Excerpt: " … For 2024, the UN had projected 701,000 births in Colombia; it had put the chance of the number of births being lower than 553,000 at only 2.5 percent. In the end, Colombia saw only 445,000 births in 2024. That translates to a fertility rate of 1.06 births per woman, down more than half from 2008. Chile’s is even lower: At current rates, 100 reproductive-age Chileans can expect to have 52 children and only 27 grandchildren."
Gift Article "The Birth-Rate Crisis Isn’t as Bad as You’ve Heard—It’s Worse" (The Atlantic, 06/30/2025)
byu/JoePNW2 inFuturology
47 Comments
Oh no … fewer people. It’s too bad we don’t have technologies to replace menial labor and communications systems that would allow everyone to contribute to a global forum of ideas …
the transition to fewer people will have some issues, but in the long run, it is a good thing
birth projections beeing of?
in an unstable region with spoty zensus?
this reminds me of back when they prognosed woman in sports will soon jump 10meters because they were closing in on male records so fast after… well, beeing allowed to do sports.
I find it hard to care much about this. I realize this has huge socioeconomic consequences, but with the swing towards authoritarianism, lack of progress on climate change prevention/mitigation, and rise of AI, the world isn’t going to be very friendly for the next few generations anyway. I don’t have the emotional bandwidth to care about this too. Besides, the solution(s) to this dilemma will likely require careful study, logical decision making, and trust by the populace in our leadership to make the right decisions: none of which are going to happen. Just toss this on the pile of global upheavals and we’ll try to suffer through with the rest of it.
This is a good thing… maybe not for capitalism, but capitalism is on its way out anyway with the rise of automation and AI. We won’t need as many people in the coming decades to keep the economic machine churning.
I have stated in past reddit comments that the UN population models are very “aggressively” optimistic. Modeling is not helped due to the fact the UN has to use statistics provided by nations which we know are false: Russia and China being 2 of the culprits but there are others.
I wish I had bookmarked it but I recall some demographic data that suggested peak population could now occur somewhere in the 2045 – 2056 timeframe. I would not be surprised at all. Nations such as China and India are being hit hard let alone the obvious ones like Japan, South Korea and much of the EU. I genuinely wonder where we will be at 2100.
then let’s ask the fucking populations as to why they cant (or dont want) to have kids. like fuck me were going to cry about statistical data and then not checkout the reasoning polls that were released in may and June in countries like the states or the UK. one of the hallmarks of people who want kids but cant is the economic landscape and uncertainty of the future of the world.
For my first 57 years- “over population will kill earth, we’re all going to die”
For the last two years- “there are not enough people, we’re all going to die”
My son and daughter-in-law would like to have a baby, but she works literally six days a week as an engineer. How in the world can she have a child with that much stress.
We are in an age where people want to live their life to its fullest – making less kids make sense
This is a problem for the oligarchs, not us. They want to devalue labor. Their greed is the single biggest contributing factor to this “issue”. Keep driving that rate down, guys, fuck those losers.
but all this, can be explained , worldwide, by….
economics and societal change.
and not, no sir, no way, biological.
I would put “the birth crisis” below almost all the other crises we are currently suffering.
Birth rate is only a problem for the people at the top. A smaller population is going to mean the average person has more opportunity and bargaining power.
This really isn’t complicated. The old folks need to pass on cheaper if not faster, In my extended family, more $ has been spent keeping dementia-ridden 80-90 year old folks “alive” then has been spent on college or trade schools for the current younger generation. The kids will be poor relative the the great-grandparents but at least they may inherit furniture they don’t want.
12 months in a nursing home or 4 years of post-secondary education? One is an investment and the other is where the $ will actually go.
At the end of the day, the core reason people worry about the future is because of their children. No children, no worries.
We’re in the 6th mass extinction event and the nations are concerned about the population not cranking out enough babies when the population on the planet is over 8 billion. I’d say someone has their priorities wrong.
Maybe we could use robots and AI to help with this problem? You know, the technology that’s supposed to run large percentages of people out of the workforce?
Imagine AI and robots actually helping the common man and society rather than just serving the ruling class and killing the lower class – one way or another.
Read the whole article. Tbh I’m kinda happy the population is declining. I’m a 25yo male in Australia. I dont mind working longer if it means we start to cut back
Does anyone else remember, say 10 years ago, that overpopulation was going to be the end of the world? Now, depopluation is. Weird.
Alright, but AI is going to wipe out all the jobs those unborns were going to perform anyway, so I’m not entirely sure what the problem is here.
“Ok are y’all gonna help us raise these kids, afford housing, make childcare affordable, make food more affordable, and bring down the costs of medical care?”
“LOL, no. Get to breeding for the benefit of the rich you fucking plebs! I simply wont have my palanquin carried by robots like a middle class phony! I need real people with strong backs!”
If you want birthdates to go up, destroy the greedy corporations sucking up all of the money and leaving nothing for actual people.
All through the ’80s and ’90s we were told that overpopulation is a looming crisis, the world will run out of food and clean water, and humans are reproducing too fast. Now in the last few years we see all these scare articles saying it’s the other way around?
I find it hard to see the issue with a smaller population. More resources to go around, less pollution, less pressure on land and wildlife, fewer cheap shitty products so we have to actually produce goods that last or recycle old stuff? I literally see no downside.
The replacement rate is falling all over the place (think only a few sub-Saharan countries etc… were above before the recent aid cuts), … but honestly with all these robots/contraptions (AI, but also GPS) .. will we need that many people?
Especially as the median family has trouble keeping a roof over their heads, food in their bellies, and preparing any youngsters for the world of tomorrow (i.e. exposure to STEM but also world cultures to participate in global business?).
Maybe this is me being selfish, idk. With everything terrible happening in the world right now, it’s hard to see a declining birth rate as a bad thing. I grew up being told the planet was overpopulated..now all of a sudden there is a panic that we aren’t making enough people. So which is it?
I wonder when some state will start sponsoring rejuvenation/longevity treatments for their population, to solve for an aging demographics and lessening the burden to care for an aging population. E.g. fully state sponsored or “trade your pension fund” for rejuvenation. Not in the next 10+ years obviously, but perhaps sometime down the line when this sort of medical intervention is more feasible
We have 8,000,000,000 people. A drawdown is desperately needed. Sorry capitalist, please stop whining and change how you measure business.
Good, women aren’t broodmares & men are generally terrible partners. Let the rate plummet, come what may.
This is only a problem for capitalism. Endless growth was never attainable in the first place.
Someday the last human will die and we will be extinct. That won’t have anything to do with this.
Birth rate crisis will only stop when children return to be economic assets of the families or at least neutral instead of liabilities.
Until someone figuring out a macro economical model where this applies, most couples will simply not have children and birth rate will continue lowering.
I don’t feel like there is enough examination of the other end of the curve. Lifespans today are almost 30 years longer than they were in 1950. The reason we are at 8 billion people isn’t because of birth rates, it’s because people are living longer. We need to figure out how to keep people working longer, or at least healthy longer so they don’t need human provided care. We also need to rethink elder care settings and find better ways to support the aged population. There isn’t a birth rate crisis as much as there is an aging crisis. Countries that can best manage their aged populations will do better than countries that just focus on cranking out more babies or even ramping up immigration.
I really think there’s no such thing as a birth rate crisis. Just a “lack of exploitable workers” crisis and that seems fine to me. And for good measure all degrowth should be readily embraced.
I used to worry about this and feel guilty but at the same time I feel abandoned and not supported from my country like my grandparents did in the 50s and 60s.
I now ponder if we really need all these people if robots and AI are going to drastically make things easier.
Good. The planet needs less humans not more, and I don’t give a fuck if that hurts the economy or not. This is coming from a bullshit capitalist angle, exactly the type of people we need less of, not more.
It’s not a birth rate crisis. It’s a cost of living crisis
In most, if not all, situations, when introducing a species to an environment that is hostile and stressful, they do not reproduce or reproduce less frequently. I believe that our current timeline is proving humans are similar to animals in this regard. If you stress them out, they don’t reproduce. There are countless actions we could take to reduce stress on the population, but it seems little of it comes to fruition.
To quote Pete Townshend, “[This is no social crisis](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dC6YLH02jeg)”
Humans have been around for tens of thousands of years. Not that we’re invulnerable, plenty of ways we can do ourselves in. Depopulation isn’t one of them. Humanity has innovated before, and will do so again.
Another day, another ‘WoMEN AReNT HAvING ENOugh BABies!’ panic article.
Tiresome.
Women with agency will NEVER breed enough again to sate the needs of a defunct economic system based on infinite growth. Deal.
Lower birth rates are the only thing that could possibly save all life from the 6th extinction. It’s not a crisis FFS!
A population decline will create a huge surplus in physical assets and drastically decline their value. Capitalism is basically toast.
Oligarchs hoarding everything and then all atonishment when families don’t pump out 4-5 kids.
Yeah, yet when someone wants to apply for visa or citizenship, every country is like sorry , we have too much people. I can’t take this seriously, and before someone says it’s not a long term fix . If you won’t even bother to fix it 30 years from now, why would I think you’ll do something to fix it now.
Nice try Gilead 🙄 apparently the first time I posted this they removed it for being too short of a comment…
And yet, the planetary population is predicted to continue increasing for at least another 30 years or so. The problem isn’t that there’s no next generation, the problem is ethnocentrism and xenophobia making immigration all but impossible on a large scale.
The future’s not overcrowded, it’s underpopulated, underfunded, and underwhelming. I grew up on sci-fi dystopias filled with aliens and rogue AIs. So it’s a bit surreal to realize that our slow-motion collapse might be happen via boring birthrate graphs that look like downhill ski slopes.