Same thing is happening to most counties in Europe but they’re “fixing it” with immigrants. But the Germany filled with Germans will be disappearing just as South Korea is.
All countries will eventually experience population decline, it’s just the speed of each that is different [1]. Global fertility rate already appears to be below replacement rate. Even China appears to be below 1 at this time [2]. India and Africa will arrive there likely in the next ~5-10 years, depending on rate of empowerment of women.
People attribute it to empowerment of women, but I wonder if it's more correlation than causation. Women empowerment happened in the same time frame there was a large shift towards urbanization. The situation across the world before was like ~80% of people living in rural areas, and ~20% living in cities. Now those proportions are approximately flipped in many places. IIRC cities appear to be a net population sink for most of history, counting on an steady stream of people moving from the countryside each generation to replenish sub-replacement numbers. Raising children "free-ranging" is more straightforward in the countryside. In cities they demand a lot of micromanagement and resources from parents, because car-infested, cramped urban landscape is expensive and hostile to children. So perhaps the causation arrow flows from accelerated urbanization to both women empowerment and sub-replacement fertility rates, not necessarily from women empowerment to sub-replacement rates.
> Most demographers now say the population bomb has largely fizzled, and some predict that the long-term trend toward a smaller global population, with fewer consumers and a smaller human footprint on the planet, could benefit the environment.
> There appear to be other upsides to declining fertility. Along with growing individual freedom and economic empowerment of women, the U.N. study also found a rapid drop in the number of girls and teenagers giving birth.
> "The decline of the adolescent birth rates has been, I would say, one of the major success stories in global population health over the past three decades," said Vladimíra Kantorová, the U.N.'s chief population scientist.
(scholar of the global demographic system; urbanization is certainly a component in a declining fertility rate, but the primary driver is women choosing to have less children, delay having them, or not having them at all, while having the means to assert those choices)
> smaller human footprint on the planet, could benefit the environment.
This i highly doubt. Humans are able to increase per capita (resource) consumption at a far faster rate! Old age care/consumption can also grow to infinity
Remains to be seen, good longitudinal study over the next 100 years imho. Old age care/consumption isn’t infinite; it’s bounded by what will be provided via social systems or personal resources. If there’s nothing to give (or no personal resources on hand), it’s homelessness or poverty until death. Can’t spend what isn’t there.
> People attribute it to empowerment of women, but I wonder if it's more correlation than causation.
Before going to far down the rabbit hole, have a look at the fertility rate of TSMC employees. TSMC employees make up 0.3% of Taiwan’s population, they are responsible for 1.8% of all babies born in Taiwan. [0]
The average TSMC woman is highly educated and highly paid, which eliminates most of the usual reasons touted for low the fertility rates in OECD nations. "All" TSMC does is make it possible for their female employees to have a career and raise a family, mostly by providing child care in-house and flexible working hours.
To pull that off TSMC must have a culture than prioritizes families and child raising over profit. In most industries with not be possible. Either their higher costs would lead to them being eaten alive by their competitors, or bought out by PE because their employees could be squeezed to pay out more profit to their owners. There isn't going to be a rash of companies with TSMC style family policies breaking out any time soon.
But a government policy could made it happen, which is another way of saying if a society or country decided they didn't want to wither away to nothing because of low birth rates, it could be done. They could mandate every company adopts TSMC style policies, or they could raise taxes and provide free child care (like they do for education), or more likely some mix that has the same effect. Everyone would have to be willing to be a bit poorer of course, because you are forcing people to spend less on fast cars and big houses, and more of child care.
But does seem like it could be done, so if South Korea (or any of the OECD) had the will, there is a way.
> To pull that off TSMC must have a culture than prioritizes families and child raising over profit. In most industries with not be possible. Either their higher costs would lead to them being eaten alive by their competitors, or bought out by PE because their employees could be squeezed to pay out more profit to their owners. There isn't going to be a rash of companies with TSMC style family policies breaking out any time soon.
Israel has a fertility rate of 3 and is very advanced so not all countries. It’s a cultural thing. We’ve given up religion and values for doomscrolling and dopamine hits.
> In 2020, the total fertility rate among ultra-Orthodox women in Israel was 6.6, while the rate among Arab women was 3.0, and among secular women, it was 2.0— still well above the OECD average— according to a report from the Jerusalem Institute for Policy Research.
(dopamine and doomscrolling are just as bad as religion and traditional values, for different reasons, imho)
Maybe because from a strictly evolutionary point of view, that’s a failure: they won’t pass on their genes (maybe also culture, values etc.), and other gene pools will take over the resources their lineage worked to secure.
"Always" is overstated. Populations have been reshaped before (e.g. farmers absorbing foragers in Europe, steppe migrations, Arabization of North Africa, the Americas after 1492 etc). So turnover isn’t new, but this mechanism is different. This pattern stems more from our system and choices (schooling, careers, costs, contraception, culture etc) than from violence/war, disease, forced moves, so in that sense it’s self driven, and historically unusual.
> Researchers have variously estimated the Muslim population of France at between 8.8% and 12.5% in 2017, and less than 1% in 2001,[64][65] making a "replacement" unlikely according to MacKellar.
You quoted the number but skipped the part where MacKellar says the whole premise relies on treating 3rd- and 4th-generation citizens as “not French.”
> While the ethnic demography of France has shifted as a result of post-WWII immigration, scholars have generally dismissed the claims of a "great replacement" as being rooted in an exaggeration of immigration statistics and unscientific, racially prejudiced views.[12] Geographer Landis MacKellar criticized Camus's thesis for assuming "that third- and fourth- generation 'immigrants' are somehow not French."[63] Researchers have variously estimated the Muslim population of France at between 8.8% and 12.5% in 2017, and less than 1% in 2001,[64][65] making a "replacement" unlikely according to MacKellar.[63]
Feels weird to call them ethnically French, especially when the context being presented is religion.
The assumption being made is that they’ll ditch the religion after four generations? I don’t see data for that assumption, maybe it is not 100%, but its certainly not as low as 20% apostacy.
Thus I would take serious issue with that statement, it is evidence of an ethnic or religious replacement.
Religion isn’t ethnicity. Did England become less British after Catholics fell from a vast majority to ~10% post-Reformation?
And the actual numbers still don’t show a majority shift. Even if every Muslim in France kept their religion, they’d be ~10% of the population — far from "replacement".
Also, you missed the point entirely if the topic is “the population of x has gone from 1% to an estimated upper of 12.5% in 20 years” and your answer is “its below 10% right now”.
Not only are you potentially immediately wrong, since the number today could exceed 10%, it also doesn’t speak to how those demographics might be shaped by disparities in birthrates or continued migration.
But, you know that, you’re just trying to argue for some reason.
Germans mostly assimilated and culturally were similar to existing Americans, sharing the same religion and similar values. Can’t say the same for Muslim immigrants at all.
What about the Irish in America then? Culturally, they were not Protestant and were regarded as very different for a long time. How come we don't hear about this as an issue in the US today?
They had a tough time integrating but ultimately they were Christian and European and had western values. Muslims don’t have any of that and their ideals of freedom amd rights aren’t compatible with western values.
No but nazis have a way of presenting facts that are only relevant if you are concerned primarily with racial purity. Is Germany’s population growing because of immigrants, or is germanys “heritage” disappearing because of white replacement?
If a man is hospitalized because he is having paranoid delusions about his wife cheating on him, he is still sick even if his suspicions are true.
This is the opposite of what you probably wanted to say, but if the man's wife is cheating on him then he's not experiencing paranoid delusions, so hospitalizing him and calling him sick would be a form of abusive crazy-making behavior in and of itself.
“A culture evaporating cannot be discussed and addressed because genocidal dictator multiple generations ago had adjacent motivations when he killed a bunch of people”
The problem with Hitler wasn’t that he wanted German people to be successful, it was his proposed solution that involved mass murder between genocide and global war.
This is a problem that requires thinking beyond lazy pattern matching
Well if you being your sentence like this, then you already made it clear that you aren't serious about discussing, because that is not what is happening.
Any discussion that lazyly tries to skirt what Germans have done 80 years ago and tries to move into similar directions is just plain ignorant.
We must get back to the real issues: 10m Ukrainian refugees because we let Putin murder in Ukraine. 10m Syrians being displaced due to the world's inaction to stop a civil war. The list could go on.
It's a statement of fact, which is neutral on its own.
Where it becomes a right wing talking point (or a discussion about the socio-economic future of a country) broadly comes down to how you present the causes, implications, and necessary actions.
The fact that many more-developed countries having shrinking native populations is a fact that governments must reckon with in some way, and salting the earth on discussing because one faction is trying to exploit it cedes the ultimate policy decisions to them.
It's neither neutral nor a statement of fact. Look at the grandparent comment:
But the Germany filled with Germans will be disappearing...
This makes a lot of deeply political assumptions about what a "german" is and whether an immigrant can be (or become) one. I'm not here to comment on whether these assumptions are correct and they're certainly common ones, but embedded political assumptions simply aren't neutral or factual.
for what it's worth, I strongly disagree with the various right wing theories about the _cause_ and specifically the idea that there is intentional exploitation of the demographic shift, but it's not controversial that falling birthrates are leading to demographic change.
I'm not German and won't presume to say who is or isn't (or should be) "German", but this is absolutely something that needs to be grappled with by governments. A shift in population being "supplied" by birth vs. migration is recognised in many Western/more economically developed countries, and that also includes naturalised immigrants (and their descendants).
My personal belief is that the modern school of business thought is a form of tragedy of the commons: with every business optimising their extraction of wealth from people in isolation, individuals in the whole find the cost of living unsustainable and are increasingly living hand to mouth and feel they cannot afford or have the time to raise children. In this way, falling birthrates are an externality of modern economic doctrine. This is also true for immigrants, who are exploited for cheaper work, and as they naturalise fall into the same trap as being exploited for extracted wealth.
In my eyes, the resolution to falling birthrates is that governments need to reach for social and economic levers to reduce the predation of companies on individuals, as well as to increase the amount of flexible wealth that individuals have so they can choose to raise kids if they want.
I think that the idea that this is actually some kind of coordinated "great replacement" is deeply untrue and instead is a fulcrum to further distract, divide, and exploit people. If my belief on the root causes is true, however, governments must have the guts to reign in business, which does not prove to be popular in political circles. Instead, it is easy for governments to allow the political fringes to continue this narrative to "immigrant wash" discontent with life - rather than address the root of the problem (optimising for growth), they can announce "tough on immigration" measures that demonise marginalised groups who are politically inert themselves (immigrants, legal or otherwise, being much more restricted in their ability to vote and influence politics than established capital).
They'll do anything but pay their workers, and not overwork them. Almost like when you need to use 80% of your paycheck to pay rent that people can't think much farther than next month.
"We" being the actual decision-makers, the owners. The class who wants GDP to go up, but doesn't care about GDP per capita.
Edit: I'm undecided if it's capitalist ownership class, or a "late stage socialism running out of other people's money". Still undecided. It's probably both, which is why we're doomed.
The liberal order(consensus between both sides) of the past 50 years have decided that GDP is the only thing that matters and we should trade everything for it.
