The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]

1. Move domestic production and jobs to lesser developed countries to increase profits.

2. Open the gates for mass immigration under the guise of openness and empathy to import wage slaves for the service sector and use every media channel to ostracize anyone who utters the slightest doubt about this policy.

3. Aggressively push DEI and gender ideology to alienate the social-democratic left from the academic left and drown out any other popular left topics like worker's rights or class warfare.

4. Amplify polarization on social media by creating as many conflicts as possible (left vs right, old vs young, men vs women, natives vs immigrants, ...).

5. Promote a right-wing populist party and trick enough people into voting for it.

6. Move the tax burden from the rich to the middle and lower class and remove regulations and restrictions on companies while ignoring all the other problems.

7. Establish surveillance and authoritarian rule under the guise of safety.

Everyone in this so-called culture war is being played, so maybe it's time to stop being smug about being smarter than the other side and start contemplating if there is any common idea that we can agree on that allows us to go forward.

This needs to be carefully qualified. Infant mortality rates for the first 99% of human history were so shockingly, stupefyingly high, that a woman might only expect to have about three of her children survive to adulthood (and maternal mortality rates were also so high that a woman wouldn't expect to survive more childbirths than 5 or 6).

What this means is that the human population was only marginally above replacement for the majority of human history. Human population didn't explode until the medicinal revolution.

But, once you dig into the figures, you realize it'd be a miracle if Nigeria has up to half of the population it claims.

Every single census that's been conducted has been marred by controversy, with states trying to buff up their populations to make their ethnicity/region look bigger and more important.

But, proxies like registered BVN (like Social Security Number, but for bank accounts) are just under 70M. Registered phone lines (~240M; each person usually owns 3-5) are similarly lackluster. Domestic demand is nothing to write home about if you run a CPG business. Zoom into a satellite view of a city that's supposed to have ~700k to 1M people and it looks like a suburb - just scanty.

Nigeria's most populous city claims to have 20M people - 2* the population of Seoul, one of the most urbanized, dense, vertical cities in the world, meanwhile, Lagos is just a sprawling slum.

Personally, I feel population counts across Africa are grossly overestimated. A good estimate would be 600-800M, but where's the fun in that when we can fearmonger about overpopulation?

and haha on “The “rebound” in future fertility for low-fertility countries is consistent with an expectation of continued progress toward gender equality and women’s empowerment and improving social and economic opportunities for young people and families.”

I speculate that a different thing is happening in Europe. Every time I hear European takes on issues, it feels like Europe is post-religion, post-values, post-meaning. Everything is relative; pleasure is the only personal goal, and not harming others is the only external goal. Why even have kids? Why get married? It's a lot of work, plus there's a widely-held belief that Europeans/Westerners in general bear generational guilt because of what colonizers did in the 1500s anyway, so it feels virtuous to voluntarily decline as a civilization, freeing up more oil and resources for the developing world.

The US and Canada seem more traditional in that a lot of people would really like to have kids and don't think it's pointless, but it's just impractical for economic reasons, and they're choosing to allocate what little resources they have towards a more comfortable life (relatively!) instead of having an economic struggle -- OR they do have kids but because they wait for economic certainty first, they start much later and as a result have way fewer per couple.

Of course, North America has a very loud segment that agrees with the European degrowth narrative detailed above, and Europe has a loud segment which goes against it.