New Cause Area: Demographic Collapse.

Demographic Collapse: An Overlooked Cause Area

Birth rates are falling much faster than many dominant societal narratives imply. This year, the global fertility rate for Latin America and the Caribbean fell below replacement rate (2.1 babies per woman), India will achieve that status next year, and China is expected to be at half their current population within 45 years.

Meanwhile, many countries, ethnicities, and cultures are more advanced on the collapse timeline. 115 countries have a birth rate below replacement rate, containing about half the world’s population. South Korea is predicted to hit a birth rate of 0.7 babies per woman within the next two years. A 0.7 birth rate means that, for every 100 Koreans there will be 4.3 great grand kids (35 kids, 12.25 grandkids)—and that’s assuming birth rates don’t continue to decline. (Projecting any current trend infinitely into the future will make things look like a crisis; we do that here to give a context as to what a 0.7 birth rate actually means if it is stable. People often contextualize population decline as a linear problem when it is an exponential problem.)

The above map shows the current state of affairs. Orange countries are those already below, or almost below, replacement rate. Africa’s extremely high birthrates conceal the fact that almost half the global population lives in countries below replacement rates. I was recently talking with a researcher in the space (Reuben Abraham) who told me that no one is updating their models (specifically the UN, but also organizations like climate change groups) and that things are much worse than most public data sources suggest (he also thinks the problem is totally unsolvable). This trend is so dominant in developed countries that even Mormons may be about to drop below replacement rate—if they have not already.

Overview

For more information about the decline in fertility, read:

• Forces at Play: For an overview of what is happening on a per-country level.
• Why is This Happening?: For a review of factors that cause fertility collapse.
• Can Life Extension Fix This?: For a breakdown on the impact life extension may have on demographic collapse.
• How AI May Offer a Deus Ex Machina: For a an exploration of demographic collapse in the context of AI and AGI risk.
• Does Addressing Economic Failures Solve Demographic Collapse?: For an overview of the limits of economic interventions.

Relevance to the Effective Altruist Community

1. The majority of EA movements and organizations are based in developed countries that will be badly hit by the results of these skewed demographics; any threat to the general stability of those countries has the second-order effect of making it harder to organize from those countries. The economic systems of virtually all developed countries are predicated on an assumption of constant growth, which means that a decline in the working population has a high probability of leading to system-level collapse. For information on the social and economic systems that are in danger, go to The Inevitable Economic Effects, Systems Collapse Risks, and Detroit as a Model for Collapse.
2. The EA community has thus far not been including birth rates in its yearly statistical analysis. If it turns out that the sociological profile that leads people to be amenable to EA ideas also dramatically lowers birth rates, that profile will not exist in future human populations. If EA is a “sterilizing meme,” the EA community is less likely to make a long-term impact. For more information read: Risk of a Future Without Effective Altruism.
3. We are on the verge of a “cultural mass extinction.” This will dramatically increase the homogeneity of our species and as such lower the prevalence of orthanganal perspectives that could generate solutions to social problems which are not apparent to surviving cultures. In addition, if current birth rates are indicative of future trends, increases in homogeneity will favor those cultures most currently actively hostile to EA ideals. We explore this below under: Risk of Cultural Mass Extinction.
4. Violence against women and girls is likely to surge as birth rates continue to decline as the few cultures with high birthrates also feature very traditional views of gender roles. We briefly touch on this under: Risk of Increased Domestic Violence.

Potential Solutions

Finally, this post will explore a few potential solutions to the problem. Population and fertility collapse is a unique issue in the EA community in that it is not a tragedy of the commons issue and thus highly tractable. We go into potential solutions in the Solutions & Tractability section.

Specifically, we explore:

• Government Intervention
• Fertility Treatment Research
• Artificial Womb Research and Development
• More Efficient Matchmaking
• Cultural Innovation

The Fertility Decline

Why is This Happening?

Decreased Utility from Children

Historically, every additional kid a family added increased that family’s wealth and quality of life—the kid either represented a near-future source of income or set of hands on the local farm. This began to change with the rise of large-scale wage labor in some parts of the world at the turn of the 1900s, but this change was still largely contained as said wage labor was only available to males.

When wage labor became widely available to both males and females around the 1970s—just as the birth control pill and more advanced forms of birth control became more widely adopted—birth rates began to plummet in developed countries (the role of female wage labor in this process is why birth rates have been more robust across countries and cultures featuring less egalitarian views toward gender). When every kid added to a family unit decreases the wealth and quality of life of said family unit, people begin to need exogenous motivators (like religion) to justify large families.

Optimization for Happiness & Memetic Shifts

Do kids really decrease happiness? While there is some nuance to this question, many studies suggest that having kids can at least temporarily lower factors like subjective well being and marital satisfaction, especially when parents lack ample childcare support (though other studies suggest that having kids brings more meaning to parents’ lives and that parents—especially fathers—experience far more joy than misery from kids). Even if having kids objectively does not lower happiness, merely the perception that becoming a parent—or having more than two kids—lowers quality of life will drive fewer people to reproduce above repopulation rate.

Moreover, any society with a large childless population must have an equal portion of the population that has at least four kids if its overall population is to remain stable (i.e. if a third of a group decides to have no kids and a third has two, then the final third has to have more than four kids to keep the population stable). While it could be argued that having one or two kids will increase the quality of life of some individuals, it becomes difficult to justify each additional kid beyond the second from a purely hedonic perspective.

In addition to the above trends, historically most families have operated under “fitness-increasing memes:” Memes that partially spread by increasing the birth rate of those who adopt them. Most fitness-increasing memes take the form of religions. These memes (typically religions) act as an exogenous motivator to increase birth rate, but are currently declining. We explore this phenomenon in greater depth in the section titled: Risk of a Future Without Effective Altruism.

Dropping Fertility

Quickly falling fertility rates present an additional—yet little-understood—factor contributing to demographic collapse. This can be seen in a rapid decrease in both male testosterone and sperm production/motility. A study from 2007 showed testosterone decreasing by 22% when comparing 1985-1987 levels and a study from 2021 found a roughly 25% decrease between 1999 and 2016. In addition it has been found that male fertility has generally decreased by about 10% over the past 16 years.

There is some debate about what is causing this, but environmental pollutants like phthalates, herbicides, air pollution, radiation from cellphones/laptops, cadmium, and general endocrine disrupters are the most likely culprits (for more, see the Wikipedia article on this trend). Infertility is rising so quickly that rates of assisted reproductive technology are rising by 5% to 10% per year! (Note: This problem is not unique to the male side of the equation, just better studied there.)

Broken Relationship Markets

A final factor contributing to demographic collapse—of which we have not even begun to see an impact—involves broken partner-finding markets. This is a big focus of our books The Pragmatist’s Guide to Relationships and The Pragmatist’s Guide to Sexuality so I won’t go too deep into the topic here, but the difficulty in the search for both sexual and romantic partners has increased dramaclly since the popularity of the Tinder model dating app took hold and this can be seen in things like falling sex rates.

To put it succinctly, the swipe model of partner sorting forces all individuals participating in that market to compete along a single metric (attractiveness). People don’t like to choose long-term partners who are below average, but historically people were able to compete along multiple metrics (attractiveness, position in local social hierarchy, intelligence, creativity, etc.) meaning that very few would be below average on all metrics and thus appealed to at least some pool of potential partners.

Can Life Extension Fix This?

Extended lifespans could potentially offset some of the threat of demographic collapse… if lifespans were actually increasing. In the USA, lifespans have actually been contracting over the last half decade or so and before that they were only increasing linearly (here is Europe so you don’t get your hopes up).

Even if life extension technology does begin to roll out, any model I can conjure for its use based on current economic systems will limit access to the top fraction of a percent of the population socioeconomically speaking and thus be irrelevant in combating the above trend.

The Economics of Demographic Collapse

In the following sections we will explore the economic impacts of demographic collapse.

Systems Collapse Risks

Our entire economic system runs on the assumption of aggregate growth. The economy = productivity per worker * number of workers, both of which have historically gone up.

However, while productivity per person increases linearly, most of the developed world is about to see their populations decrease at exponential rates (an inevitability when looking at something like the EU’s current and falling 1.5 fertility rate). When this happens, the stock market, on average, will begin to shrink and when that happens people will stop putting their money there. Civilizationaly, we will stop investing in the future.

Worse, nearly every country, every city, and every municipality has been designed with an assumption of constant growth, which has led them to essentially take on tons of leverage—not just in the form of debt, but in the form of other fixed expenses tied to past delivered goods like pensions and social security programs. Every entrepreneur here knows what this means: When things are growing, you multiply on that abundance, but when things shrink, life starts to suck, big time.

For those who haven’t worked with leverage: Imagine a city that directs 50% of its money to pensions, social-security-like programs, and debt payments (this is where Detroit was when it went bankrupt). This is fine if the population grows by half, as that 50% of the budget becomes 33% and is quite manageable. But what if the tax base shrinks? If the city’s population and tax base shrinks by just 30%, its usable money decreases by 60%, not 30%.

If a city’s tax base were to shrink by 40% (consider in NYC, just the wealthiest 38,700, 0.5% of the city’s population, pay 42.5% of taxes), the usable portion of that city’s budget would drop to 10%.

The larger point here is that it’s easy to notice that 7.2% of the budget goes to paying off debt in NYC without noticing that 33% of payroll expenses are paying off already accrued pensions. In the past this has not been a problem because cities were always growing—now it is.

As cities try to operate on smaller portions of their budgets, they will become less attractive places to live, causing even more wealthy people (who pay the lion’s share of cities’ taxes) to leave them. An exodus of wealthy taxpayers will trigger a snowball of worsening conditions for those economically trapped in cities (this is largely what happened in Detroit, as we discuss here.

Let’s ignore the financial problems cities will have. How do you keep the lights on in a city like Seoul when your population is decreasing that fast (4.3 great grandkids for every 100 Koreans)? How, at a basic level, do you keep infrastructure functional? Take immigrants? From where? I suppose developed countries could start to mass import people from Sub Saharan Africa (until they, too, fall below replacement rate) to support their mostly white and Asian, non-working, geriatric populations. That said, I feel like we have learned that importing people from Africa with the explicit purpose of supporting non-working white people is unethical.

Surely at least the suburbs will be safe, right? If the Strong Towns narrative is correct, most suburbs were built on an economic model in which they utilized developers, not tax dollars, to put down roads, electrical systems, and sewer systems—most of which will soon need to be replaced or retrofitted, as they were built during the time of suburban expansion. The Strong Towns argument holds that suburbs don’t generate enough tax revenue to maintain these systems themselves. Basically, suburbs outsourced a huge portion of their spending to developers (who will only shoulder infrastructure costs once) and aren’t equipped to shoulder that financial burden themselves. (This youtube video does a good job covering this topic.)

In a world in which real estate is losing value, the stock market is losing value, and venture capital funds aren’t chasing after growing markets and IPOs, where do people put their money? This is a really interesting thought experiment. I don’t have any solid answers yet but it would seem like being somehow financially invested in breeding populations of humans would be the only safe investment. This could either mean good things—investing in one’s community—or bad things like slavery 2.0 (I expect a bit of each will play out throughout the world).

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