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Okay. But when the whole world is liberal and TFR has crashed to 1.2, what's the plan?
The TFR crashing to 1.2 is not that big an issue. Japan/SK/Singapore etc. have had this for decades now and they're still mostly fine. Yes there is economic stagnation in the case of Japan but their social structure and order still survives and will continue to do so.
The reason western culture is incompatible with a long term TFR of 1.2 (and no migration) is because their brand of atomised individualism relies on a strong welfare state to ameliorate the mistakes humans naturally make when removed from a social system that tells them what to do based on metis and a welfare state is what is incompatible with a low TFR (barring the AI singularity leading to Luxury Automated Gay Space Communism). This doesn't mean that all worldly cultures are incompatible with such a TFR and most will actually be fine.
With such a low TFR the Western welfare state will eventually have to go out with a whimper and individuals will be forced to confront the full consequences of their poor choices. The lack of family ties and bonds (promoted indirectly by Western culture itself) mean they'll have very little recourse to relief and there will unfortunately be generational scale suffering as people slowly realise the value of kith and kin and shift to a social contract more long term suited to the human psyche.
We'll probably end up going back to a nuclear or extended family model where the young earn and use the money to support their parents etc, not too different from the conservative social structure currently in place in Eastern societies. One person may end up having to support up to 2 parents each, but equally they get free childcare at home and someone always available to look after kids (with huge skin in the game) which is a huge benefit people pay tens of thousands for each year nowadays. It'll all probably even out to not be too much of an extra burden on the breadwinner. Once that happens on a societal scale things will by and large be fine around the world, and the march of technological progress should continue to make the Earth a better place to live for all of humanity long term.
I think when the inverted pyramid gets to top heavy, the West would rather open the borders than make the hard decisions and live with it. At that point, everyone I know and loved (and their few children) will likely be long gone and the populaces values so far removed from my own it might as well be a foreign country. So I guess I don’t really care.
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Unclear. Having a sub-replacement TFR presents a different sort of problem as the tendency continues. Right now Japan is old, but not catastrophically so; their largest cohort is in its 50's, and so at the peak of their earning potential. However, in 20 years those people will all be 20 years older, and given improvements in medical technology, not many of them will have died. A society where the single largest cohort is retirees is not something that has been seen before, and will stress the system in different ways.
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