I have volunteered to go to Japan and help them increase their birth rate, but so far, none of those cute Japanese girls have taken me up on the offer...

social media and the scrolling feature---tech savvy teens slowly winning the darwin award

This is a result of many independent factors, though all of them are common to all countries in the developed world. I am not going to be able to list them all (nor even pretend to know them all) but I can give you some of the major ones.

1. In and earlier world, most people were farmers. Having children was a necessity: you needed to put those kids to work! This fueled and was fueled by a very pro-child culture and legal framework. All the dots connected. But now, children are a huge financial liability. Instead of helping produce income, they cost money (a whole lot of it for a very long time). So, the incentives are all wrong. People are just responding to those incentives.

2. There is no time to raise children. This is especially true since most families cannot afford to have a stay-at-home-parent to raise the kids. Both parents must work full time, and spend the money they earn on daycare, so someone else can raise their kids for them. Not only is this a barrier in-and-of-itself, but it reduces the expected emotional rewards of being part of a family.

3. High likelihood of divorce, terrible consequences to divorce. Back "in the day," divorces were extremely rare. People had very reasonable assurances that the partner they married would stick around and shoulder their share of the load until the kids were gone, and even stick around to face life's challenges together after that. These days, it's basically a coin flip, with no secret sauce that guarantees a lasting marriage. And when the split happens, the family's finances can be devastated and formerly-wealthy people are reduced to a poverty level existence, possibly for the rest of their lives. Regardless of the reasons why the laws are like this, the end result is clear: this legal environment is hostile to family.

4. Desirable alternatives. Working people have all kinds of ways to entertain themselves and self-actualize that weren't available to prior generations. The wealthier a country is, the more such opportunities there are. So, people have an easy choice: a difficult life of hardship and poverty with high risk of things ending badly (to have a kid), or, a life of luxury and self-actualization as a reword for a good job done. What are most people going to pick?

5. A romance-hostile culture. Especially this has been fueled by things like dating sites. People get wildly unrealistic expectations about what kind of a mate they merit, and refuse to settle, and much drama ensues. It produces a lot of single moms but not a lot of families. I will also add that our culturally-constructed ideal of marriage is one where two people fall in love, choose to marry each other, and live happily ever after. Once upon a time, in most places, marriages were arranged by the parents. That sounds ghastly to us now. "But what if I don't love the person I get stuck with????" Well, as unpopular a fact as this is, most people don't love the person they get stuck with because love is a temporary emotion most of the time. Even when it does endure through the years, its nature changes significantly. The difference is, you are stuck with a partner that you picked while young, stupid, and drunk on hormones. Whereas in the old day, your partner was chosen for you by people who were mature, wise, objective, and had your best interest at heart.

We can't turn back the clock. The entire interconnected set of cultural, legal, and religious values that produced a highly fertile world is simply gone. And much of it is gone for very good reasons that have nothing to do with fertility. But these consequences are here nonetheless. I personally think it is possible to forge a new path forward that applies the new cultural values in an intelligent and equal way, but, it will require that a lot of people overcome some very strong biases and pettiness, so I don't have my hopes up.

The women I can see in free online porn are several orders of magnitude better looking than any of the ones willing to go home with me.

In general: lack of stable income, enough income, lack of housing.

Unstable world, climate getting worse.

That are generally the main reason not to have children.

Because the country loses population equally?

> After that -- and maybe before it, in some cases -- we're going to have to figure out how the new economy works, because expanding markets will become a thing of the past.

It's possible immigration will sustain first world populations for a while after so while what you say is an inevitability it might be a ways beyond when we hit peak population that this becomes a first world problem. Particular since the first decade or so of global population decline really won't be that dramatic.

For the US this will largely depend on what the economic state of the Western hemisphere is.

One silver lining in all this is we'll have a few countries to learn from prior to experiencing this pr

With AI throwing sand in the gears of employment stability it can really only hurt the financial security that is driving birthrates down. On the other hand maybe a lower population makes a post scarcity utopia easier to accomplish once the robots are designing themselves? It's an uncertain future to be sure.

The global population is WAY WAY above what is sustainable and *must* be reduced if humanity or the planet is to survive in the long run.

"But we can feed up to 20 billion!" you say, and to that the factual rebuttal is, sure, but food isnt the only equation.. Humans are using too much of the total biomass, reducing biodiversity, we produce more waste per lbs of biomass than most other lifeforms on the planet, etc. We're a virus on this planet and everywhere we go, even with the best intentions, we ruin ecol

You're dead on.

The simple reality is the entire western world is ALREADY below replacement fertility... And for most countries it is WAY below. China is also WAY below, and India is barely at replacement and declining rapidly. Almost all population growth is coming from Africa.. and as countries there develop, it's going away as well.

Why on earth would less consumers be good for the wealthy?

Never mind your ridiculous gay people conspiracy.

I'm way ahead of you, Sparky... does anybody ever stop to think what a great form of birth control ubiquitous free online porn is? The unplanned pregnancy rate has gone down, because people don't get so horny. The business model of giving something away for free on the internet never made sense to me.

> My inner conspiracy theorist is 100% sure that the whole LGBTOMGWTFBBQ propaganda is mostly there because THEY decided that promoting anything other than a traditional family, which known to be the most children-friendly, will make them richer in the end.

That's as stupid as saying that the push for racial equality is because they're trying to make everyone turn black. It does not fucking work like that.

That might hold for a bit but eventually they wont have enough people to rent to and then property becomes a pretty crappy investment.

Don't be so sure about your kids not having kids. I thought both of my sisters had decided not to breed, the much younger one because she had Type 1 diabetes that runs on our family. But last year, in her late 40's, she had a kid. Don't know if it was an accident or not. I do know my older sister and my own daughter were accidents.

Do you know what also happened to Japan in the early 90s? The crash of the 80s bubble economy, and the resulting almost 40 years of stagflation.

When people have uncertain futures many will opt to not have children, or just one child.

Changing up society to not require both parents working which then complicates childcare would cause a major shit.

But expectations also have to change, you can't be leveraged out the wazoo and busy running little Timmy to sports ball 1, and then sports ball 2, then art class, sw

.......so....except for all the countries above the replacement rate, every country is at or below the replacement rate.

Thanks for that amazing insight, Dr. Watson.

I'll be dead within six months to a year.

My interest in future societal problems is extraordinarily limited.

Oceania? Papua New Guinea really pulling up the averages I guess.

With prevailing attitudes post-pandemic about vaccination and medical research the elderly problem may solve itself.

It's not even really bad for big business, it's just bad for the way the MBA crowd has been trained.

Many businesses operate with stable revenue, not growing.

There will probably be some discomfort as all the MBA's heads explode- but they'll figure it out quick.

A robot probably. But I doubt I will live long enough to decline that's much anyway.

In Japan, they think Robots are going to do it. Personally, I think the sexbot market is much bigger, but...

Money might contribute a bit but I don't buy it as a primary driver considering it's the poor in most societies that breed the fastest and it's some of the poorest nations that are still growing. This is why those countries that have gotten aggressive with their family aid, parental leave, and what not havent seen much in the way of results in terms of increasing their birth rates.

Sometimes.

>> immigrants

> Illegals.

typical maga chud, anonymous and wrong. only due process can determine if laws have been broken.

Like I said Global warming is the one exception we have not solved yet worldwide.

Here are things that humans have turned around, mostly in my life span.

1) Lead poisoning

2) CFCs

3) Asbestos

All of these things we had major problems and now they are mostly gone.

There are a whole bunch of stuff that the US has turned around, even if the rest of the world has not (coal use, extinction rates, renewable energy use up)