>As the ratio of working-age adults (18–64) to older adults falls from about 3.4 today toward roughly 2.4 by 2060, the arithmetic that supports those programs tightens, all else equal. On this reading, the chart is an argument for some combination of higher productivity, longer working lives, higher fertility, or higher immigration to widen the working-age base.
A great point, but I don’t think those policies should go after the (relatively tiny) wealth that boomers et al currently hold. As another commenter alluded to, the money is going to have to come from much bigger fish; there’s literally nowhere else to get it from!
Parents and Grandparents might not be interested in starting families, but they're interested in their (grand)children starting families. Ideally, that's where their wealth would go, except that it's being completely obliterated by retirement and end-of-life care.
If that were true, US policy and trends would reflect that. Instead, as groups, we are seeing earning potential decreased in the young and wealth increase in the old. This is a dysgenic shift. Coupled with AI, which when viewed as a force against labor is a product that reduces the earning potential of the young cohort as a group, this is not sustainable. The lack of stability and opportunity for young people is the sort of stuff that leads to revolution.
I hate to tell you, but no generation is particularly interested in starting families at this moment in history. This is the closest thing the world has gotten to a general strike to force capitalism to slow its roll.
Yeah, with apologies to the mill which demands more grist, we grew up hearing that if you can't afford children, then you shouldn't have them. And we learned that lesson. Lived it too, from the other side. Our parents couldn't really afford it, and it's tougher now than then, getting tougher still. So it goes.
I agree that the ultra-rich living on permanent fake debt backed by their stocks / real estate need to contribute more, but I'm tired of seeing people throw "we can tax the rich" as a panacea.
Productivity is growing much more slowly than the retiree-to-worker ratio. Workers are producing slightly more every year, but there are a lot more retirees to take care of every year. If this does not change, we will eventually see a collapse of social safety nets. Policy can only accelerate or delay that collapse.
Pray tell, what do you mean by "the rest of the world"? Surely it's not Western Europe, which is already being strangled by the cost of the welfare state?
Why would I want to turn the country at the forefront of technology and innovation into a stagnating socialist welfare state like the countries you are holding up as role models?
I don’t get this, doesn’t proof of an aging global population imply that overpopulation is solving itself? Also is it really that big of an issue? I’ve only heard bill gates talking about it, not sure what it’s got to do with that geezer tbh
Yes, because the aging population increases healthcare spending to support them while the working age population shrinks, eroding the tax base. This is currently happening in Japan right now.
It's a titanic issue. Old people are expensive. They tax the young to pay for themselves. Now the system is running out of young to tax.
And that's the situation in rich and prosperous nations. I live in a developing country that has managed to be relatively poor and have a declining birth rate. It's so absurdly pathological it's not even funny. Symptoms include, for example, increased retirement ages. We will work well into our 70+ years of age, and we will be happy. Newer generations are already coping, they've already internalized the fact they will never actually retire. This is the stuff revolutions are made out of.
There are, like, two countries where TFR is even close to 6. And there’s about 20 where it’s higher than 4. And since those countries also tend to have sky high infant-mortality rates, the global average population growth rate is somewhere like 1-1.2% and dropping fast.
Killing USAID probably put a drag on that slowdown by reducing access to family planning resources, but we’ll have to see exactly how much in the coming years.
Not a single country has a fertility rate of 6 children per woman. And the highest middle eastern country is Yemen at 4.3. The next highest is Iraq at 3.1.
Each marginal person does not produce more environmental benefits than they consume. It's dramatically the opposite. My butt is not a carbon capture device.
It's a problem to the economic model, too, but of course no one cares about more than a couple fiscal quarters in the future. The looming ecological disasters will irreversibly destroy the global economy in some of our lifetimes if nothing happens to stop it pretty soon.
Just try it for 1 fucking year and then see if you still wish that hell upon anyone.
I swear I'm starting to wonder if that's a take pushed by ultracapitalists so they can have an endless supply of labor and consumers, like the bans on abortion etc.
No, corporations want people without children, since they have more disposable income to spend on the pointless tat they want to sell you, and are willing to work longer hours to make rich people even richer.
I don't think so - children are drivers of consumption and they also reduce the agency of workers by eliminating their financial slack (less ability to jump jobs / take it easy due to higher spending floor e.g. daycare expenses, larger apartment, etc).
Energy is very easy to produce cleanly (nuclear, and solar is looking better and better). The barriers to doing so are political and financial, not technical. They will be made worse by having an aged-heavy population, which is less innovative, less willing to invest in the future, and less willing to try new things. And it makes a poorer society, obviously.
Malthus has been proved wrong at every juncture. Lack of children is about to bite us very, very hard.
But remember: the uber-rich are allowing millions to immigrate to the rich world, to prevent precisely this. (I'm not commenting here on whether immigration is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing, simply noting that large-scale immigration brings wages down, and that the low birthrate is consistently stated as its main driver.) Also, remember that paying for all those unproductive old people will consume enormous amounts of wealth, something that didn't apply during the Black Death.
> Lack of children is about to bite us very, very hard.
Why is everyone so sure of this? My own instinct is just that we'll adapt to it and it will be fine.
It's just seems like the equivalent of making one of those charts that shows we're going to run out of [some critical resource] by [some date]. They are always wrong, without exception. Because as the resource becomes more scarce, we adapt our societies to become less dependent on it. You can't just extrapolate that trend lines or relationships between statistics like GDP and population continue into the distant future; it almost never works.
I don't have my own competing, grand prediction of how the distant future will pan out. But my thinking is that societies are extremely complex systems and when one variable is tweaked, generally all the other variables also adjust to compensate.
I'm not against growing populations, just not overly concerned about depopulation either.
You're assuming at least two things that I disagree with.
First about behavior in old age. I'm pretty sure the majority of adults today don't want to live and think like their grandparents, so we can't say "less" anything. The circumstances are definitely changing enough that we already know it will be different.
The population decline is not happening in huge step changes. "About to bite us" is definitely hyperbole.
> As the population has grown poverty has decreased.
This is like comparing apples to oranges to find a correlation, and arriving at an incorrect causation.
Falling populations are largely due to better education, specifically of women, as well as integration of women into the workforce, which has been one of the bigger drivers in curbing poverty. The latter is so significant in the west and the far east (double income households mean rising costs of living, meaning SAHM households become unviable in the West for the middle class), resulting in a significant population decrease.
But in places such as the Middle East or Africa, ever increasing populations have only meant even more financial trouble for those economies. Case in point Pakistan and Egypt. In other economies such as India (which I assume is one of the "couple countries" you mentioned), overall birth rates are falling significantly to near replacement level, and in the few states/regions with high birth rates, poverty is rampant and the people reliant on subsidies from other more prosperous regions.
The problem with most of the world is that while we are able to sustain a huge population as a whole globally, most of the population growth is extremely localized, resulting in population sparsity in some comfortable regions (Canada, the US, Central Asia, southern Russia) and population unsustainability in other regions completely unsuited to population growth (sub-Saharan Africa, Indonesia, the Middle East).
Some people have a massive ecological footprint. For instance, somebody who uses a private jet ~daily.
Other people have a negative ecological footprint: their actions either actively improve the ecology of the world or act to reduce the ecological footprint of others.
The difference between the two is many orders of magnitude. A world-wide population of 100 million daily private jet users likely has a larger ecological impact than 10 billion low-impact humans.
Population change takes decades or centuries for the ecological impact to happen.
Shifts in the ecological footprint of significant populations can cause shifts over a small number of years.
It's not about existence it's about what drives the flows. People are born, work and save, and retire. Part of the savings enters as institutional money, and is consumed in retirement.
Yes. A massive implosion in aggregate consumer demand due to shrinking population will hit real estate, stocks, tax revenue, and therefore the ability to meet debt repayment obligations.
Frustratingly, (and counterintuitively), it won't help housing prices, because shrinking populations retreat to city centers. Spain, Italy, Japan, and Korea are full of $5,000 houses. Meanwhile, Madrid, Rome, Tokyo, and Seoul are more expensive than they've ever been.
Our expanding economies and improving quality of life depend on young people and a growing population. So it brings up an interesting question.
In 20 years, will countries start to compete for young people? Tax breaks, benefits, etc. Will some countries thrive while others die off completely? The proportion of young people will be a huge issue regarding military strength, innovation, etc.
That’s very idealistic opinion. The reality is that for example German government does everything for retirees and their votes. Young people as a minority are successfully ignored.
Yes, but the inverse implication of countries heavily competing is that young people will be severely restricted from leaving as well. An incredibly underrated future possibility is that it becomes much harder to get a passport.
Sounds like the who age verification debate will just solve itself. Just wait until there aren't any more children and then we don't need to worry about protecting them.
I think it's a little brash, but I do think that if we could accurately measure "care" that people with 1 child care statistically slightly more for them than those with 5 might care about any individual one. Not that they don't care, but that the one with 1 would worry more. Like how families with 1 daughter and multiple boys might dot on the only daughter a bit more.
Keep building these bike lanes and 15-minute neighborhoods. So that people don't even think about having children. Make sure people have no personal space and no personal time.
There really, really are not. Tokyo is the prime example of the urban density runaway spiral.
Japan has a declining population, yet Tokyo prices are skyrocketing. Some people now live in "microapartments" where you can cook while sitting on a toilet.
Yet spacious houses are literally sold for nothing but transaction fees, just 2-3 hours away from Tokyo.
They're talking about raising kids already born, not conditions for having one in the first place. We should separate discussion of the environment from the cost which is the really the main factor for why parents decamp for the suburbs. Causality goes the other way - it's not the compact nature that reduced fertility but the fact that dense neighborhoods are rare and pricey in the US.
> Causality goes the other way - it's not the compact nature that reduced fertility but the fact that dense neighborhoods are rare and pricey in the US.
They're unfortunately not rare. And dense housing is ALWAYS pricey in the developed countries.
Well personal space and personal time were not in abundant supply in our times of growth. It is true that urban areas have far fewer children than rural areas and that this is a worldwide property. It’s a pity since I like the ability for kids to walk to places and take the bus or train and I’ve grown up in a rural place (pythons and peacocks, cows and birds, scorpions and cobras!) and in a highly urbanized environment and they both have their advantages.
I personally think it’s just opportunity cost. Children seem like a big deal with unclear benefit and so as people get the chance to substitute with other things they do so. For my part, we put a lot of work into having kids and we live in SF. If we leave, it’ll be because my daughters don’t have mobility here because crime and cars impede their independent movement.
Nope. It's just time and personal living space. It's THAT simple.
Go on, try to plan your day with transit and no car if you have 3 children (with 2-3 year age gaps). You'll find that this really works only if everything is concentrated, or if it's a full-time job for you. That's why we hear so much about "15-minute neighborhoods".
But when everything is concentrated, it becomes EXPENSIVE and you also lose any semblance of choice. You will likely have only one school, one daycare, one community center. You become hemmed in within that "walkable" neighborhood. That park nearby? It surely can look nice, but what if it's the only park within reasonable walking distance? So you don't even have an _option_ to go somewhere else with kids, without making it a full-day trip?
People like to laugh at Texas, about how riding an SUV to a walkable park is ridiculous. But is it, really?
The way to fix all of it? Suburbs and cars. Cars provide personal freedom and personal space. That's also why the US had a higher birth rate for much longer than Europe, and it started cratering once young people were forced (by the economy) to move into dense city cores.
That's how I grew up in a family of four in India and my parents are surgeons so we didn't really have them able to take us places for the majority of time. TFR at the time was 4.0 and we had access to contraception etc. and the majority of our trips here in SF are on foot as well. There are therefore some hidden assumptions here. We do take the car to the paediatrician etc. but I should soon have an Urban Arrow / R&M bike and will see how it performs.
As the others have said, to me it seems to be the opposite. I went to Switzerland recently and was shocked at how kid friendly it was (very walkable, kid section in trains, parks with fun toys instead of shitty plastic statues).
I also saw a whole lot of families and children.
As I'm getting older and looking in the coming years at having children, the value of a tight, walkable community has risen exponentially to me.
For what it's worth, Switzerland's fertility rate (1.59 births per woman) is still well below the replacement rate, and has been for decades.
I think "make society more child-friendly" is a good idea, but one that doesn't seem to have increased fertility that much. To me it seems that educated people living comfortable lives with access to birth control simply don't want to have that many children. If you look at the country stats, the most proven way to increase fertility is to take away education, women's rights, or birth control. And imo, the western world should adapt to low birth rates, instead of trying to prop them up.
(a) non-walkable neighborhoods with big houses, big roads and cars everywhere, versus
(b) smaller houses or apartments but fewer cars, walkable neighborhoods, and bikes (and other small mobility devices that small kids can use)
I can tell you where being a kid seems more fun. And I’ve personally been to both sorts of places recently and observed how the kids behave.
Sure, with big lots, kids have lots of space in their own backyards. And big cars make soccer-momming easier. But, when kids can easily and safely get somewhere else approximately on their own, the whole situation seems better.
And yes, I really did recently observe a pretty big family in one of the latter types of places. How does one parent herd a pile of kids from their small (but not that small) apartment to some destination without a giant car? They tell the bigger kids where they’re going and they take the smaller kids, and maybe the bigger kids get their ahead, and everyone gets to experience an appropriate amount of independence for their age.
There’s also nothing new here. Until quite recently in human history, in most societies, kids were quite free to explore on their own or in groups without adults. I think it’s unfortunate that we’ve built so many places that are unsafe for small children and not easily navigable by older children.
And I can tell you that (a) is actually where the children _are_. And (b) is where the people go to die.
> Sure, with big lots, kids have lots of space in their own backyards. And big cars make soccer-momming easier. But, when kids can easily and safely get somewhere else approximately on their own, the whole situation seems better.
It seems better, but it's actually not better.
Besides, suburbs can be improved quite a bit by adding local parks, mandating sidewalks, etc. We're also on the cusp of the self-driving revolution, and pretty soon children will be able to just get into a cab by themselves.
> and everyone gets to experience an appropriate amount of independence for their size.
Got data? I think any even remotely serious attempt will discover a very mixed bag. I had an LLM pull data from various places in California and New York (because doing it by hand is a pain), and there isn’t really a clear trend either way as to where the children are.
Palo Alto has a surprisingly large number of children under 18 and under 5, and Palo Alto is fairly walkable as California cities go. Fresno and Bakersfield (not so walkable) are higher. There seems to be a larger fraction of young children in Brooklyn than in less subway-covered areas of the NYC metro area.
In general I suspect that children in the US are mildly skewed toward more suburban areas, but not strongly. There are plenty of children in dense areas.
But my claim wasn’t about where the children are — it’s about where the children can have more fun on the basis of the structure of the neighborhood.
Both have approximately similar populations but completely different approaches to city design.
NYC is at 52 and Harris County (that contains Houston) is at 67 births per year per 1000. But NYC is also diverse, with relatively sparse parts in Brooklyn and Queens, where most children live.
> In general I suspect that children in the US are mildly skewed toward more suburban areas, but not strongly.
Compare the suburban US with dense European cities. The urban damage is cumulative, and Europe started over-urbanizing earlier.
You can see the breakpoint in the US happened in 2008, as the millennials started entering the workforce. They were the first modern generation that _had_ to move to large cities to get ahead economically.
> There are plenty of children in dense areas.
Yes, in desperately poor neighborhoods. That's called an "inverted J curve".
It will be interesting to see how South Korea holds its borders 5 generations from now. That population will have shrunk substantially. Perhaps a robotic workforce and a drone military will finally deliver luxury capitalism to them. Or they will simply lose their control of their borders.
Countries with larger populations will see these guys commit civilizational suicide with enough time to recover one can hope. We won’t be funding USAID when the majority of Americans are drawing from Medicare though.
I think it’s time to bite the bullet and raise the retirement^W elder benefits eligibility age and peg it to life expectancy at birth minus 15 years or some structure like that. It’s fine that my generation will have to eat the loss - having paid for the past one but not benefiting as much from the coming ones. Some generation has to, and better us than them.
As we get better at healthcare and life, we should expect to be productive and care for ourselves for longer. I hope that as I age I remain in favour of succeeding generations over my own self. Plant the tree whose shade we won’t see etc.
What even is retirement age and what practical impact would changing it have on society? People can retire or keep working at whatever age they want as long as they can afford to
Retirement age is usually tied to various benefits. In the UK it's the age at which you can collect the state pension (currently around £12K per year, if you worked for 30-35 years). Changing the retirement age therefore affects the state's finances, quite dramatically in fact: https://obr.uk/box/the-fiscal-impact-of-increases-in-the-sta...
In some countries you can reach retirement age, get a pension and keep working. So you profit more. It's complicated as maybe you've paid to your pension since 18yrs of age and you should get some money back, but many pensions aren't based on those actual savings but on tax payers actively funding that pension. Is double dipping ok then?
In this case, I presume they're taxed on their continued employment and so they're still paying into the pension they're receiving benefits on? I don't see a problem if that's the case. They contributed to the pension with an agreed payment date and followed the process correctly. I can understand how you feel that it's unfair, but I really don't see a problem unless they stop paying into the pension or stop paying taxes on their continued employment.
The double-dipping unfairness is mostly perceived when there is high unemployment in youth, and we're allowing, via tax rules, for retirement aged persons to have decent returns on their work. They get a living-rate pension AND a job.
Like others note, UBI is a fair solution. Let's have everyone, regardless of age, be able to have a baseline. Then allow extra income form those who enjoy, or value, additional work and income.
Ah this is not a universal term. I see. I will edit. I meant “age of eligibility for elder age benefits and pensions”. E.g. social security eligibility age, state pension age, etc.
I suppose we could pay everyone about $1.2k/mo and that would exhaust the entire current federal budget but that would eliminate the 60% or so of the federal budget dedicated to the aggregate of all social welfare programs. The tax increases required would be substantial to keep Medicare, Social Security, Health services, Education, and so on.
Without more productive capacity the extra $1.2k/mo would cause enormous inflation. Just a question of what the country is optimizing for, I suppose, but I think people would be unhappy with the result.
> that would eliminate the 60% or so of the federal budget dedicated to the aggregate of all social welfare programs
The combination of UBI and healthcare largely should. UBI serves as a better alternative to most such programs (and has much less administrative overhead).
Also, any form of UBI will likely result in substantial spending increases (trickle-up economics is well-established as actually working, incremental dollars handed to the average person are typically spent, not saved), as well as reducing structural friction in the labor market (people can change jobs more easily).
> Without more productive capacity
UBI will also likely result in more businesses/entrepreneurship, R&D, and other substantial improvements to productive capacity. Studies generally show that UBI does not cause people to substantially leave the job market.
> peg it to life expectancy at birth minus 15 years
That would lower the retirement age for me. I was born in the mid-80s.
I know that was just a suggestion. We could go with something like "life expectancy at birth minus 5 years", which would raise the retirement age for me, but we're basically just admitting that retirement isn't a thing anymore if we do that. Hopefully the wealthiest nation on Earth can do better.
I think, whatever we do, we should recognize that the current retired generation holds more wealth than any other generation. If we want more kids in our society, maybe we need to get some of that wealth into the hands of people who can have more kids.
It's so frustrating that Social Security reform became the "are you a good progressive?" litmus test in the early 00s. We've had our wages tithed for our whole lives - money that would be actually worth something in retirement if invested - to go into a Ponzi scheme that will go bust before we're retirement age. You could see it coming decades away, and political infighting ensured nothing would be done about it until the discourse tired and started arguing about pronouns instead.
We could actually hold our elected officials accountable for gutting Social Security instead. Then we wouldn't have to add "stock exchange expert" to our ever-growing list of job titles.
I'm from the west coast and oregon has always seemed to have large populations of retirees in the more rural areas. My grandparents considered moving there when I was young.
Also seems that oregon has a large "self-selecting" population where folks move there from out-of-state
Yeah, they keep stating how "% counties" also qualify but they're almost all rural sparsely populated counties. Must be a retiree thing or "I grew up here and not leaving" thing.
Florida being on that list made so much sense lol.
If things don't change, those in power in the US will succeed in making the second a reality.
There is a "replacement" crisis but it's being addressed by pearl clutching and those advocating for forced birth.
Having children is expensive all the way around. And women's reproductive rights have enabled them to (rightfully) make their own choices about motherhood.
To state the obvious: children literally are the future of humanity and we need to address the issue accordingly. A lot of it would be via changing the economics of having a child, and the rest would be by making the world a "village to raise a child".
This is all eminently doable. We just need to agree on what that looks like and how to best invest in it.
Based on all available evidence, there is no will to implement or change the necessary policies, nor is it likely there will there be in the next 5-10 years (affordable housing, better working conditions, universal healthcare, robust support systems for parents, etc), locking in the fertility trap trajectory.
Even Scandinavian countries and France, with generous parental benefits, have not materially increased their fertility rates.
At least in the US, protecting agency and autonomy that might be challenged is easily solved with the second amendment for defense, as well as long term and permanent birth control for those who would not like to have any children or more children. The potentially vulnerable reproductive age population shrinks perpetually year after year, continuously reducing potential attack surface.
A people that will not or cannot reproduce itself must eventually step aside for a people that will.
Those who govern us see us as an economic zone to exploit, so perpetuating core social values isn’t really a concern. Although even countries who recognize this problem are having trouble finding a solution.
It may simply be that the future doesn’t look very much like the “developed world”. The only nations (or large subcultures like the Amish) that still have high fertility rates also have values and lifestyles that appear very foreign to us.
I’m not passing judgement, it’s just Darwin in action.
I have a thesis that people need stories to inform and inspire them. I also believe that this problem is technically solvable, and that the stories we have today are either backwards (the woman belongs at home making babies and taking care of daddy), or too hand-wavy (we just need to fund Head Start and make schools free).
I'm all for the latter approach but it doesn't address the fact that children are money, time, and energy vampires (albeit lovable and worthy of those things). We need more than that. Programs that augment school itself (the arts, scouting, DIY/maker stuff, etc). Those exist but are not evenly distributed and we need way more of it.
Lastly, the "village" part of encouraging communities to help families thrive instead of struggle; to make sure that kids have the options they need rather than turning to drugs, gangs, etc.
That’s what’s happening now. The new generations in the developed world are not reproducing, so they will not have descendants. The culture will be replaced.
You are not using “people” in the same sense. I mean “people” as a national culture, which does shift from generation to generation, but generally not in a radical sense. Immigrants assimilate over time, although they do leave lasting influence on the culture as they merge with it. Families pass on aspects of their attitudes and beliefs. Generations pass on cultural knowledge through media. This is why millennial culture in the US is a continuation and evolution of Boomer culture, despite all the intergenerational strife.
As the culture is replaced, revolution and/or national disintegration becomes more likely, as there is little to unite people in the face of significant challenges. (Why should I sacrifice for neighbors I can’t relate to? Why should I follow the laws and cultural codes of a nation I have no deep connection to? Perhaps my culture’s standards are better!) It’s a natural process that’s happened many times throughout history.
Opinions aren't genetic, so that's not very good logic. I guess the logic depends on a culture passing on a value - by means of words, not by genetics - such as spawn furiously to the next generation, who accept it uncritically. That would be a version of (2) I guess: mindless reproduction along with hostility to thinking about it, with memes as the mechanism. This memetic condition would tend to win, you'd think, except somehow it hasn't won already, and we are still somewhat mentally capable of considering our reproductive options. Perhaps having children thoughtfully is the only effective way, and so it must necessarily be by choice.
Western society is limping forward with a "yes, but me first" mentality.
We absolutely need an abundance agenda if we want people to have children. Reject the zero-sum investment thesis of NIMBY protectionism. Invest in density, efficiency, and antitrust. This is one of the most openly obvious self-owns in history. It's genuinely absurd.
We are all in this together. Make financial security easy for young people and we'll actually get children.
Adults born before computers, the public internet and the later appearance of so-called "tech" companies on the internet, will outnumber those born after computers, the internet and so-called "tech" company intermediaries
Improving healthcare and medicine should be one of the core goals of civilization, so eventually we should have healthcare good enough to enable "practical immortality": No "aging" and no deaths save in extreme cases or physical accidents/violence.
In an ideal future, the majority of humans SHOULD be all over 100 years old! and hale and healthy as a 30 year old.
The problem is not "how long most people have been alive", maybe the problem is our unwillingness to reassess social assumptions established >2000 years ago:
That everyone has to "work", everyone has to "earn", everyone has to constantly "buy", and that everyone has to constantly pump out babies so they can also keep doing the same...
tonyedgecombe | 12 hours ago
Or spend less.
throw-the-towel | 11 hours ago
boczez | 11 hours ago
bearjaws | 11 hours ago
We've already seen 20 years of policy driven by people who don't care about families being started.
boczez | 11 hours ago
philipov | 11 hours ago
midtake | 11 hours ago
co_ent | 11 hours ago
Their wealth is not liquid, but it's not relatively tiny.
>$93 trillion in assets[1]
>Total wealth: $167.26 trillion[2]
[1]https://investor.visa.com/news/news-details/2026/Visa-Resear...
[2]https://smartasset.com/financial-advisor/wealth-by-generatio...
saghm | 11 hours ago
subarctic | 11 hours ago
sdellis | 10 hours ago
glaslong | 9 hours ago
NegativeLatency | 11 hours ago
We can tax the rich, we're post scarcity, time to take a look at the rest of the world an come up with a better social safety net.
arbll | 11 hours ago
Productivity is growing much more slowly than the retiree-to-worker ratio. Workers are producing slightly more every year, but there are a lot more retirees to take care of every year. If this does not change, we will eventually see a collapse of social safety nets. Policy can only accelerate or delay that collapse.
throw-the-towel | 11 hours ago
newfriend | 10 hours ago
throwway120385 | 10 hours ago
aliasxneo | 10 hours ago
missedthecue | 10 hours ago
kps | 11 hours ago
polycancel | 10 hours ago
missedthecue | 10 hours ago
peterfirefly | 11 hours ago
pmontra | 11 hours ago
dotancohen | 11 hours ago
boczez | 11 hours ago
CodingJeebus | 11 hours ago
Yes, because the aging population increases healthcare spending to support them while the working age population shrinks, eroding the tax base. This is currently happening in Japan right now.
matheusmoreira | 11 hours ago
It's a titanic issue. Old people are expensive. They tax the young to pay for themselves. Now the system is running out of young to tax.
And that's the situation in rich and prosperous nations. I live in a developing country that has managed to be relatively poor and have a declining birth rate. It's so absurdly pathological it's not even funny. Symptoms include, for example, increased retirement ages. We will work well into our 70+ years of age, and we will be happy. Newer generations are already coping, they've already internalized the fact they will never actually retire. This is the stuff revolutions are made out of.
chermi | 11 hours ago
missedthecue | 10 hours ago
palmotea | 11 hours ago
It will be (eventually) when the worldwide birth rate drop below replacement. And it's close to that now: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN.
littlexsparkee | 9 hours ago
naravara | 11 hours ago
Killing USAID probably put a drag on that slowdown by reducing access to family planning resources, but we’ll have to see exactly how much in the coming years.
dukeyukey | 10 hours ago
dotancohen | 2 hours ago
- Niger: 6.7 births per woman
- Somalia: 6.0
- Chad: 5.5
So it seems only Africa.
mostertoaster | 11 hours ago
Maybe in a couple countries. But not for the world, and not for the west and definitely not for America.
As the population has grown poverty has decreased.
throw-the-towel | 11 hours ago
jppittma | 11 hours ago
HappySweeney | 11 hours ago
Razengan | 10 hours ago
So that's the end goal our species should aspire to?
Produce™ and Consume™?
Eternally without relent?
matchbok3 | 5 hours ago
Will you be the first to go volunteer to back to the stone ages?
I didn't think so.
KPGv2 | 11 hours ago
sph | 10 hours ago
deeviant | 11 hours ago
KPGv2 | 11 hours ago
matchbok3 | 5 hours ago
Razengan | 11 hours ago
That is such a privileged first-world take.
You haven't lived in overpopulated places.
Just try it for 1 fucking year and then see if you still wish that hell upon anyone.
I swear I'm starting to wonder if that's a take pushed by ultracapitalists so they can have an endless supply of labor and consumers, like the bans on abortion etc.
geye1234 | 11 hours ago
Razengan | 10 hours ago
geye1234 | 10 hours ago
matchbok3 | 4 hours ago
littlexsparkee | 9 hours ago
geye1234 | 11 hours ago
Energy is very easy to produce cleanly (nuclear, and solar is looking better and better). The barriers to doing so are political and financial, not technical. They will be made worse by having an aged-heavy population, which is less innovative, less willing to invest in the future, and less willing to try new things. And it makes a poorer society, obviously.
Malthus has been proved wrong at every juncture. Lack of children is about to bite us very, very hard.
epicureanideal | 10 hours ago
Could it have an effect like the Black Plague, where labor becomes more expensive?
geye1234 | 10 hours ago
But remember: the uber-rich are allowing millions to immigrate to the rich world, to prevent precisely this. (I'm not commenting here on whether immigration is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing, simply noting that large-scale immigration brings wages down, and that the low birthrate is consistently stated as its main driver.) Also, remember that paying for all those unproductive old people will consume enormous amounts of wealth, something that didn't apply during the Black Death.
jaredklewis | 5 hours ago
Why is everyone so sure of this? My own instinct is just that we'll adapt to it and it will be fine.
It's just seems like the equivalent of making one of those charts that shows we're going to run out of [some critical resource] by [some date]. They are always wrong, without exception. Because as the resource becomes more scarce, we adapt our societies to become less dependent on it. You can't just extrapolate that trend lines or relationships between statistics like GDP and population continue into the distant future; it almost never works.
I don't have my own competing, grand prediction of how the distant future will pan out. But my thinking is that societies are extremely complex systems and when one variable is tweaked, generally all the other variables also adjust to compensate.
I'm not against growing populations, just not overly concerned about depopulation either.
sublinear | 4 hours ago
First about behavior in old age. I'm pretty sure the majority of adults today don't want to live and think like their grandparents, so we can't say "less" anything. The circumstances are definitely changing enough that we already know it will be different.
The population decline is not happening in huge step changes. "About to bite us" is definitely hyperbole.
fakedang | 10 hours ago
This is like comparing apples to oranges to find a correlation, and arriving at an incorrect causation.
Falling populations are largely due to better education, specifically of women, as well as integration of women into the workforce, which has been one of the bigger drivers in curbing poverty. The latter is so significant in the west and the far east (double income households mean rising costs of living, meaning SAHM households become unviable in the West for the middle class), resulting in a significant population decrease.
But in places such as the Middle East or Africa, ever increasing populations have only meant even more financial trouble for those economies. Case in point Pakistan and Egypt. In other economies such as India (which I assume is one of the "couple countries" you mentioned), overall birth rates are falling significantly to near replacement level, and in the few states/regions with high birth rates, poverty is rampant and the people reliant on subsidies from other more prosperous regions.
The problem with most of the world is that while we are able to sustain a huge population as a whole globally, most of the population growth is extremely localized, resulting in population sparsity in some comfortable regions (Canada, the US, Central Asia, southern Russia) and population unsustainability in other regions completely unsuited to population growth (sub-Saharan Africa, Indonesia, the Middle East).
xnx | 10 hours ago
True, but not obviously a causal relationship.
bryanlarsen | 9 hours ago
Some people have a massive ecological footprint. For instance, somebody who uses a private jet ~daily.
Other people have a negative ecological footprint: their actions either actively improve the ecology of the world or act to reduce the ecological footprint of others.
The difference between the two is many orders of magnitude. A world-wide population of 100 million daily private jet users likely has a larger ecological impact than 10 billion low-impact humans.
Population change takes decades or centuries for the ecological impact to happen.
Shifts in the ecological footprint of significant populations can cause shifts over a small number of years.
cwoolfe | 11 hours ago
Maxion | 11 hours ago
wbl | 11 hours ago
Maxion | 11 hours ago
throw-the-towel | 11 hours ago
wbl | 10 hours ago
missedthecue | 10 hours ago
Frustratingly, (and counterintuitively), it won't help housing prices, because shrinking populations retreat to city centers. Spain, Italy, Japan, and Korea are full of $5,000 houses. Meanwhile, Madrid, Rome, Tokyo, and Seoul are more expensive than they've ever been.
slaw | 11 hours ago
Africa doubled it's population in the last 28 years.
matchbok3 | 11 hours ago
In 20 years, will countries start to compete for young people? Tax breaks, benefits, etc. Will some countries thrive while others die off completely? The proportion of young people will be a huge issue regarding military strength, innovation, etc.
Could get very ugly.
lnsru | 10 hours ago
missedthecue | 10 hours ago
Eddy_Viscosity2 | 11 hours ago
throw-the-towel | 11 hours ago
eigencoder | 10 hours ago
xboxnolifes | 8 hours ago
cyberax | 11 hours ago
That's how we reduce the Earth's population!
BigTTYGothGF | 11 hours ago
cyberax | 10 hours ago
Walk in Tokyo and try to find children there.
trgn | 10 hours ago
BigTTYGothGF | 9 hours ago
There might a few more things going on there than just density, perhaps operating on a national level.
cyberax | 7 hours ago
Japan has a declining population, yet Tokyo prices are skyrocketing. Some people now live in "microapartments" where you can cook while sitting on a toilet.
Yet spacious houses are literally sold for nothing but transaction fees, just 2-3 hours away from Tokyo.
phainopepla2 | 10 hours ago
missedthecue | 10 hours ago
littlexsparkee | 7 hours ago
cyberax | 3 hours ago
They're unfortunately not rare. And dense housing is ALWAYS pricey in the developed countries.
btmiller | 11 hours ago
cyberax | 10 hours ago
arjie | 10 hours ago
I personally think it’s just opportunity cost. Children seem like a big deal with unclear benefit and so as people get the chance to substitute with other things they do so. For my part, we put a lot of work into having kids and we live in SF. If we leave, it’ll be because my daughters don’t have mobility here because crime and cars impede their independent movement.
cyberax | 8 hours ago
Nope. It's just time and personal living space. It's THAT simple.
Go on, try to plan your day with transit and no car if you have 3 children (with 2-3 year age gaps). You'll find that this really works only if everything is concentrated, or if it's a full-time job for you. That's why we hear so much about "15-minute neighborhoods".
But when everything is concentrated, it becomes EXPENSIVE and you also lose any semblance of choice. You will likely have only one school, one daycare, one community center. You become hemmed in within that "walkable" neighborhood. That park nearby? It surely can look nice, but what if it's the only park within reasonable walking distance? So you don't even have an _option_ to go somewhere else with kids, without making it a full-day trip?
People like to laugh at Texas, about how riding an SUV to a walkable park is ridiculous. But is it, really?
The way to fix all of it? Suburbs and cars. Cars provide personal freedom and personal space. That's also why the US had a higher birth rate for much longer than Europe, and it started cratering once young people were forced (by the economy) to move into dense city cores.
arjie | 8 hours ago
kvuj | 10 hours ago
I also saw a whole lot of families and children.
As I'm getting older and looking in the coming years at having children, the value of a tight, walkable community has risen exponentially to me.
sheepolog | 10 hours ago
I think "make society more child-friendly" is a good idea, but one that doesn't seem to have increased fertility that much. To me it seems that educated people living comfortable lives with access to birth control simply don't want to have that many children. If you look at the country stats, the most proven way to increase fertility is to take away education, women's rights, or birth control. And imo, the western world should adapt to low birth rates, instead of trying to prop them up.
amluto | 10 hours ago
(a) non-walkable neighborhoods with big houses, big roads and cars everywhere, versus
(b) smaller houses or apartments but fewer cars, walkable neighborhoods, and bikes (and other small mobility devices that small kids can use)
I can tell you where being a kid seems more fun. And I’ve personally been to both sorts of places recently and observed how the kids behave.
Sure, with big lots, kids have lots of space in their own backyards. And big cars make soccer-momming easier. But, when kids can easily and safely get somewhere else approximately on their own, the whole situation seems better.
And yes, I really did recently observe a pretty big family in one of the latter types of places. How does one parent herd a pile of kids from their small (but not that small) apartment to some destination without a giant car? They tell the bigger kids where they’re going and they take the smaller kids, and maybe the bigger kids get their ahead, and everyone gets to experience an appropriate amount of independence for their age.
There’s also nothing new here. Until quite recently in human history, in most societies, kids were quite free to explore on their own or in groups without adults. I think it’s unfortunate that we’ve built so many places that are unsafe for small children and not easily navigable by older children.
cyberax | 7 hours ago
> Sure, with big lots, kids have lots of space in their own backyards. And big cars make soccer-momming easier. But, when kids can easily and safely get somewhere else approximately on their own, the whole situation seems better.
It seems better, but it's actually not better.
Besides, suburbs can be improved quite a bit by adding local parks, mandating sidewalks, etc. We're also on the cusp of the self-driving revolution, and pretty soon children will be able to just get into a cab by themselves.
> and everyone gets to experience an appropriate amount of independence for their size.
And how do you get to that point from 0 children?
amluto | 5 hours ago
Palo Alto has a surprisingly large number of children under 18 and under 5, and Palo Alto is fairly walkable as California cities go. Fresno and Bakersfield (not so walkable) are higher. There seems to be a larger fraction of young children in Brooklyn than in less subway-covered areas of the NYC metro area.
In general I suspect that children in the US are mildly skewed toward more suburban areas, but not strongly. There are plenty of children in dense areas.
But my claim wasn’t about where the children are — it’s about where the children can have more fun on the basis of the structure of the neighborhood.
cyberax | 4 hours ago
Both have approximately similar populations but completely different approaches to city design.
NYC is at 52 and Harris County (that contains Houston) is at 67 births per year per 1000. But NYC is also diverse, with relatively sparse parts in Brooklyn and Queens, where most children live.
> In general I suspect that children in the US are mildly skewed toward more suburban areas, but not strongly.
Compare the suburban US with dense European cities. The urban damage is cumulative, and Europe started over-urbanizing earlier.
You can see the breakpoint in the US happened in 2008, as the millennials started entering the workforce. They were the first modern generation that _had_ to move to large cities to get ahead economically.
> There are plenty of children in dense areas.
Yes, in desperately poor neighborhoods. That's called an "inverted J curve".
skapadia | 11 hours ago
colechristensen | 11 hours ago
arjie | 10 hours ago
Countries with larger populations will see these guys commit civilizational suicide with enough time to recover one can hope. We won’t be funding USAID when the majority of Americans are drawing from Medicare though.
jandrewrogers | 10 hours ago
subarctic | 11 hours ago
arjie | 11 hours ago
As we get better at healthcare and life, we should expect to be productive and care for ourselves for longer. I hope that as I age I remain in favour of succeeding generations over my own self. Plant the tree whose shade we won’t see etc.
subarctic | 10 hours ago
rwmj | 10 hours ago
swat535 | 5 hours ago
This is the natural consequence of declining birth rates.. it's either that or immigration right now.
Encouraging people to have more children requires drastic changes in society which is difficult to implement.
telesilla | 10 hours ago
unsnap_biceps | 10 hours ago
In this case, I presume they're taxed on their continued employment and so they're still paying into the pension they're receiving benefits on? I don't see a problem if that's the case. They contributed to the pension with an agreed payment date and followed the process correctly. I can understand how you feel that it's unfair, but I really don't see a problem unless they stop paying into the pension or stop paying taxes on their continued employment.
telesilla | 10 hours ago
Like others note, UBI is a fair solution. Let's have everyone, regardless of age, be able to have a baseline. Then allow extra income form those who enjoy, or value, additional work and income.
arjie | 10 hours ago
JoshTriplett | 10 hours ago
arjie | 10 hours ago
Without more productive capacity the extra $1.2k/mo would cause enormous inflation. Just a question of what the country is optimizing for, I suppose, but I think people would be unhappy with the result.
JoshTriplett | 9 hours ago
The combination of UBI and healthcare largely should. UBI serves as a better alternative to most such programs (and has much less administrative overhead).
Also, any form of UBI will likely result in substantial spending increases (trickle-up economics is well-established as actually working, incremental dollars handed to the average person are typically spent, not saved), as well as reducing structural friction in the labor market (people can change jobs more easily).
> Without more productive capacity
UBI will also likely result in more businesses/entrepreneurship, R&D, and other substantial improvements to productive capacity. Studies generally show that UBI does not cause people to substantially leave the job market.
Buttons840 | 10 hours ago
That would lower the retirement age for me. I was born in the mid-80s.
I know that was just a suggestion. We could go with something like "life expectancy at birth minus 5 years", which would raise the retirement age for me, but we're basically just admitting that retirement isn't a thing anymore if we do that. Hopefully the wealthiest nation on Earth can do better.
I think, whatever we do, we should recognize that the current retired generation holds more wealth than any other generation. If we want more kids in our society, maybe we need to get some of that wealth into the hands of people who can have more kids.
arjie | 10 hours ago
speak_plainly | 10 hours ago
trgn | 10 hours ago
bsimpson | 10 hours ago
throwway120385 | 10 hours ago
HaloZero | 10 hours ago
Maine, Vermont, and Florida
Since 2020: Delaware, Hawaii, Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and West Virginia now also qualify.
Montana is a bit of a surprise there... so is Oregon for me.
Source: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/older-ad...
eigencoder | 10 hours ago
dieselgate | 10 hours ago
HaloZero | 9 hours ago
Florida being on that list made so much sense lol.
baxtr | 10 hours ago
What kind of people will not wanting children likely select for?
At least two kinds come to mind:
1) People who love children and are willing to have them regardless of the impact on their financial situation.
2) People living in societies where women (and likely some men) lack a say in whether or not to have children.
The first kind could be very good.
The second is definitely not something we should look forward to.
pstuart | 10 hours ago
There is a "replacement" crisis but it's being addressed by pearl clutching and those advocating for forced birth.
Having children is expensive all the way around. And women's reproductive rights have enabled them to (rightfully) make their own choices about motherhood.
To state the obvious: children literally are the future of humanity and we need to address the issue accordingly. A lot of it would be via changing the economics of having a child, and the rest would be by making the world a "village to raise a child".
This is all eminently doable. We just need to agree on what that looks like and how to best invest in it.
toomuchtodo | 9 hours ago
Even Scandinavian countries and France, with generous parental benefits, have not materially increased their fertility rates.
At least in the US, protecting agency and autonomy that might be challenged is easily solved with the second amendment for defense, as well as long term and permanent birth control for those who would not like to have any children or more children. The potentially vulnerable reproductive age population shrinks perpetually year after year, continuously reducing potential attack surface.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48733976 (citations)
iamnothere | 9 hours ago
Those who govern us see us as an economic zone to exploit, so perpetuating core social values isn’t really a concern. Although even countries who recognize this problem are having trouble finding a solution.
It may simply be that the future doesn’t look very much like the “developed world”. The only nations (or large subcultures like the Amish) that still have high fertility rates also have values and lifestyles that appear very foreign to us.
I’m not passing judgement, it’s just Darwin in action.
pstuart | 8 hours ago
I have a thesis that people need stories to inform and inspire them. I also believe that this problem is technically solvable, and that the stories we have today are either backwards (the woman belongs at home making babies and taking care of daddy), or too hand-wavy (we just need to fund Head Start and make schools free).
I'm all for the latter approach but it doesn't address the fact that children are money, time, and energy vampires (albeit lovable and worthy of those things). We need more than that. Programs that augment school itself (the arts, scouting, DIY/maker stuff, etc). Those exist but are not evenly distributed and we need way more of it.
Lastly, the "village" part of encouraging communities to help families thrive instead of struggle; to make sure that kids have the options they need rather than turning to drugs, gangs, etc.
C'mon everybody, let's kumbaya!
card_zero | 4 hours ago
iamnothere | 38 minutes ago
You are not using “people” in the same sense. I mean “people” as a national culture, which does shift from generation to generation, but generally not in a radical sense. Immigrants assimilate over time, although they do leave lasting influence on the culture as they merge with it. Families pass on aspects of their attitudes and beliefs. Generations pass on cultural knowledge through media. This is why millennial culture in the US is a continuation and evolution of Boomer culture, despite all the intergenerational strife.
As the culture is replaced, revolution and/or national disintegration becomes more likely, as there is little to unite people in the face of significant challenges. (Why should I sacrifice for neighbors I can’t relate to? Why should I follow the laws and cultural codes of a nation I have no deep connection to? Perhaps my culture’s standards are better!) It’s a natural process that’s happened many times throughout history.
card_zero | 4 hours ago
blini-kot | 10 hours ago
scoofy | 9 hours ago
We absolutely need an abundance agenda if we want people to have children. Reject the zero-sum investment thesis of NIMBY protectionism. Invest in density, efficiency, and antitrust. This is one of the most openly obvious self-owns in history. It's genuinely absurd.
We are all in this together. Make financial security easy for young people and we'll actually get children.
arcrevenant | 9 hours ago
Of stack and packs lol
> We are all in this together.
When’s the last time I heard that one
1vuio0pswjnm7 | 9 hours ago
Razengan | 8 hours ago
Improving healthcare and medicine should be one of the core goals of civilization, so eventually we should have healthcare good enough to enable "practical immortality": No "aging" and no deaths save in extreme cases or physical accidents/violence.
In an ideal future, the majority of humans SHOULD be all over 100 years old! and hale and healthy as a 30 year old.
The problem is not "how long most people have been alive", maybe the problem is our unwillingness to reassess social assumptions established >2000 years ago:
That everyone has to "work", everyone has to "earn", everyone has to constantly "buy", and that everyone has to constantly pump out babies so they can also keep doing the same...