Lionel Nation - The Depopulation BOMBSHELL: Why Global Birth Rates Collapse

Dec. 2, 2025 - Lionel Nation

26:00

The Depopulation BOMBSHELL: Why Global Birth Rates Collapse

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	I'm about to tell you a reality that I'm telling you I know everything in your body, everything, every part of your core existence is going to say, oh, no, this can't be.
	Here he goes again, here he goes again with his crazy ideas.
	Oh, this is crazy.
	Because this will seem, believe it or not, counterintuitive until you really look at the facts, okay?
	I want you, my friend, to picture walking through your hometown, your hometown in maybe 30 years.
	Just imagine this.
	You're perambulating about, and every playground is silent.
	Swings hang still, but the schoolyard you attended is boarded up.
	And the only people on the street are old, walking slowly, shuffling about past rows of houses that no one wants to buy.
	And not because of war, and not because of plague and pestilence, whatever pestilence is, but because children simply stopped arriving.
	Now that is not a science fiction script.
	It is already reeled in parts of Japan and Italy and Germany.
	And the same arithmetic is now baked into the future of most of the developed world.
	And very few people are talking about it now.
	Well, nobody that you know, but it's true.
	Replacement fertility, replacement fertility.
	Remember, replacement fertility in rich societies is about 2.1 children per woman.
	You got that?
	2.1 children per woman.
	That is the rate.
	Forget the fact that fathers, we're not going to talk about 2.1 children per father, children, mothers, okay.
	That number keeps, and this is why it's critical, 2.1 replacement fertility, that number keeps a population stable once deaths are counted.
	If you go below it for a sustained period and your population begins to shrink and age, the lower you go below 2.1, the faster the contraction.
	Okay, you got that?
	Okay.
	Listen to this.
	At roughly two children per woman, two, from 2.1 to 2.
	Births take centuries to fall by half, to have HALVE.
	At 1.9, the half-life of your society falls to a few hundred years.
	At 1.8, maybe a century and a half.
	When you drop toward where many nations live today, around 1.4 to 1.3, and you're looking at a halving of births in two generations.
	Countries like South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, are now so low that their number of births halves within a single working life.
	This is incredible.
	And today, about three-quarters of humanity already live in countries below that replacement tipping point.
	Japan, Italy, Germany, Spain, South Korea, much of Eastern Europe, almost all of the industrialized world, and now large parts of Latin America and India.
	Are you listening to this?
	The surface numbers still look crowded because older generations haven't died yet.
	That is the fill-up effect.
	You see, total population growth, total population growth, only because large cohorts from the past are living longer, okay?
	That means, let me say this again.
	You see it, you notice it, you're aware of it, you're aware, you see total population growth only because large groups and factions from the past are living longer, okay?
	Which is nice.
	It kind of creates an illusion, hey, everything's okay.
	That's because codgers like me are taking better care of ourselves.
	We're living longer.
	But underneath that, the base of the pyramid has eroded considerably.
	Now listen to me carefully.
	Here's a simple measure, a simple measure that exposes it.
	Take everyone around age 50, okay?
	The people who will soon retire.
	Then count newborns, the future workers who will support them.
	In a healthy structure, there are more babies than 50-year-olds, right?
	Makes sense.
	It's intuitive.
	This is factual.
	It's axiomatic.
	Now, in country after country, the opposite is now true.
	Certain regions of Spain, Germany, and Italy already have barely one infant for every two, every two near retirees, okay?
	So let me say this again, because sometimes the numbers, when you throw them out there, this is tough.
	But in these areas, they already have barely one infant for every two near retirees, 50-year-olds.
	South Korea has a birth gap near 70%.
	By 2020, most of Europe had more 50-year-olds than newborns.
	By 2020, 39 American states did as well.
	Are you seeing where this is going?
	Now, what follows is very interesting.
	What follows has a rather grim logic, which we must attend.
	First, maternity wards quiet down.
	Then schools merge and close.
	Japan has already shut thousands.
	Local businesses lose both staff and customers.
	Property values decay in places no developer wants to touch.
	You start to see what many visitors report in Japanese provincial cities today.
	Long shopping streets with metal shutters, a few pharmacies and funeral homes, still open, of course, and almost no children in sight.
	Apartment blocks that are full of people, but nearly all of them old, many of them alone.
	Now, if you look at this correctly, economically, the spiral is just as harsh.
	Fewer workers must support more retirees.
	Pension systems were built on a wide base of workers paying for a smaller group of elders.
	Now, now they face the opposite.
	To keep promises, governments must raise taxes, cut benefits, print money, or all three.
	Public debts become harder to service because each year there are fewer taxpayers to shoulder the interest.
	Now, policymakers talk about saving the day with automation and AI and all this, but machines do not pay payroll tax.
	They don't raise children or sit at the bedside of the dying.
	It's time to get grim.
	Time to get realistic, my friend.
	Now, here's the twist: almost no one notices.
	This collapse is not driven mainly by small families.
	For mothers who do have children, average family size in many places has barely changed in 30 years.
	What?
	Two, three, even four children per mother still appear at roughly the same rates.
	The collapse comes from a different piece of math, a different perspective, a different vector.
	A rising share of people who never become parents at all.
	That's the metric.
	In Japan in the mid-1970s, childlessness went from an uncommon event, excuse me, from an uncommon event and outcome to a common one within a few short years, without any change in how many children mothers had once they started.
	Why?
	Italy showed nearly the same pattern at nearly the same time.
	Later, South Korea saw childlessness spike after its late 1990s, after rather the late 90s, after the currency crisis.
	Now, after the global financial crisis of 2007 and 2008, countries like the United States, Canada, Ireland, and others saw the same trend.
	People did not switch in large numbers from three children to one.
	They switched from vague plans for future children to permanent childlessness.
	Why?
	Why?
	Well, that's another issue.
	The why is important.
	But look at the facts still.
	The common driver in all of this is delayed parenthood.
	Demographers can plot something like a vitality curve.
	The number of first-time numbers, first-time mothers, rather should say, at every age.
	In the stable culture, that curve is smooth, peaking in the 20s, declining through the 30s, and nearly gone in the 40s.
	Kind of makes sense.
	Well, one would think.
	When a society pushes family formation deeper into the 30s, that curve stretches and flattens.
	The later the average age of first birth, the more people simply never get there.
	Fertility declines sharply with age.
	Relationships become harder to form and sustain.
	Careers in debt absorb more years, more time.
	The window closes while many still believe they have time.
	But they don't.
	Starting to make sense?
	That is not morality, it's probability.
	Now, add the ideological part no one in polite company likes to talk about, okay?
	For more than a half century, the most powerful voices in philanthropy and global policy have preached the opposite fear.
	Early 20th century eugenicists, including figures like Margaret Sanger, described high fertility among the poor, the disabled, and disfavored groups as a social threat.
	Birth control was marketed not only as empowerment, but as a population quality control.
	After the Nazi horrors made the word eugenics rather poisonous, much of the infrastructure quietly rebranded.
	Family planning programs were directed at high fertility countries.
	Global institutions sponsored campaigns, good campaigns, whose explicit goal was to reduce birth rates.
	Books like The Population Bomb turned apocalyptic predictions into pop culture.
	Remember that.
	Remember Paul Ehrlich?
	Oh, I do.
	He was always on Donahue, and you saw him all the time.
	Paul Ehrlich went on late-night TV at every show you can imagine, warning, warning of mass famines.
	He called for strict limits on family size, even flirted with coercive policies.
	He founded organizations dedicated to zero population growth.
	Why I'm doing this?
	I have no idea.
	School materials, news specials, foundation grants all amplified the same message.
	It was all presented as neutral science and humanitarian concern, kind of like global warming.
	We don't have any interest in this.
	We just want to point out the facts.
	Right.
	Now, the constant theme was that human beings, especially children, were a problem, a problem to be managed.
	That's right.
	What you might think of societal replenishment.
	Oh, no, no, no, there's a problem.
	Now, imagine what the drumbeat does over two or three generations.
	Housing gets more expensive.
	Two-income couples become a necessity.
	Work hours lengthen.
	College, then graduate school, then years of career climbing become the norm before anyone considers marriage or children.
	Meanwhile, the culture quietly, quietly shames large families as irresponsible in a crowded world and treats choosing no children as an enlightened approach.
	The same way they would look at if you drove a Tesla, you know, you capitalist hog, you pig.
	Societal pressure.
	Excuse me.
	Women in particular are told to treat the peak fertility years as the time for maximum career and educational pushing.
	Don't be saddled by motherhood.
	You can have it too.
	Remember the Rockefeller Foundation?
	I talk about that all the time.
	Of pushing women.
	You want women to live.
	Remember Virginia Slim's, Edward Bernays?
	I could go on.
	All of this because they can always have kids later.
	Fertility is no problem.
	Plus, you'll always be attractive, always be marketable, and everything's groovy the longer you wait.
	No comment.
	Now, it's the perfect recipe, the perfect recipe for pushing the vitality curve past the safe zone.
	No conspiracy memo required.
	Once the overpopulation narrative is institutionalized, every incentive, every speech and policy nudge lines up, up, up.
	Did I say nudge?
	I meant nudge.
	I like nudge better.
	Nudge.
	They nudge it up in the same direction.
	Delay, limit, fear.
	Combine that with economic shocks like the oil crisis in the 70s or the, excuse me, the, I'm dying here.
	Speaking of the elderly, or the financial crisis in 2008, and you get a clear pattern.
	Now, whenever young enough feel the ground shake under them, they delay family formation.
	Whenever anything changes, whenever there's any kind of oops, you know, that baby boom, baby boom.
	What is the boom?
	Well, that was them.
	World War II had that effect.
	Today, we get scared.
	We stay inside in our pajamas and our slides, getting, you know, door dash and watching, binge-watching Netflix.
	It's that post-COVID lunacy.
	By the way, don't think that didn't affect this.
	Now, what happens is you have to understand this.
	When you have this, when they delay family formation, a significant faction, a significant population portion never catches up.
	Now, that is why.
	That is why no country has yet reversed that once it has lived a generation below replacement.
	Did you hear what I said?
	Let me say that again.
	No country has yet reversed this effect once it has lived a generation below replacement.
	Baby bonuses, parental leave, tax credits, they produce small temporary bumps.
	But the deeper pattern doesn't move because you're not dealing with individual choices in isolation.
	You're dealing with a culture, a culture-wide schedule shift.
	Reproductive synchrony breaks down.
	People no longer, they no longer move into dating and marriage and parenthood together.
	Courtship scatters across a wide age range.
	And because we've had this detachment from individual contact, everybody swiping and tindering or whatever the hell they do, hooking up versus courtship and love.
	It's a thing of the past.
	The odds today of finding a partner, and especially over time, drop precipitously.
	Unplanned childlessness becomes a normal outcome.
	Think about this.
	And I haven't mentioned anything about the effect of, dare I say, parental rights or reproductive rights or abortion.
	That's something else.
	But work that into the equation.
	Now here's the really unsettling part, as if what I've told you before is okay.
	This didn't happen in a vacuum.
	The same elites who once warned that the planet would collapse under the weight of human numbers now face the opposite reality that entire civilizations could shrink into permanent demographic winter.
	What did they say?
	Never mind.
	Forget what I said.
	I changed my mind.
	Many of these folks can't admit the pivot because that would mean, oh, that would mean confessing that the old narrative was at best reckless and at worst an enormous social experiment deliberately carried out on billions of people.
	But that couldn't be right.
	That would be a conspiracy theory.
	So what is to be done practically right now at the level of real lives?
	Listen carefully.
	This is what needs to be done.
	First, change what you tell the young.
	They need honest odds, not fairy tales.
	They want the truth.
	They should know clearly that fertility drops with age more sharply than the culture admits.
	I know we've got to tell them this, but it's true.
	We've got to tell them that assisted reproductive technologies are not magic.
	And that in many low fertility societies, less than half of women who reach their late 20s, less than half of women who reach their late 20s without a child will ever become mothers.
	And that is not to scare them, but to let them plan with eyes open.
	And by the way, let's also take into account adoption, which is a wonderful thing, helps, but those are children who are extant.
	They're being adopted.
	Do you see what I'm saying?
	So it's a great thing, but those aren't new children.
	Those are children who were there that you have assisted in raising, which is again a wonderful thing.
	Second thing, rehabilitate.
	No, resuscitate the idea that forming a family young can be wise and honorable.
	The script that says career first, family last, is not a law of nature.
	It's a construct.
	It's a society that values its future.
	And it will make room for earlier parenthood through shorter credentialing paths, more flexible early careers, community-level support for young couples, and less financial punishment for marrying and having kids.
	This is a societal.
	This is a moral change.
	The third aspect of this, stop treating children as environmental toxins.
	Challenge this reflexive talk about overpopulation in schools and media and policy.
	Stop it.
	Stop that Greta Tunberg kind of axiomatic patellar, Pavlovian response to global warming.
	Oh, you know, the ever the omnipresent polar bear huddling with his mommy on an ice cube that was an iceberg.
	Stop it.
	Stop the semiotics and the symbology of doom.
	You know, you can care about stewardship of resources and still admit that empty playgrounds and shuttered and closed schools and armies of lonely elders shuffling about are a moral crisis.
	The message has to lift from there are too many of you to we need you.
	Number four, I think it's four.
	I hope you're keeping track of this.
	Act where you live.
	This is not only about national legislation.
	It's as immediate as how you respond when friends have a third child.
	Whether you support young parents and your family, whether your church or community group treats family formation as central, critical, or something incidental.
	Babysitting, practical help, shared housing, real intergenerational networks, critical mom, grandparents, uncles, aunts, intergenerational networks, all of that makes children possible and fun and productive for people who might otherwise conclude they have no support.
	Child rearing is scary.
	Number five, I hope to God it's number five.
	Vote and organize with long-term demography in mind.
	That means pension reform that doesn't eat the young alive.
	It means tax and housing policy that doesn't punish family size.
	It means schools and zoning and transport built around the assumption that you actually want kids in your cities.
	It means resisting policies that sell permanent population decline as progress.
	This is insanity.
	And finally, finally, dear friend, if you are young or advising the young, take this personally.
	The system that told you to fear babies will not bear the cost if you reach 40 and realize that the window has closed.
	That grief will be yours alone.
	Nobody will be there to console you.
	All right?
	Your therapy ferret, whatever, and some edibles are all you'll have.
	You don't have to follow the script that was written in the era of Ehrlich and Sanger.
	Those guys are dead.
	You can decide that if you want a family, you will not treat it as an optional hobby after every other little box is checked.
	Now remember one thing.
	Not everybody should have kids, so please, please.
	Kids involve responsibility.
	Just so you can do your part to sow your seed, to spread the population.
	We're not talking about that.
	We're talking about responsibility and raising them.
	It's an investment.
	Okay, don't take this the wrong way.
	Okay?
	We're not talking about sperm donors doling out specimens.
	Anyway, that's a disgusting thought.
	The problem is the numbers are already plotted.
	The vitality curve that I mentioned, the birth gaps, the aging pyramids, they're not predictions anymore.
	These are trajectories.
	And the only real question, the only real question is whether enough people will reject the old overpopulation paradigm, you know, the programming.
	Remember that human beings are an asset, not a burden.
	And we build a culture where it is possible to say yes to life and time.
	I sound like wham.
	To choose life?
	Anyway, if you do nothing, if you just sit back and say, okay, the yesterland future arrives by default.
	If you act, if you pay attention, if you're sentient, at least in your own choices, in your own community, in your own politics, you push back against a century of learned fear and quiet population control.
	You will not fix the world alone, but you may give it something it's running out of very fast.
	You may actually give it children.
	And what's so interesting, my friend, is that this is up to you to pay attention to.
	This is a part of our, it's a reemergence.
	It's a reconnection with the fundamentals.
	Call them conservatives.
	Call it whatever you want.
	But it's true.
	We're going back to the basics of love.
	The idea of having progeny and prodigies and children and families.
	It's okay.
	It's okay.
	And there is a biological narrative.
	You have to have children when you are fertile.
	And you tend to be more fertile when you are young.
	And sometimes that interferes with this thing called career.
	That's all.
	That's all.
	Think about this.
	What do you think?
	Let me ask you the obligatory, please like this.
	Did you like what I said?
	Good.
	Like this video.
	Send it to others.
	Subscribe to the channel.
	About 70% of the people who watch our videos don't even subscribe.
	Got to stop that.
	I put a series of questions afterwards.
	I want to hear in your discussions section what you think about this.
	Why this is critical.
	Why this is important.
	This isn't kidding around.
	This isn't some theoretical conspiracy theory.
	This is real.
	This is a perpetuation of humanity.
	This is existential.
	Capish.
	Okay, my friend.

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