That is not what is being called a crisis.

Fertility rate being *far* below replacement (1.3 vs 2.1) is being called a crisis.

If the population falls to quickly the ratio of young to old gets unbalanced and there are not enough people young enough to do the work needed to support the population too old to work. All the products and services like food and healthcare that the old consume still need to be physically produced regardless of nominal price, so simply saying "save more money for retirement" is not a solution.

There are no other options. You can do that by either increasing immigration or birth rates. That’s it.

It’s essentially UBI and universal healthcare that winds up making a lot of demand for younger workers. Keeps the grandparents able to help raise kids, if wanted/suitable.

Most people's jobs aren't necessary for a functioning society. If you look at say, agriculture, transportation, energy, sanitation, infrastructure, etc, what percent of the total population is employed in those fields, 5-10% maybe?

Society will be fine for a long time with drastically dwindling population, we'll just see a contraction of the "bullshit jobs" which have become the mainstay of post-industrial societies, with a higher percent of people employed in fields which are actually producing something of value for society.

Second, this "crisis" is entirely brought upon themselves by the generation that will have want for people to "support them". Cut out elderly healthcare and the majority of your shortage is gone.

Third, there are plenty of people available for this support, as many of the jobs these youngsters do today are only done because they are very attractive in the current economic system. If the population as a whole agrees that this "crisis" is indeed a crisis, there is enough labor to step up.

What percentage works in agriculture and related industries? A single-digit % last time I checked. It does not make sense that there could be a fundamental problem with the production of essentials (or non-essentials for that matter), especially with decades to adapt.

The Japanese economy has already been close to stagnant for the last 20 years or so.

I think we'd need some research/math to see at what working population to non-working population ratio this is actually a problem (and what fertility rate is safe to avoid this if it is indeed a problem).

> working population to non-working population ratio this is actually a problem

True. Overall I find it a bit (well huge understatement...) disappointing that while productive has increased tremendously that has not been reflected so well in compensation (for most people for a privileged minority it's the complete opposite) or working hours.

I don't see the problem though. We have a gerontocracy where most of the power has been concentrated by an unusually old generation. If there was a problem they could have done a lot to solve this problem. I mean, why expect the powerless young to solve the problems of the powerful old?

You can't let rich/talented hoard resources so that they can pour inordinate resources to their one kid and 'expect' them to inherit the talent. Nature simply doesn't work this way.

So how many do we need exactly? I think we have more than enough on Earth. Problem is that we are quite busy fucking up each other's life using this "next gen tech".

We didn't rely on some superior gene pool, instead we just educated our children in a way that exceeded our expectations.

Also, not raising children means people have more time to spend on technological progress.

Strawman. We are merely talking about not dropping to zero too fast

If I had "just a billion dollars", I'd be so happy /s.

Seriously though, do you have any tangible proposal of how to adapt? Because otherwise we are looking at a terrible situation where kinless elders are dying off lonely in poorly maintained facilities due to a lack of funding and a lack of caregivers.

See “Danchi” - https://www.archdaily.com/933829/the-rise-and-fall-of-danchi...