The pattern is well established. As societies grow wealthier and more secular, and woman gain greater agency, birthrates come down.

Well, urbanisation and our inability to plan cities for kids might, just might, have something to do with it. In the town I work 1/6 of families that live in urban neighbourhoods have kids, while it’s 4/10-5/10 in areas of bungalows with proper gardens.

Add an unstable political/medical/economical environment and housing policy becomes relevant. In good times it might be ok to have kids while living in a city flat and plan for moving to greener pastures as it becomes necessary, but not if you can’t count on having a job when it’s time to buy a new house. And with the housing market being what it is today for first time buyers…

No wonder nobody wants to have a baby!

I’d say there might be an ‘optimum’ somewhere in between - on average slightly lower rate than replacement, aiming for sustainable decline without crisis, preserving cultural heritage - as human cultural diversity matters as well as biodiversity. But we lack intelligent discussion of this topic - partly as it’s hard for people to imagine intuitively how small annual changes integrate over time.I’d like to further develop my interactive model - designed for climate projections but including a demographic model, to help people experiment for themselves, including regarding potential changes in global migration fluxes.

Even a pro-natalist like Morland, who describes himself as “unapologetically rightwing”, accepts that humanity must have a population limit. But he argues that its decline needs to be better managed and should be delayed until AI and robotics can replace labour.

So let me understand Morland’s view here. He believes in right-wing, thus most likely is against government assistance for new families (I feel i may be taking a leap here, being Canadian and feeding my view of right wing here). However he doesn’t want people to give up on having kids prior to AI and robotics being able to replace labour.

Both of these things are years off. Some AI skeptics feel AI is decades off being able to replace labour in a significant way. Tesla recently had robots that couldnt even handle being bartenders without people controlling them. Thus his answer is… to nag people to go through worse lives and have kids (due to the costs/time commitments, I’m not trying to Slag off having kids here, the joy you get is wonderful, I’m just pointing out the costs and sacrifices) until they fix the issues? I know they didn’t write an answer attributed to him, but I really don’t understand his position here. We seem to hit a point where I, personally, would be questioning my own rightwing beliefs.