Adults over 65 will outnumber children by 2029

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Walk in Tokyo and try to find children there.

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.