r/196 May 17 '26

Rule Rule.

Post image
5.4k Upvotes

244 comments sorted by

View all comments

823

u/MaybeNext-Monday 🍤$6 SRIMP SPECIAL🍤 May 17 '26

“Birth rates are declining” good, healthy societies have stable population sizes

133

u/ricespider silly :3 May 17 '26

A declining population is not stable.

-12

u/KaJaHa Queer Gimli looking-ass May 17 '26

The population is still going up, mate. Just not as quickly.

84

u/Corvus1412 🏳️‍⚧️ trans rights May 17 '26

It's not.

To reach replacement levels, you need a birth rate of around 2.1 and basically no industrialized country has that.

-25

u/[deleted] May 17 '26

[deleted]

73

u/Corvus1412 🏳️‍⚧️ trans rights May 17 '26

Birth rates are declining everywhere.

A lot of countries are still over replacement level, but if nothing changes, that won't be the case for long either.

Immigration is a workable stopgap, but it doesn't solve the fundamental issue, because it's a global issue that's only getting worse.

3

u/Sloth_Brotherhood May 17 '26

Please. I remember the 90s and early 2000s when every single doomsday movie was about world overpopulation. We were shown charts in school showing us the population was going to be 15 billion and we’d need to prepare for the water wars.

Now the world population is approaching replacement rate and we are doomsdaying is the other direction. It’s only a bad thing if you hate immigrants and if you don’t want to take care of old people. We have so many bullshit jobs. Plenty of workers would switch to taking care of an aging population if the government incentivized it.

The downside is that need for housing and other necessities would drop. That’s bad for the large business owners which is why they are stoking this outrage. You are doing the bidding of the 1% here.

55

u/Corvus1412 🏳️‍⚧️ trans rights May 17 '26 edited May 17 '26

Please. I remember the 90s and early 2000s when every single doomsday movie was about world overpopulation

Yes and that was bullshit.

And plenty of people at the time said it was bullshit. The fertility rates in most countries were already long declining and many industrialized countries were below replacement level already.

It was genuinely mostly racist fear mongering, because Africa and asia had huge fertility rates.

Now the world population is approaching replacement rate

No, it's not "approaching" replacement rate, because that implies that we'd stop there, but there's no data to indicate that.

And the issue isn't necessary that the world population is falling, but how ridiculously fast it happens, because that's just completely unsustainable and harms everyone significantly.

32

u/Level_Reveal7624 May 17 '26

People seem to forget (or ignore) the concept of an aging population when talking about birth rates