Having a median age at first birth below 26 in the United States today is outstanding. West Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Arkansas & many other States have TFRs between 1.6-1.75 & median maternal ages at first birth under 26. It’s not over yet. Not by a long shot.

https://x.com/charliesmirkley/status/2018412563877273969

The degree to which the global fertility decline is being underestimated in projections is astounding. China is already below 1.0 & Türkiye below 1.4.

The world will probably be below replacement before 2030 not ~2040 as shown in UN projections.

The world will very likely see peak human within the next 35 years.

The solution to the global demographic crisis will never be ever larger pronatalist cash handouts, tax incentives, or cheaper housing. The solution is giving those aged 22-35 hope for the future. Childbearing in the developed world today is a vote of confidence in tomorrow.

This helps explain why conservatives in the US have more children than liberals & why South Koreans, Taiwanese,& Thais have so few offspring. If young people don’t see themselves doing well (or at least doing better than their parents) their incentive to have kids diminishes.

Ground zero in demographically disintegrating South Korea is the country’s second largest city of Busan.

Busan in 2035 will be a city of sharp contrasts: booming coastal districts, hollowing inland neighborhoods, a shrinking population, & one of the oldest age profiles of any major city on Earth.

More than 40% of residents will be age 65 or older!

The city will be reliant on immigrants from Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, & the Philippines.

It will also have 500,000 less inhabitants than today for a total population far below 3,000,000.

Bus routes and other mass transit options will be cut back, young people will continue fleeing to Seoul, & schools will close in large numbers.

All of this will be readily apparent to any visitor.

🇹🇼 👶 Taiwanese births continue to fall in January 2026. Huge 8%+ fall! TFR currently sub 0.75, if these declines continue throughout the year expect a TFR of sub 0.70:

Births
2025 Jan 9,495
2026 Jan 8,723 (-8.1%)

https://www.ris.gov.tw/app/portal/2121?sn=26041150&p=1

The “Great Retirement” in the United States caused by the largest wave to leave the workforce in American history is creating tens of millions of job openings for younger Americans aged 18-45. Jobs from electricians to police officers to maritime trades to property managers to HVAC technicians will be abundant and pay more than ever. As thousands upon thousands of retirement communities are built there will be a plethora of jobs supporting those as well as in estate sales and management, financial services, home modification businesses, retirement community operations (including robotics and technology management), construction, insurance adjusting, & local and State government.

We are taking about 30 million replacement jobs from 2025-2040 from Boomers & the oldest Gen Xers retiring & 12 million new jobs created to support Boomers in retirement.

This will play out in East Asia & Europe on a far more dramatic scale as so many jobs are made available to much much smaller follow on generations. While the Zoomer Generation is huge in the United States and can absorb basically all of the incoming Boomer vacancies, Zoomer cohorts in Europe and East Asia are much smaller and there will be a large excess of unfilled jobs. This will both drive wages up & create significant job destruction.

Unfortunately it will also fuel calls from some European and East Asian politicians for mass migration to fill these jobs. Such immigration has an extremely patchy record of being allocated to parts of the labor force where it is actually most needed.

Europe & East Asia may be much better served by going all in to use robotics and AI to replace the most low skill low pay jobs mass immigration usually fills and leaving the higher paying more human centric roles to the smaller Zoomer citizen cohort. Thus they can enjoy better pay and there will be less need for mass immigration which can be societally disruptive.

The under 50 cohort in South Korea is disintegrating at an astonishing pace. Were almost 36 million Koreans aged 0-49 in the RoK when this demographic peaked in 2000. Today there are close to 10 million less. RoK on track to lose more than half its population by end of century.

It is a painful irony the South Korea built one of the most educated, productive, technologically advanced societies on our planet but in doing so, it accidentally created conditions that make many young people feel like life is an uphill marathon they never agreed to run.  In building an economy and academia that places so much emphasis on being the highest performer they sowed the seeds of their own demographic destruction. 

The disintegration of the Warsaw Pact in 1989 kicked off a surge of return migration which continued into the 2000s.  During that time ~9M ethnic Russians, ~3.8M ethnic Germans, & ~1M ethnic Kazakhs returned to their ethnic homelands.  Huge population movements also occurred in the Caucasus & smaller returns of Pontic Greeks & Ingrian Finns from the USSR.

It is extremely likely that Gen Alpha, Zoomers, & Millennials will collectively make up two thirds of the American electorate by the 2032 election.  This demographic is way more up for grabs than people think.  By 2032 they could be largely right/even far right, or progressive, or centrist, or independent (though this is least likely for the youngest cohorts).

Events matter more than anything as they always have. Events shape and radicalize more than any pundit ever accounts for.

The older, largely conservative, voting block of today will be less than a fifth of actual voters by 2032.  Their numbers also decline by almost 2,000,000 annually and the Xers taking their place are far more politically heterogeneous than Silents or older Boomers were.  They also don’t get their news mainly from television. 

Also who remains in the Boomer voting block in 2028 and 2032 is meaningfully different.  Boomers born from 1946-1950 (who are dying out in the largest numbers over the next two to six years) are more traditional, religious, & stable voters than the more secular, less TV consuming, boomers born from 1960-1964.

& don’t forget Silent Generation voters are rapidly disappearing from the electorate, which is horrible news for traditional Republican/Conservative politicians as they were one of the most solid & homogeneous electoral blocks.  In 2024 they were 7% of actual voters & will almost halve by 2028.