Scientists Want 4 Billion People by 2200. They Never Said Which Ones.

The authors, led by Mark Keegan of Columbia University, argue this would ease pressure on natural resources, reduce conflict over scarce goods, and even improve quality of life. A “pro-nature and pro-human strategy."

They insist it must be voluntary. Fertility rates drop when women get options.

Globally, hold the total fertility rate around 1.75 for a long time, and the numbers come down over the next 175 years. Clean.

What the paper does not say is which populations are supposed to do the shrinking.

Fertility rates are not distributed evenly. Most of Europe sits between 1.1 and 1.6 children per woman.

White Americans and Canadians are also well below replacement. East Asia is even lower.

The high-fertility zones are concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Middle East and South Asia, where generally, the IQ rates are on the lower side.

The Western countries that already have sub-replacement native fertility run large immigration systems that import culturally diverse people from the higher-fertility regions.

They also run high-tax, high-transfer welfare states - an average single worker exceeds 45 percent of total labour costs. Add VAT and the effective extraction on the value a typical worker creates routinely pushes past 50 percent.

The fiscal transfer from higher-earning, lower-fertility groups to lower-earning, higher-fertility groups is visible in the national accounts of Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, and others who still bother to publish the numbers by origin.

Over decades the composition of these countries changed. Official projections in the United States have non-Hispanic Whites becoming a minority in the 2040s.

The West is experiencing a collision of value systems.

European and North American societies were built on high social trust, individual responsibility, delayed gratification, low corruption, and a post-Christian ethic.

Large-scale inflows from regions with different religious and social norms clash with this logic.

The shortage of qualified, disciplined, high-trust labor will not be solved by an influx of immigrants with low employment rates.

A smaller global population might ease pressure on resources - Kabul does not "overheat the planet" the way Rotterdam or Houston does.

When developed societies demographically transform into the median of the global South and discuss Sharia Law instead of Physics or Chemistry, the extraction rate often falls for the simple reason that nobody will be able to operate the technology.

Western Europe will be thus become uninhabitable, because it's simply too cold.

Whether that counts as a success depends on whether one prioritizes the biosphere over the continuation of the civilization that produced the scientists writing the papers.

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Replacement strategy.

Western fertility collapsing is not automatically a disaster. A smaller population of high-average-capability people can maintain advanced technology, high living standards, and complex institutions more easily than a larger population of lower-average-capability people. Quantity is not the same as quality.

Instead of accepting a smaller, higher-skill, higher-trust population, Western leaders opened the doors to large-scale migration from regions with significantly lower average measured cognitive ability.

The national IQ estimates are not a secret: most of sub-Saharan Africa clusters in the 70s, much of the Middle East and North Africa in the mid-to-high 80s, while Western Europe and the European-descended populations of North America sit around 95–100.

When we combine:

• differential fertility
• continuous low-skill immigration
• and a welfare system that reduces the economic penalty for low productivity,

we get a predictable downward pressure on the national cognitive distribution - “idiocracy” dynamic.

The same societies that once selected for higher cognitive ability are now selecting in the opposite direction.

Naming this is the ultimate taboo because it violates the governing narrative.

The data gets ignored, pathologized, or explained away with “racism,” “colonialism,” or “poverty”.

We can afford a smaller Western population. We can have technological substitution for labor.

What we cannot do is keep the high-trust, high-complexity systems while steadily lowering the average cognitive and cultural capital of the population through the current migration patterns.