The fertility bear market

Everyone seems to have an explanation to why fertility rates are nose diving, yet know one seems confident enough to say they know the reason.

One thing most authors agree on is it's something that needs fixing – assuming there's something wrong with it.

To be clear, I would very much love my kids to grow surrounded by other kids. But the more I read about this topic the more it seems like a population adjustment that nature has just deployed without asking us arrogant human beings.

The road to Mount Olympus.

If we look at the data, most WEIRD countries are below the replacement rate. This means we are only a few generations ahead of a net decline in the population.

If the trend continues, the scarcity[1] some feel will soon turn into abundance. Regardless of what they feel.

The difference between the poor and the rich was abismal not very long ago. Yet this is something very few notice as the gap closed through several generations. A varied diet with access to fresh fruits, or high end meat where not generally available to the poor 100 years ago. And only 50 years ago Fashion was not a thing you could afford with an average payslip.

Knowledge has always been a scarce resource, one that could make you rich. With the explosion of the internet as the foundation, and the impulse of AI now, knowledge at scale will be available to every human being on earth (and beyond). Until recently, the only way to achieve greater knowledge was putting together sets of very smart individuals, it could only be transferred across individuals¹, pulling rare knowledge from those who held it in custody.

Large populations raised the chances of smart people collaborating together. As labor costs drop, chances that people that spend time thinking together about how to solve hard problem raised.

With agents, one single individual can now achieve things that were only possible with smart, high performing, large groups of people.

I don’t have an explanation to why fertility rates drop. But maybe, and only maybe, nature is just in a bear market. Where the gross number of individuals or the access they have to natural resources doesn’t matter as much as how they interact with one another. Maybe the human race has peaked in numbers, and now doesn’t need that many people to make progress, or just to be happy, to feel fulfillment.

Footnotes

1. Being part of a select group of people has always been an unfair advantage since the dawn of time. ↩