Suppose this were true - I am not enough of an expert to say either way, though I feel somewhat skeptical about it - is this the most important problem for us to be solving right now?

I'm not anti-natalist. I want and intend to have children. But the world doesn't really need more humans than it already has. We're not adequately providing for them all.

Let me ask a naive question: If the birth rates in Western nations decline, and populations stabilize and stop growing, what's so bad about that?

Our current economic model assumes and requires growth. Shrinking populations and economies create social unrest as the population feels a tangible reduction in opportunities that creates personal anxiety. That individual angst becomes social angst and often leads to the more dangerous patterns of resentment and violence towards other humans, societies or competitors.

Caring for the elderly with a shortage of young people will be difficult (see Japan today). Which is one of the reasons Japan is so interested in robotics, although it is unclear when or if they really can replace nurses and assistants.

To be honest I think being cared for by a robot would would be pretty dehumanizing.

A robot transports you (car). A robot decides your credit rating. A robot makes your clothes (weaving machine).

How is a robot wiping your backside any different?

"A robot decides your credit rating."

That is already pretty dehumanizing. As are decisions of opaque Facebook and Google algorithms to demonetize / disable your account, with no obvious recourse to living human beings.

What's dehumanizing is having your trustworthiness reduced to a single number at all, not the fact that it is done in a semi-automated manner.

While I think your idea is substantiated, the semi-automated manner seems worse to me.

IDK why, but being submitted to robotic decisions wakes extreme resistance in me.

This is a really poor excuse for bringing in a new life to existence - especially when there are so many better options like immigration.

How is immigration a better solution?

Instead of a child, an adult must adapt to a very different culture. With lots of cultural clashes that are pretty obvious, especially in Europe, where a lot of the migrants come from the neighboring Islamic world with its very different social norms.

Not to mention that you rely on the fact that other nations do not stop reproducing. What if they do?

Countries like Bulgaria and Serbia have dropped into very low birthrates before becoming wealthy, thus they exist in the worst of worlds: educated and employable immigrants obviously choose places like England and Germany where they can make a lot more money, domestic youth migrates to the West too, leaving an old and vulnerable population without services.

> an adult must adapt to a very different culture. With lots of cultural clashes…

Very true, but human beings can adapt. For example, all the Europeans that came to America 400-500 years ago are doing quite well today. The culture thing is just a red herring. All you are trying to do is maintain the status quo (nothing wrong with it).

> How is immigration a better solution?

The impact on finite, planetary resources is less taxed by immigration (1+0) than by birth (1+1).

My brother recently had his first kid... I think it was 4-6 years of 'trying'. His wife got pregnant the month after she had her IUD pulled, but miscarried in the first trimester. I think she had at least two or three more miscarriages, they didn't share the details with me.

Then they went for 'assisted reproduction' (in-vitro fertilization [IVF]). The first implantation lasted for a couple months, then she miscarried. The later embryos didn't take (I think they tried 2 more IVF cycles, from the frozen embryos). Eventually they gave up and started getting ready for adoption.

I went over to their house last Mothers day. They put ultrasound pictures in the box to surprise my mom. A older female friend of mine says she's seen this happen all the time: give up on 'trying', and the pregnancy will appear.

My brother and sister-in-law don't really talk to me about medical things, and I don't tell them where they're off. But I think her IUD was the "chemical castration" variety (plastic with the levonorgestrel, brand name Mirena). I never told them, "you shouldn't have trusted the pharmaceutical-industrial complex to not take your fertility away prematurely", as it was too late for that.

Progestins are sold to women as hormones that regulate their menstrual cycles, but really they're imitation hormones that suppress the menstrual cycle. Most modern women don't want a dozen pregnancies, most modern men don't want a herd of children to take care of, so FDA-approved fake hormones are an easy sell. But if we're actually concerned about the trend line from hyper-fertile to sub-fertile, being honest with women about what's in their "birth control" prescriptions is a good start.

[I hereby take credit for the anonymous edit that fixed the introduction of the Wikipedia entry for Progestogen. The fix has persisted across the years. Many others have come along to reword the introduction. Someone inserted a clarification to my edit to say that fake-hormones are used in Medicine, but my word insertion and reference are still there :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progestogen ]

(minor edits)

> A older female friend of mine says she's seen this happen all the time: give up on 'trying', and the pregnancy will appear.

People say this about lots of things (stop looking for a perfect job, and it will appear, stop trying so hard to find the perfect mate, and they'll appear, etc), but that doesn't make it a valid strategy, even if it does happen sometimes.

Stop trying is why the Coronavirus pandemic got so bad in the US, and why a climate catastrophe is all but certain in the next couple of decades. Why so many people in the US get so fat and unhealthy (speaking as a fat and unhealthy American myself).

For every person who stopped trying and had what they wanted happen to them anyway, there's plenty of people where that hasn't been true.

I agree that taking action is very important for fixing problems.

Managing emotional stress is an important part of maintaining a pregnancy. My sister-in-law was also doing other therapeutic interventions. I think the final piece of her puzzle was letting go of needing to perform.

I think doing nothing special would have been more appropriate for the coronavirus: aggressive ventilation killed a lot of patients in New York. Fever hospitals [0] would have saved a lot of lives.

Problems are easier to solve when they are correctly understood.

[0] https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/Lets-bring-back-Britains...

A perfect job, a perfect mate and a perfect climate all depend massively on external factors. Fertility requires the same two people trying more or less the same thing repeatedly, and, in that relatively closed system, stress can have a very significant impact.

You post made my day! Wish you all the best!

That many miscarriages brings so much sorrow that I don't know how to empathize.

"Most ... may..." would seem to be a non-falsifiable statement.

So, I came to post this because I'd really like some informed opinion on whether the conclusion drawn is at all likely. Beyond posting xkcd cartoons about extrapolation, is there any reason to believe this is overly pessimistic?