There is no indication that birth rates are going to stabilize, let alone recover, anywhere. Only Israel and Georgia (?) look like even half-way exceptions.
Unless they drastically and rapidly change, the 21st century will be the century of unbelievable aging and depopulation.
Based on these latest fertility numbers, we can expect the drop in new people in 100 years to be the following: USA (-47%), France (-46%), Russia (-65%), Germany (-68%), Italy (-78%), Japan (-81%), China (-88%), Thailand (-89%).
Turkey, UK, Mexico, etc. all similar.
People haven't really integrated what this means for our civilization, industrial society, and the progress of history because it's too big to wrap your head around.
I think what it means is that our civilization is about to collapse. Meaning sometime before 2200.
It is in every practical sense numerically *impossible* for immigration to fix this. You can't "make up the difference" with immigration when the difference is 50%+ of an entire generation. Especially not if you're China or the EU and your shortfall is in 100s of millions.
People still haven't updated on how rapidly fertility rates in the developing world are falling either. In 2022 already, Brazil was at 1.6, Mexico 1.8, India 2.0, Turkey 1.9, etc.
Numbers above say *Chile* is now at *0.88.* Thailand is at 0.95! What is happening!
The Danish population of Denmark hasn't changed a whit since 1980—44 years ago, or, you know, half a century.
The entire population growth in Denmark since 1980 has been immigrants. I bet this holds for many other countries too. Which means...
...the entire functioning of the quasi-redistributive quasi-capitalist system we have in Europe and North America has been subsidized by immigration for half a century already, while the previous population has stagnated and aged.
The system has been non-functional for decades.
There is no way to sustain the stack of institutions behind our version of modern industrial society when the next generations are collapsing by 50%+. It is as numerically impossible as throwing more immigrants at the problem. The math doesn't add up.
There is a strong psychological need to believe in utopian or apocalyptic visions of the near future, like AI doom/acc or imminent WW3 or ecological catastrophe, because the alternative is staring our incomprehensibly pathetic civilizational population collapse in the face.
I don't expect the dead players and bureaucrats to leap at opportunities for reform, but I think it's a catastrophic distraction for live players and independent thinkers, especially in tech, to forget that the straightforward solution is societal reform.
The solution isn't to hope we can build an AI who will solve all our problems for us or subsidize our incoherent, sociobiologically insolvent system with our wacky technology, the solution is coming up with a new, functional plan for organizing industrial societies.
People used to think that surely the low fertility rates of Asia would stabilize at, like, 1.1 at absolute minimum.
Nope. South Korea (population of 50 million) is now at 0.68. Others following. As @SamoBurja says, no reason not to expect 0.0 TFR societies in the near future.
If we fumble a much-needed reform of industrial society by 2100 or so, I think we miss our opportunity to establish permanent settlements in the Solar System and thus our chance at the stars down the line. It closes the book on that for us. Maybe in another 1000 years.
Everyone proposing to save the day with robots, AI, artificial wombs, longevity, or whatever other speculative wacky tech solution is proposing to do a great favor to the bad and broken system that brought us here.
The system needs reform, not more subsidy. Ideas, not tech.
The global economy and industrial/post-industrial standard of living, and all its attendant social norms, relies on a tremendous scale of population to be viable.
I don't think it's viable anymore when South Korea has 5 million people instead of 50 million.
I'm working on what I think will be a solution to industrial civilization's fertility problem. It's not a quick or easy problem. I published the first piece here in @palladiummag:
Also worth reading (and subscribing to!) @bismarckanlys Brief, which investigated India's rapidly falling fertility rates and near-future population stagnation here: brief.bismarckanalysis.com/p/fewer-than-o…
There is a personal upside to civilization-scale population collapse. If you are one of the few people to prioritize high fertility, your children and grandchildren will inherit a world:
Unfounded hope that fertility is a self-correcting problem, yet as @Empty_America is fond of pointing out, falling populations congregate in low-fertility cities even harder. They don't spread out to areas with cheap homes and fruitfully multiply!
If cheap homes attracted young people who automatically used them to be fecund according to some Malthusian logic, it would have happened already in places like rural America or Italy. The opposite is happening.
If you enjoyed these insights or wish to support further research on solving the problems raised herein, I warmly invite you to become a paid subscriber to @bismarckanlys Brief.
One underexplored aspect of the population collapse crisis is how many developing countries simply have fraudulent population numbers for various reasons.
Nigeria's population may be overstated by as much as double.
Every week, Bismarck Brief sends paid subscribers a new in-depth investigation of the strategy of a key institution, industry, or influential individual, from China to Silicon Valley.
Finding solutions to civilization-scale threats like the imminent demographic collapse is part of our daily work at @bismarckanlys. Make sure to follow our founder and president @SamoBurja and my colleagues @benlandautaylor and @RianCFFWhitton to stay up to date on our work!
Indeed. We could call the current demographic collapse trajectory "the Thanos Plan." Many think it will turn out very well, strangely enough. But maybe we shouldn't Thanos ourselves.
It has been remarked by @mr_scientism that elites actually do not care about development for its own sake and maybe never have. This is because advocates of development have failed to make the moral, spiritual, and anthropological case for development—only an economic one.
@mr_scientism The economic case is an instrumental one. This means if elites find non-economic and non-developmental ways to achieve their moral, spiritual, and anthropological goals, they will forget about development. The battle to be fought is one over truth and value, not instrumentality.
In simplified terms, the goal of Western elites since the 18th century has been to make libertine communism real. In the late 20th century, we finally succeeded. With this goal achieved, they are willing to let it all burn down now.
Daily reminder that, by default and absent major political, institutional, and economic reforms, both Europe and America are going to be de-developed, poor, Third World countries by 2100.
Crossing your fingers and praying for AGI is not going to cut it as a solution. We all have a collective responsibility this century to do the intellectual, cultural, institutional, and ultimately political work to reorient and repair our civilization.
Technological progress has greatly slowed since the 1960s. There is no good reason to expect imminent technological revolution, from AI or anything else. The default is de-development into poverty and irrelevance by the end of the century. What's your plan for *that?*
I don't see a single anti-woke billionaire on the list of most generous philanthropists of 2024. The ratio of dollars going to progressive causes versus any other kind of cause has got to be at least 1000-to-1, maybe 1,000,000-to-1.
Then they wonder why "the culture" changed.
"The culture" changed and will keep changing because progressives can and do spend all day figuring out new ways to persuade people of their cause and mold society in their image—but everybody else gets a job.
There is no such thing as a free marketplace of ideas where the best ideas win. The ideas that win are the most organized ideas, and organizing ideas is a full-time job. If nobody is paid to do it, it won't be done.
Car manufacturing in Western countries has completely collapsed in the last 25 years. Down -19% in the U.S., -28% in Germany, -65% in Italy, -71% in France.
But in China, it's grown 16x over.
The legacy auto industry isn't going to be destroyed—it's already been destroyed.
It's not just because of moving production around to neighboring countries. North American production is down -8% and EU+UK production is at least -15%, but in reality much more because the EU in 1999 didn't include Eastern Europe, but today does.
If that chart looks like China produces more vehicles than North America and Europe combined, that's because that's what it shows:
In 2024, the U.S., Canada, Mexico, European Union, and UK produced 30.4 million vehicles, while China produced 31.3 million.
In 19th century Sweden, this guy founded a successful bank and then fathered 21 children with three women—never divorcing, they just died and he remarried. That was wealth.
In our society, money is just good boy points.
Can be converted into real wealth with some effort, but not obviously so. Mostly just spent on expensive treats.
I have yet to see a single country with a *great* immigration policy. The UK doesn't try to bring in Canadians or Australians. Italy doesn't try to bring in Argentines and Italian-Americans. No small country can brag its largest new immigrants are Swedes and Japanese. None.
I can sit here and come up with all kinds of schemes to increase immigration for various countries that would just straightforwardly work and be better than default, yet no country is even trying to implement improvements. Seems like we are stuck with lazy immigration policy.
One way to resolve this is that even modern Western countries are actually, deep down, anti-immigration. They just happen to narrowly favor high immigration for maximally low-cost labor and maximally reliable new voters.