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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).
Maybe this is a tangential ramble at best, but it gives me a moment to take my mind off of other matters.
There are a lot of replies down-thread that boil down to "just have kids bro", that seem to be dripping with a kind of smugness that suggests that it truly is that easy, and any complications that come along with it are speed bumps at best.
I think a lot of people here forget that this forum is wildly unrepresentative of the broader (US) population. By and large the average poster here is:
All of those things together are a great set of qualities for people who intend to be parents. My father and his wife are like that, and my youngest brother is growing up to be an exceptional young man.
The thing is, my father is dying, and we're not sure if he'll live to see my brother graduate highschool. He's done what he can, but the rest of us are going to have to try and fill a gap in his life that can never be filled. No man can truly know the hour of his departure, but the average life expectancy for men in that side of my family is about 63. I'm old enough now that even though I am in a stable, committed relationship, I simply don't know if I will live long enough to properly raise a child.
On the other hand, you have me, my brother and sister on my mother's side. My mother lacks any formal diagnosis, but she is crazier than a shit house rat. She casually lets it drop that "the angels" are giving her advice these days (though it's generally good advice so we don't fight her on it), she's had a lifetime of substance abuse problems, she's had a history of violence and abuse towards me and my sister, and she's never really been able to hold down a job in any meaningful way.
As a result of all of that, none of us really have any idea of how to be a proper parent. There aren't exactly "how to not stab your own kids" lessons regularly available at the local library, so my brother and I are both terrified of having a child and fucking it up.
My sister has two kids, but she is, more than anything, a cautionary tale. She's not just crazy, but evil in a pure way that almost makes me believe that demonic elements can truly hold sway in this world. She has absolutely no compunctions about lying, cheating, using physical violence, or stealing to get her way, and sometimes she will do it just because she thinks it's funny. Her older child is schizophrenic and has been in and out of involuntary committals since he was a teenager, when he's not being held on drug charges. He's tried to kill my sister and her husband at least once already. I haven't spoken to any of them in many years after she tried to have multiple family members arrested on (false) human trafficking charges and attacking my brother with a brick.
I did my best to raise and protect my brother growing, but it was a case of the lost leading the lost. At present, he's kind of drifting through life working a retail job and living with his dad after a bad breakup. He's keeping out of trouble and keeping his head above water, but only barely.
The difference between me and those two is my father. He met all those criteria later in his life and did his best to impart those values in me. I was already damaged, so it didn't all stick. Even still, I've absorbed the virtues of hard work, tact, thrift, and reliability in a way that has allowed me to carve out a small life where I'm not constantly in fear of going to sleep hungry or without a roof over my head.
My sister got none of that. She's a mess. My one brother got a little of that. He's doing better than her. My youngest brother got more of that than I ever did from a loving, supportive network of family and friends. God willing, he'll do better than I ever will.
I probably won't have children. I'm too old. I found a partner late in life, and she can't have kids due to a medical condition that has rendered her infertile, and I don't really believe there's anyone else out there for me. Even were it possible, I am terrified that I would do it wrong. I don't really have any example of what doing it right looks like.
For people who say "just have kids bro", what do you do when the people like my mother and sister have kids? What do you do to make sure those kids even have a chance? Are they simply meant to fall through the cracks so long as the overall metrics look good? Do you try to disincentivize that from happening in the first place?
On the other side of the coin, what do you do with people like me? I've lived below my means my entire life (no vacations, extensive savings, retirement) so as to not be a burden on others. I've tried to do what good I can in raising my brother, but I have no biological children of my own. Should I be left to rot in my old age, like some of the replies suggest?
What do you do?
You (the State in its formulation as society, which is clearly the you being referenced here) don’t do anything. That’s the hardest answer of them all. You just don’t touch it, the good and the bad. Your mother and sister will have kids, and it isn’t the responsibility of the State or any other formulation of the general “you” to do anything about that. You have to stop interfering and be willing to let things play out organically. We see this perhaps most pressingly with immigration questions these days. High modernist planners at the highest levels of government realized that there was going to be natural decrease in the fertility rate after the baby boomers, and that this would create an eventual national crisis, so their solution was to import foreigners, based on their belief that all humans are fundamentally similar enough to be economically interchangeable.
This of course was a wrong idea and contributed to further depressions of the birth rate, which necessitated more immigrants, and so on and so forth until either some sort of great violence breaks out or the original people the planners were in theory looking out for become an unimportant minority in their own land.
All of that could have been avoided by the planners packing up their notebooks, going home, and letting natural civilizational cycles of rising and falling fertility play out. Those might have been the original bullshit jobs, as it were, a job that would be better done by not doing it.
But all of the modern state is like this. Its tendrils are so thick into everything that people ask “Should I be left to rot?,” rather than “What have I done so that I won’t rot in my old age?”
The State shouldn’t even be perceived as “leaving you to rot” in your old age. Your choices are the ones that should define your old age. If you don’t have descendants, do you contribute enough to a community that they think it’s worth helping you out? Are you a beloved Grandfatherly figure or are you the local crotchety hermit? Etc etc through all of our choices all through life.
I don’t blame the average person for this kind of thinking, because the State, by shoving itself into everything actually closes down the possibilities for people. Maybe you and a bunch of other childless couples want to organize a mutual support community to help look out for each other in your old age. That would be laudable, if someone on the Motte right now were doing that I would have serious respect for them, whatever their reasoning behind not having kids. But the State will come and interfere. Are your houses big enough? Is the road sized appropriately for emergency vehicles? Is your private group a little too racially homogeneous about letting new people in? Etc etc.
And the squashing of that ability to just do things, to organically arrange things, for better or for worse at the lowest level and move up from there, that’s crushing to the soul of a civilization, to a people, to individual persons. I actually think this is a discussion where many lefties might find themselves agreeing with me, in that most complaints about crony capitalism stem from this kind of State over-regulation of everything.
But to answer your question, you should be the one to make the choices that define your old age, without expecting someone in far away location to contribute. You, and everyone else, should be freed to make decisions and suffer consequences, the good and the bad.
Countries like South Korea and Japan have had far less immigration than the US and most of Europe, yet their TFR is even lower. Romania has ~97% native born population with the small number of immigrants mostly labourers from Moldova who speak the same language, and yet, the lowest fertility rate in Europe.
“Other states implemented different centralizing solutions to perceived problems and have experienced a similar crisis of modernity” is no different than what I’m saying.
Also, when coming at what was revealed to the reactionary in a dream, the facts presented must at least be factually correct.
Ukraine has the lowest TFR in Europe at 0.99, and that rate does in fact have a lot to do with immigrants.
Romania has a 1.71 fertility rate, making it #6 in Europe.
As for South Korea and Japan, they have their own problems of organic processes being interfered with. The Japanese people have always had a small and not particularly giving batch of islands to work with. The spiritual human carrying capacity on those islands might be as low 50 million people, maybe as high as 90 million. It is almost certainly not 129 million, where the population peaked. The solution to this is for the government to just not touch it. The Japanese government doesn’t actually have to pay old people. It doesn’t have to bring in waves of immigrants, either elite or lowly. It can just let the Japanese people find their own carrying capacity and then work with what is given it in terms of human capital.
Korea’s situation is even worse, and TBH they may be so far gone as a result of culture and government that they’re going to get rolled by North Korea one day, despite North Korea also having a declining population.. That would be a key marker of what the world’s future is going to look like, it it were to happen this century.
I did pick an outdated or possibly wrong map for that statistic, but the point still stands: immigration like you described does not seem to correlate with TFR.
If you look at the countries with the lowest number of foreign born residents in the EU, i.e. Poland, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, they have TFRs of 1.31, 1.57, 1.71, 1.6, 1.50, they are not doing any better the ones with the highest amount of immigration.
Ukraine's TFR was already very low before the war, you can't blame the recent rapid Russian "immigration" for that.
Are you under the impression that I think what I described applies to Bulgaria? It may or may not. I have no idea and don’t care, because I’m not Bulgarian. I’m sure this will shock you, but the USA is different from Bulgaria. I don’t care about Bulgaria and didn’t mention it.
I’m concerned about White people in America, and our fertility is 1.75, and we keep being given the chance to welcome new immigrants with a 2.19 TFR into what is rapidly becoming not our country anymore.
You can think that that’s a good or a bad thing, but your argument is not arguing about what I’m actually saying.
What I am saying is that, in 1965, the United States government, staring down the barrel of the already massive drop in TFR from the pill, should not have passed the Hart-Cellar Act in an attempt to goose the numbers, because opening the floodgates to immigration made the problem worse for the native population in America.
That’s why your references to “Well, Bulgaria has a low TFR” hold no power here. Because at least that’s the TFR the native Bulgarian population is settling on. You can’t tell me what the TFR of the native German population is, because the national stats are full of Turks and Arabs now. These stats are meaningless and say nothing about the effects of immigration.
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