Fertility rates have declined by half in OECD countries over the past 60 years, posing the risk of population decline and serious economic and social challenges for future generations, according to a new OECD report.
The 2024 edition of Society at a Glance shows that the total fertility rate dropped from 3.3 children per woman in 1960 to just 1.5 children per woman in 2022, on average across OECD countries. This is significantly below the “replacement level” of 2.1 children per woman needed to keep population constant in the absence of migration. The total fertility rate is low in Italy and Spain, at 1.2 children per woman in 2022, and lowest in Korea, at an estimated 0.7 children per woman in 2023.
Low fertility rates could lead to population decline starting in the coming decade, with deaths outpacing births for the first time in at least half a century. The number of individuals aged 65 and over for every 100 people of working age is also projected to double from 30 in 2020 to 59 in 2060 across the OECD area. The resulting shrinking working populations could lead to ageing societies that place significant social and economic pressures on governments, notably to increase expenditures on pension and health services.
A second major trend identified in Society at a Glance is later parenthood, with the average age of women giving birth rising from 28.6 in 2000 to 30.9 in 2022. When comparing women born in 1935 and 1975, the percentage of women without a child about doubled in Estonia, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Poland, Portugal and Spain.
Personal choices of having children are influenced by a range of factors, including economic and social parenting pressures, as well as changing social attitudes, such as the de-stigmatisation of having no children. Multifaceted policy approaches will be needed to assist people’s decision to have children.
“While OECD countries are using a range of policy options to support families, the economic cost and long-term financial uncertainty of having children continue to significantly influence people’s decision to become parents,” Stefano Scarpetta, Director of the OECD’s Employment, Labour and Social Affairs Directorate, said. “Facilitating parenthood decisions requires comprehensive and reliable support to families. This includes affordable housing, family policies that help reconcile work and family life, and coherence with other public policies that promote access to quality jobs and career progression of women.”
Society at a Glance shows that increased housing costs since the mid-2010s have complicated the formation of long-term relationships and families, with an ever-increasing number of young people in their 20s and 30s living with their parents for financial reasons. Access to more affordable housing would make it easier for young individuals to start families.
With the number of dual-earner households growing, better family policies that help reconcile work and family life would help improve fertility. Historically, higher employment rates among women were linked to low fertility, while they are now positively correlated across the OECD on average.
Countries also need to consider how to adapt their policy strategies to a new “low-fertility future”. This includes a proactive approach to migration and integration and facilitating access to employment for under-represented groups. Increasing productivity would also help mitigate the economic and fiscal consequences of a potentially shrinking workforce.
This is a press release from the OECD. There is more detail here, and on broader issues.
138 Comments
Who needs the local residents to procreate when you can just allow immigrants to arrive from the third world instead.
It an easy solution in the short term, like dropping rates to zero instead of maintaining/improving productivity, but comes with a really bad set of social and financial problems in the longer term.
(edited to fix typos)
Just a handful of countries (US, Australia, etc.) will continue attracting the bulk of global talent, while the rest of us scrape the bottom of the barrel in the name of skilled migration.
NZ for one might struggle big time to maintain living standards unless we seriously up our game in making better policy choices.
NZ is running an excessively high unsustainable immigration rate.
This is driving down gdp/capita growth & thus incomes relative to having an optimal immigration policy based on maximising gdp/capita growth (or wellbeing per capita growth).
We are simply shooting ourselves in the foot especially given our fertility rate is quite high relative to other OECD countries.
John Butt has done some interesting data crunching on immigration recently.
Myths were blown.
Generally we attract immigrants with higher skills education and earning power than our average population base, and by a decent margain.
It's a bit rough when u think about it.
Severely overpopulated regions like some parts of India lose their best and brightest to NZ, 1400,000,000 people, tiny tiny movements from such a huge population can really impact a tiny country like NZ with 5,000,000 - that's 1400 Indians to 5 kiwis.
I've been on side with most economists who see NZs weakness is shallow capital, shallow and weak R and D across all companies, leaving us selling milk powder and pretty green holiday escapes not making chips (raycon or something we had that crashed out, all mainly family directors?? Lack of capital pools, economies is scale? I had their shares under fisher funds and lost money on them just for being hopeful) - luckily NZ is getting there and our tech sector is growing fast - guess who's driving this growth? Smart immigrants. Directly pumping our GDP making everyone in NZ more wealthy.
NZ population to 15 million john key and many economists see happening.
Hmmm wonder why people buy and hold forever property here....
Simon - park your agenda for a little, put on a thinking cap:
https://www.ecosophia.net/an-unfamiliar-world/
Read it all. Then ask what money is? Something you have never done, it seems.
Its the higher population of politicians thats the problem both in central and local govt.
- Regulations up the wazoo
- Extremist splinter groups with restrictive agendas
- Climate and environmental policies created by numpties
- Native seats in local govt and MMP were supposed to have made life better
The coalition sometimes says the wrong thing that is taken the wrong way but you cannot fault their energy and motivation
Yes you never talk about climate and GHG 🤭 youre a comedian now and a hypocrite, using your motorcar running FF and benefitting from mining yet deny NZ should do any mining. To be green and offgrid you have to rely on mined materials. I dare say you use fertilisers on your veges and trees, either applied directly or indirectly through compost. Lime magnesium sulphur phosphorus potassium. Naturist ruud kleinpaste has no issue recommending all those minerals
I smell real fear.
That's OK, it happens to anyone when the penny drops.
You need to listen better though; I went ahead (they call it early adopting) thinking someone had better. Thus energy efficiency, thus off-grid, thus near self-sufficiency in food. Then I realised that this was no more sustainable than the fossil-powered collection of stuff we've built up.
The logical question was then to ask: What is real sustainability? (Because it looks like solar PV cannot build solar PV, and ex fossil fuels, we'll be running the aging fleet of PV into the inevitable entropy. One thing is for sure: less people is a help in real sustainability terms (entirely logical, since it's only humans - many of them, consuming as never before - who are the problem). So too is less consumption per head.
You're trying to shoot au unwelcome message, by denigrating the messenger. Even if I weren't here, the message still would be. Yes, we have a problem on our hands - one which will require a huge re-jig of just about everything we do. Pointing at someone who has made a start, shows up as, well, just what I said.
That fear is your own, the world population has and is rising since Noah's time. And when did you realise that solar PV isn't everything, but what a great admission
"by powerdownkiwi | 23rd Jun 24, 10:38pm
I smell real fear.
That's OK, it happens to anyone when the penny drops.
You need to listen better though; I went ahead (they call it early adopting) thinking someone had better. Thus energy efficiency, thus off-grid, thus near self-sufficiency in food. Then I realised that this was no more sustainable than the fossil-powered collection of stuff we've built up.
The logical question was then to ask: What is real sustainability? (Because it looks like solar PV cannot build solar PV, and ex fossil fuels, we'll be running the aging fleet of PV into the inevitable entropy. One thing is for sure: less people is a help in real sustainability terms (entirely logical, since it's only humans - many of them, consuming as never before - who are the problem). So too is less consumption per head.
You're trying to shoot au unwelcome message, by denigrating the messenger. Even if I weren't here, the message still would be. Yes, we have a problem on our hands - one which will require a huge re-jig of just about everything we do. Pointing at someone who has made a start, shows up as, well, just what I said."
No I don't have to listen better about your pathetic compromised lifestyle, I suggest you start "re-jigging" starts at home, so stop making excuses for why you use FF
Sayonara
You must have struggled at school.
Preferred?
I prefer solar - it's the origin of just about energy flow, and the better way to access it is the earliest you can intercept it. I have NEVER said I prefer PV.
Please try and expand your thinking - you just look silly.
I'm in the tech industry. I'd estimate at my company of almost 200 employees that 80% have moved to NZ within the past 10 years. Very few born and bred kiwis. Most of these recent arrivals are very talented and good people however a bigger problem is the fact that for the majority their end goal is Australia. Many have been with us for a few years and then moved on as soon as they get PR. The backdoor entry to Aus continues to be a problem even for those NZ companies who pay at the top end of the market.
The countries immigrants tend to move to NZ from like China, India, The Philippines etc. all now have rapidly declining fertility rates that are already under the replacement rate.
Collapsing fertility rates are occuring now both in the OECD and developing world, this isn't some future hypothetical problem this is a demographic storm comming that we are only just just starting to feel the effects of. For some countries it's already too late, they don't have enough women between 18 and 40 anymore even if they could incentivise people to have larger families, it's just too late to avert the collapse. For many others they realise they are in danger but have no idea of what needs to be done or how to do it.
This is a much bigger danger to the future of humankind than climate change. People won't like me saying this. However, the reality is that people are not choosing to have families for the first time in history. For 6 thousand years or more, procreation was a normal part of human existence. Now people want to do multiple degrees, have expensive holidays, buy expensive toys etc etc rather than have children. It will be a sad world without children.
I'm from the third world. If you bring in people from the third world you end up with a third world country. Its no skin off my nose, I can live with intermittent power, overcrowding, violent crime, dirty water and food shortages. If you don't like if you can go back to Europe or where-ever else you came from, we run the country now, we own all the business, this place belongs to us now and if you can't get your women pregnant, we can fix that.
You don't have kids.
You couldn't take mine away for any amount of "cost savings". You won't know till you do. Your heart will never the same.
And I'm as ruthlessly logic based as they come (prob on the spectrum).
I'm lucky and saw costs of kids decades ago and said I'd need networth of 1 mill with 100k passive income per child, hitting those numbers roughly so we can give the kids the best of life while still enjoying ours fully independently as we know the time comes when they will eventually leave the nest
Better to have a buffer than find yourself short.
Yes costs aren't that much and media overblow them.
But I don't want my kids to see me financially stressed and I also want to be able to take months years maybe forever off work to spend time with them, so yea 100k passive income works for us (saving excess but happy this option is there)
100k passive? In 10 years that will be near min wage. And won't buy a lot.
I buy rental units as rents go up with income and then some. And there's 100k easy as after buying from 2011 at 6% yields they are now 25% as rent has skyrocketed.. it will never change inflation kills the fake shit eg "currency" and real assets and real services (rentals) will do well.
Palmy getting hooked up to welly via 4 lane highway by 2029 (otaki to north of levin highest) possibly 110kph or 120kph like US).
Simon clearly doesn't do research properly.
You are the right thing. Planning for the future and for potential financial freedom for your kids. I see PDK doesn’t like this idea, because he doesn’t like planning or the future. Unless you are planning for the sky to fall in your view is pointless. Sometimes I think he may have taken the reuse of resources too far and put a well down into his septic tank.
Nah! There's two possible futures, Techno Utopia (Star Trek) and the power down. Techno can't be achieved without massive resource inputs. In parellel there'll need to be enormous investment into artificial props keeping life support systems semi functional, which are currently provided for free by nature. This scenario is doomed to fail. With every Tech solution there's system leakage somewhere else. Planning for survival through the thrashing around period where humans try to imitate science fiction TV from the sixties, is the best long term strategy.
In case you haven't noticed, standard run LTG is playing out in front of your eyes right now, although it's not portrayed as such through any media except rarely accessible research papers
Power down is what will emerge from the ashes.
Although the prophets of old were just as certain as you that the end of the world is nigh, I can guarantee you that most of the rest of the world is actively planning and securing energy and commodity resources for their future. Just because western culture can no longer describe why human civilisation is important and should continue doesn't mean that other cultures around the world have lost that impetus.
If net $1m and $100k income was needed per child, population everywhere would be deeply negative. Then the ability to make $1m in the first place diminishes as there are fewer and fewer people to enslave.
I started young and with nothing, I come from below the poverty line growing up, and my children are highly privileged, both in terms of what they have and the amount of time I make available to them. I think there is zero logic to the statement that you need that absurd amount of money to raise children.
There is no perfect solution. Maybe a return to abject poverty would work. But couldn't we try to produce a modern society with thriving young families? Every child treated as a precious state treasure. Universal generous child benefit; a free modern dry, well insulated house for each Kiwi family having a baby; extra bedrooms as more children arrive. Five years maternity or paternity leave at full pay from the govt. On the other side of the coin every case of child abuse to be prosecuted ruthlessly with group responsibility and punishment until any specific abuser in imprisoned - if a few innocent people are tarred by association then so be it. This putting Kiwi kids as highest govt priority would cost a fortune but could be paid for by a cut to Super, remove WFF and accommodation allowance because they wouldn't be needed, close a few universities and increase income tax. Just a matter of deciding priorities. It still may fail to get young Kiwis producing 2.1 babies but at lest the free housing and child benefit would stop young families going to Austrlia
NZs economy seeks 15 mill population.
We won't be coming down anytime soon and for good reason esp if you get sick and expect to get seen to promptly , not a 9 month wait only to find you're now much sicker.
Go to any emergency room any time and count the waiting and ask how long they've been waiting - 11 hrs last time I ran this test (I was actually sick) - I went private and did not wait at all, straight in.
No MW, disagree completely there. The article is about population decline in the OECD, not world population. Projections of world population arent showing population declines, with more than half of the population growth between now and 2050 happening in Africa.
If the population trends were more even (both trending down), Id see this as a win, but this is a recipe for regression if our poorest and most under privileged are expanding at an ever increasing rate
Fertility rates dropping quite fast....
https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2024/06/peak-population-projections/
Check out Tom murphy's take on the UN population projections
Which leads on to his "peak power" video https://youtu.be/hTMjxp3Nznk?si=ln11qTqK1evgI4fw
could come as early as 2034...
We just need to make sure we plan well to manage the population down while supporting the older generations.
We need to support the older generations that genuinely need the help. The current trajectory is that we continue universal super and juice the country with immigration, then stick our heads in the sand and hope the baby boomers don't live too long to suck the super fund dry or govt will have to start pulling more out of every avenue they can to sustain it. It will reach a breaking point, and many of todays youth are coming more and more to terms that they may not have any, or bare minimal support when they retire given the current system is built on a premise that is no longer appropriate or sustainable (humans multiplying at exponential rates).
So what they're really saying is that current generations have used an economic model that borrowed from the future to grow now and without the population it can't be sustained.
So we're simply going to suggest how to maintain that borrowing from even further future to maintain the system.
Someone had better tell the housing sector.
- In 2022, the average number of bedrooms in new residential dwellings built in New Zealand was 3.2.
- This has been a relatively stable trend over the past 5 years, with the average number of bedrooms in new homes ranging from 3.0 to 3.3 between 2018-2022.
- The most common size was 3-bedroom homes, which made up around 50-55% of new residential construction during this period.
- 4-bedroom homes accounted for 25-30% of new builds, while 2-bedroom and smaller homes were around 15-20% of the total.
So you're saying those with borrowing would have negative equity, moving on to the banks whose loans would never be repayable, also in negative equity? Ouch, no one is going to let that happen. That's not saying it won't happen, or shouldn't happen, it's just everyone is invested both literally and psychologically in this system.
Why this obsession with breeding ever more humans? We dont need them. Its not the Agricultural Era any more, its not even the Industrial Era. We dont need a continuous supply of humans to toil in the fields, or go down the mines. We have AI and robotics - most people will soon be replaceable by tech, although if we delay it long enough we might manage to just let everyone die off gracefully first.
We should be celebrating the reduction of humans. You know, "human induced climate change" - solved. Planetary pollution - solved. Poverty - solved. Deforestation - solved. Think of all the land we can give back to nature and endangered species.
Don't have kids. Get a dog.
Relationships are too complicated and a bloody minefield what with all this consent crap and psychological babble about how not to mess up your own life or someone else's. Or even the children's life.
Got to be the"best parents". Society has made it all too bloody complicated and too fricken hard.
Go and buy a sex toy and watch porn.
It's a lot safer, cheaper,and less hassle.
The sex toy won't be much good for nursing frail, elderly people. We can't even look after children and the elderly now. How will be when the dependency ratio of 2:1.
"Assuming the continuation of the current trajectory of our fertility and mortality (and even with some variation), the exponential population growth of the mid-20th century (doubling time of 37 years) is about to flip to an asymptotic decline, with the population halving every about 40 years."
https://insightplus.mja.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Picture4-1.png
Yeah shoveling old people into rest homes has been marketed as normal behaviour for decades now. Most elderly only need care for the last year of their lives, the rest of the time they can actually be active and productive within the family.
Perhaps all those redundant child care workers could retrain as carers for the infirm?
"...need care for the last year of their lives". Yeah, nah. For once I am the doomer here! Take Japan - 20% of 65+ to have dementia.
"Japan's total health spending reached 10.74% of gross domestic product in 2019, or $4,360 per capita. That is not nearly enough. By 2025, Japan will face a shortage of 320,000 nursing care staff and by 2040, a shortfall of approximately 1 million medical and welfare workers.
A reset would greatly aid physicians and nurses on the front lines of a silent war with dementia. According to government figures, 15% of Japanese 65 and older have dementia. In two years, one in five are forecast to have it. The lack of long-term care facilities and labor has left providers bearing an inordinate burden in this battle.
Currently, Japan has 10,600 welfare facilities for long-term care. Based on an average capacity of 87 beds, that translates into 922,200 spaces available for the 20 million Japanese over 75."
If half those citizens require long-term care, Japan will have less than one-tenth the needed capacity. Already, demand is surging, with 45% more Tokyo seniors on track to be in need of such care by 2025 as compared with 2015.
...It also lacks sufficient physicians, nurses, specialists, support staff and advanced, innovative medical infrastructure. A study released in April by the Association of Japan Medical Colleges found that 30% of university hospital physicians surveyed are at risk of death from working too many hours, known in Japanese as karoshi."
https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Japan-s-health-care-system-isn-t-keepin…
Why would the percentage of Japanese falling victim to dementia change from 15% to 20% in two years? That sounds like something that needs to be looked into. Rather suspect figures I think, although dementia is a problem for sure. The Japanese are supposed to eat quite healthily too.
Too much sticky rice?
Less frequent bowel movements signal higher risk of dementia: Japan researchers
https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20230809/p2a/00m/0sc/009000c
I did a bit of digging around and it seems, like everywhere else, metabolic disorders like diabetes are likely to blame. The constipation thing is also an indicator of poor metabolic health too. There is a connection between diabetes and constipation. Everyone should be working on their metabolic health, not just for your own sake but for the sake of your family and the country.
It shocks me the level of type II diabetes out there in NZ and the lack of care taken by many with it. When you see people getting charcot foot, peripheral neuropathy, ulcers, amputations of toes feet, and sometimes leg or part of, and more. All due to unmanaged diabetes. If I somehow developed this, which isn't likely as I have an active lifestyle, I would be working as hard as I possibly could to get fit, strong and rid of the scourge knowing full well what can come of it. I do however concede that there are some who are less able to be active due to other factors such as disability, long term injury etc, however dietary factors are able to be self-managed.
Varying rates of population growth could have interesting consequences. The ferocity of the war in Gaza may be influenced by population growth. The combined populations of Gaza, the West Bank and Israeli Muslims almost equals that of non-Muslim Israelis. They are also younger on average. It may only take 100 years or less for the Muslim population to double that of non-Muslim Israelis.
Older population means the growth model won’t work the same. The sun will still come up and down
Remember literally everyone in NZ today has access to healthcare, travel and knowledge etc better than JD Rockefeller ever had by a mile.
My grandparents had a very happy, enjoyable life and never locked the door on their house, not that they got out of living in a tent/shed into a house until in their 30s with 4 kids in the mid 1930s, after moving all over NZ for 5 years during the Great Depression - we have never seen hardship and poverty like that since then (thankfully).
How did they survive you may ask as they ended up with 6 children!!!
That generation would be considered strange and financially mad today but our big, simple, family gatherings are one of the greatest memories of my life - and it cost very little with gardens, farms and cooking together.
Makes you wonder what have we done to ourselves and what we see as important. I plead guilty.
Population replacement - first world jurisdictions are being colonised by people from third world jurisdictions. As those of the first world are replaced, their fertility is declining. One sees this in all natural systems where a species is being replaced by a competing species/sub-species.
declining fertility is correlated with habitat loss and resource loss, increasing population from immigration results in less house space per capita for the pre-existing population which results adjustment disorder and ultimately a decline in fertility, (relative decrease in nesting sites due to changes in the environment means lower fertility). For the population coming in - in their new habitat if they find more house space per capita then they are inclined to increase their level of fertility (relative increase in nesting sites in the new environment means more children).
Interesting how house occupancy rates have increased with increased immigration and fertility of the pre-existing population has declined.
The immigrants are in place of the population we didn't generate naturally. It's a bit of a catch 22, you have a low birth rate and then the remnant population has a larger burden funding society, or you import new people, and they compete with that same remnant population.
High immigration = less houses per capita = less fertility of the pre-existing population.
A immigration consultant at home was saying the government policy of immigration to NZ was because NZ men were not fertile enough and Kiwi women wanted fertile Indian men with high fertility rates, thats why I came out anyway. I came out and realised that the reason they had low fertility was the locals didn't feel they have enough houses. My main job now is buying houses and turning garages into accommodation to help out local kiwis.
Er seems like Indian fertility is not that much better than here...?
Wrong, and I’m assuming you’re a fan of Eugenics?
Most fertility difference is Urban V Rural so as a country industrialised and people move to cities to take up factory jobs their fertility rate drop. There isn’t a “replacement” there is a change in circumstances. This isn’t country specific but more related to how quickly the country industrialised, ie Japan and South Korea versus NZ….Are the Japanese being replaced?
Surveys of the Korean population indicate the population cite insufficient resources for reproduction.
Each country is different however immigration in NZ causes the reduction in resources per capita. The common denominator is resources per capita.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/2/28/fears-for-future-as-south-kore….
Almost every parent or want to be parent will cite lack of resources. Clearly, there are many other contingencies than resources - the highest birth rates are in the most resource deprived areas.
One theory around varying developed population rates is that suburbia allows for slightly higher birth rates than metro dwellers, presumably this is because an apartment is less conducive to kids than a backyard.
I actually researched this issue, albeit superficially (for a 1st year uni paper). There are quite a few different theories and explanations, and aside from cost of living I learned that:
- in modern life there are far more choices than in the past. People now want to travel, have a career (or two), persue hobbies, and so on.
- up until quite recently, children were considered a productive resource. During the industrial revolution they would go to work in factories from as young as 7, for example. Before this period families needed lots of manual labour to work their farms
- more children died, whether in childbirth, during their infancy, or at a later due to accidents or sickness.
It is interesting that many countries that have tried financial support to boost birth rates have not seen any corresponding increases. At this stage I don't know what to think, and am more inclined to link the decline with the wider process of industrialisation around the world than a short term housing bubble.
Those are your values and your justification for your problem. Further north where I come from our Afghan brother don't let their women go to school. There job is to have children. Myself, I have 9 children to 3 different women, the last three were to a white kiwi. If you can't get your women pregnant, there are alot of people where I come from who can, its just useless white men and thats why we come here. The kiwi can't run anything, they can't run a business or their own family for that matter.
The ones back home are easy to look after. My consultant advised me to set up a trust when I came to NZ, I got myself a Kiwibuild, and brought houses in my trust. Kianga Ora don't care how many places you own overseas, all they care about is making sure Kiwis don't rip off the system. NZers were so kind to give me ACC after only being here for 2 weeks. It took 2 years to get back into work thanks to kind Kiwis and ACC. I got to see all of NZ while recovering and when I was skiing in Queens I met a Kiwi girl. I then got a Kiwi pregnant and got my residency a year before Covid hit. Nothing wrong with Kiwi women fertility, we have had 3 now, it must be the men. I find the Kiwi men who live in my trusts rental properties just don't seem to have the go in them to find a woman, anecdotally, I find the Kiwi women prefer the Indian man to the Kiwi.
No doubt there's more than one reason for falling birth rates. Physical, psychological and environmental. We are biological organisms, in spite being regarded as economic units, biological machines and the embodiment of super natural beings, by our artificially constructed civilisation.
Like all biological organisms we consume resources, and produce waste. Consuming too many resources, producing too much waste results in population decline, if not crash. We are poisoning ourselves and our ability to reproduce. The science is clear.
Overlay this with psychology, such as trained consumerism, you need to buy this now automatically means a decision to delay child rearing.
Also there's an unconscious biological imperative of filling newly discovered favourable niches. All the available niches are filled already. There are humans everywhere. Oppressively so many places.
Economic? Many already noted.
A declining younger population doesn't really put our prosperity at risk at all though does it? Or, perhaps it does if we carry on being dumbasses - focusing on how much money / savings we have, what financial assets we are holding that might be worth X or Y in the future? When we consider our economy in terms of the real resources that sustain our society things get a lot simpler.
Let me put it like this: Do we have enough people, technology, materials etc to support every member of our population to live a good life? Yes, we do, and by some distance. So how do we ensure that our real resources are being used to support our collective wellbeing? Clue: We don't run our economy as a ponzi scheme with (i) desperate people wanting to work but shut out of jobs by the central bank's hamfisted nonsense; (ii) poor working people running between jobs to keep the lights on; (iii) rentiers sucking up all the money and using it buy assets that allow them to suck up even more.
No, we need a more educated population and enough collective will and votes (meaning those that want change need to actually get to a voting booth on the day) to demand this change, or those with vested interests in the ponzi will continue to vote to enact change that further benefits them at the expense of the rest. We also need visionary politicians who are willing to admit to the public that we rely far too heavily on housing, push the discussion on public platforms and are willing to put their reputation on the line to push for changes that man won't like, but are for the betterment of the majority of NZ'ers, not just a select couple of groups.
Aside from sociological and financial reasons there may also be environmental factors at play.
"Individual lifestyle changes may not be enough to halt the decline in sperm quality. Mounting evidence suggests there is a wider, environmental threat: toxic pollutants."
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230327-how-pollution-is-causing-a-…
The BBC article discusses quite a few possible factors, but none really explain why sperm quality has declined particularly rapidly since 2019:
"...motile sperm concentration and total motile sperm count (TMSC) in ejaculates—both measures of sperm quality—declined by as much as 22% from 2019 to 2022."
https://academic.oup.com/humrep/advance-article/doi/10.1093/humrep/deae…
Hmmm, what might have happened from 2020 to 2022?
Humanity is essentially incoherent at this point. Low birth rates can’t be a bad thing if anthropogenic climate change, unsustainable resource use and untold other human induced poly-crisis are also bad.
Least worst solution is simply to not be born, way worse solutions are to deplete the resources to the point of human calamity (inevitable presuming population growth continues indefinitely) or die in a war over these depleted resources and massive geopolitical upheaval over what remains.
One or two generations will need to grapple with the transition (sadly my generation and my children) but every epoch reaches its zenith sooner or later. We are privileged to have seen it I think.
I learned about this, in 1975. Not as well as I know it now, nor with the maturity, but I at least understood.
And my echelon assumed that everyone else would get onboard; it was just so obvious.
But the Neanderthal comments following Landgirl, tell us that didn't happen. Painter, too, is capable of total cognitive dissonance. How can they?
You regard yourself as being the epitome of civilisation (actually political correctness) describing others as "neanderthals." What is curious is that you are using a specifically materialistic, westernised cultural and corporate scientific perspective on the future course of Earth. Try not to blame (or condescend) the other 7 billion people in the world for not buying into this colonialism any more.
Yes. You are right. That does seem
to be his angle. Prattling on about some stuff he learned 50 years ago, which still doesn’t apply to present day and predicting it will happen. Anyone they doesn’t agree with his failed predictions of the past or future, now gets met with capital letters (or yelling).
While I understand your views that PDK sometimes an aura of "you are a fool if you don't understand or believe this", he is right, and the message is simple, so irrespective of his persona or demeanour, he is entitled to his views as we all are. For may in their 50's and older, his views may not seem too relevant as it won't effect them as much, however for the rest of us, we have to think about what kind of world our children will grow up in and what it will look like when we are old, when they are old, and what their children, should they choose to have them, will grow up in.
Painter, too, is capable of total cognitive dissonance. How can they?
You try to bring virtually anything going on back to your small group of core assumptions and beliefs.
I can't really argue with you that currently the status quo is extremely challenged. I just also can't limit that all back to formulas and theories offering a single conclusion. We are now at a stage where the rate of change we are undertaking greatly exceeds our ability to observe it, let alone form conclusions.
The universe and reality is really beyond our ability to comprehend. Hard sciences give us very good measuring tools, but often not real understanding. It leads to extremely flat thinking, no depth.
Except Systems science, which is the integration of all of them.
And one can know enough, to separate physics from social constructs; the Titanic sank because there was more water going in, than out. There would have been a goodly crowd of optimists aboard, and some quite good brains.
It sank.
Fact.
Quite a lot of depth, as I recall...
Hi Palmtree,
When you try and reduce the complexity of the world and its trajectory to just a few over-simplified elements then sure, you can vividly imagine that human beings are nothing more than over-crowded bacteria on a petri dish blissfully unaware that the next time they double they are simply going to wipe themselves out. Let me assure you that this is not how human civilisation works.
You can assure all you like, but it's a false posit.
All prior civilisations have declined/collapsed. The speed has differed; the trajectory has not.
This time we are running that experiment globally - there is no precedent.
You need to realise that physical sciences outgun emotive ones; if you come out of oncology with a 3 month prognosis - will you assure the specialist that this is not how civilisation works? Good luck with that.
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