Crazy that we live in a world where you can watch the damage of demographic shifts in real time, and that's still not enough to convince you that it's a problem.
The modern world doesn't scale down, and we have yet to figure out a solution.
this post was submitted on 16 May 2026
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There are 8.3 Billion people on the planet and there were 7.5 ten years ago. We have enough people. We have enough resources for everyone to live comfortably and be well in their communities. We have more than enough money and other valuable things to trade.
The main thing getting in our way isn't a low birth rate.
Anyone genuinely concerned with the depopulation of humans in 2026 is probably some flavour of breeder cult weirdo, and the only ones constantly banging on about it in politics, academia, the news, etc are imperialists, industrialists and racist patriarchs. IME.
I agree with you that there are too many people on this world, and yes, we can do with way less.
Having said that
A little bit lower that the 2.1 birthrate is fine, A very low birth rate is very bad for everyone. Sudden changed on demographics will fuck your country up and can make it disappear in a hundred years without you realizing it until it's too late
Demographics is like a slow moving cargo train, you only hear some humming and then some blaring and then when it hits you it won't stop or even slow down for a second
Countries like South Korea are at risk for their very existence and really should act now to avoid the day that North Korea can just walk in because they won't have enough people left to even take care of themselves
China has a similar problem and it's bad. They have a huge amount of people becoming old and unable to add to the economy anymore and requiring more and more help from others... That means that more money will go out to the old, and there is less money for the young to get kids and add to the next generation. This is in part why there are so few kids these days, it's simply too expensive to have any.
Lowering your population slowly and carefully is fine. Having your population drop off a cliff like it's happening in many counties world wide is a disaster
Then good news! Globally we're still over 2.1
Not a problem unless you were counting on collecting social security
Millenials and younger don't tend to include retirement in their plans. Death is the plan for us, 100 million in America is all that is planned, should AI not pan out.
The rest of the world, they plan to exterminate.
That last sentence is not clear. Who is planning and who is exterminating? American Millenials are exterminating the rest of the world? The rest of the world is planning to exterminate... someone? Their own population?
I don't know if I plan on being around that long
You could withhold your taxes but doing that would be too large an action for most Americans.
That's a great way to ensure you won't be around that long.
That was gonna happen anywy
But what about the orphan grinder? Wont somebody think of the orphan grinder?
The machine needs cogs!
cannon fodder for the military.
Become unfuckable.
Way ahead of you.
well most countries have below-replacement births anyways.
If growth doesn't compensate for shrinking working population, you'll be fucked. Somone has to work so you have your retirement.
Not really, we're just being looted and exploited by the ownership class. We have plenty of productivity to take care of everyone: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
Why not make billionaires an illegal thing. Poof! You have money for retirement for everyone
Money isn't the issue in the end, the issue is that you still need enough people in working age so that you can use the money to get the goods and services that you need as a retiree.
If a large number of people retire without finding any young successor, services just become more and more inaccessible. Like e.g. if there are not enough doctors in your area because many of them retired, you won't get treatment even with money, because the capacity just isn't enough anymore to treat everybody. If a car shop closes down because the mechanic retires, you cannot get your car repaired there any longer, even with a lot of money, and so on..
An old society means that the area decays, more and more places close down or cannot get maintained any longer. And money doesn't help because numbers in a bank account don't do the real work. There are already a few old regions around the globe where this can be seen
You mean, like robots? We have these hard-codded robots that can work a long time without human intervention.
And they have been a thing long before the LLM crap.
Thanks for pointing that out. A lot of people some seem to realize automation was doing fine before LLMs.
The dark factories don't need LLMs.
Finally somone who gets it. It's like economic 101 in school: Money is fundamentally worthless. It can only buy as much as the economy is able to produce
IMO this is an education system failure. You get things like that when you have different skill set in society VS what economy demands. If economy moves towards high tech and you have only unskilled labor at your disposal wages go down. (that plus immigration factor)
If I'm correct, highly specialized workers should get an opposite trend.
I can't think of anything more irresponsible and selfish than procreation in the 21st century. Why would anyone want to end their own life and subject themselves to the stress of ensuring their craft human survives and becomes a relatively average coal miner.
I'm not going to fault someone who has the means to provide for a child for making that choice. It's a very personal one, just as not having a child is.
Tax-funded retirement is fucked, but like, who still thinks they're having one.
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I make it my personal responsibility in life to constantly bring up the necessity of immigration as the solution to age disparity and population decline. There are working people. There are as many as you could ever need, tens of millions, perhaps hundreds. It's never going to be an issue which can't be solved with immigration.
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I am more than willing to fix the declining birth rates in every country but nobody is accepting my offers =/
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