[somenameforme]

I don't understand why people, generally on both sides of the issue, just ignore the social effects of it and instead just focus on the personal. I suspect most don't intuit how rapidly fertility shifts population sizes, because it's an exponential. A fertility rate of 1 means each generation decreases by more than 50%, compounding. So after just 5 generations and your generational size is down 97% with your population doing the exact same, staggered out by a few decades.

And fertility determines not only the size of a population, but even the age ratios within that population. Low fertility means you end up with far more elderly than you do working age. Far from this vision of being a society with more for everybody, we'll be creating societies where labor is ever-more scarce, economies are primarily dedicated to helping sustain the elderly and simultaneously collapsing at the same time. It's not going to be pretty.

For these reasons, and many others, I think the social aspect is one of the most important. Self fulfillment and these other things are very important and good, but if we don't have children then we're going to be creating some pretty messed up societies for our descendants. We're likely going to get to see this play out in South Korea during our lifetimes. And I do wonder what their descendants will think of the South Koreans of today.

[lII1lIlI11ll]

Western societies solve that problem by letting in immigrants. I'm not sure what SK or Japan are going to do though.

[somenameforme]

I don't really think immigration is a long-term solution, because of the scale issue - which most greatly underestimate. We're talking about needing a never-ending stream of hundreds of millions of people. And you'd ideally want people that speak the language, have at least some basic skills, and so on. It's not particularly realistic, even before getting into the social chaos that such would cause.

And it becomes even less realistic if you look outward to times when this becomes necessary. Japan is a good example of this issue. Migrating to Japan is not difficult. The only meaningful barrier is learning basic Japanese. Beyond that, after just 5 years of residency you can even apply for citizenship which has a very high acceptance rate. And there are a ton of 'Japanese enthusiasts', many of whom already speak basic Japanese.

And many of them have tried to migrate, but they don't last at all. They quickly realize that a Japan in decline is not the Japan in their minds. Getting paid $1500 a month to work a job with extremely high expectations and demands in a country with a median age of 50 (and increasing) isn't the Japan they thought they were moving to.

[moi2388]

That solves the problem by removing western society. Which can hardly be called a solution