Katherine Boyle

Those jobs, which used to be filled by service workers, there's no one who's going to be able to fill that.

On every economic dimension, if you do not have a generation of workers, of people paying into the system, social security, I mean, social security is a huge issue, but if you don't have people paying into the system, doing the labor, being able to do the things for the elder generation, society starts crumbling.

And then there's, of course, the social ramifications of not having families.

I'm a firm believer that the most important institution in America is the family.

the family used to exist to take care of the people who were weakest, right?

Like, it's like, you know, you used to have these big families, and, you know, sometimes the weakest child would still be living with mom and dad at home, and that was okay.

You know, you sort of had empathy for them, but it was like it was the family's responsibility

to take care of these people.

We quickly moved that to now it's the state's responsibility to take care of these people who may be sick in some way, may be unable to provide for themselves in some way, might have psychological issues.

Now the state has to take care of them, which is why you see a lot of these people on the street now.

because the state does a terrible job of taking care of these people.

But as fewer and fewer children exist, it's like you're not going to have a society that can provide for itself, that can continue into perpetuity.

And, you know, the exponential decline of this, too, where it's like, it sounds, oh, well, we went from 2.1 to 1.6.

That can't be that bad.

I mean, in a couple generations, that means that our population has shrunk by half.

Yeah, and the best example of this, and I wish I had the numbers in front of me, is South Korea.

So South Korea, I think their birth rate is the lowest of any country, any industrialized country, I think it's 0.9.

And when you have fewer and fewer people, no one's doing the jobs.

Japan is also heading this way, their birth rate's quite low.

The only argument that people make as the bright side of this that could potentially make up for both the labor loss and also just the civilizational collapse is robotics.