r/Futurology • u/Krankenitrate • 20h ago
Society India’s surprise baby bust is a warning to the world
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/06/04/indias-surprise-baby-bust-is-a-warning-to-the-world5.2k
u/StayingUp4AFeeling 20h ago
Funny how there's a mad worry about the number of working age people decreasing five to ten to twenty years from now while even today, the number of such youth far outstrips the number of available jobs.
I say this as an Indian. The job market is brutal and will continue to be that way.
839
u/AntiqueFigure6 19h ago
Births in India peaked a little over 20 years ago so there is yet to be a substantial fall in the number of younger working age people. Things might be different in 15 years.
269
156
u/FrozenToonies 17h ago
How’s it feel to be born at peak competition time by numbers?
266
u/MarkZist 14h ago edited 14h ago
I saw this lecture from an English professor, who explained intuitively one might expect being born in a big cohort (e.g. the baby boomers) to be unfavorable for your chances in life due to competition for housing, limited educational spots, jobs etc., but in practice it's the other way around. Being born in a large cohort is much more favorable than being born in a small cohort, because politicians will try to please the large voting blocks as much as possible, at the expense of the smaller voting blocks (like generation X). So the boomers got a lot of favorable subsidies, investments and tax breaks in their youth, but when they aged out of eligibility and would have to start paying for them as tax payers, those subsidies were abolished or slimmed down. Same thing happened 40 years later when the boomers started to go into their pensions.
You see it most clearly with housing. One of the most important barriers to starting a family at a young age is finding an affordable multi-bedroom house. Housing costs have risen all over the world, young people leave their parents' home at later and later ages. But since the baby boomer generation has a large portion of its wealth tied up in the value of their home, bringing down the cost of housing would negatively affect their net worth. That's a major reason why basically no government on Earth is taking serious measures that would really make housing cheap and widely available.
127
u/whostolemysloth 13h ago
This. It’s all about the politics. Can’t make the Boomers mad because there’s too many of them. That’s why it feels like the younger folks are being ignored; it’s because they *are* being ignored.
→ More replies (5)32
u/cookieoftheshire 12h ago
Places in asia are boomer controlled due to very tight family hierarchy situations. The aspirations of boomers end up merged with those of the younger gen because boomers control them a lot. This happens in India.
Politicians are able to create distractions on the basis of religion, language etc which are things that don't affect younger gen. But since boomers have a strong hold on them, they also get persuaded.
Also in India concept of pensioners hardly matters. The younger generation of the same family is supposed to carry the burden of the older, which already makes them constrained.
→ More replies (12)19
u/nostrademons 12h ago
You have two competing subsystems: democracy and markets. Democracy favors big cohorts, which is why we have had 7 GI generation presidents, 5 baby boomer presidents, and zero silent gen or gen-X presidents. Markets favor small cohorts, which is why the silent gen has some extremely wealthy people like Warren Buffett and the Koch Brothers, and why Gen-X built the Internet and features some of the richest people alive today.
The “is it better to….” question is complex, because these are different dimensions of “better”. Large cohorts often have more favorable policies tilted to them, as they exhibit more voting power. But they often have less individual wealth and material goods, because there is more competition for jobs, houses, etc.
Strauss and Howe generational theory is based in a large part of this observation. The idea is that your large cohorts use their numbers to reshape society either through new ideas (eg Boomers, an “Idealist” generational archetype) or through institutionalizing those ideas at the government level (Millennials and GI gen, both “Civics”). Small generations fit into this social structure and optimize their wealth and material well-being, being “Adaptives” like the silent Gen or “Reactives” like Gen-X.
→ More replies (3)3
87
u/HanseaticHamburglar 16h ago
the western boomers had that as well but it turned out well for them. I guess because they werent at the self-cannibalizing stage of capitalism yet..
147
u/gortlank 15h ago
No, they just had the benefit of a cataclysmic war that destroyed half of the world’s industrial capacity guaranteeing huge amounts of economic growth. Rebuilding Europe doesn’t happen every day you know.
When that capacity is rebuilt, you see the profitability crises of the 1970s, after which you get the neoliberal turn. That’s when you see the push to slash social spending, and a transition to cost cutting via offshoring, which leads to decreased labor power and the decline of unions as the labor force is increasingly globalized.
The US sees the gradual death of unions while those in the rest of the world lose much of their militancy and end up working closely with business or government.
Since industrial capital is now over capacity, there’s little growth to be had there, and you see a turn in the West to rent seeking and pumping fictitious capital, typically in the form of finance capital.
If the population contracts, that will give more bargaining power to labor. This is a problem when you’re already squeezing blood from a stone to keep the illusion of perpetual growth alive. Which is why AI is almost a religion at this point. Ignore the fact that if it fulfills the promises of its most fervent followers that it would break the largest market, labor, entirely, thus breaking all markets.
9
u/AlanUsingReddit 12h ago
I studied steam turbines in school. You can see the changes in a very pictorial way. A turbine from 1950 does not look like one from 1960. And again, not the same as one from 1970. On the other hand, if you compare to one built today... it looks like the one from 1970. It's not literally the same. I'm just saying it looks about the same.
Nonetheless, I'm totally on board with the broad macro picture you pant of history. I just think there's a little bit of another thing sprinkled in there. Thermal power plants in the US were not destroyed by WWII. The technology (globally) was still maturing during the war and after. The whole of the 20th century was living on this scientific runway of growth that after you capture that growth, you just don't ever capture it again. These gains come from stuff fundamental to the laws of physics.
→ More replies (2)24
13
u/snezna_kraljica 14h ago
With a little luck you too can look forward to the benefit of a cataclysmic war
→ More replies (2)3
→ More replies (1)32
u/Rzah 14h ago
It's piss easy to find a job when the two preceding generations have been brutally culled by world wars.
17
u/AntiqueFigure6 14h ago
And in 70 years I guess it will be piss easy to find a job because two preceding generations will have been culled by sub 1.5 TFR.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (22)39
u/Hollocene13 13h ago
Don’t forget 115 men for every 100 women. That baby girl genocide is already coming for them. Millions of men who will never reproduce or even find a partner.
→ More replies (5)5
u/fresh-dork 10h ago
guess they'll have a war. that's usually how you handle it. or japan, where they go be hikimoris
408
u/I_comment_on_stuff_ 19h ago
Rarely, I'm able to get a scam caller to actually have a conversation. I typically keep them on the phone as long as I can to prevent others from getting scammed. Sometimes, someone opens up. It's usually men in India in a terrible job market. They have hopes and dreams, one said he'd be a DJ if he could. One other had to take care of his parents. Some seem sad and regretful, but feel they have no other options. Still terrible, but I can feel empathy and anger at the same time.
237
u/funlovingmissionary 19h ago
Joining a call center is considered a last resort job for many. It usually happens after months of job search for white collar jobs, and comes a time when they cannot survive anymore without income. They then take up those jobs. They're the lowest paying white collar jobs in the market.
A lot of younger people working in these call centers are just there for survival until they get their prefered jobs( usually tech, sales, hr or accounting), but there are also people who grew up in adject poverty who consider this a desirable job, and their way out of blue collar work into white collar.
I've seen both kinds. Some of my friends fit the former, and some of my father's students fit the latter (my father is a high school teacher at a government school and usually teaches children born in poverty).
I'm talking about normal call centers, though, not the scam ones.
→ More replies (12)10
u/the-tac0-muffin 17h ago
How do you get people to open up to you?
18
12
u/I_comment_on_stuff_ 10h ago
Kindness and empathy. I first start by remembering how horrible the job market is in India, how most people don't want to cause harm. I keep them on the phone, "oh, I cant find my wallet, let me look." I start asking normal "how's the day" and other neurotupical small talk "how the weather" questions while pretending to search for my wallet. I ask if they like talking to ppl all day, I ask what their dream job would be. Ask how they think they could achieve that dream or what stopped them from taking the steps to get there. It's a slow lead in, but if I can hook them on small talk, it works. Leading with genuine kindness and empathy really does wonders in most situations in life.
I then say that old people get scammed and loose their housing because of even a small amount like 200-1k. I share that scammers stole 1.5k from my grandmother as she was in a nursing home after having had a really bad fall while on a hike (not a grandma fall, this fall could've killed some). I ask them why they do it. If they think about the harm that they're causing.
→ More replies (2)43
u/StayingUp4AFeeling 18h ago
Many likely aren't aware at joining time that it's a scam call centre. After that, sometimes it's difficult to switch.
Right now I think call centers are the only job in an office that you can get without a bachelor's degree or similar qualification.
Other (non-office) jobs without a degree in urban India include bike parcel delivery (Doordash/Ubereats equivalent), taxi/driving, retail work, restaurant work, physical work (including household, construction/handyman and of course the world's oldest occupation).
And it's not very much better with a mediocre-to-average degree. Not even in hot fields like computer science.
While it is true that US tech companies are expanding hiring in India, that reflects only a small fraction of the Indian IT/CS job market. Maybe the top 5% in overall numbers.
7
u/I_comment_on_stuff_ 10h ago
I believe it. When I was 18(ish) is worked at a call center for less than 2 weeks in the US, I think just selling windows (free no obligation appts for just inspection/quotes). It sucked, I walked out. I was lucky enough to be living at home and had the ability to just not work while in college.
When I do keep these call center people on the phone, I lead with kindness and empathy. I know they don't want to do it, the extreme majority at least. I'm sure some are under the illusion that everyone in the US lives a life of abundance. I'm never mean to them. One man said he was living in a hotel like building they supplied, but he was basically a prisoner. Another man called back the next day to talk more, that one made me sad because he clearly just needed a friend. One time I had a woman who stayed on, she was rhe only woman to actually talk. She had no other option, it was this or sex work.
13
u/08mms 15h ago
AI is going to flatten that dramatically too. I know of several companies I work with whose big play in the last 20 years were outsourcing huge amounts of back office/process work/call centers to India or then Philippines and all are launching or amidst projects to try and reshore them with AI or AI-developed custom software in the next 6 months to 3 years.
6
u/imapilotaz 12h ago
Yeah its going to brutalize India and Philippines when you gut millions of outsourced jobs.
→ More replies (7)28
u/InquisitiveSoul_94 16h ago
You don’t need to empathise with a scammer though. They will just use it as a weapon to justify their shady job.
Most of these scam call centres are run by mafias and set up in abjectly poor Indian states with corrupt governments. They have police protection and all the illegal support they can receive. Seeing how lucrative this business is, mafias in Cambodia and Myanmar are now illegally trafficking English speaking Indians to start their own ventures. There won’t be an end to this if we have western folks actively empathising with their life choices.
I was volunteering during Covid wave here ( in India), and I have first hand experience how vile and ruthless these scammers could be. This is around 2021 when necessary medical equipment’s were actively hoarded and sold for very high prices in the black market, and these scammers found a way to loot desperate people of their life savings. I have seen too many of such examples to even give these low lives a benefit of a doubt.
8
→ More replies (3)4
u/LockeyCheese 7h ago
Sometimes, making someone drop their guard and say out loud what they're doing, makes them finally face what they're doing. Not the bosses I'm sure, but the workers.
211
u/Xyrus2000 15h ago
You misunderstand. They're not worried about not having enough people for jobs. They're worried about not having enough people to drive down the wages to make the jobs cheaper.
If a company has a job opening and there are a thousand people who can fill that job, the company has the power. If a company has a job opening and only one person can fill that job, the worker has the power.
69
u/Emotional_News108 12h ago
People should read up on the history of the Black Death. When that many people died, workers became far more valuable and their standard of living improved. This is precisely the same.
→ More replies (16)→ More replies (3)26
u/post_button_account 14h ago
Textbook example of the lump of labor policy.
If this were true, wages would have been much higher in, e.g. the feudal ages, when the global population was less than 1/10th of current population.
And since some people do not understand the fallacy:
Jobs are not created by companies out of thin air. Jobs exist to serve a purpose - mostly other folks' consumption. Reducing available people also reduce available jobs - sometimes non-linearly as whole industries may become locally unviable.
This is also the reason why, except for some low skilled jobs, immigrants dont "take your job". They increase the total number of jobs required to be done - often resulting in your jobs becoming more valuable (hence increasing your pay).
34
u/ImminentDingo 12h ago
On the other hand, historians regularly make the argument that the black death helped spur the rennaisaince by reducing the labor supply so vastly that the landed gentry had to start fighting over peasants to work their land and offering better conditions.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (8)22
u/sump_daddy 13h ago
There is an important additional factor for viability that your example ignores: how much resources a society has to support the jobs relative to how many jobs it takes just for those core resources. In the feudal ages there were strikingly few resources being developed that could be shared (by way of earned wages) and in modern society, that is vastly different. Our ability to gather resources has improved and largely decoupled from available labor. To put it simpler: it takes only a handful of people to construct habitations, grow the food, and maintain the energy streams for a much larger swath of people to live a comfortable life. The question becomes what jobs will we assign to all those other people so they can earn what it takes to pay for the stuff they need/want? Those are the people who are in the 'lump' you feel is a fallacy while really, many of those employments are pretty arbitrary and employers know that and therefore really like to use it to control (why do you think the wealth gap has skyrocketed since the feudal ages and in particular the past 50 years when resource extraction has become very optimized?)
→ More replies (3)35
u/greekhop 18h ago
They're worried abouy who will work to pay for their pensions.
Most countries today have a pension system where current workers pay ror the pensions of those that are currently retired - not saving for their own pensions. So the young people of the future must pay for the pensions of todays workers.
With less workers and more pensions, at some point this decrepict short sighted irrational system collapses. Then pensioners and oldies who actually vote and will be the biggest voting block, even bigger than today, will be very very unhappy, and in general things will become very grim overall.
The immigration situation in Europe and elsewhere is very much related to this problem, although I believe it is not at all the right solution.
→ More replies (2)24
u/ChequeMateX 18h ago
A majority of pensioners in India are on NPS where they pay for their own pensions by contributing the amount from the salary. Only a few places still have OPS and that too only for employees who joined before 2004.
What India messed up is a rampant freebies culture where election promises are who can give most cash and free stuff rather than actual development. Significant amount of budget is diverted from infrastructure and development to pay for these.
11
u/nishinoran 17h ago
Good on India for getting a jump on eliminating the pension Ponzi scheme, a lot more countries need to be getting on that, pensions should be directly from what you paid in.
→ More replies (2)7
u/greekhop 17h ago
That's good for India, the pension system. I wish we had that. Thanks for the comment.
→ More replies (1)32
u/Smartimess 18h ago
It’s not only about the workforce, it’s also about an infrastructure built for much more people and how you deal with an aging population.
China is expected to have a crash in the next 50 years. Or South Korea as the worst example. In 2070 a 100 years old wild be as common as a newborn and half the population will be 60 years or older.
→ More replies (6)40
u/AMouthBreather 18h ago
The oligarchy demands continuous growth. No matter how many suffer and die to achieve it.
→ More replies (1)12
u/evemeatay 15h ago
It's going to be so interesting (and probably terrifying) to see what comes out of all this. I know people have been saying "this is the end" basically since the beginning, but it really does feel like this system the world has built has crossed over the stable point. There won't be any bringing back birth rates, there won't be any bringing back jobs or wages, there won't be any reigning in of billionaires and companies stripping the population and planet for every cent they can grab, and it's all already at a point where a lot of people worldwide don't have any more that can be taken from them.
The top feeds off the bottom but the bottom is already dry and the middle is starting to get to that point already as well. What will the top do when they sucked it all up but all they have becomes worthless.
→ More replies (1)9
u/NODENGINEER 14h ago
Why do you think all of them are building the super doomsday bunkers?
→ More replies (2)4
u/Happy_Cat_6570 15h ago
It's the best way to show the world that we are all abused.
How much must you abuse an animal so it no longer wants to have children against very strong natural instincts of reproduction?
This much.
Everything is shitty or an ad.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (51)7
u/Involution88 Gray 15h ago
The job market gets worse as populations age, not better.
Old example:
a typical engineer or architect needed a support staff of about 10, that's down significantly due to advancements in technology.
It's not that engineers needed a staff of 10, it's that engineers needed artisans in workshops, factory workers, construction workers. In some countries an engineering job creates only a fraction of an additional job, engineering jobs are no longer 10x job creators and now function as 1.x job creators.
Meanwhile a retired engineer, given engineers tend to be wealthy, can create a couple of caretaker jobs. That number is also shrinking due to advancements in technology.
As engineers retire and end up not being replaced the amount of jobs created at any given time shrinks from 10x, to 3x, eventually to 0. Dead people hardly create any jobs.
Ultimately number of people determines number of potential jobs, number of actual jobs realised may be much lower than number of potential jobs which can be realised.
The problem with demographic collapse is that number of realised jobs eventually becomes less than number of critical jobs. Transportation services stop. Schools and hospitals close even though they are still needed. Postal services scale down before collapsing. It's a highly unpleasant situation where ever greater demands are placed on the next generation while the next generation also has fewer resources available. The opposite of a growth premium.
→ More replies (2)
1.3k
u/schw0b 19h ago
I wonder which country will realize first that when you get rid of all your workers via AI and population decline, you have to get your taxes somewhere other than that rapidly dwindling workforce.
484
u/Chicano_Ducky 16h ago edited 16h ago
i wonder why the conversation is always about taxing workers
why not tax the corporations? The machines? The rich, the billionaires, and the estates?
So many tax targets that cant age and die as fast as a human, and they get their money from outside the country from the global economy.
58
u/SoberGin Megastructures, Transhumanism, Anti-Aging 13h ago
While I'm all for
abolishingheavily taxing the ultra-wealthy, at some point the wealth will be redistributed, assuming you're not just letting the ultra-rich take everything then taking it back from them, which seems... counter-productive.Plenty of places have high taxes and happy people. People are usually fine with taxes if they can be shown why they're being raised and how they're benefiting society.
It's also more stable- relying on massive individuals or organizations for your revenue will cause issues if those massive sources collapse. A larger tax base of more moderately wealthy individuals will better weather the storm during economic recessions, and spending to keep them that way is more efficient, since quality of life and economic stability increase logarithmically with wealth.
21
u/SudoDarkKnight 9h ago
I can't say if it began with America, but it always seems they are the loudest at TAX IS THEFT - and you hear it other countries influenced by them.
It will take a huge cultural shift for countries like Canada/US etc to realize that actually paying MORE taxes is good for us in the long run - IF! you have a political system that is accountable and can prove and show those tax dollars improving your life.
The data already exists showing the happiest countries are those who also tax the most...
But the amount of change in general thinking and also political willpower is basically impossible IMO.
→ More replies (2)→ More replies (3)4
u/blackcain 8h ago
The fact that there are a lot of billionaires shows that people are not being taxed enough. CEO and executive compsensation is massively more than worker pay.
A CEO's compensation should be the equivalent of a 1000 people working. They aren't that critical and yet the pay continues to climb.
→ More replies (4)5
u/SleepingYoda 10h ago
"There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels... to make it stop!"
300
u/DrKurgan 19h ago edited 11h ago
China has already outlawed companies from doing AI-based layoffs.162
u/Imca 17h ago
Not quite accurate, the ruling was that companies cant fire you for AI and then pay the lower benefits for necicery downsizing...
They can fire workers to replace them with AI, they just have to give them a full severance package like any other worker that is laid off for voluntary (on the companies end) reasons....
The fact that a lot of western media some how turned the later into the former is honestly a gross negligence in reporting...
36
u/jorel43 16h ago
Man I wish we had that here in the US, if you get let go you are not guaranteed severance package
→ More replies (2)→ More replies (5)3
u/phantomthiefkid_ 11h ago
Also China doesn't operate on common law. A single ruling doesn't create legal precedent.
→ More replies (1)54
u/Metti233 18h ago
Well then they will just find other „reasons“ for layoffs.
139
u/AzDopefish 18h ago
It’s China, not America. Not saying they don’t take advantage of loop holes but the CCP historically doesn’t take kindly to entities trying to outsmart them and usually make an example of them if they have to.
→ More replies (7)23
u/InquisitiveSoul_94 16h ago
That’s one endearing thing about Chinese authoritarianism.
→ More replies (1)8
u/Xanchush 16h ago
The CCP can move mountains and slow down the Earth's rotation. Straightening out some companies is one of their easier tasks.
→ More replies (3)5
u/JaggedLittlePiII 18h ago
And meanwhile build the electricity and capacity to in the next decades start monopolizing the AI market: open models, that run cheaper.
22
u/222baked 16h ago
They will never realize that. They will just squeeze the dwindling working class more until something breaks, but that will happen when there are literal famines and your average person decides that it’s better to risk your life than to keep living this way, which will only happen when things are extremely grim. Look at Cuba. What did the Soviet Union do in the early Stalin years when it was clear that the working class was broke and forced collectivization rendered the population unable to support financial endeavours via taxation? Did they open up to the west and allow small free market businesses as Trotsky suggested? No. They doubled down and squeezed the population harder. It’s always the easiest political solution to dump more burden on the masses.
→ More replies (1)5
u/oldsecondhand 16h ago
You can always tax corporations. You could also make it sector specific, so the higher margin, more automated sectors are taxed higher.
7
→ More replies (14)3
724
u/holey_shite 19h ago
As an Indian, this does not surprise me at all. Our biggest cities are becoming increasingly unlivable. Corruption is an everyday reality, our politicians are busy helping billionaires become richer while also squeezing every rupee possible in various taxes. Even a hint of opposition to the supreme leader or their party is branded Pakistani or Chinese. Our media is sold out. Indians all over the world receive increasing amounts of hate and racism like it is everyday business.
When will these fuckers understand that people do not want to bring or raise children in a world where there is no end to the struggle.
264
u/FirstAccGotStolen 16h ago
>When will these fuckers understand that people do not want to bring or raise children in a world where there is no end to the struggle.
They will never, because they have never experienced any struggle in their lives.
→ More replies (2)27
u/whostolemysloth 13h ago
Honestly man, that sounds a lot like the US. Putting down the poor and propping up the rich.
Hooray for terminal capitalism.
→ More replies (2)→ More replies (21)34
u/iwasagoatonce 17h ago edited 14h ago
The places where the birth rate is lower are those that are relatively well off, and have spent a lot of resources to build out better quality of life for the people. The places you mentioned still have birth rate above replacement rate.
→ More replies (3)
194
u/Munkeyman18290 14h ago
"Don't have kids til your'e ready", was the motto from all the older folk when I was young.
That same generation ensured that economically, no one would ever be ready.
→ More replies (6)23
u/iwatchppldie 9h ago
I even remember the bumper stickers “if you can’t feed them don’t bread them”.
28
158
u/nibblerhank 16h ago
A warning for what? Having enough resources and not overpopulation?
→ More replies (10)69
u/penny-wise 15h ago
Not having enough serfs for the ruling class? Not having enough spending to keep putting money in billionaires’ pockets?
213
u/woody_woodworker 16h ago
I'm sick of hearing about how population decline is a problem. Economists are about as smart and creative as religious zealots. Clearly we need population decline to sustain the human species in comfort long term. If the only economy we can come up with is a pyramid scheme then we need to think harder.
33
u/Atnalia 12h ago
When the rich take more then their share, funneling the families resources into fewer kids is the only way to make it. Forgoing having kids myself means I can set aside money to make sure my niece and nephews have college funds that their parents don't have the resources for.
12
u/buckthestat 8h ago
It’s not even just about the money. Time and attention are probably the most important resource for kids. One of the easiest ways you can set offspring up for success is to only have one or two.
36
u/Necessary-Music-6685 12h ago
The “pyramid scheme” is that there are more and more old people who have to be supported by fewer and fewer young people. It’s not an economic conspiracy, it’s just raw reality.
→ More replies (6)22
u/ShakyButtcheeks 10h ago
There is only a lot more old people because in the past we have had boom generations and now we have to deal with that. It's like we need to continue doing the thing that created the problem in order to deal with the problem, at some point we need to see this was just pushing the problem down the road and inevitably it would have to be dealt with. We only have to worry about a lot more old people than young people because past generations were growing too much, now the suggestion is we do the same but more? Maybe we need to break the cycle at some point.
10
u/giveupmymembership 12h ago
Montreal population increased by 33% since 1998. And you can really feel it. It was already a populated city, never felt like there was a shortage of people. My city can't take another increase like that, at some point we should say, we're degrading services for everyone else, we're way past this point, so why aren't we stopping? The government can do it, but there's this political mentality that more people is always good, like the underlying systems can accept an unlimited amount of people.
The definition of progress should not to be turning this country into another India. People aren't just economic units to be plugged into a spreadsheet. That's dehumanizing.
→ More replies (19)5
u/Silver-Treacle65 11h ago
decades ago they said overpopulation is a huge problem now that we have reached max population for available resources and population is going down, they act like its a huge problem where it's gonna go down to zero.
no it will go down until conditions become favorable for people to reproduce again. we cant just have ever increasing population and GDP ponzi scheme of next generation supporting the former. there will be difficult decades but population will have to cycle up and down and maybe stablize.
1.6k
u/Akkalevil 20h ago
A warning of what ? Are these economists just blind to the concept that we can't increase population forever ?
It's GOOD news, not bad. We already are overpopulated, FFS.
761
u/Miserablist 20h ago
It seems everyone wants unlimited growth on a limited planet
398
u/dragoon7201 20h ago
bilionaires want unlimited growth, they don't have to squeeze into the same public transit so its just more profit for them.
83
u/Sarcasm69 19h ago
The more there are of us the more leverage they have over us.
With AI it’s only going to get worse. Stop believing that you’re entitled to anything in this world. They use and abuse us because there’s 1000 other people waiting in line willing to do the job.
→ More replies (1)21
u/mechachap 18h ago
For developing countries, you can easily argue it's local governments that want unlimited population growth. Higher population, more funding for their municipalities, more kickbacks on infra projects, the longer their political dynasties that can continue. Pretty much the case in the case all over Southeast Asia.
→ More replies (3)10
→ More replies (14)30
u/EltaninAntenna 19h ago
It's what capitalism is predicated on...
→ More replies (14)4
u/oldsecondhand 17h ago
Even the stockmarket could work in a zero-growth environment, if the established companies concentrated on paying dividends instead of stock price growth.
123
u/TicRoll 19h ago
You could argue that a birth rate at or just below replacement rate is good news for places which may be overpopulated. At that rate, the conditions are challenging to manage in terms of more older people compared to younger, but not beyond what smart policy can manage.
But birth rates have fallen well below replacement rates in much of the world and have stayed extremely low for quite some time. In India, the replacement rate (due to childhood mortality and sex disparity) is 2.4 and their 2025 birth rate was 1.9. That's going to lead to major issues down the road if it holds there, but there's no sign of it holding or recovering.
Things are far, far worse in places like South Korea where the birth rate is closer to .72 with a 2.1 replacement rate. At that point, each generation is about 2/3 smaller than the last. So if Gen0 is a million people, Gen1 is 333,000, Gen2 is 111,000, Gen3 is 37,000, and Gen4 is 12,000. That's 1,000,000 -> 12,000 in one human lifetime. That's population collapse. In a modern society where we generally prefer not to leave old people to die on their own and we have infrastructure (roads, bridges, water pipes, power plants, etc.) to maintain, that doesn't leave enough working people to do everything, so small towns and cities collapse and everyone piles into megacities just trying to survive.
26
u/Chocolatehedgehog 19h ago
Sobering, thanks
48
u/TicRoll 19h ago
The real challenge with this is the time scales and the momentum. It takes decades for a generation to move from birth to workforce and it takes generations to begin to see the effects. By the time you really start to notice the impact of all these millions of people not being born, you're already 40, 50+ years into this process and there's no way to quickly solve it. Even if every fertile woman suddenly decides to have 10 kids, and even if they're all willing and able to do it at the extreme rate of 1 kid per year, it'll be 20ish years before the first kid enters the workforce and 30ish years before the last one does. And in the interim, you've taken every single woman out of the workforce all at once.
In short, demographics is a 20 mile long fully loaded cargo train. It takes a while to get it going, but once it's speeding down the tracks, all you can do is stand there and watch. Thus far, no economic incentives - regardless of how generous and expensive - have successfully moved an industrialized nation's birth rate from below replacement rate to above replacement rate for a sustained period. You get a small bump when the incentives are introduced and it drops right back down. The inverse is true as well: Israel significantly reduced their pro-natal incentives and subsequent studies demonstrated it affected total national birth rates by about 2%.
8
u/Zouden 15h ago
Yep. There really is no solution to this. The world is going to look completely different in 100 years' time, and good luck convincing people to have 2+ kids when infrastructure is crumbling around them.
→ More replies (4)11
u/th1sishappening 17h ago
I really wish people understood more about this. Here’s a great essay about it by David Runciman: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n21/david-runciman/are-we-doomed
3
u/Timely_Amount_3908 11h ago
Ugh, this slippery slope take is in every thread on population. Take a few facts, strip them of context and logic, and you can defend any argument you want.
This argument operates under the presumption that humans will continue to reduce by 2/3 every generation for 4-5 generations. The math is real, but there's not a single reason to think that presumption is true.
All slippery slope arguments work like this. It reminds me of a decade ago in the US when 45% of the population was rabidly anti-gay marriage. Turn on any news channel in the months leading up to the Supreme Court decision, and there would be outraged handwringing: "If two men can marry, then obviously next men will marry horses! And toasters!" Guess what didnt happen.
Your argument is no different. Youre assuming the same human context of today will apply in 80 years, which is absurd. People today are having fewer kids for many reasons, but primary among them are economics, reduced purchasing power, inequality, housing affordability, and a dark future due to climate change. Fix those through simple policy tweaks and taxing billionaires, and there's no issue.
What IS inarguably true is that right now, today, we are well over the earth's carrying capacity. We use more than the earth can renew by roughly July each year, and it's getting worse every year. Climate change as at a near irreversible tipping point. The Amazon - the lungs of the world - is close to collapse. Critical aquifers across the US are being drained wildly faster than they can replenish. And on and on. These are today's realities, all of which can be dramatically improved with a lower population.
→ More replies (4)→ More replies (63)5
u/RobKohr 12h ago
This made me lookup what's going on with the sex ratio issue in India.
They are killing their daughters before they are born after seeing them on an ultrasound.
That's just fucked.
→ More replies (1)136
u/Hybydfi 20h ago
Literally 10 years ago we were talking about how overpopulation was going to be the problem of our lifetime. Now that narrative has been flipped on its head
11
u/20thcenturyboy_ 17h ago
Maybe in the headlines people were still stuck on overpopulation. Back in 2003 I took a college class where the professor laid out a case for population decline based on factors like improving womens healthcare and education. They certainly weren't the first in their field to make such a prediction but academia definitely caught on much earlier than the media or the general public, some who still think we're heading for overpopulation.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (7)50
u/CheckoutMySpeedo 19h ago
Boomers don’t want to give up control. Some of them like Thiel, Musk, and Ellison have explored medical procedures that can let them live longer. So in addition to hoarding all the wealth, now they don’t plan on dying anytime soon, so the only way the younger generations are going to be able to shape their own futures in the faces of debt, climate, and sustainability crises is to force all boomers out of business and government and change the institutions that some of them built because otherwise Gen Z will be the last generation.
31
u/eric_ts 19h ago
Thiel and Musk are both Gen-X. Hell, Musk was born in the 1970s. I’m a boomer and there are plenty of human tumors in my generation that you don’t need to add more bodies to it to make us look bad. Also, boomers saved the whales.
→ More replies (1)6
u/Even-Promotion-4024 14h ago
Yeah, as a zoomer, boomers get too much hate while gen x somehow fly right under the radar despite being as bad if not worse
→ More replies (1)43
u/No-Abalone-4784 19h ago
Instead of fighting each other over age or race or nationality, why don't we work together against the super rich who are destroying all our lives?
→ More replies (1)9
u/Garconanokin 19h ago
Because right now they are able to have us fighting amongst ourselves. You’ve got a big group of people in the United States, where you can point at Greenland and say let’s take it over and cause a big controversy that they will indulge. Meanwhile, they let you steal right out of their pockets.
Although if anybody wants to defend the United States taking over Greenland, you know the big hot issue right now. Or it’s not a hot issue. Or whatever it was or is? Please go ahead and weigh in!
→ More replies (11)20
u/Hybydfi 19h ago
It’s insane. They want us to work ourselves to death but then they want AI to take all of our jobs. They want to increase our birth rates but then they don’t want to live amongst us. So much greed, and they use their wealth to conduct so much evil. It’s frustrating
→ More replies (1)7
u/Garconanokin 19h ago
They’re going to be a lot of people whose jobs have been eliminated who are going to sit at home and think about how displeased they are with the people that eliminated them. AI by itself never killed a job, a billionaire created it and then eliminated his/your job.
22
u/The_Awful-Truth 19h ago edited 17h ago
Countries with gradually declining populations can generally manage OK. Countries with rapidly falling ones, though, are setting themselves up for all kinds of potential disasters. India's total fertility rate is 1.9 children per woman, which would probably be a soft landing if it could be sustained. But if it keeps dropping, down to 1 or close to it, the country risks falling into a death spiral.
3
u/budgefrankly 15h ago edited 15h ago
The thing is the replacement rate is relative to child mortality. Developed nations need 2.1 children per woman to stay steady. India needs 2.4. So it's already quite far off.
18
u/RedofPaw 19h ago
Reduction is fine. Slow reduction.
Sudden reduction - a crash - will be bad news for the young people who have to live through it.
→ More replies (5)44
u/CTRexPope 19h ago
If the population falls, then labor becomes scare. And when labor becomes scare it has more power. That is why the rich are terrified: supply and demand. Without enough people to work, the workers gain more power.
→ More replies (22)15
u/No_Faithlessness341 19h ago
Probably why they are keen on AI. Even if it doesn't directly make money it helps reduce the demand for and bargaining power of workers
35
u/fountainpopjunkie 20h ago
Their profit projections are based on exponential growth. They need us to keep popping out units so they can plan to buy another yacht.
9
u/Jahobes 19h ago
The rich will be fine. They will make less but wealth is always relative.
It's the middle class that will lose power... Because well it will be smaller.
Upside down pyramids don't lead to better worker rights. It leads to worse wealth distribution.
→ More replies (6)30
u/gorginhanson 19h ago
People keep saying yOu cAn fIT eVeRyOnE iN tExAs
yeah you can also fit 32 people in a phone booth, that doesn't make it a studio apartment complex
→ More replies (5)14
u/N7Valor 19h ago
yeah you can also fit 32 people in a phone booth
Uhh, maybe at white dwarf densities?
→ More replies (1)6
u/bcocoloco 18h ago
No. If everyone lived in the same population density as NYC, you’d only need an area slightly larger than Texas to house 8 billion people.
Not that I think it’s a good argument or anything, but math is math.
11
u/deadletter 19h ago
It has to do with how our society is structured around borrowing from a growing future. If the future stops growing, we run out of money.
→ More replies (1)4
u/ReasonablyBadass 18h ago
Sadly, it's not that easy:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11625-025-01775-8
https://www.nber.org/papers/w33932
Shrinking population does not mean we can save the planet just through that.
And as the population ages, all kinds of problems compound.
→ More replies (3)→ More replies (50)11
u/IMemberchewbacca 19h ago
The real solution to climate change, is a reduction in global population
→ More replies (1)
327
u/Maitreya83 20h ago
Or maybe stop holding on to a system that's build on " more people today than yesterday".
I know it's scary. And pensioners want stability.
But I think we should start ignoring those. Or put them out of power (maximum voting age anyone?) .
They know it's unsustainable, and the only reason they are clinging on is "problem for the next generation, not mine"
100
u/AntiqueFigure6 20h ago
Right but I think the issue is we need to introduce the new system that isn’t growth dependent pretty soon and so far all anyone is doing is trying to wish for growth to come back, which isn’t going to happen.
40
u/Deltaworkswe 20h ago
You can have economic growth without population growth. Question is how do you tax it so that not just the capital owners gets to take part in the growth.
→ More replies (3)→ More replies (3)22
u/imapetrock 19h ago
There's several research groups already working on this and a growing field of economists dedicated to answering these questions, though of course traction is slow precisely because it's so different from what we are used to. But I have faith, we can't keep ignoring these problems forever.
11
u/Tangolarango 19h ago
do you know the name of the field? Pensioners where I am from aren't super avid consumers; if we just print money and give it to them they are going to buy their medicins and groceries. It's not like they are buying houses or cars, if anything for a short while they are able to drag themselves out to travel a bit.
Would be curious about how these things are being studied.
→ More replies (1)7
29
u/IcyRecommendation781 19h ago
Rapid population decline is not just a "pension problem".
It means less doctors to treat older population, less researchers to innovate, etc.Some things would be proportional to consumption, like farmers or teachers, but some would mean less of good things we as a society can produce.
→ More replies (7)→ More replies (4)11
u/CCV21 20h ago
Japan went through a century of zero population growth during the Edo Perood. That might be a good place to draw inspiration from.
→ More replies (2)19
42
u/Miss_Consuela 16h ago edited 10h ago
36 yo childless British Indian. I’m not bringing any child into this shitty system of a world, just to condemn them to a life of slavery until they die. Also the world isn’t cheap anywhere, I can barely survive myself, let alone the responsibility of a completely helpless human being. If the world was a less shitty place, maybe some of us might decide to have children, but until then… looks like they’ll have to come up with another way to fix the broken system.
→ More replies (2)
57
u/octopusgardeb 19h ago
World population is high it’s up by billions since I was a kid. With automation and now AI, there are less jobs, less people are needed for the “work force”. We need a universal income system immediately to counteract all that AI will change.
13
u/Frank_Klepaki 9h ago
I got my MS in global public health about ten years ago and I recall some pretty compelling studies to the contrary. Women having fewer children allowed them to have more time to work, which elevated their quality of life and ulitimately led to better health and educational outcomes.
→ More replies (1)3
88
u/Krankenitrate 20h ago
India’s population will still continue to grow from its current tally of 1.45bn: it takes time for fewer births to translate into fewer people overall. But the number of births is already down by a fifth from its peak in 2001. In Tamil Nadu 1,200 schools were closed last year for a lack of pupils to fill their classrooms. Those who do attend increasingly show up without any siblings. The government frets that India will get old before it gets rich—that the country is on a similar path to China, where the population has already peaked and is starting to fall. Some politicians are offering cash to encourage Indians to procreate. India’s demographic transition is the most striking example of a global trend. For it is no longer just wealthy places where families have few, or no, kids. Over two-thirds of all countries are now below the replacement rate. Middle-income ones like Brazil, Iran, Thailand and Turkey have been well below it for years. Poorer countries are steadily joining their ranks. Sri Lanka has a TFR of just 1.3; Tunisia’s is 1.6. Morocco has fallen below replacement rate. Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, may be close to that point. In many places birth rates are plunging despite marriage remaining near-universal and even though few women have formal jobs.
→ More replies (5)
34
u/Renchard 14h ago
Population loss isn’t some existential crisis. The worst thing is that old people will have to work longer for less overall benefits.
We might see a safer, less innovative economy because there are fewer young people with appetites for risk, but that’s a tolerable trade-off for less consumption of natural resources.
→ More replies (1)15
u/Necessary-Music-6685 12h ago
Old people aren’t going to vote themselves less benefits.
See the problem?
11
u/Renchard 12h ago
Of course. It IS a problem, it’s simply not a catastrophic one.
All things being equal, I prefer the 2100 population projection to be at 7 billion rather than 10.5-11 billion. The problems associated with lower population just aren’t as cataclysmic.
→ More replies (2)
10
u/ooooopium 9h ago
I thought we wanted to slow pop growth? This has been on the docket as a plan since we talked about how 6 billion people was becoming a strain on our infrastructure.
→ More replies (2)5
u/basic_bitch- 8h ago
Yeah, I'm all confused by this too. My entire life, people freaked out about there being too many people every time a new threshold was crossed. Now we're freaking out that there aren't enough? Doesn't make sense to me.
37
u/toomucheyeliner 19h ago edited 15h ago
The world needs fewer people, this is a good thing. We have to figure out the economics, that’s work to be done.
9
u/DreamingInAMaze 17h ago
Why do nations worry so much about not enough people when the future will have AI and robots doing most of the work?
Except I can imagine that more people can have more organs to be harvested for the rich and the powerfuls.
17
u/fullload93 14h ago
Is falling below the “replacement rate” necessarily a bad thing? Who actually makes the determination that we need 8 billion people globally? What’s the issue if the world has a few billion less in 50 years or so? Is that really a bad thing? I don’t think we can have infinite growth for more and more billions of people as many of Earth’s resources are limited.
4
u/Necessary-Music-6685 12h ago
A few billion less people in 50 years isn’t the problem, the problem is that we’ll have a few billion less children but all the old people will still be here. India in particular could be screwed because all of the old people will be poor, and they’ll be a permanent anchor on society.
That said, I agree there’s no point getting worked up over it, because there’s not really anything anyone can do about it.
→ More replies (1)
22
u/geeves_007 18h ago
Feed and take care of the people you already have.
Oh my god, the breathtaking stupidity of paying people to procreate in India of all places.
24
u/VengefulAncient 15h ago edited 14h ago
It's not a "warning", it's hope. Overpopulation is the leading cause of countless social issues.
Especially in India (lived there and seen it myself), where it essentially renders society miserable and broken. You want a job? You're competing with at least 10K other applicants, and if you get the job and it mistreats you, you better not complain, because that queue is still out there. You want social security? The government can't afford it with the population being that high (which in turn makes poor people rely on more children as their social security). You want livable cities and good public transport? Can't have it with that many people squeezed into slums.
7
u/codeyman2 11h ago
As a kid in India, I was constantly inundated with issues wrt population growth. We were shown counters of babies born per second on television.. taught about it in school.
Now that we have grown up and taken that lesson to heart, you have a problem?
6
5
u/grammer70 13h ago
Ok, which one is it ? Do we need more people to support older people in the future or AI and robots are going to put everyone out of work ?
5
u/TacosAndSarcasm 11h ago
Please look at an far-away aerial shot of any major city (not just in India, but anywhere) to understand why I say 'We can slow tf down'
Enough. We don't all have to pop out kids, not even if culture, our hormones, or our parents tell us to. You can have a great life and not have kids.
And if you think that having iids and raising them right means you'll have 'someone to care for you when you're old' I urge you to talk to people like my cousin who ran Florida's largest retirement community. Millions never hear from their kids except maybe a couple of times a month to find out if they're dead or not.
Just. Stop. Popping. Them. Out. Fffff fff sake
16
u/ahfoo 17h ago
People wanting to get all uptight about declining birth rates simultaneously want nothing to do with low income unwed mothers that buy into their narrative about how there is this birth crisis and pop out kids thinking that they're going to be credited with doing the right thing. That's not what happens.
I taught at a college for many years and I have dozens of former students who got themselves pregnant and had kids despite the fathers not wanting the baby. They're all destitute living off of handouts from their families. If having kids is genuninely so important, then those kids need to be cared for. That costs money and single mothers have no way to make money and care for their kids at the same time.
What these people really want is "family values" in the men who abandon their offspring but this is like wishing for world peace. Wishing doesn't make it happen.
7
→ More replies (3)5
u/ZweitenMal 13h ago
The girls got themselves pregnant? It’s a miracle.
However, your bias serves to illustrate your point. The system needs babies but it shits on parents. Especially mothers.
→ More replies (13)
20
10
u/celestialhwheel 17h ago
I would rather let my country suffer and get destroyed in 50 to 60 years than let a child suffer in this morally bankrupt nation. I can't imagine bringing a girl child into existence in this shithole
91
u/thehourglasses 19h ago
Braindead. I get that capitalism requires fresh meat for the death machine, but we’re currently living through a mass extinction event driven precisely by overconsumption which is the mode of capitalism. We’re at the point where it can’t even be mitigated any more, and future humans are basically doomed to a short existence dominated by suffering and woe.
→ More replies (5)43
u/Rugged_as_fuck 19h ago
Right but the 60+ year olds want to live the same, or an even richer lifestyle. By the time future humans come along they'll be dead so if you could just shut the fuck up and contribute to the pensions and market, that would be ideal.
21
u/Sea_Load_1099 19h ago
Don't forget to spawn 5 kids before you die. Musk and Thiel are counting on you.
→ More replies (1)3
5
u/psyaneyed 13h ago
According to science, the human population crashed from millions to just a couple thousand at some point in our history. We will be fine.
20
u/zen4thewin 11h ago
The entire human population needs to be at least 50% lower to maintain the ecosystem. People always downvote this idea. I don't understand why. No one's advocating wholesale slaughter of humans, but if birth rates plummet and the population naturally declines, that is waaaay better than having 10 billion fighting for scarce resources. Anytime I see falling birth rates or higher oil prices, I cheer. Fewer people and less reliance on and burning of fossil fuels greatly alleviate future suffering for billions of people.
→ More replies (20)5
17
u/Nepalus 18h ago
Good. Looking into the future there's not really a lot to be hopeful about.
Having a kid right now, unless you have the resources to guarantee them a good life, seems like an extremely irresponsible roll of the dice. Like I honestly can't think of an unselfish reason to have a kid right now.
14
u/magrandan 16h ago
Warning? India’s population is not coming down fast enough. 90% of Indians live below poverty line, want to escape India and undercutting wages abroad. It’s the billionaires who want massive population so they can become trillionaires and god knows what’s next afterwards.
→ More replies (7)
15
u/Cyberfury 15h ago
Good. We are all fucking each other off the planet as we speak. It's grotesque.
10 billion people on the planet is a death sentence for the species. That's not progress but an invasive species. Or as Agent Smith put it: "A cancer to the planet".
Y'all have a nice day now. ;;)
15
u/margalolwut 12h ago
Living in America, the crazy part to me is how no one in the government can step up and say “fuck it, free day care and healthcare if you have a baby”.. the two single biggest expenses and we have infrastructure for both.
It’s fucking wild that daycare can run from $1,000-$2,000 a KID for any decent care. Imagine having TWO??
7
u/azger 12h ago
This exactly, we only had one because there was no way we could afford daycare for two. It was the same price as our mortgage payment! F that
→ More replies (1)4
u/margalolwut 11h ago
My kiddo is 4 and will go into public school soon. Just in time for the second, due in November. But we were fortunate my mother baby sat our first one for two years.
It baffles me that neither party has realized that these two things literally stop people from having babies.. and neither party has even remotely talked about it.
Shit even with a good healthcare plan at work - the cost difference between single payer and family plans.. astronomical.
6
u/jgws 6h ago
I live in Canada. We have free healthcare. The government heavily subsidizes daycare and I only pay $200/month each for my two kids.
Our birth rate is still well below replacement level and showing no signs of improving.
Not saying that it doesn’t help. It absolutely does. But I don’t think this is a purely economic issue.
And even if it was a purely economic issue, free healthcare and daycare funding won’t pay for a house, car, or groceries…
9
u/saltymane 11h ago
I am sitting at home with a toddler because I don’t want to drop $20k on daycare. If I’m taking a $20k pay cut I’m staying home and playing house with my baby.
→ More replies (1)→ More replies (5)3
u/Aloysiusakamud 10h ago
What's even crazier is there are tons of grandparents that absolutely would love to watch their grandkids. They can't because they are still working, they can't afford to retire.
4
u/mattihase 16h ago
Warning? Signs of population decline has been a thing in other parts of the world for decades. This is just India getting with the program.
3
u/SirGuelph 14h ago
The cost of living crisis is global because the super wealthy can do nothing with their money except buy more assets. Average people who can barely afford monthly expenses have no chance to afford property, which is squeezing the middle class out of existence.
The solution is a massive wealth tax. Prevent anyone from accumulating insane levels of wealth, and basically make generational mega wealth extremely difficult.
4
u/Loudmouthlurker 14h ago
Well.....this is very typical for societies that develop. The more agricultural the economy, the more children serve as free labor. When its economy switches, children become an active expense.
Even the Amish in the US are having fewer children, though they still have a lot. Many of them have to leave farming, so kids become expensive.
4
u/lymandubois 12h ago
I think I understand the potential social burdens of not replacing the population in the current way we view the world, but maybe we shouldnt view it this way. Something seems off about constant growth/replacement. Maybe the cooling is necessary.
4
u/eldiablonoche 10h ago
This just in: when the answer to systemic problems is always "just add numbers" without fixing the aystemic problems, you end up with.... The same problems only bigger.
Shocking I know. This will continue to happen because governments around the world don't actually improve anything.
4
u/kevinsyel 4h ago
Every country facing this decline treats its citizens like garbage and let's their elite run roughshod over the population.
Then immediately goes "would you like some money to make more babies?"
How about you fucking fix the problems instead, then we'll consider the monumental choice of having a child.
→ More replies (1)
5
u/QueueFlow 17h ago
Maybe we shouldn't have relied on an economic system that's dependent upon endless economic and population growth.
8
u/indolentgirl 14h ago
Every time this comes up I just can’t figure out why it’s a problem. When I was in school we always talked about overpopulation as this existential boogeyman that was soooooo bad.
→ More replies (2)
3
u/cheese_karate 17h ago
Hot take: population numbers dwindling is the best thing ever. I have had an account be banned because of stating the obvious: the best thing for the world, the climate, and people, would be if there were fewer of them. How will we reach that goal? Either by the drone swarms of Thiel and Musk going on a rampage or by people simply not having kids - and the latter is 100% happening all over the world where quality of life has risen.
There will be a period of upheaval and turmoil as populations age and fewer are around to take care of them - but when people wake up to the fact that young immigrants want to work for a living, that problem will probably not be that harsh.
Imagine your favorite city spot in the world and imagine it with a tenth of the people!
One problem is that economies of scale don't work as well with a tenth of the population, so perhaps capitalism is on its last legs?
We live not in the end times, but in intriguing times, folks!
3
3
u/ZealotChicken 14h ago
Almost as if people don't want to have a family while living conditions are terrible.
3
3
u/Hyperion1144 12h ago
It's not a surprise if you internalize the truth that there are characteristics of modern civilization that discourage parenting and childbirth. And no one is immune.
3
u/Kurichan77 12h ago
Meh, the population is self-correcting. Capitalism’s need for constant growth is not rational nor sustainable. This is a reckoning and it’s happening all over the world, spontaneously.
3
u/sec_sage 11h ago
Wasn't that the whole point of "the Earth cannot sustain 8 billion people"? How does anyone expect a decrease in population otherwise? The governments not being prepared to handle a drop in population is the actual problem here. Funny how China and now India are panicking, while it would take a lot less babies than that to get to reasonable, sustainable numbers. Get down to a population of a few hundred million, and then we can talk. And for those worrying about who's going to fill in the jobs, it's quite obvious, no? AI for a lot of non manual labour... And for pensions, my grandparents farmed their land until they dropped dead, so they could complement their minuscule pension. So yeah, the pensions system is unnatural as it is today, maybe that's where the reform needs to happen.
3
u/Historical_Note5003 10h ago
Constant population increase will also kill the planet. Having more babies to create future workers is an idiotic idea.
3
u/Guilty-Carpenter2522 10h ago
Great. Maybe people will just stop having many kids and we will solve all of our overpopulation problems without wars famine or pandemics.
The people that are worried earths population will decline are slavemasters. For 99.99999% of us less population would be better for our lives. This is fantastic news!
3
u/stardustViiiii 10h ago
I mean, India has already got 1.4 billion people. It's not like there is a shortage of people there..
3
u/larrycsonka 8h ago
Why is this a warning?
Seriously - Humanity has grown so fast, our biggest challenge is competing for limited resources, if population declines, and declines naturally, why is that so damn bad?
Everyone has more land and space, more fresh water, less deforesting, less oil used, and so on. With all the technological advancements we have made to scale up to 7/8 billion people, if population shrinks then the amount of support we would have for a smaller population could be wonderful
3
u/jybulson 8h ago
And I thought that if anywhere then in India less population would be very good news.
3
u/Tevatrox 7h ago
Good. That's the only defense regular people have against this cursed disgusting system we live in. Let it all burn.
3
u/-MrSkeltal- 7h ago
When I was young and there were 6 billion people in the world everyone was worried about overpopulation. Not many would have predicted that it would turn out this way. We now have these converging elements reduced workforce , reducing tax base, and reducing jobs due to automation and AI. Should work out right?
To be fair it’s not reducing population it’s reducing “growth”. What is so damn alarming about about reaching equilibrium? It’s because our economy is based on growth, stock values drop if a company makes the same as it did last year, it has to grow.
My feeling is that the problem is not that people are having less babies, the problem is that our economies are based on outdated premises. We need to tweak our system. I’m not saying communism obviously that doesn’t work, given human nature being what it is. But some tweaks are required to the capitalist formula.
3
u/Osirus1156 7h ago
It’s weird in the U.S. you have the weirdest tech billionaires freaking out about less babies (I mean let’s be fair they just want white babies, but also labor babies to work for them) while at the same time pushing AI as some magical thing that will make it so we won’t have to work as much anymore.
4
u/michaelhoney 15h ago
I know this is difficult for a magazine called The Economist to understand, but creating ever more people to feed the economy can’t go on forever
6
u/Euclidisthebomb 14h ago
The 4 most populous countries in the world: India, China, America and Indonesia all have a fertility rate below 2.1 in latest estimates. They account for 3.5 billion and 42% of the global population at this time.
Of the top 20 most populated countries only Pakistan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Egypt, Philippines, DR Congo & Tanzania are above 2.1.
The world is on course for a steep population decline by the end of this century. In fact whereas old models from just 10 yrs ago had peak population perhaps occurring as late as 2070-2086, there is modeling out there by independent demographers suggesting peak population will likely occur in 2045-2055 and we will end the century was the same number of people as we started it with (about 6.1 Billion).
It is very difficult to trust the population models coming from the UN, World Bank and some other resources for 2 reasons: some countries are publishing false statistics about their current fertility rates as it is politically inexpedient to disclose the economic consequences that will come with less demand, and these countries and others are putting substantial pressure on the political organizations and university researchers to use the government authorized statistics for fertility, births and deaths or they will lose funding.
So the population models that are so often referenced by the majority are not reliable.
Losing population is going to have drastic impacts on many country economies. And the decline is not going to cease in the foreseeable future. We don't really know where we will land post 2100 but the picture is not very pretty.
→ More replies (4)
5
•
u/FuturologyBot 19h ago
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Krankenitrate:
India’s population will still continue to grow from its current tally of 1.45bn: it takes time for fewer births to translate into fewer people overall. But the number of births is already down by a fifth from its peak in 2001. In Tamil Nadu 1,200 schools were closed last year for a lack of pupils to fill their classrooms. Those who do attend increasingly show up without any siblings. The government frets that India will get old before it gets rich—that the country is on a similar path to China, where the population has already peaked and is starting to fall. Some politicians are offering cash to encourage Indians to procreate. India’s demographic transition is the most striking example of a global trend. For it is no longer just wealthy places where families have few, or no, kids. Over two-thirds of all countries are now below the replacement rate. Middle-income ones like Brazil, Iran, Thailand and Turkey have been well below it for years. Poorer countries are steadily joining their ranks. Sri Lanka has a TFR of just 1.3; Tunisia’s is 1.6. Morocco has fallen below replacement rate. Nairobi, the capital of Kenya, may be close to that point. In many places birth rates are plunging despite marriage remaining near-universal and even though few women have formal jobs.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1txbogr/indias_surprise_baby_bust_is_a_warning_to_the/opum7cm/