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.

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.

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.

Countries with larger populations will see these guys commit civilizational suicide with enough time to recover one can hope. We won’t be funding USAID when the majority of Americans are drawing from Medicare though.

We've already seen 20 years of policy driven by people who don't care about families being started.

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.

True, but not obviously a causal relationship.

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.

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.

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.

Without more productive capacity the extra $1.2k/mo would cause enormous inflation. Just a question of what the country is optimizing for, I suppose, but I think people would be unhappy with the result.

I think "make society more child-friendly" is a good idea, but one that doesn't seem to have increased fertility that much. To me it seems that educated people living comfortable lives with access to birth control simply don't want to have that many children. If you look at the country stats, the most proven way to increase fertility is to take away education, women's rights, or birth control. And imo, the western world should adapt to low birth rates, instead of trying to prop them up.

Nope. It's just time and personal living space. It's THAT simple.

Go on, try to plan your day with transit and no car if you have 3 children (with 2-3 year age gaps). You'll find that this really works only if everything is concentrated, or if it's a full-time job for you. That's why we hear so much about "15-minute neighborhoods".

But when everything is concentrated, it becomes EXPENSIVE and you also lose any semblance of choice. You will likely have only one school, one daycare, one community center. You become hemmed in within that "walkable" neighborhood. That park nearby? It surely can look nice, but what if it's the only park within reasonable walking distance? So you don't even have an _option_ to go somewhere else with kids, without making it a full-day trip?

People like to laugh at Texas, about how riding an SUV to a walkable park is ridiculous. But is it, really?

The way to fix all of it? Suburbs and cars. Cars provide personal freedom and personal space. That's also why the US had a higher birth rate for much longer than Europe, and it started cratering once young people were forced (by the economy) to move into dense city cores.

Walk in Tokyo and try to find children there.