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I'm coming around to the belief that nothing can or should be done. What, exactly, are we trying to save? Groups that choose not to reproduce will die off and be replaced by those that do. Same as it ever was. Why should society, at immense cost, prop up genetic dead ends. The amount of intervention necessary would be staggering and as far as I know has never been successful.
Post-AI the future of humanity looks weird anyway.
Personally, if you care, you should have as many kids as you can reasonably tolerate.
You run into a ton of problems where costs are structured and can't change as quickly as the population. National pensions heavily depend on growing populations, national debt doesn't but servicing it becomes an increasing burden as the population shrinks, many businesses are similarly more leveraged than survivable. You also have the problem of every pension wanting more income producing assets as all the demand for loans sinks and collateral drops rapidly in value.
Yes, a Japan-style economic malaise seems likely. I'm okay with that personally. I do think it's funny that the complete replacement of a population is "meh" to most people, but pensioners taking a 20% pay cut is a disaster of epic proportions.
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Because if this ai thing doesn't take off and fertility doesn't make a U-turn and quick the economies of every major nation on earth are going to collapse in like 30 years. It's such a straightforward and obvious reason I'm baffled why it gets asked every thread. We don't have anything like the timescale needed to make a Mormon and Amish dominated society work. We just don't.
Honest question, what exactly is meant by economic collapse here? It's not obvious to me why a lower birthrate would be so disastrous. Even if production output goes down there's less people to produce for, right?
Old people don't work (or work much less efficiently if you force them to). The more old people compared to yoing people you have in your society, the more people you have to provide for and the less people are able to provide.
Look at South Korea, currently with a fertility rate of 0.78 (!) If this rate continues, this means there will be 5 grandparent/old person for every grandchild. It means the next generation will be 40% (!) the size of the previous generation. This is a doomed society, it is completely unsustainable.
Where I disagree slightly with @aqouta is that it's not even a matter of taxes and wealth, not that they don't matter, but it's a red herring. It's really a question of labour. There simply won't be enough labour to actually do shit that needs to be done, wealth be damned.
Accumulated wealth is meaningless if you can't actually find or have enough anyone to pay to do things. If you don't have kids or grandkids to look after you, it's going to have be someone else's kids that wipes your geriatric arse. And they can charge a lot for the pleasure, because the demand will be sky-high. Assets and capital actually need someone to use them. It all comes back to labour. Again, you need people to actually do shit, and not have a signifant percentage of the manpower taken up by caring for older generations, which drains wealth from society, it doesn't generate it.
Also, in many countries, generational wealth stored in property, and the property market will crash as the population shrinks and demand crashes. The value of many assets and wealth in general will crash - the idea that the older generations can used their accumulated wealth (perhaps substainal due to not having kids) to pay for people to look after them comfortably is an illusion, a lie. (Don't get me started on national debts which will have absolutely no way to pay off with a shrinking labour pool).
I suppose we can just hope robots and AI bail us out. Although that might just cause its own not dissimilar issues.
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The proportion of people retired and thus not producing and just consuming becomes much larger. Imagine the difference in your personal life if you and your partner had to both support 3 sets of parents each instead of one each. Yes, I know taxes do that in practice but it's the same result. And this extra pressure on the younger generation further compounds and makes it harder to reproduce in future generations. And it's hard to build wealth without inheriting it because the next generation will be too small to absorb all of the current generation's capital investment.
To reply to both you and @ThenElection , as repugnant as it would be to say, the historical(?) solution to population burdens has been to simply...reduce...the number of mouths to feed.
Covid-19 was supposed to help with that.
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It's the ratio of dependents to earners, not the aggregate number of people. At least, that's what I'm concerned about. It has the potential to lead to a death spiral: working taxpayers have to pay more to support more non workers, the incentive to work dissipates, and the world is made much poorer.
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I think that's hyperbole. The economies of major countries won't collapse, they will adjust as they always have, perhaps with a small decrease in standard of living. With an average age of 48.1, Japan is already 30 years further progressed than the United States on this timeline. They are doing just fine economically. Arguably, they have a higher quality of life than the U.S.
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