We are humans and as such we have always adapted. We will adapt again. You can all live in fear re population decline if you like but I’m just getting on with it.
this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2026
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actually quite pragmatic 🤨
Who will pay to care for the aging population? Welp, whether you live in a socialised care country or the United hellscapes of America, the answer is: you will. Or your kids will, or whatever generation we're talking about here.
Even if you do live in the US and have no elderly relatives, the insurance companies will have to hike the shit out of their premiums to remain profitable.
The fewer working age people there are compared to people past working age, the worse it will be.
Yep. There's a big bowl of shit, and some day it must be eaten. The choice becomes: do you eat the shit, or do you add a little squirt and pass it to your kids?
Billionnaires.
“I guess we’ll have to increase wages”. Doesn’t work when there aren’t enough working people to maintain critical infrastructure.
World wide population decline is going to cause some serious problems. The US will need to establish a strong immigration policy to absorb people fleeing failing countries/geographies while continuing to provide food, and the transportation of that food, to the rest of the us.
The US will need to establish a strong immigration policy to absorb people fleeing failing countries/geographies
Why would anyone be running to the US? Do you think people dream of being forced into labor camps?
The US has a lot of space and a lot of farmland. Most countries don’t. As ocean transportation of food (amongst other resources) becomes less reliable due to lack of security, people will be fleeing their failed or failing country to one that’s more stable.
You’re right to think that the US has shit policies for immigration now but I think that will change once population decline starts affecting how much food is stocked at grocery stores.
I anticipate things being a lot worse than they are even now over the next 15 years. Multiple wars, state-sanctioned sea piracy, and a failure in the complex supply chain that creates advanced chipsets used for things like servers/workstations, satellites, weather prediction, stock markets, etc. leading to a mini-collapse as a best-case scenario.
My dude, it's not just the shit policies for immigration, its the fact it's rapidly turning into to the sort of country most migrants have fled from
I’m well aware. I think it’s temporary though. I believe that there will be significant problems when the cost of importing food skyrockets, the cost of domestic food skyrockets, and the farmers are telling their local news that they need immigrants back.
This might happen soon too, we just signed a deal with the devil to try to cap the exploding cost of diesel. That fuel is used to create and move food.
What's the connection between population decline and tight knit communities and crime? I can't see any
Mostly just less anonymity. In a large community, you can remain more-or-less unknown. In a town where everyone knows each other, you're a known entity whether you like it or not.
Big anonymous city is better environment for crime than village of 50 where everyone knows each other by name.
Except in practice living in the city no one ever steals from me and all the folks I know who live in rural areas are like “watch out for methheads, they’ll steal your shit”
Considering how people struggle with the comparatively small hiccup that is the current Iran-US war, I find it hard to believe that all commenters here would be fine when global trade dwindles.
I however am built different and would simply survive economic and societal collapse.
Society is going to collapse anyway, the question is, how hard and how badly. The whole idea behind "not sustainable" is that it is not possible to sustain something. I personally rather hit the brakes than accelerate before hitting the wall.
The whole idea behind “not sustainable” is that it is not possible to sustain something.
-1 That is not "the idea!", that is the definition. A recursive one at that.
-2 That doesn't really follow from either your or OPs comments. What is not sustainable? The economy, society, global trade? Did you delete a sentence?
I think your comment makes more sense if I was arguing for people to counteract population decline. I am not. I was simply pointing out that it won't be sunshine and rainbows as OP and many commenters here seem to believe.
If society is constantly getting richer every single year and has for decades... Why are people still struggling? Either poor people are unreasonable/irrational, we don't actually care about reducing cost of basic necessities,or the wealth increases are being siphoned out elsewhere.
Population decline would be a non-issue in a functioning economy, because a small shrinkage of the economy would be a non-issue.
I always hate it when someone says that we would need to reduce our standard of living to remain sustainable. It's 100% bullshit predicted on using a definition of "standard of living" that nobody understands (roughly speaking I think it's only used to compare two different persons or groups in an idealized snapshot in time). We waste so much food. Some of it's necessary, but, 40%??
yes! If there wasn’t so much overconsumption by a small set of very rich folks everyone could live a comfortable life sustainably, it’s so frustrating
Even the fears about the economy and government spending are bullshit. Notice the folks obsessing over birthrates always quote the retiree to worker ratio. They don't talk about the dependent to worker ratio, and that's what really matters. Yes, our populations are aging, and yes that means relatively more old people to take care of. But we in turn also have far fewer children to take care of. If we can adapt to the Baby Boom era, we can adapt to an aging population.
Further afield, fears about human extinction are total bullshit. No country is a monolith; every nation has groups within it with higher and lower relative birth rates. If the birth rate stays low and never recovers among the mainstream society, eventually the smaller groups end up composing most of the population, and then the birth rate recovers. The Amish inherit the Earth.
Or, if even that fails, ultimately technology loss alone stabilizes your birthrates. Eventually your population falls so low that you just can't physically manufacture reliable birth control anymore. That's a product of industrial production. It requires a certain minimum population size to run a factory. Below that and we just regress to earlier technological eras. Eventually we end up back in a mostly agrarian state, and suddenly having kids is once again economically beneficial.
Well, the Japan's population is declining and they've been in stagflation for the last 30 years.
Japan is a whole other mess caused by the exotic monetary policy used to cushion the real estate crash and a risk adverse corporate culture unwilling to properly make use of it, causing investment to stagnate.
Look what happened after the plague, 50% of the population was gone.
It broke the back of the Catholic church and feudalism. Peasants got their first pay raise... ever.
It broke the back of the Catholic church and feudalism. Peasants got their first pay raise... ever.
You're missing maybe the most important part of this: ...eventually. It was at least 40 years after the plague hit, and probably more like 70-100, depending how exactly you're counting. AKA it might get better after we're all dead
That seems...obvious?
Why would the effects of reduced population happen before the population is reduced?
I think feudalism carried on for 200 more years
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who will work unskilled jobs if there aren't enough people to do them?
Immigrants usually
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Houses are already kept artificially empty to retain prices. Capitalism always finds a way to screw you over.
When the population was predicted to explode into the 21st century, the news said this was a big problem. Now the population is expected to gradually decline. The news is saying this is a big problem.
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The people that want higher birth rates don't care about higher wages, the environment, or people's safety.
They just need workers they can milk them until they can't work anymore. They need these workers to spend all their money so they have to keep working.
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Okay, but retirement is based off there being more people working than not, so in countries with national pensions we'll have to significantly raise taxes, and in countries without such a system, retirees who are invested into index funds, need publicly traded corporations to start underpaying their employees even more (it's really eye-opening when you realize people over 55 own 73% of all the resources of the US, from money to stocks to real estate).
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Lower population is generally better for almost all sectors.
But lowering the population means killing people or restricting birthing rights.
People can also just stop breeding. Seems to be happening in a lot of developed countries. Might be slower but I bet the population will level off eventually. Or plummet dramatically from climate change/right wing political policies.
Or people just saying "nah"
Well, I dunno about you, but I'm in no hurry to get children.
Well no. That’s a wildly incorrect take.
Birth rates are already decreasing and are below replacement rate in many places already. Fertility rates are at an all time low. They naturally decrease as income and quality of life increases.
The global fertility rate is 2.2 births per woman. Which is just barely above replacement. In most developed nations, that rate is down in the 1.6 range, well below replacement.
Total Human population is excepted to peak within 50 years and then begun naturally declining, but many countries are already there. China has seen several consecutive years of population decline. India is seeing a leveling off of population growth and will soon decline. The US is increasing solely off of immigration. Japan has a decreasing population. Same with Korea. 8 EU countries have seen population declines over the last 20 years.
If you wanted to see population decline in the US specifically, banning immigration would do it and we’d see a decline in the next census.
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