> With world fertility rates seemingly all in decline

As much as various folks like to bang on about declining birthrates, the global birthrate is positive (i.e. >2.0 children per woman), and birthrates are only really low in very affluent demographics.

There's nothing particularly sinister going on either - since most children with access to adequate nutrition and healthcare now survive into adulthood, these societies are not losing a ton of population to wars, very little reason for reproducing above replacement rate.

Yeah, it is very weird to me too. It's only a problem in a handful of countries that have really, really low birthrates and can't/won't attract immigrants.

In 2024, 171 countries had birth rates below replacement rates. That's gotten worse since then. 70% of people live in countries with birth rates below replacement rates.

So not just a handful of countries.

It’s a handful of countries that have 1) “really, really low birthrates,” i.e., not just below replacement but very below replacement AND 2) do not have relatively permissive immigration policies.

That most countries are 3) below replacement rate by some amount is a separate third thing.

> very little reason for reproducing above replacement rate.

But reproduction is below replacement rate.

And? It's only a few years since folks were deeply worried about overpopulation, and whether the earth could support 10 billion people...

Yeah, I don't understand how we can be worried about both things at the same time. In my view, it's good that reproduction is below replacement. Yeah, pensions won't be great, but at least we won't spread like a cancer onto a strained planet.

That's one of the weirdest realizations I had in the Northern Territories of Canada. There are people living everywhere. Of course they must have looked at me the same way, so I can't really complain.

What is worrisome it's not the instant figures. It's the trend.

Are Ireland and India considered affluent now?

> Is Ireland considered affluent now?

Ireland is the richest country in Europe by GDP-per-capita[1] (apart a few uber-rich city states).

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Eu...

> India...

India has been struggling to get its population growth control under control for decades. I think we can excuse a brief overcorrection as they stabilise.

Ireland's figures are wildly unbalanced compared to other EU countries because so many companies decided to formally register their headquarters there. They don't pay as much tax as they should so the income stats are way up there but the positive effects are not as you might expect from that (if they weren't actually negative).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_Sandwich

This is now mostly a thing of the past but there are still lingering after-effects.

> They don't pay as much tax as they should so the income stats are way up

What do you mean by "the income stats are way up"?

That the GDP stats are skewed but the taxes aren't there. So it looks as if Ireland is doing much better on paper than what is happening in reality. Normally with that kind of GDP you'd also have a solid tax base to go with it, here it is the opposite, Ireland has that GDP because their corporate taxes were super low.

Yeah, I mean, all the city-states on this list are playing this game too - Monaco, Lichtenstein, and Luxembourg aren't paradises for the poor either.

> Normally with that kind of GDP you'd also have a solid tax base to go with it, here it is the opposite

You are badly misinformed. The Irish state is actually in receipt of colossal quantities of corporate tax each year, which has placed it in a significantly stronger fiscal position than most other EU nations.

Whether this state of affairs is sustainable in the longer term is another question, but for the last ten years or so, the strategy of encouraging FDI has unquestionably paid off extremely well.

The rates are declining everywhere, although still positive.

>As much as various folks like to bang on about declining birthrates, the global birthrate is positive

Sure. Imagine that central Africa (the only place with positive fertility rates) somehow never changes in that regard. What will happen? Will they be able to power the entire world's population replacement, they who made no AIDS medicines of their own. They make no John Deere tractors. No industry at all, really. Will they even be able to feed these people they are creating?

I think once the developed world goes extinct, so too they.

>There's nothing particularly sinister going on either

Functional human extinction in 120 years, absolute human extinction in 350 (or fewer). Technological stagnation (no new advancement) in fewer than 50.

>very little reason for reproducing above replacement rate.

That's not even the argument. The argument is, why isn't everyone terrified that we're well below the replacement rate (where population neither grows nor shrinks), and that we could raise it back up to the replacement rate if we wanted to.

> Functional human extinction in 120 years, absolute human extinction in 350 (or fewer).

I would love to see your basis for claiming this, because I don't believe a word of it.

My personal take is that, as population declines, we eventually won't be able to produce birth control pills (or plastic, if you believe that microplastics are the cause). A couple generations after that, the population decline will halt.

> Technological stagnation (no new advancement) in fewer than 50.

This I could at least see. Society requires a certain level of specialization in order to advance, and that requires a certain number of people. More technologically advanced societies may get by with fewer people, but there's still a lower limit, below which technological progress halts (or at least massively slows down).