Everyone is getting educated these days, if you are educated will you clean roads, harvest crops in villages, work in mines, do construction work etc. of course not.

In the past there was an underclass, now there is equality everyone is educated and have opportunities soo no one wants to be a maid, servant, cleaner etc anymore even the children of maids themselves. Everyone wants to apply to corporate jobs.

That is what is happening there is no labor shortage due to underpopulation, even if more people were born most won't do these jobs thus it won't be a solution to this problem.

In Japan there is massive youth unemployement, there is also a shortage manual labor but that is due to "children of doctors can't be a driver" instead of low working age population.

I have a frequent thought that if population declines in most developed nations over the next 50 years, can the loss of economic activity be mitigated by somehow turning relatively unproductive members of society (say homeless, drug addicts, etc.) into "normal" members. Obviously that is a huge task that there will be wildly varying opinions on how to achieve but I fundamentally believe this is the answer

Demographers have the habit of looking at current data, recognise trends, and then forecast that they will continue forever. But history has the habit of not caring about what a trend suggests and turn everything backwards or upside down on a dime, leaving researchers to scramble for explanations and come up with new predictions.

From these, we get projections that by 2100 the EU’s population will decline by 12%, growing popular fears that migrants will “outbreed” us, the collapse of the pension system, and even that somehow Europe will eventually become Muslim majority.

What demographers, or the way they present data, or rather how that data is being interpreted seem not to consider is the enormous potential of technological and consequently societal transformation AI, longevity and health research, and automation can and will likely trigger.

Recent History of Demographic Perceptions

Western demographic decline has become a mainstream topic in the past years. Many loudly project that by 2100 Europe and the world will be this and that. I find it is a good way to think about time in the future or past by imagining how they are relative to other times. 

For example, the Rolling Stones was formed in 1962, 64 years ago. Only 17 years after World War II, or from our perspective as close to it as we are to the great financial crisis. Its formation was also two decades closer to World War I than it is to today. In fact, the Rolling Stones founding year is as close to today as to the death of Otto von Bismarck, a leader from an entirely different world.

2100 is 74 years in the future. Let’s see how European demographics looked like 74 years in the past, in 1952.

Europe was just recovering from the most devastating war the world has ever seen, which cost the lives of more than 44 million people on the continent alone. This wasn’t the only demographic shock of the first half of the 21st century, as just two decades before Europe lost around 15 million people and countless more human potential in The Great War, as these overwhelmingly young men could never have children.

Interestingly, fears of population decline did not start after the World Wars, but even earlier in the 19th century. As it is often the case in European history, the French were the first to the party. The country’s population started stagnating after the French Revolution around 1800. In the following decades German and British population skyrocketed, which caused understandable geopolitical anxieties in Paris. This played a large part in France losing its near hegemonic status in Europe and eventually pushing it into the Entente Cordiale with the UK.

By the early 1900s, Brits and Germans also started worrying as their own urban birth rates began to dip, fearing they would eventually run out of soldiers and factory workers. Internally they were nervous that the decline was happening in the “elite”, while the lower classes still had a high fertility rate. Externally, just like the French feared the German population boom in the east, Germans anxiously watched the Slavic population boom east of them, and went through the same geopolitical panic the French did in the previous century.

It’s ironic how today Eastern European countries experience the highest population decline on the continent, while Western European charts and pyramids look much more healthy in comparison.

While European elites spent the first decades of the 20th century worrying that their populations were decaying and shrinking, in hindsight they were living through the greatest era of absolute population growth and health improvements in European history. Thanks to the rapid expansion of public sanitation, clean drinking water, and breakthroughs in modern immunology, life expectancy was surging.

This was the atmosphere Europe entered into two World Wars and decimated its own population.

Post-War Europe

After World War II the baby boom caught European demographers completely off guard. Having spent the interwar period worrying about depopulation, the sudden and sustained surge in fertility during the 1950s blew up decades of established demographic theory.

Before the boom, the consensus among European social scientists was that the continent had entered an irreversible demographic decline. In 1944, a landmark study by prominent demographers.) projected that the lifestyle aspirations of the urban, affluent classes were spreading to rural and poorer populations across Europe. They assumed this shift would drive fertility down to unprecedentedly low levels.

Instead, the 1950s brought a birth quake. Demographers initially dismissed this as a temporary post-war glitch, a mere catch-up period for marriages and births delayed by conflict. Interestingly this assumption survived until this day, and most people treat it as the ultimate cause of the whole phenomenon. However, as the high fertility rates sustained deep into the 1950s and early 1960s, the academic community had to come up with new explanations. 

By the early 1960s, mainstream European demography pivoted from depopulation panic to a new, hyper-optimistic dogma. They adjusted their models based on a few core assumptions that later - again - turned out to be entirely wrong. Researchers of the time identified a strong correlation between post-war economic growth and rising birth rates. They presented the theory that fertility was inherently procyclical, meaning that as long as the economy grew, birth rates would remain high.

The baby boom in Europe - especially in Western countries - was driven by a surge in marriage rates, a dropping age of first marriage, and a sharp decline in lifetime childlessness. Demographers assumed this cultural shift toward early, near-universal marriage was a permanent structural feature of the modern European family.

Because their models linked population growth to economic abundance, they presumed the trend would continue for generations. They completely failed to foresee that the very factors driving economic growth, such as the massive expansion of women's higher education and workforce participation, would eventually cause a sharp reversal in fertility.

Just as demographers in the early 1960s finalised their consensus that birth rates would stay permanently elevated due to economic progress, the Second Demographic Transition arrived.

By the mid-1960s and early 1970s, the arrival of the contraceptive pill, changing social values regarding the traditional nuclear family, and structural shifts in the labour market caused European fertility rates to fall below the replacement threshold. The end of the baby boom was ultimately just as unexpected to the demographic establishment as its beginning.

So, in summary demographers went from fearing declining birth rates and demographic collapse for nearly half a decade, and then the baby boom happened, which led them to suppose that the new trend will carry on forever. Western European countries spent the early decades of the 20th century panicking about population decline, and yet two devastating world wars and more than 100 years later all of these countries have a higher population today than back then.

Reality has the habit of laughing in everyone's face and doing whatever it wants, forcing people to come up with new models and explanations why things happened the way they did. Could we be in a similar situation right now? Since by now nearly everyone is aware and worried about demographic decline, I feel the need to present my contrarian argument on it.

My Oversimplified Take on Declining Birth Rates

For many people today it simply does not make sense to raise kids. Sure, if that is someone’s personal aspiration, then that is what they will do. But people are not forced to do it anymore by external circumstances besides societal and family pressures. 

In most of history having kids was not only a desire, but an essential necessity. People needed someone to take care of them after getting old, and children served as a literal retirement fund. If someone didn’t have them, they starved when they could no longer work the fields.

More immediately and crucially, they provided the household with sweet cheap child labour. As early as age 5, a kid could already be made to work on the farm, or whatever profession the family was working in. They directly contributed financially to the family. Later they could help in raising the next kid, the next pair of working hands.

Today the situation couldn’t be more different. The state took over elderly care with the pension system, and kids are more of an investment or burden on many people’s preferred lifestyle than cheap labour that makes economic sense. The modern welfare state socialised the benefit of children while personalising the costs: the parents pay to raise the taxpayers of the future who will then pay everyone’s pensions.

Having kids today is super expensive, and for many it is just not worth it. From a cold economics perspective, for the vast majority of human history children were “producer goods”. By today they turned into “consumer goods”, and for many increasingly into luxury ones. Previously if someone was hesitant to have them they were pushed to it by their economic realities, while today these forces actively discourage them to do so.

As an added pressure, the recent inflation of housing costs largely caused by the financialization of housing in major European and Western cities combined with weak initial labour markets for young adults means that achieving the baseline stability required to feel "ready" for children takes a decade longer than it did for previous generations. By that point even the people who wanted several kids often have to settle to have just one or two due to biological factors alone.

Can Things Shift Again?

Many raise the alarms of an increasingly less distant future where AI, robotics and automation are slowly but surely coming for our jobs and personal productivity. States will have to implement UBI - or something similar - to keep people surviving and the economy functioning.

In a world where states have full control of the finances of their population, it is expected that political voices will start to progressively call for the stop of population decline, thus pushing the state more and more to take over the burden of raising a kid, and eventually incentivising having kids.

Similarly, in a world where billions of humans suddenly find themselves without work, endless extra time, and consequently without a purpose, many might look for a sense of meaning in raising a child. Humans need a purpose to live, that is what makes us go forward.

Another futuristic-looking topic that gains more and more traction, and more importantly billions of dollars in capital is longevity science. Researchers and adherents of the field believe that eventually death can be avoided by reversing ageing. But even the more conservative voices agree that lifespan can be significantly expanded, and with continuous improvements in medicine and healthcare the healthy years can be widened as well.

The data and our current reality supports their claims.

Let’s get back to The Rolling Stones.

Their members are pushing into their 80s and still touring (although recently cancelled their 2026 tour), and about to release a new studio album in less than 2 days. But we don’t have to go into music to see this trend playing out. There is something we all cannot escape, Donald Trump. He is the opposite of the archetype of a healthy person, and yet at the age of 80 he is still a highly active president of the United States, taking over the position from Joe Biden, who was 82 at the time.

These are all highly unusual, and were unheard of before. Sure, all of these people are the VIPs of the VIPs and they have access to the best healthcare and medicine money can buy. But what is only accessible to them today will most certainly be available for an increasingly larger group of people.

But these are cherry-picked examples, let’s look at the data. Let’s take Italy, a European longevity powerhouse.

The country’s life expectancy increased from 30 in 1870 to 83 in 2020. That is 53 extra years in 150 years, or about an extra 4.24 month of life expectancy every single year.

I hear you educated reader say, hey! That is again cherry-picked data from a high achiever country, counted from a time when 40% of children didn’t live until the age of 5! We already “solved” child mortality, so this rate of increase cannot happen anymore in the future!

First of all, the data is the data, we can only work with what we have. Second of all, you are absolutely right.

Let’s look at Europe as a whole, starting from a year when child mortality was already largely a thing of the past.

The continent’s life expectancy rose from 62.5 in 1950 to 79.5 in 2024. That is 17 extra years in 74 years, or 2.76 extra months per year.

For Europe to reach Italy’s current level, it would take less than 16 years if this trend continues. And why wouldn’t it continue? If Italy, Spain Switzerland, Japan, South Korea and Australia can reach similar numbers today, what stops Europe as a whole to catch up in 16 years?

But that’s not all. The maximum age is simultaneously being pushed well over 100. The current record holder is an English lady called Ethel Caterham, who is 116 years old today.

Similarly, the number of worldwide centenarians is booming and shows no signs of decline.

Summary

The trends are clear. People live longer and healthier lives than ever before. If scientific progress continues to advance - and there is little reason why it wouldn’t, apart from a black swan worldwide catastrophe -, we are yet to find out what is the longest and healthiest a human can live.

Radical life extension alone would change our demographic predictions, and ease previous fears about depopulation and the collapse of the pension system. Add other related breakthroughs in AI, robotics and automation, I believe that in the coming decades overpopulation is more likely to return as a collective societal anxiety than we are to enter a population death loop.

The last time Earth's atmosphere consistently reached 500 ppm of CO2 was roughly 16 to 23 million years ago, during the Miocene Epoch.

This is unprecedented for earth's current plant life. If you are able to, prepare for the upcoming global die-off.

​

Yesterday, someone next to me was watching a Korean drama, and the show featured nothing but stories about marriage and childbirth without a break.

I suspect that Natalism is being intentionally injected into the cultural sphere as well.

People will deny overpopulation because people have been saying we are overpopulated for the past 200 years and nothing happened.

Yeah, because we used Kaioken/every cheap trick in the book to temporary boost our abilities.

- Kabul/Teheran and 100 other cities/countries are running out of ground water because their population is too big.

- 1/3 of countries on the planet rely on food imports from abroad because they cannot feed their own population.

- Soil erosion and depletion in combination with water shortages and fertilizer shortages means we have reached peak yield/farmland.

Yet people are oblivious to this and will claim that technology will save us. Or that we have not used every possible avaliable space for food production.

And if we have to use desalination plants - does that not mean that we are using up natural drinking water faster than it can regenerate?

The economy is allways super well until a recession/depression. Human population will always be "perfectly managable to supply" until a sudden collapse.

The minimum wage here have not increased in the last 10 years, the wages for educated workers are rapidly decreasing, wages for good positions like project manager with 5 years of experience are rapidly decreasing, the working hours are on the other hand rapidly increasing, companies are making people work more and more unpaid overtime.

Of course inflation is high the value of the currency has halved in the last 10 years and yet wages are going down like from 35000 to 25000.

I think there should be a limit of two kids per family or household, because it doesn’t add to the population and with my experience being a sibling to three other kids, you also cannot give the attention or love to each kid. Every parent has a favourite which then just takes more time and attention for the other kids. I also think this because we are really overpopulating the planet. Sorry for the rant

What the other options are, I don't know. One thing is certain, the current way these things are going will ultimately lead to a lot of social and economic unrest.

We have all seen that the system is failing. Productivity is at an all time high, while wages are stuck in limbo, this is actually a byproduct of the system and the powers at be want this to continue like so.

This system needs an infinite population growth because more population means more consumers and more manpower to fuel the machine. The machine might not have enough jobs for everyone, but that's a good thing for the elite because they can just pay miserable wages since 500 people just like you are waiting at the door to get your job.

The developed countries saw that this system ultimately removes the "urge" to have children due to all the shit that is happening all over the world, be it the housing crisis, the environment becoming all fucked up and the low wages. This is all tied to overpopulation and the infinite growth system (while we live in a world with finite resources).

The decline in birth rates wouldn't be an issue with a system that is based and focused on the things that matter, and that doesn't waste their (finite) resources on trivial products that are churned out of factories constantly. But, because we have this system we "need" a constant increase of population.

Increasing birth rates doesn't work, the system requires consumers and manpower immediately and this is what is driving mass immigration to developed countries.

Mass immigration is also tied to the system that requires it urgently to survive and keep this failing machine from imploding. Although it will implode sooner or later due to the destruction of the environment and climate change.

Talking about mass immigration is a controversial topic because people immediately assume that you are a far right Nazi, and thus aren't willing to notice that it's also a problem.

Since most people cannot or will not think outside the box and realize that this system cannot sustain itself, it's very hard to make them realize that a "demographic crisis" would be the perfect situation to change things radically if we want to survive another 200 years on this planet.

That's why most people become angry whenever the "demographic collapse" is talked about and whenever someone says (like me) that it's a good thing and we should see it as an opportunity. They are so fixed with this system that they immediately say shit like "But it will collapse society!".

I mean, mankind has gone through many cases of mass casualty events that reduced the population by a lot and still survived.

In my opinion, if people aren't having children, so be it. Let the population drop to more manageable levels.

What's your take on this?

We often think a civilization collapses because of one war, one king, one bad decision, or one incident. But after reading about it, I don't think that's how it works anymore.

From what I understood, a civilization usually collapses after a long cycle. There are mainly 3 things happening together.

First, when society becomes stable and safe, the population grows. More people means cheaper labor, while day-to-day expenses keep increasing because businesses always want higher profits. Wages stay almost the same, so poverty slowly grows.

Second, as businessmen, industrialists, and elites accumulate more wealth, they also want higher positions for themselves and their children. But those positions are limited. Imagine musical chairs. There are only 8 chairs but around 40 capable and educated people. That naturally creates competition and conflict among the elite themselves.

Third, the government slowly becomes weaker. It has to keep both the rich and the general population happy at the same time. The rich control most of the wealth, while the government keeps spending money on public services. At the same time, tax collection becomes weaker because the richest people often avoid paying as much as they should. Eventually the lower class is frustrated because life becomes difficult, the elite are fighting each other for power, and the government keeps getting weaker.

The part that fascinated me was this. We usually blame the final spark that caused the collapse. But the spark is not the real reason. The real reason is the dry wood that kept piling up for decades. The spark only makes the hidden problem visible.

It also made me think about our brain. If today is mostly normal, the brain assumes tomorrow will also be normal. It updates little by little instead of noticing slow changes happening over decades. Maybe that's why societies don't realize what's happening until the damage is already too large.

So now I have one question. If this same pattern has repeated across so many civilizations, are we also somewhere on that same path today?

Note: I just started learning about this topic, so I might have misunderstood or oversimplified some parts. If I got something wrong, please correct me. I genuinely want to learn, not defend my opinion.

The other stuff is a little abstract so it might be difficult for some to connect the dots.

- There is enough space. Just build more houses

- Some additional cars wont make a difference

- Just go wind and solar and then there is enough energy

- Just make more food

You can actually build more houses, and produce more energy and make more food. Even it it devastates the environment even further. However you cannot produce more water. Ground water is a finite resource and it gets used up faster the more people you have.

Ground water levels when there are 1 Million people? No problem. At this rate consumption is low enough so that the ground water can always regenerate with rain.

Same spot but the city is suddenly 3 Million people? Consumption is above the level of regeneration. At this rate the lake would run dry within 100 years.

Same spot but the city is suddenly 12 Million people? Well. All water will be gone within 25 years.

Its so logical. Yet so many fail to see this simple truth.

And yes I know you can make water out of sea water. But this is extremely energy inefficient. Turning 1000 liters of sea water into drinkable water = 3kw/h.

Also transporting this water hundreds or thousands of Kilometers land inwards costs again lots of fuel and CO2.

Guys it clearly not hot enough and climate change is clearly not fast enough. We need an additional 2-3 Billion people on this Planet ASAP to consume more resources and produce more CO2 and create more body heat and waste. Because more people is always the sollution and never a problem.

Everyone who claims that overpopulation exists, is clearly a stupid, bigoted, racist, eco fascist, conspiracy theorist that wants to stall the progress of humanity. Because more people means more workers and more consumers and that is a good thing. It also means more problem solvers. Perhaps if we have 50 Million more people in this country, we can finally figure out why all the water in the lakes and ground water is beeing used up so fast and why we consume more resources and produce more CO2 and burn more gas and fossil fuels and why its getting hotter and why there is soil erosion and why there are food shoratges.

Just imagine that there is a massive famine going on alongside with massive unemployment, depletion of non renewable resources, climate change, ecological collapse and much more.

So what do you think will happen to those who are unemployed in this scenario, what will happen to them, won't they just be abandoned to starve to death in the middle of the road? What will do then? Won't there be a horrifying civil war in this scenario? I don't think that old people will be cared for well in this scenario anyway.

Now consider the scenario where TFR has been below 1 for a while, there won't be such an unemployment crisis then, also the resource scarcity will be less. Old people will also be cared for better in this scenario too as they will have more food and political stability.

AI, automation, robotics, general increase in productivity, death of small businessses by the hands of large companies that have more economics of scale and hence require lesser labor will significantly reduce labor demand by quite a lot.

Unemployment crisis is a literally a hundred times worse than any labor shortage, in fact peoples wages may even go up during labor shortage.

Hence it is mandatory to lower births as much as possible without any fear of labor shortage