All the climate change problems, wars, pandemics and natural disasters won't devastate human simply because we been through all those and we recovered. But demographic collapse because of high living standard? It's uncharted territory here and I am really, really worry.
Phrase things with the blame assigned accordingly. Your phrasing blames people for not becoming parents. A more accurate phrasing is '....because their wealthy elites are so greedy they make having children unaffordable'
"Demographic collapse" is because people can't afford rent, can't afford food, can't afford healthcare - childbirth is ABSURDLY expensive in the US, can't afford childcare, and so many other things.
Why is that? Because of greed. More and more of everything is swallowed up by private equity and corporate management who have no empathy, no flexibility, only a demand for eternal growth. The human piece is irrelevant and actively undesirable. Far simpler to just pay for some GPUs and write articles blaming ordinary people for having no more options.
plus, parents care more what happen to their kids these days, which turns even more time consuming
You get hardcore communists, evangelical christians, muslim scholars, boring census interpreters, etc. It's a whole lot of people out on the fringes of some bell curve that are all worried about this one little thing. I imagine climate change people were like this in the early days. It's a bit heartening as people who normally are enemies ideologically will share tips and news of studies. A little preview of a better future. And so a nicer place to hang out than the regular doomer internet.
Thing is with the 'baby-o-sphere', it's a lot like the plot of TNG's The Chase ( https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Chase_(episode)), in that, you know once the little key or recipe that is discovered that will reliably change birthrates, then everyone is going to scatter and start hating each other again. C'est la vie.
To get some sober second thought though, you could watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIDnr646tLA&t=1452s
It tears down the strawman case of demographic collapse, but I'm with you that its still pretty scary looking and quite unprecedented.
This is similar in some ways to the situation when I was young where population growth was the single biggest crisis facing the developed world.
Either way, we're doomed.
In the past, natural selection had no reason to distinguish between the drive to have sex and the drive to have children because they have the same effect. If we abruptly take away the former as a reliable enough mechanism to propagate the species, we should expect much fewer children. And that is exactly what happened when the pill was introduced a few decades ago: it cut the birth rate in half in developed countries almost instantly.
If we wanted to ameliorate the demographic issues caused by this, we just have to restrict the supply and availability of birth control pills and similar surefire methods like IUDs, just enough such that the birth rate is pegged at 2.1 children per woman.
But this is difficult to achieve in democratic societies because the people that want sex without reproduction make up a significant portion of the population. But we have to fill the labor gap somehow. The solutions we've come up with are mass immigration, and soon, AI. Of course, these solutions create new problems that we'll have to deal with later, but such is life.
West Virginia is a surprise to me, I can only guess that is because of young people moving out. Same could probably be said for Rhode Island, Maine and Vermont.
1. For the first time in human history, it's a viable thing to live alone. Not only that, but actually living alone is easier than living with a spouse. If you want to be married you have to put a lot of effort into dealing with the other person. If you're single, nothing stops you from just eating frozen pizza and playing video games all you want. 100 years ago most people were farmers, and good luck trying to farm land alone, especially as a woman. Once the economic survival necessity to marry disappeared, the naked truth was exposed - people just don't like each other. We'd rather sit alone.
2. When people were finally taught "if you put penis into vagina without latex, a child will pop out, and you will need to keep feeding it for next twenty years", the reaction was "fuck that" because honestly, parenthood is just a bad deal. Nature got around this problem by equipping us with sex drive and for most animals that works because most animals don't make the mental connection between sex and pregnancy, but modern people do make the connection, which breaks the system.
3. Demographic collapse is actually not a problem. Humanity will not die out. It's just a giant evolutionary bottleneck, like many in history. Will the society collapse? Maybe. Not the first and not the last time.
4. Even if the society collapses, a better one will emerge. Black Death killed half of Europe's population, and some historians say that this contributed to Renaissanace, which was a major postive turning point. Labor shortages led to much better position of common workers, and the last time I checked, common workers bitched about being exploited.
It makes no sense to have kids when you can't afford your own existence.
Tax the fucking rich.
All of it is societys perception, how we are being bought up as men and women, our actual purpose, and greed that has killed the desire for children.
https://www.populationpyramid.net/world/2024/
I noticed some middle eastern countries have a very skewed male female ratio among people born roughly 30 years ago.
https://www.npr.org/2025/10/31/nx-s1-5551108/housing-costs-b...
The Boomer generation has perpetuated and intensified restrictive zoning. The lack of new homes where well-payong jobs are located has caused housing prices to soar.
The Boomer generation has also led the de-growth movement. I guess they are going to get their way by making it too expensive for their grandkids to have children and cause the population to plummet.
Given those things, I wonder if there is an actual problem here or we just don't have the experience to see how it resolves. It's hard to see the side effects of increased standards and living or more choice and equality for women as inherently bad or something we need to fight against, especially when there seem to be few effective solutions that are compatible with a free and modern society.
Thus, to the extent that costs and money play a role, it does not seem to be a decisive one. There is something else going on.
And based on current trend it seems that it's the most religious group ( Islamists, Orthodox Jews) who props up the birthrates. But they are also economically most unproductive and most anti-science ones, so I really unsure where this will lead us.
This census investigation is talking about people under the age of 18, meaning it includes people who were conceived almost two decades ago.
Several states on the list also have significantly above average housing affordability (home price to income ratios) like West Virginia or Pennsylvania.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
We aren't supposed to think of children as an economic good. For one children don't pay money for their care so it's difficult for capital to exploit the relationship. Unpaid work especially done by women is valued at zero. Or seen as a sunk cost.
If we reject that than we see that it takes similar amounts of time and labor to raise children as it did a 100 years ago. Other resources have increased. Particularly raising children in an urban environment costs more than rural. And unlike rural children's labor has no value in urban environments. That totally sets up cost disease.
I've been thinking along the lines of generalized Malthusian limits it's not just malnutrition and disease that limits population growth. Toss in cost disease and you can argue for urban, capitalist industrial economies we've overshot some nebulous limit that doesn't show up in mortality statistics.
I would surmise it’s the opposite cause, people are wealthier now and so kids are less desirable because the opportunity cost is higher.
They will give you reasons like over population, environnemental collapse etc... I think they are very self centered and don't want to make sacrifices
A few examples of fertility rates (higher is better, 2023 data):
Sweden: 1.45
US: 1.62
Kenya: 3.21OP has identified the problem more accurately than you have, though.
AI is a symptom, not a cause. We have to fill the labor gap with immigrants and AI because people are having fewer children.
Do you think modern institutions are less efficient at suppressing human greed than medieval ones? Obviously they are more efficient.
The problem you mention is not the wealthy elite, but rather the unproductive parasites, rich and poor. And this is a somewhat separate problem from the birth rate collapse. Indeed, it doesn't help the birth rate, but it's also not the main reason people aren't having children. The main reason is people wanting to have sex without having children, and we've given everyone the ability to do so with the birth control pill.
It is cultural. Having kids is low status in the modern world. And it fucking makes a lot of sense. I only like kids because I have kids, my wife wanted to have kids, and I was kind of forced into it. Now, I love having kids, but because I already have them.
The simple explanation is that there is no local "cost" to doubling your household's income. The only thing you "pay" is to have fewer children. As smaller households become more competitive, average costs rise and the only way to stay competitive is for other households to also stay small.
Looking at world-wide graphs and it's extremely worrying - many countries are completely upside-down and over the next 25-50 years as the elderly die, these populations will crash.
IMO governments should have started doing something about 20 years ago if they wanted to keep things on-track, I suspect the children of today are just going to have to suffer the consequences of a large population decrease.
It's certainly plausible that this is all for the best for Earth's sustainability, but I expect the coming years to be turbulent nonetheless.
Popular socioeconomic explanations for why people are having fewer children aren't wrong, but those aren't the biggest factors. They likely explain the drop from 2008-present, but this recent drop is nothing compared to the 1960-1975 pill cliff. If you claim the socioeconomic problems are unsolvable (which I don't think is true either), there is still the option of regulating the pill as a controlled substance.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_oral_contraceptive_pi...
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...
I can't think of a single year in human history when the world wasn't crazy (maybe with the exception of a couple years in the late 1990s)
Seeing that actually the number of kid per woman is not stable but actually dropping worldwide, the ratio between old and young will get even worse than it is today.
We face the largest demographic crisis ever and we're passing the problem onto the young while draining them via taxation, whislt demanding ever increasing benefits in an all out land grab.
In 1950 the ratio of those paying into the system versus withdrawing was 15:1, were now at 2:1.
Nit-Pick:
The Renaissance is more of the exception that proves the rule than anything. If you look at other plagues history they typically don't result in any large scale changes in society, just misery usually. Unfortunately (?) the data is a bit sparse here, as large scale deaths like this are a bit rare in history, so there really aren't that many plagues to study. But, I think my point still stands, the Renaissance was an outlier, not an expected result.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_epidemics_and_pandemic...
Most families had only one person working, and one available for childcare. Housing was dramatically cheaper. So was a university education. So was food.
And no - unregulated capitalistic greed has dramatically accelerated in the last few decades. It hasn't always been this way. Corporations are buying up everything so they can extract rent and using algorithms and regulatory control to extract every possible dime. Where before you might rent a small home from a landlord who would understand if you were laid off and had to skip a month or two (and who might not raise rents every year) now you have an apartment owned by equity using software to talk to all the other landlords and fix prices as high as possible who will file eviction if you're a minute late.
How dare they not want to spend decades doing something they don't want at enormous personal and financial cost just to keep your favorite economic pyramid scheme running. So selfish.
Here's an idea: if you want kids so much, pay for them. Provide universal healthcare, childcare, education. Provide food stamps for everyone under 18. Put your money where your mouth is.
I guess my thought is that it's non-obvious what "doing something" would have looked like. The seemingly inevitable outcome of economic, social, and technological progress has been declining birthrates, and many proposed solutions would effectively involve reversing one of those three things. I'm honestly not sure that would be a better outcome. I'd welcome a more palatable alternative, but it's not clear one will be forthcoming.
It is far from evident what size of real productive population is needed to sustain a society. With modern tools it does feel like it could be in the realm of sub 10% of the population. This will get even more wild if the techno-optimists are correct.
Depending on how close we are to biophysical bounds trying to increase the population to the historically required productive ratios is just going to make living conditions worse for the average person.
Comparing the affordability crisis for the middle class in the US to that of historically poor developing countries as it relates to birth rates is not a very good argument.
It might be somewhat comparable a decade or so from now if we keep letting wealth inequality run away at current rates, but it isn't right now.
I have my own ideas, but I'd love to hear your opinion.
Presumably the worrying thing here is a possible boom-and-bust cycle. In the long view it should be self-limiting, if a small population with lots of space tends to fill it with a larger future population that then reproduces less. It's just unpleasant to be caught at the declining stage of that cycle, with abundant old people.
Adoption is costly but for now there’s a tax credit. And I suspect every company would like to have the kind of employee who adopts. Some will pay large proportions of the cost, but not the median employer.
Is this a serious question?
The average price of a home in 1950 was like $7,500 - $10,000.
The average price of a home in 2025 is like $410,000 - $530,000
Of all the (generally) rising numbers that factor into the US economy, wages is one of the major things that has risen the least since the 1950s, and especially so since 1980.
Please go advocate for the Chinese to take immigrants from everywhere on earth at the same time, which they currently do not at all. Or do you not care about that for some reason?
Developing countries don’t care less about their infants, how can you think that?
Just one data point to illustrate: in 1950, a bottle of Coca-Cola cost 5 cents.
Empires are fucking resilient creations. The news of US hegemony demise are vastly exagerated.
We do actually have this today in the US through policies like the earned income tax credit, child/dependent care tax credit, and child tax credit, which primarily reduce taxes for people with children (and therefore put a relatively higher tax burden on childless people).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_oral_contraceptive_pi...
I mean, come on, it's literally called "birth control". It would be strange if it didn't affect birth rate.
I would say you have high birthrates despite low material growth in patriarchal countries, where men have more leverage over women. Whereas in countries struggling with birthrates, women have higher standards. For example, home ownership is a bottleneck. In the USA the supply of homes is artificially constrained by the older property-owning class to boost the value of their investment (but really it will result in a crash due to resulting population changes). In china, you have different shenanigans in the construction industry.
"Third world" immigrant groups have lower standards at first, but after they reach a certain material status in a "first world" country, they have the same birthrate trend as their native peers.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-money-more-babies-whats-the-...
This phenomenon has many many causes, and does not represent any statistic on a parents caring for their kids. It is ludicrous you would think so. Please provide at least one study that shows some form of causality.
Do you think there is any chance that there is a diverse set of natural tendencies among humans, clustered by what sort of environmental filters those humans passed through? For example, surviving “trying to kill you” winter every year for thousands of years in a row with survivor man tier technology, where planning and tool design/making are critical, vs not?
I’m literally asking if you think there’s no chance, and if so, how do you know that? Was it scientifically proven? I’ve looked long and hard for that, and gosh I just couldn’t find where that ever happened.
If there is a chance, though, then we are gambling at (further) becoming Brazil in order to save the comfort of one single generation of old people. Yeah I think I’ll pass on that, thanks.
As for alternate solutions. We could allocate available resources based on how many descendants the old person produced. Why should we tolerate free riders and make the young produced by others pay for them? Let them be in old people dorms. Let them have insufficient medical care. It isn’t worth risking the quality of the country over, obviously. And if we use the scheme I mentioned, then they aren’t anybody’s grandparents, anyway. Who will fight for them?
The values you hold, the ones you are defending right now, are western values. Your type seems so sure that the newcomers can be brainwashed to think like we do. Good luck with that! Egalitarianism is not the norm historically or globally. It certainly isn’t the human default.
Thats certainly not a set of values I’d say is worth keeping. Neither is the “but white people are evolved to be better” crap.
If we assume there are many, or even infinite, valid ways to structure a large human group, and the structuring of the large human group depends on the humans executing certain behaviors, then, unless we assume that all humans have completely identical natural instincts and behaviors, an assumption which has no basis in fact, then structures developed by a particular group may not be equally operable by another group, because the two groups may have differing instincts or behaviors. If particular behaviors are required to operate the large human group structure, then humans who have an easier or harder time performing these behaviors will tend to produce a version of the implemented structure with higher or lower fidelity with respect to its abstract design.
No structure of humans is “better” or “worse” than another structure. That is the Eurocentrism in your frame. The style of societal structure we live in is highly contingent. It was developed by Europeans. Can it be operated just as well by other groups? We don’t really know for sure, but the attempts we see around the world have had quite mixed results. That doesn’t mean those people are “bad people” or whatever, or “inferior”, it just means they may be better suited for a different sort of social structure than the one that was developed by our ancestors and people similar to them.
This issue is so highly moralized these days from childhood brainwashing (unintentional, I think) that people’s minds simply won’t go there in a calm and rational manner, absent substantial deprogramming (which is not a fun experience, let me tell you).
JUNE 26, 2025 — The U.S. population age 65 and older rose by 3.1% (to 61.2 million) while the population under age 18 decreased by 0.2% (to 73.1 million) from 2023 to 2024, according to the Vintage 2024 Population Estimates released today by the U.S. Census Bureau.
The data show the population continued to age, with the share of the population age 65 and older steadily increasing from 12.4% in 2004 to 18.0% in 2024, and the share of children declining from 25.0% to 21.5%.
Ongoing growth among the older population, coupled with persistent annual declines in the population under age 18 has reduced the size difference between these two age groups from just over 20 million in 2020 to just below 12 million in 2024. From 2020 to 2024, the older population grew by 13.0%, significantly outpacing the 1.4% growth of working-age adults (ages 18 to 64), while the number of children declined by 1.7%.
"Children still outnumber older adults in the United States, despite a decline in births this decade,” said Lauren Bowers, chief of the Census Bureau’s Population Estimates Branch. "However, the gap is narrowing as baby boomers continue to age into their retirement years. In fact, the number of states and counties where older adults outnumber children is on the rise, especially in sparsely populated areas.”
As recently as 2020, there were just three states where older adults outnumbered children: Maine, Vermont, and Florida. By 2024, this number had increased to 11, with Delaware, Hawaii, Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and West Virginia joining their ranks.
Similarly, from 2020 to 2024, the number of U.S. metro areas with more older adults than children increased from 58 to 112. This represents nearly 30% of the nation’s 387 metro areas. Additionally, in 2024, three metro areas with at least 1 million people (Cleveland, OH; Providence-Warwick, RI-MA; and Hartford-West Hartford-East Hartford, CT) had more older people than younger people for the first time.
In 2020, 31.3% (or 983) of the nation’s 3,144 counties had more older adults than children. This figure increased to almost 45% (1,411 counties) in 2024. In both years, most of these counties had small populations and were located outside of metro and micro areas.
Note: References to race and Hispanic origin compositions are for non-Hispanic race alone groups. Hispanic or Latino populations are of any race unless otherwise specified.
Today’s release includes estimates of population by race, age, sex and Hispanic origin for the nation, states, metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas, and counties, and estimates of population by age and sex for Puerto Rico Commonwealth and its municipios.
This is the final release of the Vintage 2024 Population Estimates. The Census Bureau previously released total population estimates for the nation, states and Puerto Rico Commonwealth; metropolitan and micropolitan statistical areas; counties and Puerto Rico municipios; and incorporated places and minor civil divisions. Components of population change and housing unit estimates for the nation, states and counties are also available on the Population and Housing Unit Estimates webpage.
This release does not incorporate data from the 2020 Modified Age and Race Census files.
The full release schedule for the Population Estimates Program can be found on the Census Bureau’s website.
With each new release of annual estimates, the entire time series of estimates is revised for all years back to the date of the last census. All previously published (vintage) estimates are superseded and archived on the FTP2 site.