There is no indication that birth rates are going to stabilize, let alone recover, anywhere. Only Israel and Georgia (?) look like even half-way exceptions.
Unless they drastically and rapidly change, the 21st century will be the century of unbelievable aging and depopulation.
Based on these latest fertility numbers, we can expect the drop in new people in 100 years to be the following: USA (-47%), France (-46%), Russia (-65%), Germany (-68%), Italy (-78%), Japan (-81%), China (-88%), Thailand (-89%).
Turkey, UK, Mexico, etc. all similar.
People haven't really integrated what this means for our civilization, industrial society, and the progress of history because it's too big to wrap your head around.
I think what it means is that our civilization is about to collapse. Meaning sometime before 2200.
It is in every practical sense numerically *impossible* for immigration to fix this. You can't "make up the difference" with immigration when the difference is 50%+ of an entire generation. Especially not if you're China or the EU and your shortfall is in 100s of millions.
People still haven't updated on how rapidly fertility rates in the developing world are falling either. In 2022 already, Brazil was at 1.6, Mexico 1.8, India 2.0, Turkey 1.9, etc.
Numbers above say *Chile* is now at *0.88.* Thailand is at 0.95! What is happening!
The Danish population of Denmark hasn't changed a whit since 1980—44 years ago, or, you know, half a century.
The entire population growth in Denmark since 1980 has been immigrants. I bet this holds for many other countries too. Which means...
...the entire functioning of the quasi-redistributive quasi-capitalist system we have in Europe and North America has been subsidized by immigration for half a century already, while the previous population has stagnated and aged.
The system has been non-functional for decades.
There is no way to sustain the stack of institutions behind our version of modern industrial society when the next generations are collapsing by 50%+. It is as numerically impossible as throwing more immigrants at the problem. The math doesn't add up.
There is a strong psychological need to believe in utopian or apocalyptic visions of the near future, like AI doom/acc or imminent WW3 or ecological catastrophe, because the alternative is staring our incomprehensibly pathetic civilizational population collapse in the face.
I don't expect the dead players and bureaucrats to leap at opportunities for reform, but I think it's a catastrophic distraction for live players and independent thinkers, especially in tech, to forget that the straightforward solution is societal reform.
The solution isn't to hope we can build an AI who will solve all our problems for us or subsidize our incoherent, sociobiologically insolvent system with our wacky technology, the solution is coming up with a new, functional plan for organizing industrial societies.
People used to think that surely the low fertility rates of Asia would stabilize at, like, 1.1 at absolute minimum.
Nope. South Korea (population of 50 million) is now at 0.68. Others following. As @SamoBurja says, no reason not to expect 0.0 TFR societies in the near future.
If we fumble a much-needed reform of industrial society by 2100 or so, I think we miss our opportunity to establish permanent settlements in the Solar System and thus our chance at the stars down the line. It closes the book on that for us. Maybe in another 1000 years.
Everyone proposing to save the day with robots, AI, artificial wombs, longevity, or whatever other speculative wacky tech solution is proposing to do a great favor to the bad and broken system that brought us here.
The system needs reform, not more subsidy. Ideas, not tech.
The global economy and industrial/post-industrial standard of living, and all its attendant social norms, relies on a tremendous scale of population to be viable.
I don't think it's viable anymore when South Korea has 5 million people instead of 50 million.
I'm working on what I think will be a solution to industrial civilization's fertility problem. It's not a quick or easy problem. I published the first piece here in @palladiummag:
Also worth reading (and subscribing to!) @bismarckanlys Brief, which investigated India's rapidly falling fertility rates and near-future population stagnation here: brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/fewer-than-o…
There is a personal upside to civilization-scale population collapse. If you are one of the few people to prioritize high fertility, your children and grandchildren will inherit a world:
Unfounded hope that fertility is a self-correcting problem, yet as @Empty_America is fond of pointing out, falling populations congregate in low-fertility cities even harder. They don't spread out to areas with cheap homes and fruitfully multiply!
If cheap homes attracted young people who automatically used them to be fecund according to some Malthusian logic, it would have happened already in places like rural America or Italy. The opposite is happening.
If you enjoyed these insights or wish to support further research on solving the problems raised herein, I warmly invite you to become a paid subscriber to @bismarckanlys Brief.
One underexplored aspect of the population collapse crisis is how many developing countries simply have fraudulent population numbers for various reasons.
Nigeria's population may be overstated by as much as double.
Every week, Bismarck Brief sends paid subscribers a new in-depth investigation of the strategy of a key institution, industry, or influential individual, from China to Silicon Valley.
Finding solutions to civilization-scale threats like the imminent demographic collapse is part of our daily work at @bismarckanlys. Make sure to follow our founder and president @SamoBurja and my colleagues @benlandautaylor and @RianCFFWhitton to stay up to date on our work!
Indeed. We could call the current demographic collapse trajectory "the Thanos Plan." Many think it will turn out very well, strangely enough. But maybe we shouldn't Thanos ourselves.
Bureaucracies staffed by middle-aged and elderly petty authoritarian socialist women import criminal migrants then let them loose because this is the closest approximation to organized physical violence they can sustain against their real enemies—taxpayers who could defund them.
If the same bureaucracies were staffed by young men, as authoritarian and socialist regimes were in the past, they would not need this convoluted scheme and could just raise irregular organized paramilitaries themselves. But aging women are literally incapable of this.
Mass immigration is primarily an accounting fraud scheme by the old against the young, but it cannot explain the particular sub-phenomenon of bureaucracies specifically seeking out, encouraging, and excusing the worst imaginable behavior by the worst imaginable people.
The story of the last century is basically the United States defeating its fellow great powers, in order: Austria-Hungary (1918), Turkey (1918), Germany (1945), Italy (1945), Japan (1945), the United Kingdom (1956), France (1969), and Russia (1991).
France was defeated in 1941, but then Charles de Gaulle pulled off a second wind that saw final defeat delayed a few more decades. Since 1999, Putin has been doing the exact same thing in the exact same situation.
In 1989, NATO (658m) was 1.6x the population of the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact (400m). Today it's 6.2x the size, 973m to 155m for Russia and Belarus. The fall of the USSR was basically decolonization for Russia, but absorption into U.S. orbit was bungled and reversed.
Boomers allowed affirmative action and diversity politics to take over society. But note that there was never a mass firing of 20-30% of Boomers to make room for diverse hires or whatever. They just grandfathered themselves in then betrayed the next generation with it, as usual.
The 2010s woke cancellation wave was in substantial part an attempt by Millennials to remedy this Boomer hypocrisy and grab some of the spoils for themselves. But of course equally if not more unfair, too much collateral damage, and far too unfocused to really work.
The young are in general completely asleep to how craven, unjust, and illegitimate their elders' rule is and has been. The Boomers will all be dead in twenty years, which will be the greatest opportunity for a paradigm shift in societal governance. It must not be squandered.
If a tech CEO revealed he could manufacture self-replicating fully autonomous universally adaptable humaniform AGIs that stayed in good working condition for ~60 years for $450k each, he would be hailed as a hero and the U.S. government would order $10 trillion worth of them.
At $450k per child, we could double the U.S. birth rate and reach well above replacement fertility for the price of just $1.6 trillion. That is just 23% of annual federal spending and less than Social Security + Medicare. It's literally a steal!
Boomers just hate children and believe as a matter of selfish dogmatic faith they should not only cost $0 and raise themselves, but actually pay Boomers for the privilege of being born. There is no other explanation for this plain economic irrationality.
From 2009-2011, a trivial amount of investment in Bitcoin would have turned any millionaire into a megabillionaire by now, and any billionaire into a literal trillionaire. Yet none did. This shows even Peter Thiel is understating the case about groupthink/cowardice in business.
The fact that as far as we can tell every single professional and major investor in Silicon Valley and Wall Street completely missed by far the best investment opportunity of the last fifteen years—one which wasn't even that obscure—is an indictment of "investing" and "finance."
If there were people out there who really knew how to make money through investing, we should have multiple literal trillionaires. Yet we do not. In fact most of the world's wealthiest people are founders who build valuable companies, not people who bet on companies or assets.
There are only four kinds of politics we have: Boomer Leftism (respectable), Boomer Rightism (populism), Millennial Leftism (Zohran), and Millennial Rightism (Bukele). In 20 years the Boomers and their politics will have died off, and Millennial Leftism won't make sense anymore.
Millennial Leftism only makes sense in the context of disenfranchised youth building a battering-ram coalition to loot a little something from the Boomers in the here and now. When the Boomers are dead and gone, it won't make sense anymore. Millennial dictators are inevitable.
Boomer Leftism is unrestrained looting for the benefit of Boomers. Boomer Rightism is slightly restrained looting for the benefit of Boomers. Millennial Leftism is unrestrained looting for the benefit of Millennials. Only Millennial Rightism promises to end the looting.