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Presume that a majority of women of reproductive age per generation al cohort do not want children, and intend to exit those fertility years childfree. What then?

I see no crisis, only total fertility rates reaching a neutral rate based on women empowered to make the best choice for themselves.

https://www.axios.com/2024/07/25/adults-no-children-why-pew-...

https://www.dw.com/en/why-south-korean-women-arent-having-ba...

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20240918-chile-birth-r...

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dogma1138 19 hours ago | parent [-]

Society will have to correct itself somehow, either through social change or technological advancement that or we will all go extinct…

I actually wonder why this isn’t a bigger talking point, we are probably not at the point of no return yet but many countries are getting there and people will be caught by surprise as whilst the effect is delayed human life expectancy isn’t that long and it doesn’t take more than a couple of generations like ours until we are going to be facing a major crisis.

I really don’t know where we went wrong, and I’m not sure it’s purely financial either (tho it is for many), at least from my anecdotal experience.

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maxloh 17 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I really don’t know where we went wrong, and I’m not sure it’s purely financial either (tho it is for many), at least from my anecdotal experience.

The problem is welly explained in the video: the society in East Asia (South Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan, etc.) is too toxic for the youth and it is too hard for them to live a decent life.

Young people there are constantly competing with others of their generation. Households are unaffordable for the majority of the population, and for the lucky ones, it takes approximately 30 to 50 years to buy one. Traditional culture encourages people to work extremely hard, to the extent that they don't even have time for social activities or to form relationships. Meanwhile, promotion is often difficult because management-level positions are occupied by older individuals.

People are stopping having children not only because they cannot afford it, both financially and in terms of time, but also because they do not want their children to suffer. It is expected that the situation will persist for generations to come.

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toomuchtodo 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The population ballooned because women were not educated and empowered. Now that they are, and have robust access to family planning, TFR is coming down rapidly and population will eventually follow.

Where we went wrong? Women not being empowered in the first place. This is the fix, not a problem. This is a success story.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40982392

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41225389

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dogma1138 18 hours ago | parent [-]

I don’t know what’s right or wrong but can we agree that TFR below replacement isn’t sustainable in the long term?

Even if you don’t see shrinking population as a massive problem which it will be, if the TFR remains below ~2.1 humanity won’t be here for much longer.

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toomuchtodo 18 hours ago | parent [-]

I disagree. The world has ~8.2B people, and has blown past 6 out of 9 planetary boundaries while headed to 9-10B people by 2100 (due to population momentum). Humanity will successfully continue on with an order of magnitude reduction in that number 150-200 years from now, based on a median global TFR of ~0.5-1. TFR isn’t going to 0. We can plan accordingly, if we choose to. We are currently on the unsustainable path; a lower TFR puts us closer to sustainability.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458

https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/population

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dogma1138 18 hours ago | parent [-]

You can disagree all you want but if the TFR of the world becomes as low as the one of Chile we will get to below 1 billion people world wide within less than a century and go extinct within a millennia and the latter is based on that life expectancy won’t change and if there will be that big of a reduction in population life expectancy will plummet.

I’m also not sure how much empowerment anyone will have once we are forced back to living as agrarian subsistence farmers within a few generations.

So I don’t know if you are trolling at this point or not…

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toomuchtodo 17 hours ago | parent [-]

Not trolling at all. Actually bootstrapping a non profit to buy unwanted fertility from people who don’t want it, to sell into carbon markets to spin up a flywheel to help everyone who doesn’t want kids to be empowered to not have them. So perhaps we just see the future and individual agency and empowerment differently.

	▲	dogma1138 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Gilead is already taken…