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Comment by loeg | Hacker News Reader

It is a major flaw. Birth rate is falling basically everywhere and below replacement (~2.1) even in places people think of as booming in recent history -- India is at 1.98, South America somewhere around 1.8. It's really just portions of Africa that still have TFR above 2.1 and the rates there are declining over time, too. Immigranting your way of a demographic collapse only works if there are lots of births happening somewhere else.

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https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf

The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 - August 2025 (400 comments)

(slide 39, net migration to Earth is zero)

> Roughly speaking, the bottom 70% of the population receives net payments (and services) from the government over their lifetime, while the 70%-90% percentile receives approximately zero net payments, the top 10% pays it all.

Well, maybe if there was more equal income distribution, less overall penalization to those who do not have as many assets, and so on, then it would be more distributed?

I mean, that is basically what is happening anyway, but you have a nation distributing that wealth through social programs, instead of capitalists sharing their take willingly with those who helped them earn it.

Yip, I'm a advocate for capitalism but there's definitely a bug with interest/investments in that earning money makes it even easier to earn money, even if you do absolutely nothing with your life. Just dump everything in a diversified portfolio and you become an infinite money printer when you reach the point of having enough money that all your expanses are small relative to your capital gains.

This issue radically distorts the concept of who is contributing to society and who is living off the contributions of others.

OTOH that same unequal distribution allows investment and patronage in areas that would otherwise go unfunded, ... some of which goes on to create revolutionary technologies that benefit everyone.

I think the topic of an unequal distribution is somewhat different than somebody earning tremendous amounts of money in exchange for doing literally nothing. It can lead to it of course, but I think that even if we put a million people, from birth, on an island with absolutely identical initial conditions - give the islanders a few generations, and there would be people doing dramatically better than others. I don't really see a problem with this.

The point I was making is that tax receipts don't really tell you much of anything about who's contributing to society. For instance farmers tend to be living close to broke and are typical recipients of various assistance programs. By contrast the Waltons have paid more in tax than most people will earn in their lifetime, many times over. Nonetheless, the world wouldn't even notice if the Waltons, and all like them, suddenly disappeared - whereas there'd be a catastrophic effect were the same to happen to even a tiny fraction of farmers.

In a way the current system is sort of like a privatized deflationary system. Your money becomes worth more over time, but only if you're wealthy enough to buy this privilege. For everybody else, inflation makes their money, and frequently their earnings, only decrease over time. And I think this is highly undesirable, even for somebody 100% okay with inequality.

Ok, now go on YouTube and search for root bug, since you're so keen on bugs.

I can't speak to places outside of the Western Anglosphere, because I simply don't have any information about them—but within it, it's abundantly clear (and there have been some recent studies bearing this out) that a major cause of reduced birth rates is lack of economic opportunity among the non-capital-owning classes.

I 100% guarantee you that if we implemented a full UBI today—one that would pay something close to the median individual income, and even if it were only for adults (and thus you got no "bonus" for having extra kids)—once the initial chaos settled down, you'd see those birth rates go up quite a bit. So many people are waiting to have kids until they're financially stable enough...and then they never become so.

I know that one of the big reasons my wife and I didn't have kids in our 20s was because we were concerned about our financial stability (and frankly, we were better off than most of the people that age today—by quite a ways, since we were homeowners).

Having a Scandinavian perspective on this, where birthrates also have fallen a lot recently, I don't think financial stability is the only factor. In my experience ppl here don't wait with having kids so long due to lack of money. With the social safety net we have here, free healthcare and education, paid parental leave etc, you are fine as long as you have a decent job. The reason that ppl wait until they are 35+ to get kids is rather that they want to do other shit first and just stay "young" longer and don't want the responsibility. Having kids is just not that important for ppl so they wait until they are kind of bored of other things and then they are often suddenly too old, or fail to find a good partner, or just don't want the responsibility.

Africa has TFR 4.1

For now, yes. It’s trending down, just like everywhere else.

Israel is trending up, TFR of >3.

They have actually turned their low birth rates around after a period of low rates. They are a sign that this trend of declining birth rates is not eternal and can be reversed.

The truth is that woman, given a informed choice without societal or religious pressure - would rather not have children. So artificial wombs and AI for raising it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_womb

Is this a good solution? No. But its a foreseeable feasible one that does not involve slavery. Which, lets not kid ourselves, the migration approach is also. Just outsourced slavery.

Of course, societal status and contract-control functions that were allocating resources and value to woman would have to be reevaluated - as what remains is a faction of the population unwilling to contribute anything but terrorist movements trying to take over because that urge for societal control and fear of non-power is to strong.

No criticism of you, nor do I want to put words in your mouth, but there seems to be a generalisation to 'all woman' in this argument, and from that an unstated assumption that the only way for humanity to preserve itself is something like artificial wombs/coercion etc. Surely another possible scenario is that the people that aren't interested in having children (or the conditions that make people not want to have children) will 'go away' as the population declines, and we will reach a new stable population level? Who can say which one of these is more likely?

That opens just the next can of worm- with self-selecting for non-rationality in a population. Just letting the thing run its course is basically a eugenics program against rational people. Its basically the enlightenment weeding itself out, which i would find sad, liking the civilization i reside in.

> [P]eople that aren't interested in having children will 'go away' as the population declines, and we will reach a new stable population level?

I think this is exactly what we're seeing. This is evolution as a punctuated equilibrium. Nature's last trick "sex feels good (but also leads to babies)" is breaking down in effectiveness on people. Instead, it will be some innate desire to have children that will carry some subpopulation forward. Given the extremely strong selection pressure on (it affects the one life event most determinative of "evolutionary success") this could happen really quickly.

I don’t think that’s necessarily true — people have fewer kids than they desire. Addressing that gap would get us to replacement rate. And obviously, the current rate is significantly non-zero.

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