Die große Entvölkerung
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/05/global-birthrate-decline/687297/?utm_source=reddit&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_medium=social&utm_content=edit-promo&utm_term=short
Die große Entvölkerung
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/05/global-birthrate-decline/687297/?utm_source=reddit&utm_campaign=the-atlantic&utm_medium=social&utm_content=edit-promo&utm_term=short
43 Kommentare
Derek Thompson: “Birth rates have been declining in developed countries for a long time, as child mortality has declined, as women’s education has increased, as female labor-force participation has soared, as contraception use has proliferated, and as modern notions of feminism have empowered women to take more control over their bodies and their economic futures. And birth rates have *continued* to decline as smartphone usage has surged, as housing prices have increased, as time spent at home on the internet has grown, and as socialization and coupling have declined …
“‘Only two things are important right now in life: fertility and deep learning,’ the University of Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde said at the conclusion of a recent lecture. ‘Everything else is noise. Once you start thinking about these, it’s hard to start thinking about anything else.’ I recently spoke with Fernández-Villaverde about why the birth rate is dropping, why it matters, and just how steep the decline is likely to get …
**Thompson:** „The implications of the decline of fertility combine both upsides and downsides. Let’s talk about the upsides first.“
**Fernández-Villaverde:** „In a world where population doesn’t grow or where population starts going down, we will consume less energy, or the growth of energy consumption will be smaller. That’s good for the environment.
Second, it will help us redesign a lot of cities across the world. I’m originally from Madrid, in Spain. A lot of the residential neighborhoods in Madrid are ugly. People don’t see those when they come to visit Madrid, but they are really ugly, because in the 1960s and 1970s when population was growing very fast, you had to build these horrible high-rises just to put people under a roof. We are not going to need those ugly high-rises. We can demolish them.
**Thompson:** „What are the downsides?“
**Fernández-Villaverde:** „The obvious thing that comes to mind is Social Security. Everything related to retirement benefits, Social Security payments, the equivalent of Medicare and similar health programs for the elderly across the world, that’s going to impose a tremendous amount of cost on the planet. But also you are going to start being forced to close primary schools. The school district here in Philadelphia, where I live, was just forced to announce a couple of weeks ago that they are closing a lot of primary schools because there are no kids. That’s a serious disruption for a lot of local communities. You will be forced to close hospitals. You will be forced to close a lot of other public services.“
Read more: [https://theatln.tc/N8TRFoHp](https://theatln.tc/N8TRFoHp)
Here’s a no-paywall reading link. [https://archive.ph/zMuL0](https://archive.ph/zMuL0)
Oh no, rich ass countries might actually have to rely on immigration in a population of over 8 billion on earth.
The opportunity cost of having children is the highest it has ever been for women.
Housing is not tracked in inflationary statistics, and has become out of reach for many working class families.
In other words; money printer go brrr
When people feel safe, and happy, and optimistic, and have some money in the bank at the end of each month, then starting a family probably happens a lot more easily. When they’re stressed, and pessimistic about the state of the world, and everything is expensive, then it’s a very different matter.
But having economies effectively running as pyramid schemes, where we need a continually growing population as no generation contributes enough for its own healthcare, welfare and support, is a massive unsustainable concern.
What’s so surprising about it when all companies are trying to replace humans with AI?
Musk talked about the importance of having kids, while making his employees sleeping at the office in sleeping bags. Work Work Work. Train the AIs then be replaced.
Unless he provides free money and childcare after all that and encourages sex at the office (after all when can people find time to produce babies?), he is just paying lip service and a hypocrite.
The Earth will cherish when there is less of us. We are all good.
It would be a miracle if there are humans left in the world by the year 3,000… at the rate we’re going… maybe not
Society allows for something like a „Billionaire“ to exist, nevertheless a TRILLIONAIRE, and then we wonder why people are disillusioned about bringing children into the world?
What an asinine article and speculation, when the truth is as plain as day and nobody wants to just call it out (I imagine for fear of the big bad CEOs pointing their ire at your organization):
It is greed and lack of regulation from governments that allows said greed to fester, without ceasing. It corrupts everything it touches, and is truly the root of **all** the problems in this world.
Period, end of story.
Our sperm can detect that AI and robots are here now.
It’s always the men that think repopulation is the biggest crisis. Dude. This is the futurology sub! We should be thinking about how to reimagine a future world with humans in much better proportion to the world. A global society where we take care of each other instead of exploit each other and the planet. We have countries that need people, and countries with people who need to leave. It will be hard but this could be the change we’ve needed to make.
There are more people on earth today than at any time in recorded history, in the last 100 years the world’s population has quadrupled from around 2 billion to around 8 billion… If we quadruple the population again, by 2126 there would 32 billion people.. that seems wildly unsustainable. I simply don’t understand why this is such an issue for certain people.
This article is one of the rare articles that discussed the political difficulties around immigration as remedy for population decline in an intelligent way.
It should be an acceptable opinion to want to maintain the cultural and linguistic makeup of where you grew up.
Some immigration is a good and necessary thing for an innovative vibrant economy, but it’s not a solution to population decline.
Let’s ask the billionaires and the ecocnomic state of the world for the bottom 60% of people.
Make it less shitty and people will start having babies. It’s that easy.
I don’t think the declining birth rate has much to do with any of that. A huge part of it is just that a lot of countries have done an amazing thing and slashed teen pregnancy rates down to almost nothing. They’ve also made birth control cheap and available and unwanted/unplanned pregnancies are way down (as is abortion) compared to past decades. It turns out that the young women who could least afford children didn’t want to have them. They just wanted to live normal lives and unintended pregnancies were a risk. Now that it’s easier to midigate that risk, they are.
The result of all this is that the average age of first pregnancy is up and the average number of children had is down. This isn’t to say that there are zero economic headwinds or concerns about the future. Of course there are. Women choosing to wait longer to have children undoubtedly involves decisions about when in life they feel financially stable and the pressures to feel more established in their career before taking on children along with more social factors like the fact that people just marry later than they used to (who wants to get married at 18 or 22). But after all that, the raw number of women who decide to have children has actually been trending up for decades from a low of 80% twenty years ago to around 86% today.
The issue isn’t that fewer women are choosing to have children. As of now, more are choosing to become mothers. It’s that fewer are choosing to have more than two, that many women are waiting until the tail end of their fertile years to have their children, and that if you start at 38 or 40 it’s just a lot easier to have fewer children than you hoped for than if you’d started at 25.
All of that adds to below replacement rate reproduction and I’m very skeptical that there’s any acceptable government/policy solution to that. In the end we’re going to have to either contend with what needs to change for us to manage retirement, healthcare, and serving rural communities in the face of declining populations, or we’re going to have to make sure that we are a country that’s very attractive to immigrants in order to slow or stop those demographic trends.
8.3 billion people and still rising is „depopulation“ ???
How about you find some real current problems to write about not future hypothetical ones
We were educated and poor in the wake of the 2008 Recession. We couldn’t afford children. I never see anybody saying how fucking expensive children are.
What the heck is „deep learning“ supposed to be? Sounds like a corporate buzzword that doesn’t actually mean anything
People arent having kids because society expects you to work like youre not a parent, and parent like you dont work. Its crushing. Its miserable.
Expecting two parents to always be in the workplace *full time* all the time is, as reality is showing us, antithetical to human survival
More elderly are going to end up crippled and physically and/or mentally unable to work, and certainly unable to find work that younger people or AI entities can’t do better, burdening their (fewer, if any) children with their feeding and care while the oligarchs drive up housing prices till people can’t even pay their property taxes and driving up food and water costs till Soylent Green looks like a good option. These guys do not appear to have any solutions for the vast majority of the population that will be affected by their narcissistic pursuits. This is why government should not be unduly influenced by the rich. Tax wealth, not work.
Our grandparents could graduate high school and get a job making minimum wage, then start a single income family, buy a house and pay it off after a few years, and support 3 children. Then they’d retire with a full pension.
Im so goddamn tired of the „falling birthrate“ shit. Especially when we know a large percentage of jobs are on the verge of disappearing— Most of these birthrate fetishists are also against government assistance programs and either complicit or responsible for the future elimination of jobs. What do these people want this desired bigger population to do? How do you want them to live, make money, survive? Or is it just „lets raise the probability of finding the next Mozart“ (one of the grossest things Ive ever heard Elon Musk say) implying that the remaining non-Mozart portion of that massive population can go fuck itself?
Daycare is $2400/month. Having a kid is a financial decision on par with getting 2+ ridiculous car payments for 5 years.
So why?
Since AI will take over all jobs in the next 12-18 months, why do we need more people?
Social Security is only a concern because the rich will refuse to share the wealth created by AI that will displace what was once an increasing labor pool that Social Security relied on. Wealth will increase, it should be trivial to provide for all without an increasing population to make paying for the elderly possible. In fact at some point the displacement will be so severe the oligarchs will have no choice but to establish some form of UBI. For countries less under the Oligarchs’ thumb the transition will be less painful and the UBI more generous.
>In Spain, in addition to Spanish, we have regional languages like Catalan. The problem is Catalonia is getting a lot of immigrants. The immigrants are not Catalan speakers. Their kids may learn Catalan in school, but they don’t speak Catalan. Given the current level of immigration, Catalan, I have forecast, is doomed as a language. It will not exist. Some people will always speak it in a small village in the mountains, but as a working language of day-to-day life, Catalan is doomed. If you’re a native Catalan speaker, this is existential. So this is not about being anti-immigrant because I’m a nasty guy. This is not about being racist. This is just about saying, “Don’t I have a right to my language to still exist?” I’m an immigrant myself, so it’s not that I’m against immigration. But like everything, it needs to be within a reasonable degree.
I always find this argument weird. To what degree can you demand that something cultural like language stays the same?
Can a pig farmer in Manhattan Island in the 1700s demand that Manhattan remains an agricultural center? Can I demand that a Legend of Zelda game comes out every 5 years so my kid has the same childhood cadence that I do? Can I demand that baseball not use cameras to let bad calls be bad calls like it was in my day? Can I keep it so that I don’t have to compete with 2 income households when househunty, like in the 1950s?
In the end, societal changes happen whether you want them or not. It either changes by decision makers or by economic pressures no one can control.
It’s bizarre to me that this conservative-coded thought pattern is fine with some modes of economic induced change, but not others. If the free market pushes everyone to use emails and Slack rather than the post and interoffice memos, that’s fine, you need to stay competitive in the free market, it’s silly to be attached to how it was before.
But some elements of society absolutely must not be changed, even if it means taking an economic hit. I’ve never been able to successfully predict which elements are in which category.
I think idiocracy really hit the nail on the head. I know many successful people who are entering their 30s/40s and children are looking less and less likely for them, some don’t care, some it’s a little heartbreaking. But then i have friends who barely finished highschool(if at all) several baby mommas, couch hops from woman to woman until one is pregnant and then heads back to his shanty home in hawaii. All while having no real job or means to provide. I know people who had aspirations and could have gone on to do great things and just sell their bodies now.
With the exception of many countries in Africa and 3-4 smaller countries in South America the fertility rate is below replacement rate everywhere.
Once upon a time demographers were anticipating a global population that exceeded 15 billion and some had estimates approaching 18 billion. Peak population was forecast past 2100 and there were dire population forecasts and consequences that as an aside were the backbone of many a science fiction novel and drama.
Even as recently as 2015 peak population was forecast around 2085 and a world population of approx 12-13B was hypothesized.
Now all of that is out the window. I read some musings by demographers in 2024/2025 suggesting that our current world population of 8.3 billion is within arm’s length of peak population, and that peak population may occur as soon as 2045-2050 and we may very well end the century with about the same number of people as we started it with.
One issue facing demographers is that some countries are not reporting reliable population statistics and in a few instances such as China and Russia the figures being reported are likely deliberately understated for the net population decline due to political reasons.
China and India are by far the two most populous countries on the planet. China’s fertility rate is below 1.0 and India’s fertility rate is now estimated at approx 1.8-1.9. Replacement rate is about 2.1.
The current UN models are garbage in, garbage out. There are so many political pressures on their modeling now that they are at best a very basic reference set.
The economic and social consequences are immense. Theoretically there should be a massive generational transfer of wealth. But wealth is being increasingly concentrated into the hands of fewer and fewer people. So many questions.
We will redesign cities? People have been talking about this for decades, and it doesn’t happen. The money for infrastructure isn’t there and governments don’t care about people, at least in America. This whole redesigning cities and re-envisioning things is hysterical. This person is trapped in their ivory tower and does not get enough time on the ground seeing what is really going on.
In reality, people are on the verge of tearing each other apart.
‘Only two things are important right now in life: fertility and deep learning,’
This is just as shallow as I will take the rest of his personal opinion. Was not worth the read.
They wildly underestimate how bad depopulation is.
„Close a few schools and disruption of some entitlement services like medicare“
Let me put it this way: There is NO economic model that demonstrates your life get’s better as population declines. Not most indicate things get a little harder. There’s not a single scenario where you life gets better as population declines. Everything we do depends entirely on a growing population. You’re welcome to name a better system.
And to put it in short for you: A rising tide raises all ships. Yea? The reverse applies just the same. A falling tide lowers all ships. And it does it at the same time.
Take a town with 3 shoe stores in it. As the town depopulates, all three shoe stores begin to struggle. The business doesn’t consolidate to one. They each start to lose business, take on debt and fail at the same time. If one opts to get out early, maybe the other two can survive. But they’ll run into the same problem. If they all try to hang around, which they’ll need to, becase they still need to eat and provide for their families, they’ll all run to the end, which is all of them buried in debt and failing. Then, when they finally collapse, all three go under. Then you have a town with no shoe stores and no shoes. And now 3 or more people also unemployed.
You see how that’s really bad? Now do that at global scale. Depopulation doesn’t scare you enough.
I can’t speak for everyone, but I can share a couple of friends’ perspectives. One makes >$500k/yr, but isn’t sure about the future, and will at this point never have kids. She’s married, and happy, but even with that income won’t commit to buying a house, let alone raising minions.
The other friend has been a consultant and now works for a major tech company. He’s in the meetings where industry leaders are talking about replacing 80-90% of their workforces with AI. Same situation as the other friend. Very well-educated, makes over $300k/yr, and just got out of a “10 out of 10” relationship because she wants kids and he can’t commit to that.
If *these* people aren’t secure in their futures, nobody is.
Fertility and birth rate are different though, right?
lol I like how the guy’s like with less population we can redesign cities and demolish ugly residential neighborhoods.
He’s counting on robots to do all the construction I guess.
People can see the downward trajectory of the world, particularly with anthropogenic climate change, and don’t want to bring children into it. I’m not sure how this if this is a shock to anyone, but it is good to see an in-depth article on the possible outcomes.
Bro just adjust the infrastructure. People need jobs and housing. People need community. People need education.
We don’t need more babies to fix this. More babies will strain young people and old people who are illiterate and losing jobs and homes.
The real reason is that the best way to increase birthrates is by having someone in the household taking care of the kids while someone works. That someone traditionally has been the woman. While this days that might not be the case we need a system that makes it that only one person per house hold can work.
A lot of people aren’t having children not just because there’s very little safety net but ALSO because the state of the world is extremely bleak right now. Just think about it for a minute- would YOU want to raise a child in a world where there’s 12 different viruses going around, we’re on the edge of possibly having world war 3, we could very well be rendered infertile by microplastics and AI is now a clear and present threat to humanity?
No WONDER nobody is having children!
Obligatory reminder that population decreases in the US won’t start until 2080 and that’s assuming these trends continue.
Yes yes yes „tHe ExOnOmY! sToNkS! WoRkErS outNumBeRed bY RetIrEes!“ and other economic dire portents that generally aren’t as bad as Republicans doing Republican things to the economy or climate change.
That aside „The Great Depopulation“ is objectively , quantifiably, hyperbolic bullshit by stupid people who think they’re smart.
It’s not depopulation. We’ve got many decades before you start to notice shorter lines at the grocery store.
This is only catastrophic if
1: youre a white supremacist, like Elon Musk and every asshole screaming about depopulation and it’s specifically because white people population decreases are slightly faster than everyone else. And if that’s the case you’re already pissing your depends about Obama and black lives matter.
2: You’re convinced there won’t be enough peasants working at your corporate warehouse to keep your wealth from falling slightly.
If you’re not one of those groups, this is not a problem.
Social security is insolvent because Republicans keep sabotaging it. There should be no cap on social security contributions, there could be a means testing for payouts. „If we don’t have far more workers than retirees we can’t do it at all“ is nonsensical bullshit designed as an excuse to kill it completely.
Same goes for retiree support in general.
Stop parroting eugenics lines from the Epstein class. This is NOT A FUCKING PROBLEM, CLIMATE CHANGE AND WEALTH INEQUALITY ARE.
Capitalism is the only problem! That’s it! If we just had living wages then problem solved! Then everyone would start having kids again and there would be no depopulation problem!
We still have over 8 billion people , its amazing we can even feed that many. so this is a fake crisis. Empires rise and fall ,which has happened many times over the centuries, maybe its a good thing that population is decreasing instead of the doom and gloom from countries negatively affected if they don’t increase it.
Why do people have kids? Because they want to have something that survives them forward into the future. That, and instinctual pressure.
If people aren’t having kids, that means they don’t believe they have something they need to offer to this future, and they’re also either don’t have, or choose not to obey their instinctual drives.
We keep talking about people as if they’re this magical machine where if you tweak some settings they will suddenly want kids. Having a kid is a personal, individual decision. Each and every decision will be made for personal, individual reasons. If people aren’t having kids en masse, that just means we’ve removed too many reasons for people to want kids, be it by imposing financial, social, or psychological boundaries that people can’t resolve.
Essentially, it’s pretty obviously not one thing, because if it was one thing then with all our funding and budgets and investigations we’d probably find that thing, especially after the decades we’ve been searching. As such, it’s clearly a multitude of factors that all give rise to this one net effect; people don’t want kids because all sorts of things are all sorts of bad. If you want people to have kids, give people a reason to want to train a next generation that can look forward to something.
„Why is the birth rate declining in every country on Earth?“
Why even bother to read an article that begins with a straight out lie?