I think we have to address the elephant in the room. How do we change this trend, as conventional ways don’t seem to bear fruit.

27 comments
  1. It’s probably fine, since we’re still so far off carbon neutrality, a lot of other places will become uninhabitable on earth and we’ll pay the price for our greed by having to welcome climatic asylum seekers.

  2. A stabil population is good for us.
    The growth/decline will even out and then fluxurate from decade to decade.

  3. Oh no . The overall population will fall to where it was in 2005. Europe was empty then. You could walk for days and never see another person. Seriously, I fail to see the problem. The only people complaining are worrying about who to tax, not because this is some mythical perfect population.

  4. >How do we change this trend,

    1. Don’t use contraceptives
    2. Relax immigration laws

    I’ll assume “dying less” is a given.

    ​

    >as conventional ways don’t seem to bear fruit.

    Bearing fruit isn’t the object of the exercise. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

  5. Okay, how do you actually change this trend? Simple, nothing short of a fundamental restructuring of our economic system will do it:

    Housing needs to be free for young people. I don’t mean more affordable. I mean free, like “them commies build 2 million apartments and just gave them to people” -kind of free.

    Prices of food need to be fixed or completely subsidised.

    Healthcare needs to be completely nationalized and free at the point of service. We’re good here, but we’re actually becoming more like America. Same with education, we can’t afford to have a college debt crisis like the USA.

    Childcare needs to be nationalized and available to anyone who wants it.

    A paradigm-shift needs to occur when it comes to working and socializing. We must put limits on working hours (4 day work week?) and do every single thing to encourage socialization and friend groups.

    So basically impossible under neo-liberalism.

  6. In 2 years we had a world wide pandemic and a hot war in Europe. And in the 80s we thought we would all have flying cars by 2020. The world will change so much in 80 that Europe could maybe even not exists by then.

  7. Well wasn’t overpopulation a problem ? The rest of the world also follow the trend, And with the automatisation of work it shouldn’t be a problem for the elder to be okey.

  8. Why should we change this trend? Growth for the sake of growth is unsustainable. We’d do the planet a favour if there were actually less of us

  9. [UN Projections of EU27 and similarly populous countries/regions in 2100](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/population-past-future?time=2023..latest&country=NGA~USA~COD~OWID_EU27~PAK~Latin+America+and+the+Caribbean+%28UN%29).

    TL;DR: Sub-Saharan Africa’s population will explode due to high birth rates. South Asia’s population will continue to grow due to increasing life expectancy. The US population will continue to increase, but at a very slow rate mostly due to immigration. Other areas of the world like Latin America and the Caribbean or Southeast Asia will be flat. China’s population has already peaked and will collapse due to the 1 child policy.

    The UN projects a greater EU population decline than Eurostat does, but it’s the shape of the population pyramid that matters, not the size. The hardest part will be getting over the Boomer retirement hump, but that won’t last forever because even Boomers die.

  10. Likewise, the population of Africa will increase approximately 2.5 to 3 times. The world is getting more and more troubled.

  11. It’s the over 65ers in my country who have the biggest problems with immigrants, not realising you need as many people paying tax as possible to pay for their pensions.

    I’ve tried explaining to some of them in my family that the money they pain in in the 70’s hasn’t just sat in a vault waiting for them to retire. That their tax back then paid pensions back then. But I got nowhere

  12. This is a catastrophic issue that requires immediate, extreme, and decisive political action to avert. We need to raise fertility rates.

  13. > I think we have to address the elephant in the room. How do we change this trend, as conventional ways don’t seem to bear fruit.

    We could stop being assholes to each other and try to build a society where people want to have children.

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