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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.
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