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Not directly responding to your point, but it really feels like 2024 is the year that concern about birth rates and pronatalism broke into the mainstream. Looking at Google trends, it looks like news searches for 'birth rate' have increased pretty massively in the past ten years. Web searches for pronatalism have also increased a lot in the last two years.
Is it simply that birth rates have finally dropped so much that more governments are taking notice (outside of Eastern Europe and East Asia)? Is it that future-thinking intellectuals picked it up and the rest of the world is following? Did these guys make it happen?
Maybe fertility doomerism will become the right-wing version of left-wing climate doomerism?
I think this is a case of a very niche interest becoming slightly less niche, but still staying very niche. The vast majority of people do not care in the least bit about the fertility rates of societies.
These surveys suggest that this is changing. I think you're right that it's still pretty low, but the Google Trends links I posted do suggest that awareness is growing, and we can only expect that to increase as birth rates continue to decline and governments become even more panicked.
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To your basic question of "why specifically this year", the answer is probably "Elon Musk bought Twitter and this is one of the fruits". Prior to that, this was a banned opinion in mainstream venues, so of course the mainstream didn't hear it much.
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I think it's pretty simple, back somewhere in the 70-00s we profited from a short-term demographic dividend as we could forego spending on children, which we could invest in other things (in practice mostly hedonistic endeavours). Now we're starting to see the long-term effects, which is a never-before seen crunch on retirement. As somebody else put it, "now that it's time to reap, I wish I had sown more".
How much of that is reproduction rates and how much of that is the combination of the elderly living longer than ever before + costing significantly more than ever before.
Have life expectancies really improved much, if at all, since 2000? I see headlines suggesting that they've actually regressed in the US fairly often, largely due to obesity more than countering anti-smoking efforts and such.
Medical expenditure on squeezing out those last few years far greater than the cost of just being elderly, though. Not only is the person not being productive, suddenly they've got a raft of major intervention surgeries and therapies.
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A little, not much. From 2000–2019 there was a slight increase from 76.7 to 79.1. (Note: more recent data is still screwed up because of bad Covid-19 assumptions).
https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy
I think that lower smoking rates have played a big part in the increase. If so, health care costs would have increased as well, since lung cancer kills people relatively cheaply compared to, say, Alzheimers.
Prediction: Life expectancy will increase considerably in the next 10 years due to GLP-1 drugs.
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