Posted by brandonb 15 hours ago
Maine, Vermont, and Florida
Since 2020: Delaware, Hawaii, Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and West Virginia now also qualify.
Montana is a bit of a surprise there... so is Oregon for me.
Source: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/older-ad...
Florida being on that list made so much sense lol.
Maybe in a couple countries. But not for the world, and not for the west and definitely not for America.
As the population has grown poverty has decreased.
Energy is very easy to produce cleanly (nuclear, and solar is looking better and better). The barriers to doing so are political and financial, not technical. They will be made worse by having an aged-heavy population, which is less innovative, less willing to invest in the future, and less willing to try new things. And it makes a poorer society, obviously.
Malthus has been proved wrong at every juncture. Lack of children is about to bite us very, very hard.
Why is everyone so sure of this? My own instinct is just that we'll adapt to it and it will be fine.
It's just seems like the equivalent of making one of those charts that shows we're going to run out of [some critical resource] by [some date]. They are always wrong, without exception. Because as the resource becomes more scarce, we adapt our societies to become less dependent on it. You can't just extrapolate that trend lines or relationships between statistics like GDP and population continue into the distant future; it almost never works.
I don't have my own competing, grand prediction of how the distant future will pan out. But my thinking is that societies are extremely complex systems and when one variable is tweaked, generally all the other variables also adjust to compensate.
I'm not against growing populations, just not overly concerned about depopulation either.
Could it have an effect like the Black Plague, where labor becomes more expensive?
But remember: the uber-rich are allowing millions to immigrate to the rich world, to prevent precisely this. (I'm not commenting here on whether immigration is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing, simply noting that large-scale immigration brings wages down, and that the low birthrate is consistently stated as its main driver.) Also, remember that paying for all those unproductive old people will consume enormous amounts of wealth, something that didn't apply during the Black Death.
First about behavior in old age. I'm pretty sure the majority of adults today don't want to live and think like their grandparents, so we can't say "less" anything. The circumstances are definitely changing enough that we already know it will be different.
The population decline is not happening in huge step changes. "About to bite us" is definitely hyperbole.
True, but not obviously a causal relationship.
So that's the end goal our species should aspire to?
Produce™ and Consume™?
Eternally without relent?
Will you be the first to go volunteer to back to the stone ages?
I didn't think so.
This is like comparing apples to oranges to find a correlation, and arriving at an incorrect causation.
Falling populations are largely due to better education, specifically of women, as well as integration of women into the workforce, which has been one of the bigger drivers in curbing poverty. The latter is so significant in the west and the far east (double income households mean rising costs of living, meaning SAHM households become unviable in the West for the middle class), resulting in a significant population decrease.
But in places such as the Middle East or Africa, ever increasing populations have only meant even more financial trouble for those economies. Case in point Pakistan and Egypt. In other economies such as India (which I assume is one of the "couple countries" you mentioned), overall birth rates are falling significantly to near replacement level, and in the few states/regions with high birth rates, poverty is rampant and the people reliant on subsidies from other more prosperous regions.
The problem with most of the world is that while we are able to sustain a huge population as a whole globally, most of the population growth is extremely localized, resulting in population sparsity in some comfortable regions (Canada, the US, Central Asia, southern Russia) and population unsustainability in other regions completely unsuited to population growth (sub-Saharan Africa, Indonesia, the Middle East).
That is such a privileged first-world take.
You haven't lived in overpopulated places.
Just try it for 1 fucking year and then see if you still wish that hell upon anyone.
I swear I'm starting to wonder if that's a take pushed by ultracapitalists so they can have an endless supply of labor and consumers, like the bans on abortion etc.
Some people have a massive ecological footprint. For instance, somebody who uses a private jet ~daily.
Other people have a negative ecological footprint: their actions either actively improve the ecology of the world or act to reduce the ecological footprint of others.
The difference between the two is many orders of magnitude. A world-wide population of 100 million daily private jet users likely has a larger ecological impact than 10 billion low-impact humans.
Population change takes decades or centuries for the ecological impact to happen.
Shifts in the ecological footprint of significant populations can cause shifts over a small number of years.
It will be (eventually) when the worldwide birth rate drop below replacement. And it's close to that now: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN.
- Niger: 6.7 births per woman
- Somalia: 6.0
- Chad: 5.5
So it seems only Africa.
It's a titanic issue. Old people are expensive. They tax the young to pay for themselves. Now the system is running out of young to tax.
And that's the situation in rich and prosperous nations. I live in a developing country that has managed to be relatively poor and have a declining birth rate. It's so absurdly pathological it's not even funny. Symptoms include, for example, increased retirement ages. We will work well into our 70+ years of age, and we will be happy. Newer generations are already coping, they've already internalized the fact they will never actually retire. This is the stuff revolutions are made out of.
Yes, because the aging population increases healthcare spending to support them while the working age population shrinks, eroding the tax base. This is currently happening in Japan right now.
Killing USAID probably put a drag on that slowdown by reducing access to family planning resources, but we’ll have to see exactly how much in the coming years.
What kind of people will not wanting children likely select for?
At least two kinds come to mind:
1) People who love children and are willing to have them regardless of the impact on their financial situation.
2) People living in societies where women (and likely some men) lack a say in whether or not to have children.
The first kind could be very good.
The second is definitely not something we should look forward to.
There is a "replacement" crisis but it's being addressed by pearl clutching and those advocating for forced birth.
Having children is expensive all the way around. And women's reproductive rights have enabled them to (rightfully) make their own choices about motherhood.
To state the obvious: children literally are the future of humanity and we need to address the issue accordingly. A lot of it would be via changing the economics of having a child, and the rest would be by making the world a "village to raise a child".
This is all eminently doable. We just need to agree on what that looks like and how to best invest in it.
Those who govern us see us as an economic zone to exploit, so perpetuating core social values isn’t really a concern. Although even countries who recognize this problem are having trouble finding a solution.
It may simply be that the future doesn’t look very much like the “developed world”. The only nations (or large subcultures like the Amish) that still have high fertility rates also have values and lifestyles that appear very foreign to us.
I’m not passing judgement, it’s just Darwin in action.
You are not using “people” in the same sense. I mean “people” as a national culture, which does shift from generation to generation, but generally not in a radical sense. Immigrants assimilate over time, although they do leave lasting influence on the culture as they merge with it. Families pass on aspects of their attitudes and beliefs. Generations pass on cultural knowledge through media. This is why millennial culture in the US is a continuation and evolution of Boomer culture, despite all the intergenerational strife.
As the culture is replaced, revolution and/or national disintegration becomes more likely, as there is little to unite people in the face of significant challenges. (Why should I sacrifice for neighbors I can’t relate to? Why should I follow the laws and cultural codes of a nation I have no deep connection to? Perhaps my own culture’s standards are better!) It’s a natural process that’s happened many times throughout history.
(This sounds overly cut and dry, but culture is complicated, and a national culture is made up of tens to hundreds of regional cultures and subcultures that all have a share of influence. In the end it’s an abstraction. You can’t really force a culture of any size to behave in a certain way, nor can you “preserve” it except in the form of documentation. But culture does produce a lineage of identifiable characteristics that gets passed down, if it survives.)
I have a thesis that people need stories to inform and inspire them. I also believe that this problem is technically solvable, and that the stories we have today are either backwards (the woman belongs at home making babies and taking care of daddy), or too hand-wavy (we just need to fund Head Start and make schools free).
I'm all for the latter approach but it doesn't address the fact that children are money, time, and energy vampires (albeit lovable and worthy of those things). We need more than that. Programs that augment school itself (the arts, scouting, DIY/maker stuff, etc). Those exist but are not evenly distributed and we need way more of it.
Lastly, the "village" part of encouraging communities to help families thrive instead of struggle; to make sure that kids have the options they need rather than turning to drugs, gangs, etc.
C'mon everybody, let's kumbaya!
Even Scandinavian countries and France, with generous parental benefits, have not materially increased their fertility rates.
At least in the US, protecting agency and autonomy that might be challenged is easily solved with the second amendment for defense, as well as long term and permanent birth control for those who would not like to have any children or more children. The potentially vulnerable reproductive age population shrinks perpetually year after year, continuously reducing potential attack surface.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48733976 (citations)
Frustratingly, (and counterintuitively), it won't help housing prices, because shrinking populations retreat to city centers. Spain, Italy, Japan, and Korea are full of $5,000 houses. Meanwhile, Madrid, Rome, Tokyo, and Seoul are more expensive than they've ever been.
We can tax the rich, we're post scarcity, time to take a look at the rest of the world an come up with a better social safety net.
Productivity is growing much more slowly than the retiree-to-worker ratio. Workers are producing slightly more every year, but there are a lot more retirees to take care of every year. If this does not change, we will eventually see a collapse of social safety nets. Policy can only accelerate or delay that collapse.