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I just saw a tweet and I don’t care if it’s factually true because a it’s definitely directionally true but it seems like Humans overall just hit below replacement fertility. That would seem existential at some point. Shouldn’t we be considering radical policy choices. One big issue is men dropping out of the labor force. One radical thing we could do would be positive male discrimination. Make firms hirer men whenever possible. There are probably a lot more radical policies but more stable male careers would definitely seem to help. Not saying we should do that specifically but it probably should be inside the Overton window.
https://ourworldindata.org/cdn-cgi/imagedelivery/qLq-8BTgXU8yG0N6HnOy8g/2d3c25c3-b784-4c9c-454f-14d8d304ee00/w=1350
There are billions of humans on the planet. There are going to be billions of humans on the planet for the next hundred years. A tiny blip below replacement means the number might shrink very slowly for a decade or two. It is concerning economically for a society built around the assumption that each generation will be exponentially larger than the previous one. It is concerning culturally for ethnic and cultural groups which are below average and worried about being replaced by groups which are above average. It is NOT an existential risk to the human race. There are a bunch of people who have lots of children, and if low birth rates become an existential risk to certain groups then the ones having more children will become more prominent and more confident in their belief structures that cause them to have more children. (This includes but is not limited to minorities. See Malcolm Collins and the pro-natalist movement).
Humanity will adapt and survive, as it always does.
Yes agree. I almost added a sentence on this. Today it’s more of a worry about maintaining advanced civilization as tfr is most acute amongst those groups. And even then you likely have 100-200 years.
Supposedly Rome had the same issue around the time of Augustus and they tried to reverse the tfr fall with legal changes. The decline will take centuries, but what comes after a dark age is concerning.
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