Our new workshop, Autonomous Strategy Lab (a follow up to Autonomous Strategy, but also a good place to start if you haven’t done a workshop with us yet) is coming up in June. Read more about the workshop here, and email us at info@nemesis.global if you want to be on the early bird list. Enrollment opens soon.Youth is in decline – this time literally, rather than figuratively.With other crises and narratives du jour dominating headlines, plummeting worldwide birth rates aren’t really getting the attention they deserve, considering their magnitude and wider societal impact.South Korea, for example, has a fertility rate of 0.78 births per woman, the lowest in the world. If this trend continues (and nothing so far suggests that it wouldn’t), in 40 years or so South Korea’s population will fall by 50% (and another 50% in 80 years, and another 50% in 120 years…). It’s an extreme example, but the same trend persists across the urbanized world1. In the US, Japan, China, Europe, Russia, the Middle East, Latin America, and South East Asia, fertility rates everywhere are below replacement rate. Some large cities in China have fertility rates as low as 0.4 (and there’s speculation the real numbers are significantly lower): hardly any babies are being born.Interestingly enough, once a society’s fertility rate has started to decline, none have been able to meaningfully reverse the trend.So far the conversation around birth rates has predominantly been framed as a binary left vs. right choice: pitting climate concerns and a positive vision of degrowth against ethnonationalist natalism. (Elon Musk isn’t helping here.) This simplistic framing obscures a more universal and pressing question, which is how complex societies can continue to function, or even fundamentally exist, with fewer and fewer people maintaining and managing them. Are we accidentally on track towards…extinction?Luckily, that’s outside of our scope. What we’re concerned with at Nemesis HQ is the waning influence o