alt Hacker NewsThe US is flirting with its first-ever population decline
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Once you have a kid, it's obvious why even besides the costs involved. There's not much sense of community, particularly in the white middle class. People are very individualistic and distrusting of others. There's a good reason for some of this, but to have a community you need to be a community member. And that means letting people in, trusting others and being trustworthy, and being out for the group instead of just yourself.
Living in a city that this administration has constantly been attacking forced me and my wife, as well as many of our neighbors, to put off our family growth plans. Not only did many of my neighbors lose their jobs, but others are simply fearful of living their lives.
We're fine financially, have housing, etc, but at this point why would we go through the stress of raising a child when a masked federal agent might jump out and disappear our friends, family, or nanny who could be watching them?
And that is before we even get into the potentially disastrous child healthcare decisions and regulation rollbacks.
It's an unfortunate time to be trying to grow a healthy family, IMO.
ETA: I already have children.
My darwinian theory:
About 11 years ago I went on a bus in Rochester, NY. It was bizarre to me that every person in the bus (about 12-15 people aged between 18-25 maybe) were buried in their phones. No one was talking to each other, not looking outside, nothing. I had the latest iPhone but since America was new for me I mostly spent time looking at the world around me and talking to people. I felt sad that the social world had come to this.
Fast forward to now and this is what I see in India too. Talking to random people in their prime years (maybe 18-30) is now 'weird'. But it's perfectly fine if it's via 'insta' or 'snap'. I can't imagine how much worse it's now in America in that age group. I know my pre teen nephews have withdrawals if I take away their devices here in India.
The moral here is that procreation requires better social skills and strong presence in the world and good parenting will probably create that. In order to raise an offspring, people need to have good mental health and that generally leads to good physical health which in turn improves the mental health and so on which can lead to procreation etc. The scrolling and virtual world is a distraction from reality. Something that keeps away humans from each other. We will only see this getting worse. In India the social world is still good enough to see higher birth rates. But that is also now slowing down. Mental health of people is not great. People complain about being single but there is virtually no way to hold a conversation as getting their attention is impossible. Phones are glued to their eyes and hands even when sitting with you.
I am hoping though things will be different in the future.
This is happening everywhere, including nations with great social systems/healthcare/parental leave/etc. And it happens even when nations try throwing money at the problem.
While economic concerns may be worsening the issue - I don't think they're the root cause as many would like to say.
I think the root cause is that we have outsmarted our biology. Once you give people education on the risks of sex and pregnancy, a focus on consent, easy access to contraceptives, knowledge of the responsibilities of child-rearing, and a world of other activities and pursuits - they simply stop having children at or above replacement rate.
Once given the knowledge and choice, humans do not have enough children to sustain a population.
No one wants that answer because it means we can't just blame it on [[CURRENT_PROBLEM]]. And it means there are no real 'solutions'.
People in their 20's will see peak world population in their lifetime. It will be fascinating to see how society changes over the decades that follow that.
This may offend some, but I think the large amount of women joining the labor force may be a factor. American society, pre-WWII, usually had only one member of the household at work. More often than not it was the man who went to work, and the women stayed home to take care of the children. American society, pre-1930s (the Great Depression saw the rise of the female workers) was build on a one-income household.
And yes, there is a big income disparity in the US. However, the fact that labor has practically doubled is another thing.
Most of the developed countries are facing this.
I think our financial/defense systems are not prepared for population decline, so I foresee a lot of turbulence.
The new left will call for more immigration and more globalism to avoid wars, but will have to deal with integration of swaths of immigrants.
The new right will call for closing of the borders and double down on AI doing the work of producing and defending, but will have to deal with the fact that AI will not be ready for that.
Arranging society in such a way that women would rather have a career than be a mother will have profound consequences. The value of motherhood needs to be properly valued in society's collective mind.
I truly believe psychology is at the root of this. People start families when the optimism they feel about the future outweighs the pessimism. Even if this evaluation is done subconsciously.
At some point, in first-world society - averaging across different societies and social support systems, and considering the numbers in aggregate - we flipped. Pessimism about the future outweighs optimism. Downstream of that flip, the prevailing trend changed. Here we are.
This is what happens when your population growth is driven by legal immigrants, and then you make your country very unfriendly to legal immigrants by "accidentally" locking them up while at the same time making it really hard for them to become permanent residents.
The Olympics have really driven home to me how America is truly a melting pot. When you look at the Olympians from say Greece, you can say "oh those are Greek people". When you look at the Nordic athletes, you can say the same. Or the Japanese or Chinese.
But you look at the American team, and they don't have a single physical "look". There is a mix of races and cultures, and they're all American. People complain that America doesn't have a culture, and they're kind of right. We have mix of everyone else's.
It will take decades, if ever, to fix this. Some people from all around the world longed to come to America. Not anymore. Now they are looking elsewhere.
The exchange of value between men and women has changed. Women used to have time but no money. Men had money but no time. Men and women exchanged these with each other. Now everyone has to have a job to even support themselves, and no time to raise a family.
An unsolvable problem that will correct itself homeostatically. Also: https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/
Slow and sustained population decline while automation and AI are increasing is great news. A gradual gobal population decrease would be beneficial in every way except for economies built on perpetually increasing consumption.
New Yorker has a detailed article on this phenomenon that's a great read.
It busts many common myths.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03/03/the-population...
The primary cause of low birth rates is that society does not value children.
Sure we talk a big game, everything is 'for the children' obviously. However, we publicly divest from schools, we invest in technologies that devalue humans and human labor. Growing up we make people believe they need to be millionaires just to not be swallowed up by the 9-to-5 meat grinder (this is true actually). It's no wonder young people don't value family when every signal in our society is telling them not to.
Is this a stupid question? Why do we want high fertility rates anyway? Isn't the world overpopulated?
One factor is that people are obsessed with removing any friction in their life that stands in the way of whatever they believe makes them happy at the end of the day. Which for a lot of the US is just being alone and unbothered with a TV or a phone.
Having responsibilities and caring for others is actually good for the human soul. Being inconvenienced is a part of real life.
I’m not trying to convince everyone that they need to have a kid. But from my experience, having kids provides a very deep and satisfying purpose. Not the only purpose. But it does provide one. And it helps cut through the craziness and hurt and vanity of this world.
this is the quietest crisis in the us right now. our entire insurance and social safety net system (especially ltc and social security) is mathematically dependent on a forever growth pyramid.
once that population curve flattens or flips, the risk pooling math just breaks. you can’t underwrite a 30-year health or life liability for a cohort when the generation behind them is 20% smaller. we’re looking at a fundamental failure of the actuarial models we've used since the 50s.
I tend to think people who argue about the economics or community issues tend to miss the forest for the trees. For the most part, other than biological drive, having kids is stupid. The systems that most people complain about failing - mostly around the community or economic costs of childcare - exist to make having children less stupid. We dramatically reduced teen and early 20s pregnancy rates, when hormones are yelling at us to make babies, and expected people to have them later in life when they're better at self-control?
Then, people who have a child that young are far, far more likely to have additional children. Outside of the first few years, a sibling often reduces the strain on the parents, and provides additional value. Your life starts to orient around the kid(s), and we get a couple of other hormone boosts so we love them and want more of them.
I am consistently confused that this conversation never seems to touch on just how many births are mostly because two people's biology overrode their judgement and that initial failure results in a feedback loop where you have another child or two. If that poor judgement doesn't happen, you don't kick off that loop, and then you're trying to rationally choose to do something that never made all that much sense in the first place.
Surprised nobody has brought this up yet. There is also a competitive element to family additions in the form of pets. While not cheap, they are significantly cheaper. Lower emotional and financial stakes also makes them feel like an easier choice.
"Loving dogs has become an expression not of loneliness but of how unhappy many Americans are with society and other people. [...] For some owners, dogs simply offer more satisfying relationships than other people do." [0]
[0] https://theconversation.com/americans-are-asking-too-much-of...
a usa with fewer people would be quite nice. more liebensraum for everybody, true affluence, a spacious rowhome in a walkable city and a rustic cabin in the woods for everybody. population decline is really only a problem in welfare states. it took less than 2 generations to demonstrate this.
I don't see a lot of comments about how China is tackling this. While the US is spending all it's time/investments developing AI, China is investing heavily in robotics.
They seem to understand that they can't mitigate the decline, they may be able to provide the same level of service without the need for as many workers. Based on the experiments we have attempted to fix this issue, I think that's actually a smart move.
The economics no longer support families—and after decades of calls for “fiscal responsibility” across cultures and states, is it any wonder birthrates are falling? Burnout among the working class plays an equal part in the decline.
“It takes a village to raise a child” isn’t advice, it’s a policy framework because massive support is needed to rear kids and the majority today have less than their previous generations.
The article is paywalled but it seems the gist is that by restricting immigration and escalating deportation, we risk population decrease.
What I find amusing about this is that it is roughly equivalent to saying that the United States needs to conquer new territory to survive. Need to bring more people under our thumb.
This is definitely "dying empire" thinking.
Worth saying that I do not agree with this. I think in many ways our cardinal sin is that in the interest of legibility (especially for tax purposes) we've regulated our ability to employee people and to get work to an absolutely insane degree. To such a degree in fact, that much of our economy relies on having a source of "black market" labor and indentured servitude in the guise of immigration.
Where we flirt with danger is that we look at one side of this equation, the immigration side, but not the other, the labor side.
We should ask ourselves a question, if the system we're living in is not rewarding having kids, is a good system at all?
If we need more young people in our society in the USA, this is actually the easiest problem to solve -- just open up immigration. As long as lots of people still want to come here (not guaranteed to last forever), not having enough people is a problem only of our own making. If only most of our problems were so easy to solve.
Get off the internet and make some sexy time.
Total Fertility Rate (births per woman) un US:
2015 | 1.83
2016 | 1.80
2017 | 1.75
2018 | 1.71
2019 | 1.68
2020 | 1.62
2021 | 1.63
2022 | 1.67
2023 | 1.62
2024 | 1.62
2025 | 1.62
2026 | 1.61
Politizacion of long term trend wont help here.
incels blame women, femcels blame men, the left blames cost of living, the right blames lack of values, journalists blame the current thing. it's all so tiresome.
the real reason is both boring and obvious: a very significant percentage of educated urban people in the developed world don't want children. both sexes have a very high number of very valid reasons for that, and it's very pointless to examine any particular one.
and no, importing uneducated rural people from the undeveloped world won't fix shit, because their children too will be educated urban people. I think our young global leaders are beginning to realize that, hence the very recent shift from ubiquitous antinatalism of the previous decades to frantic nagging about our unwillingness to breed.
it would take extremely dystopian measures to "fix" the birth rates, and no one, not even Russia and China are presently willing to go that far. Russia is, however, rapidly ramping up its authoritarianism to North Korea levels, so I assume it will be them who will be the first to ban contraception - the least insane measure that can make significant difference. and given how eagerly the West has been embracing Internet censorship, political violence against dissidents, social credit, and other hallmarks of authoritarian regimes in the past decade, I assume that after a few years of pearl clutching, they will follow suit.
If the US wants to increase its population, maybe it should stop sending masked agents out to kick in doors, directly reducing the population.
Maybe they should have a look to what other countries are doing. [0]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jan/27/spain-decree-r...
(Comedy writing mode ON: )
"We need to flatten the curve..."
(Comedy writing mode OFF: )
You know, to re-quote the powers-that-be and the mainstream news media...
What, no takers?
You know, "flatten the curve... of population increase?" -- what, still not funny?
Hey, I'm just re-quoting what other people said... (a whole lot of people, incidentally!) but in the context of the article, above!
What, still no takers?
You people have no sense of (dark, very dark, let's be completely honest about that!) humor!
:-)
Maybe if young folks could afford housing they'd have kids...there's a thought.
That sounds like a horrible way to flirt.
Population declines have happened many times in many places in history, and it sometimes heralds collapse and at other times it is just a temporary phenomenon. Part of the issue is with how you define the metrics and what you consider success. Population increase can correlate with good things and also with bad things. Perhaps much of the problem here is with the idea that gross population numbers should be a governance KPI, rather than more specific measures and goals.
Good. Reduce population growth until housing buildout can catch up with population. Trying to create more babies and allowing immigration when there aren't enough homes is dumb.
Shithole country
Mass human behavior in regards to fertility, climate destruction, and social decay is much more sensical if you frame it as species-wide suicidality.
Poor people. Start pumping out kids to be future wage slaves in this corpo dominated country. Carls Jr loves you.
Good. As the working population stagnates perhaps employers will attach some value to workers. Of course, without an underclass of immigrant labor, prices will rise and the US will have to import more food. And temporary heathcare workers can be brought in to help the aging population. It's good that America's cordial relationships with key trading partners will facilitate the free movement of goods and labor ...
#1 story on BBC news: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpw052pkvl0o
I'm struggling to see why this is a problem.
ICE works :0
I've said it before on HN, but it's worth repeating: When my parents started a family in the late-60's, my dad had only a high school diploma, yet he supported his wife, 2 kids, 2 cars, and a brand new house. Heck, one of their cars was a 1964 convertible Corvette (my mom still talks about how much she misses that car). That is basically unheard-of these days.
Capitalism. The problem is capitalism. The endless quest for ever-increasing profits just expands wealth inequality. Millennials went through this when the job pipeline died in 2008 (ie entry level positions disappeared). We now have a huge number of people who are laden with debt they’ll never repay and many will never own a home or retire.
Illegal immigration exists to suppress wages of both documented and undocumented people. It’s to increase profits. Certain industries will collapse without it.
And as the global hegemonic superpower, imperialism is the highest form of capitalism. Destabilizing other countries is a tool for exploitation.
Immigration has been the only thing propping up population growth.
I honestly see the US collapsing in our lifetimes. The billionaires will flee. Empires don’t die quietly or quickly however. It’s going to be violent and drawn out.
I approve. The population shrinks until we build more god damn housing in these major cities where all the fucking jobs are!!
We are in dire need of housing in these cities. I don’t think we should keep trying to recreate 1920s tenement conditions.
If productivity gains had ever filtered down to the population instead of being frittered away by the wealthy in orgies of creation and destruction, it would be easy to afford a population decline.
Productivity went up 90% since 1979, and pay went up 30%. We could support 2x the ratio of retirees to workers as 1979 at the same level of comfort. Instead, we build huge houses (for wealthy people) and tear them down, and build a military to kill impoverished foreigners (for our wealthy investors), blow it up, and build it again.
The "demographic crisis" people are a child-sacrificing cult posing as a child-worshipping cult. They want more people to keep the prices of labor down, and they act like that's a concern that you should share. Unless you're in the top 20-40% in the West, you're going to work until you die, or get sick and die in the gutter.
If you really wanted the population to go up, maybe don't engineer society so that all of its wealth lies in the hands of boomers and their failchildren who don't work. Governance would improve instantly and vastly if only people who worked got a vote.
The funny thing is that the right-wing pro-natalist points at wealthy elites and concocts a conspiracy that they want to reduce the population (for unknown, nefarious reasons.) No, they love cheap servants. They spend all of their effort in bombing and sieging poor countries on bizarre pretenses then opening the doors to their own countries to let them rush in. The only difference between the right-wing pro-natalists and wealthy elites is that the elite will happily import the servants from the South to wherever they want to live, and right-wingers (even if they call themselves "liberals") are secretly just doing the 14 words. We don't need more immigrants or more babies, we need to shed parasites.
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I like to hang out on fertility twitter.
It's a strange place. Since the fertility problem is worldwide, you get a lot of ideologies mixing about. There's hardcore CCP folks, free market Mormons, radical Imams, universalist preachers, the whole lot of them. They're all trying to share ideas and jumping on the latest research findings from reputable and crackpot sources.
They're all looking for the recipe to get people to have kids again, and mostly finding nothing.
"Oh it's apartments!"
"Oh it's incentives!"
"Oh it's childcare!"
And then bickering how none of it is real and affects popsquat.
Once some formula is found, then the whole place will fall apart and they'll go back to hating each other again. But for now, it's a nice weird little place.
My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.
I know that's almost tautological. But it's simplicity cuts through the crap. No amount of baby cash, or white picket fences, or coercion, or lack of birth control, or whatever other set of schemes you can make, none of that matters. Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them.
That's a gigantic task, I know. And I don't have the policy recommendations to enact that. I'm just a dweb on the Internet. But that is my take.