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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.
Population increased caused by above-replacement fertility is exponential. More babies means more parents who have more babies.
The opposite is also true. Fewer babies means fewer parents to have babies. It won't look like decline at first, because on a population tally a 75-year-old looks the same as a 20-year-old, but pensioners can't have babies, no matter how many of them there are. And the mechanism you are proposing (high-fertility subgroups drag up overall fertility enough to make a difference) has really only happened in Israel. For the other 99% of the world, there is no thermostatic mechanism in evidence. More likely population will plummet in the same way it skyrocketted after the industrial revolution.
They are the ones that maintain industrial society.
Right now, that's subsaharan Africans with average IQs in the 70s, plus anti-modernity breeder cults like the Amish or Haredim. All three require industrial society to be maintained by other people. When the other people disappear, who will provide healthcare for the Amish, welfare for the Haredim or food aid for the Africans?
And more to the point, if industrial society does collapse, that makes us much more vulnerable to existential threats like pandemics, asteroid strikes, nuclear war or misaligned-AI takeover.
Although to be honest, saying 'humanity will survive' is pretty cold comfort. Like consoling the dinosaurs with 'don't worry, that big asteroid won't kill all the animals, the mammals will be fine'
The Amish can ship food to the Africans in exchange for brain draining their igbos and Tutsis as doctors.
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