Still a significant milestone though.

The current administration is trying to make it so fewer people will want to violate our laws and sneak into our country.

Those two things actually have very little to do with each other. That is why some of the biggest supporters of border enforcement are those who came here through legal channels.

Western countries are trying to prevent super aged societies via mass migration. Of course 1) Most of the source countries are themselves low fertility and 2) the more mass migration you have the less attractive the target country becomes.

It's just kicking the can down the road.

inb4 "wHaT aBoUt AfRiCa"? West Africa is about what the western world was post war, and is on the exact same trajectory - declining every year.

The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 - August 2025 (400 comments)

We know that better living conditions (health, income, education etc) lead to lower fertility. In a world that you have both developed and developing countries, the stable equilibrium seems to be world suffering.

Wtf.

I think that's the wrong read.

All sorts of animal population follow a sigmoidal growth pattern where there's exponential growth, some degree of overshoot and then a return to a steady level somewhat below that peak.

I think it's more likely, drawing from biology, that we end up at a stable global population level without having to worry about moving backwards along the metrics of education, income or contraceptive access.

Remember it was just a few years ago everyone was absolutely terrified that we would grow to the point where the world simply couldn't hold us all and we'd die off -- and now we're terrified the population will zero out. In reality, neither is very likely. We're probably just going to chill around 8 billion or so until/if we go multi-planetary.

To wit: the current human population is beyond the natural carrying capacity of the places we live. The only reason we can sustain 7bn people today is because we've artificially increased local carrying capacity through artificial fertilizer. If we lost that technology today, a majorty of humans alive now would starve to death.

There's really no reason to assume any environmental factors that don't physically preclude human occupation will have any effect on overall population numbers. We can artificially extend our ecosystem to support essentially unlimited people. The only real hard limit is space to physically put bodies and the amount of energy our society can use without boiling the oceans with waste heat.

If population growth levels out, it won't be for any natural reason because we are already well beyond any natural limit.

There's absolutely no inherent equilibrating force that will stabilize global fertility rates at replacement. Many countries have blown by replacement (the USA included) and continue on a downward trend year over year.

Animal populations usually decline because they lack food or have predators and other external factors. Not usually because of a lack of will to reproduce due to social or economic reasons.

EDIT: I did not think I'd have to state this explicitly, but:

yes, I am in fact talking about the capitalist economy the western world currently operates under

growth = economic growth

Japan is a good example of a country where the population has been in steady decline for a long time now. The economy has stagnated, but it has not collapsed.

The more worrisome part of what we're seeing in Japan is the total hollowing out of the countryside as the young systematically pack into the three large cities that increasingly dominate all economic activity, namely Tokyo, Osaka and Fukuoka.

Give it time. Japan only crossed the point of deaths > births about 20 years ago, which was also the time it reached peak population (as recorded by a census around that time).

Give it 20 years for the peak kids to grow above 40 and it will be a dystopia.

"We find a robust association between density and fertility over time, both within- and between-countries. That is, increases in population density are associated with declines in fertility rates, controlling for a variety of socioeconomic, socioecological, geographic, population-based, and female empowerment variables."

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34914431/

The Steep Curve to Peak Urban - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45265342 - September 2025

> Cities are engines of productivity, trade, innovation and prosperity. We’ve built, re-built and expanded in cities because they bring us closer, offer us greater access to jobs, services, ideas, opportunities and experiences. They make us overall wealthier and healthier, as long as we invest in addressing the side effects and unintended consequences of urbanization.

https://population.un.org/wpp/

The economy we were born into, the level of material production, business, amenities etc and how we run things, does.

It can find an equilibrium at some point, but it will be blood and people who think they should have robot servants and food delivery wont like it. As for the time it will be achieving that equilibrium, it will be painful.

All economies do not inherently rely on growth. It's just that capitalists have brainwashed themselves into believing capitalism is the only type of economy possible and that growth can go on without bound literally forever.

It's exactly as stupid as it sounds.

The problem with this instability is that the numbers bounce around wildly. Up and down, by a lot, in as little as 2 or 3 generations. But there's a process that stops the bouncing: hitting zero.

Obviously that's more at the upper end, but for an obligate carnivore that is an amazing multiplier.

If you consider starting a family with no hope of ever getting out of renting, as landlords constantly raise monthlies, you might reconsider children.

On top of the issues with people working so often and so hard that they rarely have time to meet anyone outside of work; no wonder people aren't marrying.

Generally the less money you make the more kids you have. It's really a question of prioritization. People say they're holding off on kids for X or Y reason but I think this is more of an expressed vs revealed preferences situation. They would rather chase material wealth for themselves than have kids, and to be clear I'm not judging just observing. Through most of human history mud huts weren't a blocker to having kids.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...

Aside from that, it's merely observations/anecdotes, but from what I’ve seen people who have managed to achieve a massive uplift in economic status (say from minimum wage in their mid-20s → net worth north of $500k-$1m in their mid-30s) are more likely to have children than people who’ve always been wealthy. I would theorize that such individuals feel a greater degree of economic freedom, having lived at the bottom and being able to make more effective use of what they have.

Previously, but this no longer holds.

https://www.governance.fyi/p/45-why-rising-family-size-tempo...

https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s...

https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-money-more-babies-whats-the-...

https://www.demographic-research.org/articles/volume/51/26

https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf

(your paper is five years old, and is lagging broad, rapid global fertility decline trends; it's not income-fertility, its "educated, empowered women with access to birth control have less kids, no kids, and/or delay childbirth" regardless of income, with the caveat being some higher income cohorts and ultra orthodox religions/cultures [Israel] having higher than baseline fertility)

Education and contraceptives as the article I linked are separately correlated and powerful, as is religious adherence. They're all factors. Note that each of these factors is differently important in different countries or regions, so just because you found a study that shows a positive correlation in the Netherlands that it is in isolation important or that it would work the same way in the US.

A different scenario. It's one thing to function in a world where you have nothing but can always make ends meet because while you aren't earning anything more, at least your expenses aren't increasing. Currently we have a different system.

Even the most generous countries aren’t fully compensating for the costs of raising a family, and the assistance offered by many is less than pocket change. It’s only natural that incentive is going to be low.

Alternately: in the past, dying was a lot easier, and society adapted to that by creating extra people, and we've reached a point where that isn't as necessary. That doesn't mean it wouldn't be awesome to improve things for the number of people we do have, or that those improvements are easy, but it's not obvious to me why the assumption would be that quality of life only changes if the population continues changing. In other words, it sounds like you're measuring two different things, noticing one of them slowing no longer increasing, and trying to make inferences about the other one without actually establishing how exactly that connection works.

How do you come to this conclusion. We're seeing that our oh so clever selves have used chemicals/plastics in these nice living conditions to the point they have negative consequences on our health. Having a nice place to live with a job with a nice salary while lending to better health does not lower one's fertility. Maybe these people with the nice jobs and nice places to live are choosing not to have kids which become the reason they can't have nice things. I think you've jumped to an incorrect conclusion

Statistically, we're most likely to be born when the world population is at its peak.

I think the first country to do it will be scolded heavily, but only until everyone else figures out how they did it and are able to copy them.

You could also incentivize couples to adopt up to the point that the (augmented) fertility rate hits replacement level. That's the ultimate problem to solve here, you're not trying to grow the population, simply put a floor under it to stabilize and prevent demographic collapse.

Might wish to add it in ultraviolet, though.

Either way, we supposedly have a large aging population and as such death rates are going to increase due to old age etc