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Earlier this year the Swedish government appointed a state-funded Investigative Committee For a Future with Children (Swed. Utredningen för en framtid med barn) with instructions to look into the recent decline in fertility and what it portends for Sweden going forward. Yesterday the Committee released its first report detailing the potential consequences of lower fertility, aptly titled The Silent Crisis. Here is a link on the off-chance you know Swedish, or on the very on-chance you want an AI to give you the key takeaways: https://framtidmedbarn.se/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Nr-1-Den-tysta-krisen.pdf
Really though, the key graph is on page 18 and you don't need to know Swedish or have Grok ready to read it, because it's more or less shock horror demography-gore. Given current (or, if you look at the orange graph, slightly worse) trends without mass immigration the Committee estimates a whopping 40% decrease in the Swedish population by 2100. In actual numbers this brings the population down from a small-but-respectable ten million Swedes to about six million which roughly corresponds to the Swedish population in the year 1940. Unlike what was the case in 1940 though, the relative quality of the population will be vastly inferior, and will in large past consist of 80+ seniors mostly incapable of doing serious productive work and in need not only of constant and large transfers from the working-age population via taxes, but also significant care efforts in homes for the elderly. The Committee estimates that every working citizen in the worst-case scenario will need to finance no less than 1.6 other people. The last but not least horrifying part is the merciless shift in public spending: many municipalities will have to downsize schools and kindergartens in order to build more homes for the elderly, which in turn reinforces the circle of demographic disaster and suicide. Instead of happy children playing in kindergartens we'll have non-sentient dementia patients as the primary receivers of care in our society! There is a real risk of not only Sweden, but every corner of the West, becoming a wasteland of retirement homes.
I recently read Untergang des Abendlandes by Oswald Spengler and I really am quite struck by some of the similiarities between Spengler's moody prophecies and what seems to happening all over the West (and most of the westernized world). Somewhere in all the gobbledygook about the historical meaning of numbers or whatever Spengler theorizes that demographic decay is ever a symptom of a civilization beginning to die. The picture he paints is one of eine entsetzliche Entvölkerung, a terrible depopulation, beginning with die Weltstädte, the World Cities, sucking up most able-bodied and sound men and women from rural areas, followed by a rapid decline in fertility due to urban individual values making life in general and children in particular into something doubtful and baseless, followed in turn by even more rapid urbanization until the final swift conquest and sundering of the entire civilization from Civ-style roaming barbarians brings the whole enterprise to an ignominious end. To be fair Spengler was no great thinker, and he was probably just extrapolating from the demographic decline of the early 20th century which was actually eventually solved. The glove does seem to fit though, doesn't it?
Anyway, the dangers of demographic decline is nothing new to the Motte, but I found it refreshing to see the consequence of the current trajectory put in plain text and graph by a state-financed publication rather than whispered on forums. There was a post here a while back linking to an unpleasant and depresing anti-children essay talking about how the fertility crisis is inevitable when women are allowed to choose freely (link: https://kryptogal.substack.com/p/the-fertility-crisis-is-inevitable). I think proponents of that particular case need to take a little bit more responsibility for where their ideas actually lead, rather than brush everything off with weak optimistic rambling about how a declining, decaying and rapidly aging population is nothing to worry about, and how the failure of the West and unending reign of Umbar and the Shadow might actually be a good thing, really, if you look at it from Sauron's perspective! I for one prefer the thought of all the Free People of the West continuing to perpetuate, sustain and rule themselves, and I will not apologize for this view.
Still, I for one am not despairing quite yet. The report itself is a good sign! In Sweden many seem to be realizing that there is indeed another crisis looming over us now besides climate change, and that it is little use making the planet more livable if there's no one left to live on it. Swedes are not nearly as dumb or naive as right-wing media would have many believe, and there is a strong hatred for immigrations here now coupled with a new appreciation for Swedish culture which bodes well for the future. Besides that, all the usual attempts (such as a strong welfare state, generous parent leave, et cetera) have already been tried here, which means we don't have to go through a bunch of ineffective non-solutions before we can move on to more innovative attempts. I for one think it would be interesting with a tax break for families coupled with a big tax hike for rich childless women. This would both create good incentives as well as clarify what society sees as the most valuable form of femininity. Many have posted much about this subject before, but I think it's ready for one more round. What does the Motte think about this?
(P.S. Later in January a follow-up report will be releaed with suggestions on how to rectify the problem, and if the Motte is interested I might make a post about that report too when it releases).
Hopefully, some nation somewhere will have the epiphany that, in fact, there is not a need to transfer large sums of money to the elderly.
Based on the demographic decline, it can be assumed that some significant amount of these elderly will have had no kids. Which means they had their fun spending on themselves in their youth. That is to say, they have had their cake, and there is no need to then let them eat it too.
Those who have had kids can be supported by their descendants, who will at least be freed up from having to pay for somebody else’s old person.
Pensions are old men cutting trees down.
In general, the social state is fundamentally corrupt, divorcing people from their action's consequences. (Alas, we don't have to imagine the block voting to increase their privileges... We're already stuck in a doom loop.)
Pension/Social Security is just deferred compensation with the usual government fuckery.
Pension/Social Security is more like young men planting trees, but the government confiscates many of those trees under the pretense of insurance/Equity. Then, several decades later when a given former young man (now not such a young man) would like to retire, the government will return some lumber, that may or may not correspond to the present value of the trees the man planted when he was younger.
I have nothing against older men who would like to recoup their deferred compensation.
But most people do in fact not plant trees. The vast majority of economic activity produces things that are either consumed almost immediately or can't be conserved for the time scales relevant to retirement. A worker in a power plant can't store up lots of kilowatt hours to then use them up over his retirement 30 years later, for there to be electricity at that point there needs to be a new, younger worker taking his spot and giving up a share of his production.
Financial abstractions like saving only work out if the material economy on which the financial stuff is making a claim on continues to exist up to the point in time where the saver wants to convert green paper into actual goods or services. The causal mechanism isn't saving, it's having children and ensuring that they become productive participants of the economy.
Also massive amounts of the population don't cover what they take out of the public spending apparatus especially when it involves a lengthy retirement period with significant medical support.
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The problem with making older men whole on their social security contributions is that
That money is gone, long since spent on whatever stupid shit the government does (by this point, social security is old enough that the money has chiefly been spent paying out social security benefits to even older men, who are now dead).
Social security always promised more out in benefits than was paid it. It was structured like a pyramid scheme, and inherently reliant on forcing every new member of an exponentially increasing population to enroll at gunpoint. So when fertility collapsed...
The only ways to keep giving old people their promised benefits is one of:
Keep borrowing money until nobody is willing to lend anymore. We already owe Lord Tywin three million gold; what's another 80,000?
Keep printing money to inflate away the entitlements. Sufficiently high inflation is indistinguishable from a default.
Keep importing immigrants to pay for the benefits, replacing your people to kick the can down the road a few more years. Except, a lot of those immigrants are going on welfare and making the problem worse. Hispanics and H1-Bs are productive; Sub-Saharan Africans, MENAs, and Haitian refugees are not.
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If that's all it was, sure. The problem is that Social Security is effectively a ponzi scheme. Total payouts are far greater than total contributions, with many retirees able to claim roughly 250% of what they paid in as benefits. Social Security was (and is) dependent on population growth because there need to be more people paying into it than receiving it. The only way to fix this is to dramatically lower the amount that retirees get from SS, and that's a political non-starter even after all the boomers die because that means gen x and millennials will be the ones who paid in significant amounts that they won't ever get back.
https://taxpolicycenter.org/taxvox/lifetime-social-security-benefits-and-taxes-2023-update
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