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So anyway, I was discussing the great replacement theory with a far-righter earlier, and I said that immigration had little to no effect on native birthrates, citing Japan and Korea as examples.
That pointed to a far more likely culprit, education as a whole (not just women’s). South Korea and Japan can’t seem to stop "investing in the future" by making their and their kids’ lives hell. Naturally, to escape the vicious cycle, they end up abolishing the future.
Isn’t it weird that a prominent justification for making money in our society is ‘sending my kids to college’? Anyone who refuses to do so is shamed with accusations of selfishness and not wanting their kids to succeed. They then choose the alternative path where kids aren’t even in the picture, so they’re free to be selfish in peace. We’re copenhagen ethics-ing humanity into slow painless extinction.
Trads like to assign the blame to female education, but most of the arguments apply to men as well. People are wasting 5-15 years of their lives on a very expensive vacation, at best, when they could be having kids. We want them to make that important decision early, and nothing sobers a young man quicker than staring decades of drudgery in the face.
It’s time to abandon our rosy view of Education as just an intolerable burden on the living. The unborn are its primary victims. Your children cry out: “Mum! Dad! Why do you let my Evil Professor keep me here? Why can’t I liiive? “
Say No To School. Choose Life.
I find concerns about sub-replacement fertility rates to be largely pointless:
After all, the future belongs to those who show up.
In pretty much no plausible future will population crashes meaningfully impact standards of living, outside perhaps the most sclerotic nations such as Japan and China in the next decade or so. You simply won't notice before it becomes as quaint a problem as worrying about excess horseshit on city streets as the people switch to flying cars..
So is a plague, but both can cause a lot of social disruption and avoidable damage before they are corrected.
Notice how I specifically said that it's exceedingly unlikely that anyone here will have their QOL significantly degraded by a population collapse, unless you're Japanese or Chinese in the next 5-10 years.
Also, the histrionic claims made by OP about this being tantamount to an "extinction", which it categorically isn't.
This can only be true for the definition of collapse that doesn't matter. Those groups and types of individuals you yourself find distasteful will be becoming more and more prominent parts of our lives. Those nice clean neighborhoods of prosocial, functional adults will be shrinking over our lifetimes; every institution that stull works well will be slowly turning into what Americans call DMV; then go lower and lower. This gap will not be plugged by technology because this technology will be at the disposal of rapidly degenerating human stock that has less and less good political sense. Certainly it will not have enough decency to tolerate more successful people going off grid.
You seem to enjoy having moved to the UK. Will your quality of life be significantly degraded by the worst aspects of India catching up?
And that's still only the differential collapse. Because then these people, too, get old and even less capable.
What are your AI timelines? As far as I'm concerned, I expect ~30% unemployment rates within 5 years due to to automation, and an outright Singularity (in the sense that superintelligent AGI breaks all the charts, not that it necessarily goes FOOM) within 10.
I specifically said significant population collapse because I don't see the problem becoming noticeable within 10 years, and certainly not 5.
I strongly disagree that technology can't mitigate or even reverse the negative effects in said time frame. The primary concerns of demographic collapse are loss of tax revenue to prop up social security and pensions, and insufficient productive workers to maintain infrastructure and care for an aging populace. In a largely automated economy, those are moot points, and the latter can be mitigated by caretaker robots.
If humans become obsolete, then I don't see how a decrease in their number matters!
Also, in the particular case of the UK, it's multicultural enough that I genuinely don't think I could even tell if there was a 10-20% change in demographic ratios in said time frame. From what I can tell, they're finally cracking down on illegal immigration, so I have reason to expect that they'll largely take productive, reasonably prosocial immigrants in the future.
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