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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).
I don't think low birth rates can be fixed through policy. If you look at historical or current pro-natalist policies, how many of them have succeeded? Norway has excellent compensation for parents, but the birthrate is still falling. Romania's Decree 770, making abortion illegal in all but a few rare instances, and higher income taxes for the childless, did lead to a temporary baby boom, but the consequences were not positive with high maternal and infant mortality, and the birthrate started to decline again anyway. Wealthy women bribed doctors while poorer women had risky illegal abortions, and many children were abandoned in orphanages.
I don't think there's any way out of this problem for Western civilisation as we know it. The cost of children is not only financial, but also biological, social and emotional. Either religious groups with high fertility rate take over (although even the Muslim world is having declining birth rates) or technological advances make the whole problem go away. If you automate the vast majority of human labour, then nearly your entire population is non-productive dependents whether they're young and able bodied, or old and infirm.
They can absolutely be fixed by policy. People aren't going to have kids because they get paid. They will have kids because the family is their support structure and they need it.
Cut all money to unmarried or divorced women from the government. Promote the family as the pension system. Have a culture that instills family values instead of individualism.
Modern women are married to the state. The marriage to the state is fruitless one. This form of marriage needs to be abolished and the other form needs to be promoted.
One big thing I see missing from all these "the solution is simple: force women to have children by coercion!" answers is - are men ready to be fathers?
Parenting is not just "I knocked the bitch up, that's my job done, now I should be able to live as I please without being asked to do anything with the squalling brats except pay the minimum out of my wages to feed and clothe them".
Are men today able, and ready, to be a father to a family of three, four, or more children? Are they ready to make sacrifices? Because even with all the laments over how women divorce and bleed men dry, men very easily drop their existing family to go off and start with a new partner (and maybe a new baby). They don't have relationships with their children, see the arguments over "what if you found out the kid wasn't yours?" and several men have no problem that after being the father for ten or more years, now the child means nothing to them and they don't love it and don't care if it dies and don't care if they're the only father it has ever known, that tie is severed.
You can't have big families where it's all on the woman. That's how we got 'married to the State' in the first place; men were willing to fuck around, not so willing to be parents. Or even would be disasters if permitted to be in the life of the family.
Being a husband and father involves a lot more than just "I married her and got her pregnant, job done".
I mean, isn't that a solved problem? You coerce them too.
Right. This is an asked and answered question. We already throw men into Definitely Not Debtors Prison if they refuse to participate. What reason do we have to believe this couldn't be trivially scaled up and out?
My position on this issue is that men as a demographic should be extremely careful when proposing coercive measures to solve this problem, as virtually all of this coercion is all but guaranteed to fall on their own heads. Men can be conscripted, both into war and child rearing, and women cannot. If you peel back the (philosophically) liberal live-and-let-live sentiments many in our culture harbor, you'll find nothing but contempt and scorn for what little freedom men have in this domain. Do you think this is likely to change any time soon?
Yeah, I think that this is a big part of the reason fertility issues seem like they would be straightforward to address with policy changes but in practice are very difficult to solve by means of public policy. Because at the end of the day, addressing fertility requires enacting policies which will (1) be coercive towards women; and (2) will in many cases treat women unfairly. And Western societies, although very much willing to bring the hammer down on men, are far more reluctant to do so to women.
But this still doesn't address the bread and butter issue. More men than women in Japan don't want kids. What do we do about the high costs and salaryman culture? Aspiring parents need to get on daycare waiting lists ahead of conception. FWIW this is as many people as our planet can take, maybe we finally set up those space colonies?
Assuming for the sake of argument that this one study is valid, significant, and representative of attitudes throughout the Western world, I don't think that really matters. Because (1) most men desperately want female validation; and (2) society has no problem imposing coercive and unfair policies on men as a group.
If women want to marry and have children enough, it will happen despite the costs. Both historically and today, people bring up large families in conditions much poorer than those offered by a median Japanese worker.
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Giving money to people who have children and taking money away from people who don't is just a difference in framing, in practice it's the same thing. Any money you give to people who have children is going to come from people who don't: either in the form of missing tax breaks, unaccessible benefits or extra taxes.
It seems better to you because you prefer framing it as punishing people who don't behave the way you like (right wing) rather than framing it as rewarding those who do (left wing). But it really is just a framing. The only real variable is the size of the money transfer.
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Not sure where you're getting the "married to the state" idea from. Where I live, women aged 16-24 are out-earning men and the majority of NEETs are men, and 10x less likely to be raising children compared to their female counterparts. If you're suggesting cutting welfare to parents - the main source of welfare women are getting more than men, AFAIK - that seems to be the opposite of a pro-natal policy.
Plus, if you look at stats, fertility rate and income generally follows a U shape where the poorest people on welfare have more children than the middle-class, and are generally less likely to be married as well, so not sure what you'd be accomplishing there.
How is this supposed to work? Older middle class and upper people have private pension funds and own homes that have appreciated to multiples of their initial values. Poor people will struggle to help their parents, making raising children even more difficult and unaffordable.
The average parent spends a total of ~$200k per child here. In the absence of a state pension, it would be more rational to add that money to your retirement fund than to hope your child will be generous enough to give you a monthly stipend in your old age.
If most women out-earn men, and women have a well-documented desire to only date men who earn more than them, how do we expect anyone to form relationships and start families?
That desire isn’t necessarily localized in the kind of woman who is actually earning more, is it?
Assuming that it is, though, the answer is easy enough. Marry older men. This comes up enough on this Godforsaken forum; I’m almost surprised you didn’t think of it.
Then we get the resentful younger men saying women are all gold-diggers and the State should force Stacy-Anne to be my girlfriend.
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They don't want to do that either.
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I think one problem is looking at it as a purely financial issue. Sure, that's an element of it: families unable, or sometimes just unwilling, to take on the financial burden of child-rearing, which we've managed to raise in various ways like requiring car seats and larger vehicles or an expectation of how many kids fit in a given room. But it's also a cultural one: we need to convince people that the costs and burdens of raising kids are worthwhile. Governments like to treat every problem as a financial one, and that's certainly one facet to approach, but I think culture leaders and trendsetters need to play a part too. How many kids does the average popular fiction character have? Of the 7 hero characters in The Avengers (2012), one is shown to have kids. I realize child actors are difficult to work with (for well-intentioned reasons), but I feel like there's a big space for positive portrayals of "family" (maybe I'm ignoring The Fast and the Furious franchise?) in the stories we tell each other beyond kids movies.
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Perhaps we could actually try to make having children the financially preferable choice (or even just equivalent!) instead of an immense burden relative to childlessness/having too few children before we throw up our hands and declare defeat?
There are massive financial incentives, caused by the state, to not have children and the current transfers are pathetically small compared to those.
We can't. Essentially everyone wants them, especially those who have children. Removing them would mean making children somehow less safe and protected. This is everything from child labor laws to car seats to occupancy restrictions (on number of children in a room) to expensive requirements on child care providers, and much more.
Of course we can, gradually increase taxation for the childless with commensurate tax rebates for those with children. Have the exact rates depend on the fertility rate.
Easy peasy. Perhaps you don't want to do this but its well within the capacity of the state to do.
Something like, special yearly levy on childless adult, then split the earning from this levy to every child so that people are encouraged to have at least 1 kid to avoid the tax, while poor people can continue to spawn kids to get more benefit from this tax
And what of those who aren't able to have kids, would be terrible parents if they did have kids, or aren't earning enough for the levy to be worthwhile? Here's a charming story of a married couple with six children who were abusive scum to those kids. Yes, how lovely to contemplate a future filled with such happy thriving families!
If you make it a condition that "everyone has to be the parent of one child", then you will get "hello, me and Joe agreed to have a baby, here's the baby, we're giving it up to social services because neither of us wants to raise a kid, can we have our certificates of child-production stamped for the tax office, please?"
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Surely you realise it would be trivial to design policy around this?
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This is easy to say, but very hard to demonstrate that it actually works. It certainly is not a mathematical inevitability.
Perhaps, but why give up before giving even a shadow of a try?
Why continue massively subsidising civilisation destroying anti-social behaviour?
So are you the parent of fifteen children? Walk the walk before you demand the right to control others over when and how they have children. That's what annoys me the most about these blithe theoretical solutions: the people putting them forward are also the ones saying they're not married yet, have no kids, etc.
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Because we already have. There are lots of policies which transfer money to people with children. Most directly in the US, the Earned Income Tax Credit and the tax deduction for dependents, but many, many others. As these policies have proliferated, fertility has dropped.
And yet it's more and more financially preferable to not have children. What we have done is like noticed that car sales a dropping and handed out 10$ vouchers and wonder why that doesn't have an impact on car sales.
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They'll go on welfare though. Lacking the need to provide, they don't have much motivation already. Just video games all day, TV for the women, fooling around in between. They'll be like the blessed teenagers of Omelas.
So tie welfare to children as well if it becomes an issue. We do this shit all the time.
We've made parenthood and family size a moral issue, where having more than two children is a sin against blessed Gaia, and moreover a sign that you're a fool to waste your prime years having babies instead of having fun, and this also means that you must be poor, stupid, inferior human capital since everyone knows it's the underclass that is the most fertile.
You're not going to wind back fifty years of "having babies is irresponsible and selfish" by promising "hey, we'll give you twenty dollars coupon every month for each kid up to the age of seven!"
Children's allowance is indeed a thing, and indeed a very necessary thing. But so is abuse of the system, and for all the scorn about the 'welfare queens' political sloganeering, I've seen myself people cheating the system.
Changing social attitudes is like turning an oil tanker. You can do it, but it'll take a lot of time and careful manoeuvring. Plus men being unwilling to marry a woman who already has children - and remember, single mothers also includes widows and divorced women. So there's little incentive to have a lot of kids unless you're sure your spouse will never leave you, and that's not 100% any more since we've reduced marriage to "if at least two people (but maybe we can legislate in the future for more partners) want to live together, but only so long as they want to live together and are 'in love', no more than that".
If your choice is to be single mother with young children, or single woman with no children, after your relationship/marriage breaks down, then option B is better for dating/getting a new partner. I'm making a large assumption on that one, the first study I could find about remarriage after divorce is from 2015 for the period 1979-2010, and that makes the data fifteen years out of date:
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Romania's attempt failed because they lacked the will to actually continue enforcing it, not because the policy itself didn't work.
How you solve for lack of will to enforce such policies is a whole other problem, but the policies themselves work. People still fuck, a lot, and if there is little to no access to birth control and abortion that fucking is going to result in children.
If you don't care about dysgenic solutions then the easiest one is to import as many third worlders as possible, eventually you'll stumble on some ethnicity with low enough impulse control. It might sound like it sucks but really banning contraception does the same thing on a slightly longer timescale. The challenge is finding a non-dysgeinc solution in an environment where having children is an objectively stupid decision on an individual level.
Putting it this way suggests another solution: Make it so having children isn't a stupid decision on an individual level. But paradoxically this means treating children as less valuable, not more, so there's no way to get there from here.
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They literally don't.
That's still a lot of fucking going on in those charts, just comparatively less
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If the government bans condoms and the pill, watch that number go down even further. People didn't have porn and video games back when TFR was high and birth control illegal.
Then the Amish and breeding fetishists will inherit the earth.
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If a communist dictatorship couldn't enforce the policy, what chances does a liberal western democracy have? The War on Condoms will be even less effective than the War on Drugs.
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