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What kind of people will not wanting children likely select for?
At least two kinds come to mind:
1) People who love children and are willing to have them regardless of the impact on their financial situation.
2) People living in societies where women (and likely some men) lack a say in whether or not to have children.
The first kind could be very good.
The second is definitely not something we should look forward to.
There is a "replacement" crisis but it's being addressed by pearl clutching and those advocating for forced birth.
Having children is expensive all the way around. And women's reproductive rights have enabled them to (rightfully) make their own choices about motherhood.
To state the obvious: children literally are the future of humanity and we need to address the issue accordingly. A lot of it would be via changing the economics of having a child, and the rest would be by making the world a "village to raise a child".
This is all eminently doable. We just need to agree on what that looks like and how to best invest in it.
Maine, Vermont, and Florida
Since 2020: Delaware, Hawaii, Montana, New Hampshire, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and West Virginia now also qualify.
Montana is a bit of a surprise there... so is Oregon for me.
Source: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/older-ad...
Maybe in a couple countries. But not for the world, and not for the west and definitely not for America.
As the population has grown poverty has decreased.
Energy is very easy to produce cleanly (nuclear, and solar is looking better and better). The barriers to doing so are political and financial, not technical. They will be made worse by having an aged-heavy population, which is less innovative, less willing to invest in the future, and less willing to try new things. And it makes a poorer society, obviously.
Malthus has been proved wrong at every juncture. Lack of children is about to bite us very, very hard.
Could it have an effect like the Black Plague, where labor becomes more expensive?
1. The federal poverty threshold is identical across the 48 contiguous states. A single adult is evaluated under the same income line whether living in rural Mississippi or San Francisco, despite vast differences in housing and living costs.
2. The US measures pre-tax cash income; it does not deduct income taxes, payroll taxes, OOP medical expenses, commuting costs, or childcare costs, all of which drastically reduce a family’s usable income.
3. It ignores modern basic needs that, when the measure was developed in the ~1960s, did not exist. It does not include modern necessities such as Internet access, child care expenses, mobile phones, etc.
Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) developed by the Census Bureau in ~2010 and Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed (ALICE) developed by the United Way, are considered to be far more realistic measures in today's terms. Both show drastic differences to the officially quoted poverty measures with ALICE showing ~12% of households are 'poor,' but, upwards of 40% of US households cannot afford basic necessities.
Of course, opponents will say that there is a difference in the definition of poverty between the 1960s and today. Folks in the 1960s were facing different hardship realities that are not faced by households today (lack of indoor plumbing or heating), but that doesn't do anything to say that if you reside in an expensive city (e.g., a metropolis in CA) and cannot afford rent or transportation, because the measures don't take into account regional/geo differences, you are still absolutely fucked.
We need to update the measures to something far more reliable, rooted in the realities of today as opposed to 70 years ago, and which take into account that 'poverty' is a relative term.
True, but not obviously a causal relationship.
This is like comparing apples to oranges to find a correlation, and arriving at an incorrect causation.
Falling populations are largely due to better education, specifically of women, as well as integration of women into the workforce, which has been one of the bigger drivers in curbing poverty. The latter is so significant in the west and the far east (double income households mean rising costs of living, meaning SAHM households become unviable in the West for the middle class), resulting in a significant population decrease.
But in places such as the Middle East or Africa, ever increasing populations have only meant even more financial trouble for those economies. Case in point Pakistan and Egypt. In other economies such as India (which I assume is one of the "couple countries" you mentioned), overall birth rates are falling significantly to near replacement level, and in the few states/regions with high birth rates, poverty is rampant and the people reliant on subsidies from other more prosperous regions.
The problem with most of the world is that while we are able to sustain a huge population as a whole globally, most of the population growth is extremely localized, resulting in population sparsity in some comfortable regions (Canada, the US, Central Asia, southern Russia) and population unsustainability in other regions completely unsuited to population growth (sub-Saharan Africa, Indonesia, the Middle East).
That is such a privileged first-world take.
You haven't lived in overpopulated places.
Just try it for 1 fucking year and then see if you still wish that hell upon anyone.
I swear I'm starting to wonder if that's a take pushed by corporations so they can have an endless supply of labor and consumers, like the bans on abortion etc.
It will be (eventually) when the worldwide birth rate drop below replacement. And it's close to that now: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN.
It's a titanic issue. Old people are expensive. They tax the young to pay for themselves. Now the system is running out of young to tax.
And that's the situation in rich and prosperous nations. I live in a developing country that has managed to be relatively poor and have a declining birth rate. It's so absurdly pathological it's not even funny. Symptoms include, for example, increased retirement ages. We will work well into our 70+ years of age, and we will be happy. Newer generations are already coping, they've already internalized the fact they will never actually retire. This is the stuff revolutions are made out of.
Yes, because the aging population increases healthcare spending to support them while the working age population shrinks, eroding the tax base. This is currently happening in Japan right now.
Killing USAID probably put a drag on that slowdown by reducing access to family planning resources, but we’ll have to see exactly how much in the coming years.
Frustratingly, (and counterintuitively), it won't help housing prices, because shrinking populations retreat to city centers. Spain, Italy, Japan, and Korea are full of $5,000 houses. Meanwhile, Madrid, Rome, Tokyo, and Seoul are more expensive than they've ever been.
We can tax the rich, we're post scarcity, time to take a look at the rest of the world an come up with a better social safety net.
Productivity is growing much more slowly than the retiree-to-worker ratio. Workers are producing slightly more every year, but there are a lot more retirees to take care of every year. If this does not change, we will eventually see a collapse of social safety nets. Policy can only accelerate or delay that collapse.
We absolutely need an abundance agenda if we want people to have children. Reject the zero-sum investment thesis of NIMBY protectionism. Invest in density, efficiency, and antitrust. This is one of the most openly obvious self-owns in history. It's genuinely absurd.
We are all in this together. Make financial security easy for young people and we'll actually get children.
Of stack and packs lol
> We are all in this together.
When’s the last time I heard that one
Countries with larger populations will see these guys commit civilizational suicide with enough time to recover one can hope. We won’t be funding USAID when the majority of Americans are drawing from Medicare though.
Africa doubled it's population in the last 28 years.
That's how we reduce the Earth's population!
(a) non-walkable neighborhoods with big houses, big roads and cars everywhere, versus
(b) smaller houses or apartments but fewer cars, walkable neighborhoods, and bikes (and other small mobility devices that small kids can use)
I can tell you where being a kid seems more fun. And I’ve personally been to both sorts of places recently and observed how the kids behave.
Sure, with big lots, kids have lots of space in their own backyards. And big cars make soccer-momming easier. But, when kids can easily and safely get somewhere else approximately on their own, the whole situation seems better.
And yes, I really did recently observe a pretty big family in one of the latter types of places. How does one parent herd a pile of kids from their small (but not that small) apartment to some destination without a giant car? They tell the bigger kids where they’re going and they take the smaller kids, and maybe the bigger kids get their ahead, and everyone gets to experience an appropriate amount of independence for their size.
I also saw a whole lot of families and children.
As I'm getting older and looking in the coming years at having children, the value of a tight, walkable community has risen exponentially to me.
I think "make society more child-friendly" is a good idea, but one that doesn't seem to have increased fertility that much. To me it seems that educated people living comfortable lives with access to birth control simply don't want to have that many children. If you look at the country stats, the most proven way to increase fertility is to take away education, women's rights, or birth control. And imo, the western world should adapt to low birth rates, instead of trying to prop them up.
I personally think it’s just opportunity cost. Children seem like a big deal with unclear benefit and so as people get the chance to substitute with other things they do so. For my part, we put a lot of work into having kids and we live in SF. If we leave, it’ll be because my daughters don’t have mobility here because crime and cars impede their independent movement.
Walk in Tokyo and try to find children there.
In 20 years, will countries start to compete for young people? Tax breaks, benefits, etc. Will some countries thrive while others die off completely? The proportion of young people will be a huge issue regarding military strength, innovation, etc.
Could get very ugly.
Or spend less.
We've already seen 20 years of policy driven by people who don't care about families being started.
Their wealth is not liquid, but it's not relatively tiny.
>$93 trillion in assets[1]
>Total wealth: $167.26 trillion[2]
[1]https://investor.visa.com/news/news-details/2026/Visa-Resear...
[2]https://smartasset.com/financial-advisor/wealth-by-generatio...
As we get better at healthcare and life, we should expect to be productive and care for ourselves for longer. I hope that as I age I remain in favour of succeeding generations over my own self. Plant the tree whose shade we won’t see etc.
That would lower the retirement age for me. I was born in the mid-80s.
I know that was just a suggestion. We could go with something like "life expectancy at birth minus 5 years", which would raise the retirement age for me, but we're basically just admitting that retirement isn't a thing anymore if we do that. Hopefully the wealthiest nation on Earth can do better.
I think, whatever we do, we should recognize that the current retired generation holds more wealth than any other generation. If we want more kids in our society, maybe we need to get some of that wealth into the hands of people who can have more kids.
Without more productive capacity the extra $1.2k/mo would cause enormous inflation. Just a question of what the country is optimizing for, I suppose, but I think people would be unhappy with the result.
In this case, I presume they're taxed on their continued employment and so they're still paying into the pension they're receiving benefits on? I don't see a problem if that's the case. They contributed to the pension with an agreed payment date and followed the process correctly. I can understand how you feel that it's unfair, but I really don't see a problem unless they stop paying into the pension or stop paying taxes on their continued employment.