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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).
My take is that those who don't have to spend 9 months pregnant if they wish to perpetuate the species don't really have much right to complain about low fertility rates.
You frame it as if the birth rate collapse is being caused by women choosing not to have children.
It's not, mothers are still having as many children as they did in the 1970s. The issue is that fewer women are becoming mothers. And it's not because they are choosing not to. Childless by choice women have always existed, but they've always been a tiny proportion.
The birth rate collapse is happening because young men and young women are not coupling up any more.
And given that men make up 50% of the non-forming couples, I think we are perfectly entitled to talk about it.
As the saying goes, men chase and women choose. Women are choosing not to have children.
That's false. According to surveys, women still want to have children. If every woman had as many children as she wants, every country barring a few would have above-replacement fertility.
But young people aren't coupling up, and that's obviously not 100% women, how could it be? That would have to mean that young men are asking out as many women as they always have, but the women are all saying no for some reason.
In reality, both men and women are socialising much less, and the effect is more pronounced among men than women.
Surveys don't mean much. If women aren't having children, it's because they don't want them, they biologically can't have them, or because they can't find a man to impregnate them. Infertility happens but there's no evidence it's increased anywhere near enough to explain the drop in TFR. The last is not credible.
Yes, that's exactly what I've been saying. Young people are failing to couple up which has caused the recent birth rate collapse. But that's not a unilateral decision on the part of any individual woman or man. It's a coordination problem. Leaving aside the fact that blaming 'women' is incoherent because 'women' cannot make a collective decision as billions of autonomous individuals, you seem to be ignoring the fact that it takes two people to have a baby. The average young woman wants to get married and have children, but no woman can do that on her own. She needs to find a man who wants to do the same, and do it with her. The coordination mechanisms we used to have for this (in person socialising in most societies) have broken down, so the birth rate has collapsed.
Blaming individuals for systemic problems, or blaming one sex for a problem that involves both sexes, is a lazy copout.
In my experience, when a woman claims that she is unable to find a husband, it's almost always because she has standards which are mathematically unreasonable. e.g. she is a 5/10 in desirability but wants a man who is an 8/10 in desirability.
Or is it because neither she, not her would-be suitor, are going outside?
Women have always had higher standards than men, and yet the fertilty collapse is (very) recent. In the 2000s, birth rates in the western world were going up, not down.
'Women be too picky' explanations have the same problem as 'people be too lazy' explanations for obesity. You can't simply point to an eternal characteristic (women are picky, people are lazy) and use it to explain a time-restricted phenomenon. You have to explain why the characteristic matters now when it didn't matter in say, 2005.
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As the saying goes, men chase and women choose. Women have, increasingly, been choosing "none of the above". Societally, it is anathema to even consider that women's choices may be the problem, so we get this shifting of the responsibility back to men... but this is a problem men can't solve short of going Full Roman, which isn't going to happen.
Why do you only focus on women though? It takes two people to form a relationship. Neither men nor women are socialising much in person, and yet you blame the resulting lack of coupling as exlusively the fault of women, as if our hypothetical twenty-something woman is somehow obliged to break into the apartment of the modern porn- and video game-addicted young man and drag him down the aisle?
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