner.
Based on history it hasn't happened. How do you know it's going to?
>>The alternative is to keep pushing for an ever growing population and to end up in Soylent Green / Blade Runner.
That is absolutely not the only alternative. One would be to have a stable population at the current size. Another on would be decreasing population slowly and not as drastically as it will happen in Korea. A third one would be growing it slowly. The fourth one would be oscillating around the current size, etc.
"The second derivative of population will remain constant for the next 100 years" is just as silly today as it was in 1925.
We don't know how a society can work that way as it's a first time.
This system can't work. This system is going to collapse. Just matter of time.
50 years ago people were saying "we are doomed" because of overpopulation. We had people saying that the optimal number of humans on the planet was just one billion and that we had to engage in extreme measures of international oppression to force as much of the unavoidable starvation on certain populations and not others. Now we are seeing "the world is doomed" because of underpopulation (despite the fact that the world population is still growing) and we are starting to see the proposed extreme measures of rolling back women's rights in order to address this.