What is so bad about declining birth rates?

I think people should have the right to have kids if they want to, and not if they don't want to.

American-style capitalism depends on continuous, non-stop population growth forever. More people to work to create wealth for the rich, more people to buy more stuff. When we don't have enough babies, they make up the population gain with immigration. And boy, do some people hate that!

But the alternative is to make it easier for people to have babies, to subsidize them, provide things like education and health care and maternal leave. But they hate that even worse.

Japan is having serious problems because of the low birth rate. They don't have people to replace the retiring baby boomers in the workforce. They haven't allowed immigration like the US and many European countries have. That's how we fuel our growing economy- with increasing numbers of workers. How do you expand a business if there's no one to hire to work in it?

I can see your point of view. And I know it's selfish to have kids. But I want to have them because they make life beautiful and they're a blessing

Population needs to grow. There is no way an economy can work without it.

Immigration is a solution... and a cost effective one too.... but you might find yourself living in a different country by the end of it.

It is kind of funny how people of this generation think the world is getting worse. No world wars, minimal slavery, long life expectancy, comfortable lifestyle, etc etc. People don't want kids that's fine, but don't make BS excuses for it.

It's our duty to replace ourselves. Pick up the torch

We have too many people. I say it's good. The problem is that the economies can't keep growing without increasing numbers of people. But that's a built-in problem of the system. Endless economic growth is unsustainable.

In a broad sketch, two things. One is fixable if there was a political will to do so, the other is more real from a practical point of view and requires a certain level of nudging/interferring in people's private affairs.

Problem one: We live in a global society where success is measured in growth. MORE of everything is seen as good. Any lack of "growth" in manufacturing, spending, extracting natural resources, even making people causes governments, big banks, hedge find managers, and global corporations to panic.

This requires a rethink because it's clearly unsustainable, but it's so ingrained that it cannot be changed without united, global effort and it will take time, generations maybe. David Graber (I suppose he's best called an economic historian rather than a straight up economist these days) rightly points out that "growth" just for the sake of growth is meaningless. Most human endevour is spent on maintenance and we ought to value how well we do that instead of how fast we blow through resources.


The other serious problem is demographic balance, ie how the age profile of a population is spread out. There needs to be enough able people of working age to support both the old and the young and the society has to make it possible to both contribute/benefit themselves, plus also to devote their energies toward making a new generation and caring for their elders if we don't want the society to end. China is facing a huge problem right now because they curbed their population growth rate too steeply w/ the one child policy. The upshot is that the burden of caring for the elderly is too large for individuals, plus the tax base to support the young and elderly is falling too rapidly. If we want to responsibly contract our population instead of letting war, famine and disease do the job we will need incentives for couples to have their child(ren) in a certain time-frame so that the age distribution is smoother.


Those are the two big issues in a nut shell. There's a lot of very side issues as well and you can see some of the replies allude to them. For example, in the "growth is god" model we have now a falling tax base to care for the elderly requires importing workers which can cause unplanned social unrest if the rate is higher than the society can absorb (which varies widely). It's also highly exploitative of the "imports" and their home countries. The home countries nourish their children and then lose their working age tax base. The importer country wants to keep the imported workers at the bottom of the pile and then eject them as soon as the are used up to become a burden on their home countries, or perish. This is what colonialism is, whether it's with goods or people. Don't kid yourself. When all those former colonies were granted independence after WWII it was only because their former masters worked out that it was cheaper to just let mega-corporations exploit them and not bother with a civil service framework.

Things are going to get very interesting this century as as many jobs were lost to industrialization will be lost to automation. It took a few generations before the general population saw any benefits from industrialization and that only happened because workers fought for them tooth and claw, yet the promise of less work, more leisure that mechanizing heavy labour never materialized. Instead we were duped into making MORE to spend MORE, much of it crap. If we don't start fighting we can't control automation which is actually something that could help us contract our populations in a sustainable way. Yeah, it's going to be really interesting....

Nothing we need less people right now

Nothing, really.