Britain is running out of babies

> ... falling birth rates present a crisis which needs to be addressed by urgent cultural change.

Not this ** again. Ignore the doomsayers, there is no crisis. Falling birthrates is a good thing. Living in a world of dwindling finite resources is, in fact, a huge problem. We can only engineer our way out of problems for so long. Feeding 8 bullion people? Because we enrich the soul with nitrogen and phosphorus, but we can't keep that up forever. Eventually soil erosion will limit it food supply. What happens when the oil runs out? Wind and solar aren't replacing it quickly enough. Whether the author likes it or not, climate change is still getting worse and we're not doing enough to stop global warming.

There's not enough young people to care for the elderly? How about we take some of the millions of young people working bullshit jobs, and put them to work taking care of the elderly? Or fixing our crippling infrastructure? Or providing a quality education to the children we do have? Can we really not spare some of the young people working in sales and advertising? No, clearly it's far more important to have our young people working in the new Starbucks. Sorry if no one is around when your grandma falls over and breaks her hip, but I really need my pumpkin spice latte.

There is no birthrate crisis, only horribly misaligned economic incentives.

Depopulate by people's choice, or depopulate by massive war over resources at some point. Choose wisely. Can't run the Ponzi scheme forever. It sounds like no children are immigrating either? Maybe understand what's keeping newcomers away.

They made a movie about it already Set in 2027

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Men

The adage about South Korea is striking. What is the purpose of intense competition if the result is oblivion? Its difficult to imagine that a South Korea with 8 million people will still be South Korea.

My pet theory for why fertility is falling is more sophisticated than the likely incorrect theories that the economy is bad or people are struggling economically.

My guess is that humans want to have children who belong to the same socioeconomic class as themselves or higher. Mate preferences in humans is strongly driven by socioeconomics, so I think this is plausible. In the world we live in today, it is extremely difficult for anyone to guarantee this for their children. In today's world, across countries, there is so much flux - many children are at a higher income percentile than their parents, and an equal number are at a lower income percentile. There is so much risk in having children.

So people choose to have the one child who they put all their resources in. Or no child at all, because they think they will create a child who is at a lower income percentile.

This theory sidesteps counterargument that we are better than the past in the absolute sense. It's a relative theory. Humans want their progeny to be relatively better than themselves.

I would love to see data on this.

There's only a shortage if you assume the current economic model which requires growth.

The environment would certainly be better off with fewer people.

Maybe, I'm just irredeemably liberal, but thinking of "ethnic continuity" as something worth preserving gives me the ick.

Britain is such a stark case of a nation going from proudly being top of the world, to an absolutely determined self-destruction.

I've no doubt that countries like China have people in government who are thoroughly studying them, to make sure they avoid it happening to them.

Meanwhile Britain is busy trying to deport people.