That's who I meant, yes.

You raise an interesting point, but you also seem to be conflating two things. Having children is more expensive than ever, and purchasing power has continued to drop for decades. Not to mention the drastic increase in specific "raising a family" essentials/barriers like housing costs, medical debt, educational debt, and childcare expenses. I don't have numbers to back this up, but my intuition (based on observation and casual reading) is that more working class people who actively want to have children are not doing so because they are stretched too thin than we saw in the 1970's (when people could work part-time to pay for all 4 years of college and expect a high paying career out of their degree).

Also, a 15% drop in 50 years is nothing to scoff at. In America, we are below the replacement fertility rate of 2.1 children per woman. Currently it is at 1.7, so our population would be declining without immigration. [1] This is not a bad thing in my opinion, but it is extremely significant in terms of politics, culture, and economics. If our fertility rate continues to drop expect to start hearing about it more often and at higher volume from many different corners.

[1] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/vsrr/vsrr028.pdf

Why would any of that be specific to millennials, though? The way you’re describing it nothing would have changed in a very long time.

I’m pretty sure the “I’m too poor to have a family” perspective stems directly from the wild increases we’ve see in the price of housing and not a whole lot else.

For those wondering, I think this is mostly because of men having multiple wives.

Our superpower is developing technology. It’s unlikely evolution could ever outperform that as it operates on much slower time scales for adaptation. So any viral mutation now will only really manifest at population scale after hundreds of thousands of years whereas technology can do it within years or decades.

Super powers would be sensory I think unless we sprout wings or gills. So things we've probably seen already in another species like infrared vision or what not... but we do have technology to do that already so the question is how does that influence the evolutionary landscape.

> a future mutation was necessary to save humanity

Even in that scenario, it is very simple, we protected the people today and use vaccines to induce the necessary mutation. The moral choice in my book is to always err on the side of the living than "potential of the living".

That's the domain of longscamism

> No, you’re assuming a counterfactual.

I'm not assuming anything. I'm following the science as reported in the article above. That in FACT a virus lead to an important part of human development. And was in FACT beneficial. Those are true facts, if you trust the science.

> If the virus hadn’t come along, humanity as it stands today may not exist but whatever animal was infected could potentially have kept reproducing / another virus would accomplish what happened anyway. Those are far more likely scenarios.

You literally immediately launched into assuming a counterfactual (that didn't happen, you just made it up).

> You’re taking an impossible to prove hypothetical that would require omniscient level reasoning

Yes, and I made it clear that's what I was doing. And I explicitly said it was an imaginary situation that would never happen. I was using it for illustrative purposes for people who are flexible enough in their thinking. I'm sorry that isn't you.

Ants and bees in a hive have very similar genetics. Typically 75%, and sometimes 100%, if I remember.

This means that a hive in some ways is best thought of as a single organization, which happens to have a "distributed" body.

In that view, the non reproducing individuals are propagating their DNA in the same sense that human liver cells do, even though they don't have the direct involvement that down and egg cells do.

I doesn't seem like the above commenter was making a value judgement.

They are involved in helping their queen produce new offspring that also contains part of their own genetic material. In bees and ants you have to think of them as one single individual. Each single worker is not able to reproduce but they still will indirectly still reproduce through their queen. Not sure what being good humans has to do with this.

Genetic line =/= role to play in society.

Those are different things.

The OP was making an observation. But I'll bite.

First, human beings are not bees or ants. Our nature vis-a-vis reproduction is quite different. Most human beings do reproduce as that is our nature, or certainly most of us used to with the exception of periods of social collapse (think of Rome). We're in that sort of condition now, where we are having little or no children in the developed world. This does not bode well and at some point the decline of such a society will become irreversible.

Of course, you are right that not everyone must reproduce, that there is no particular obligation for anyone to reproduce, and that those who do not can still contribute to the well-being of their families, the human species, and the common good. And indeed, if you are, say, a Catholic, you would say that while having children is the natural course and the normal path for most people, a small minority are called to sacrifice this natural end for the sake of a higher supernatural, spiritual end, e.g., the priesthood, by which one becomes a spiritual parent in place of a biological one. Certainly, we can be parental figures in non-biological ways as well. Even biological parents do that.

But that's not that we're seeing behind the present demographic decline. Something like the priesthood is an exception, not the rule. Most who can have children of their own are not having them, or many of them, not because of some kind of exceptional higher calling, but rather for morally dubious reasons. Children are demanding. They require sacrifice. They demand the love known as charity. A consumerist is going to view a child not as a gift, but a burden. Furthermore, our society demonizes families, especially large families (perhaps in part stemming from Protestant attempts to restrict Catholic populations in the US). Having many children used to be seen as a blessing, a privilege. Today, we both think we're entitled to having children (IVF is a testament to that), and refuse to have them.

This is a perfect example of what I like to call the Eggs-Waffles Phenomenon. Basically, you can’t say something like “I like waffles” on the internet without someone replying “how dare you malign people who like eggs”. And here there’s not even a value judgement or personal preference yet this has somehow been perceived as an attack on the childless. Others have jumped in to bemoan the perceived attack on the family. It’s wild.

Nowhere do I argue that you should or shouldn’t reproduce or that either outcome affects your perceived or actual value. The word “fail” seems to be doing a lot of heavy lifting in your perceptions here.

There used to be some truth to that but not so much anymore. It's historically correct that the poor used to have more kids (and I think are still a bit more likely to have them than the middle class). But what started to happen about 10-15 years ago was that everyone became less likely to start a family except for rich people. To be precise if a woman is rich enough to afford childcare she's much more likely to have kids.

Here's an article on the topic: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/oct/25/women-w... - that's about a decade old and the evidence/trend has only grown.

Children are just another one of those things that is increasingly out of reach for the American middle class, along with property ownership, health care etc. For the poster I responded to to ignore the economic data and paint the middle class and ordinary human beings as being selfish and immoral is perverse.

>wealthier people opt to have fewer or no kids, and larger families are usually those of lower income, like there's an inverse relationship between wealth and desired number of children.

I've also noticed this trend, richer societies have less children and poorer societies have more children.

Absolutely no politician (aka the people charged with population and demographic concerns) actually points this out, though. Probably because it goes against a lot of narratives and the simple solution it implies is brutally unpalatable for pretty much everyone.

I also notice that every single would-be or could-be parent inquired says they can't afford it, while also clearly enjoying many luxuries that being poor would actively prohibit. I presume they all keep claiming the issue is money because who doesn't like free handouts from the government just by saying you'll have kids? Get 'em while the getting's good. I'm not talking about just the US, either.

Anyway, I believe the only true solution to declining birth rates is simply to become poor again as a society. It's the only logical solution when becoming richer clearly leads to less children.

The person making the claim gets to present the data supporting it.

It depends on what you mean by collapse. Is it that population will decline globally for a bit to a new equilibrium point? Sure I can believe that because boomers were a huge population bubble after WWII and there have been lots of living standard advancements since then (a huge one being family planning options being more and more available to the world’s population). It’s also important to remember that the population bubble was also driven by significant life extension and health advancements in medicine and nutrition without any real birth control being available so the lag until birth control became available results in another population bubble.

None of that is particularly dire. And btw, it’s not even clear to me that the population will actually start decreasing. And even if it does, believing it’s some runaway effect that can’t be fixed within 20 years once we notice it seems myopic as well.

The position you’re taking though, that population will not only decline but that there’s no bottom to it and society will collapse, is the Elon Musk doomer talking point that this somehow portends the end of countries or civilizations or humanity itself. There’s simply no evidence and no realistic mechanism of action for something that extreme. Human populations have always ebbed and flowed and the exponential growth we’ve seen since the Industrial Revolution is not the norm nor is it sustainable.

> This is not a fringe theory. The effects of the collapse we can theorise on, but the collapse will happen now. It's not a question or a theory

Again - you’ve stated something quite extreme without providing any support and then tried to shift the responsibility for providing evidence to the person doubting your wild claim. That’s not how it works, sorry. It is a hypothesis that there’s demographic collapse until it’s either happened or there’s credible evidence it will happen. Right now afaik neither is true.

My theory is that, as of now population might be above a "equilibrium". Since it is above equilibrium, it causes increased economic competition to raise kids. So only few economically well off couple have kid's.

After few generations, population comes back to some level where economic competition to raise kids is reduced. Also, most of the lineages of people who chose not to have kids would have been wiped out or atleast somewhat reduced (Natural selection at play). So the people living in the future are likely to have kids on the condition that there is no economic penalty.

So humanity extinction due to demographic decline is less likely. Instead it might happen due to something like nuclear war. More details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox#It_is_the_nature...

I mean, population decline is a thing, and most 'developed' nations, or whatever you want to call us, are experiencing it. Demographic collapse sounds like a a scary term bandied about by people with an agenda (or those who want to proclaim the sky is falling but bizarrely want to ignore climate change and ecological collapse).

I'm just guessing, because I haven't encountered the term and I'm not finding much about it on google. Certainly nothing from scientific or authoritative sources. I guess one article from FT uses the term to describe China's population decline.

You are making a big assumption about it being cyclical. Never in history have we had contraception, it's a huge change to human behaviour. It's not at all obvious that women actually want more than 1.5 children on average in the west.

We also have tinder etc and a bunch of other changes that are HUGE in terms of culture.

I'm not saying any of these are bad, and there's not way we are going back to no contraceptives. But to ignore the effects of these, ESPECIALLY as birth rates are trending down EVERYWHERE, is pushing your head in the sand.

You are making a lot of assumptions, and as my example shows, if your assumptions are wrong for say ~50 years, you've already made a huge dent in your populations makeup.