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MontyCarloHall 9 hours ago [-]
This has happened to every single society [*] as it industrializes [0], and offering extensive support and incentives to parents (e.g. as has been tried in Scandinavian countries) does very little to reverse this trend [1, 2].
My hypothesis is that as societies industrialize, they afford their population more and more activities that are simply more fun and rewarding than having children. So many people I know put off having children (or curtailed the number they had) because they were reluctant to give up the activities only available in a childfree/one-and-done life. Ultimately, we are hedonistic creatures, and having kids is antithetical to the myriad hedonic pursuits available in wealthy, industrialized societies.
[*] Israel is the lone exception, due to its Orthodox Jewish population.
I have a different pet explanation from the other replies here, and I honestly don't get why it's not talked about more.
Basically, our economic reality and expectations have come into conflict with biology and human lifespan.
If you want a secured dignified life and basic prerequisites to starting a family, every year that takes a little longer. And these days, almost everyone wants that dignified middle class life before they start a family.
A degree, an advanced degree, a good enough job, sufficient housing, a little fun to boot. Not until 25, 28, 30, 33, 35.
But we're supposed to have children in our early 20s. That's when we're strong and energetic enough, with good backs, and grand parents fit and willing to pitch in.
When we finally feel ready in our mid 30s, we find that time has conspired against us. Our parents are far away and often ailing and demanding care and attention. We have less energy and more stress and dread the lost sleep. We have the wisdom and worldliness to know just how hard this is going to be. And once we've metabolised all those things, that's when we realize that conception is no longer a question of a great night out and a few drinks. How many kids will be born at the end of that gauntlet? We're finding out right now.
scoofy 4 hours ago [-]
This is really the message of Abundance.
If you want people to have kids, you need to make sure they are economically secure by the time they are of childbearing age... which means before they are 30. To do that, you cannot have supply constrained zero-sum shortage anywhere in society. It means that the cost of an apartment needs to be at-or-below the cost to build that apartment so people can just save up and buy one early on in their career.
We need to not just allowing housing to get built, but actually we need to go as far as subsiding housing that nobody needs so that it's built before that need ever arises.
This is effectively impossible in a democratic society, and we are going to learn just how impossible it is as western society slowly collapses under the weight of its own social programs. It's honestly horrifying to watch.
broken-kebab 2 hours ago [-]
It's 2026 now and we know for sure that applying purely economic stimuli did nothing substantial to birthrate anywhere. FWIW kids of rich parents do not procreate somehow better even if they are not constrained by housing market.
linkregister 6 minutes ago [-]
Early childhood public spending as a percentage of GDP has a strong positive correlation with fertility. That is, among nations that have already experienced the fertility drop associated with women's employment.
Economic stimulus does nothing about affordability of goods in a shortage. Quite the opposite, economic stimulus just causes inflation for goods in a shortage. Which is exactly what we’ve seen for 15 years.
broken-kebab 1 hours ago [-]
It's a bit of evasion. If you support the claim that it's housing which keeps Western societies birthrate low, you building your theory on the same sand of "economy prevents youth from having kids".
scoofy 52 minutes ago [-]
Income is not wealth. The crisis is caused by the inability for the median income here to build wealth. That people can’t separate the two is a large part of the problem.
As long as your saving is being eaten by asset inflation, no matter how fast you’re running, you’re still on a treadmill.
echelon 42 minutes ago [-]
The economic argument is oversold. Poor people have kids more than any other demographic.
Smartphones are why we don't have kids.
Unlimited dopamine is why we don't have kids.
The internet is why we don't have kids.
Women like having fun and independence and don't want to be stay at home nannies.
Modern life is TOO FUN.
Fun is why there are no more babies.
Babies are not fun.
Babies are what you do in the 1950's when you're bored out of your mind with nothing to do.
Babies are what you do when you have to wait until next week for your Reader's Digest to arrive in the mail.
Babies are the anti-dopamine.
For the first time in history, we're not bored out of our fucking minds 24/7. Our brains are fully occupied.
There isn't space for babies now that we have the internet.
----
Thought experiment: if you had five million dollars extra right now, would you have a kid tonight?
The answer is probably "fuck no".
And you know why.
Look at the countries still having kids - they're mostly places where women don't have equal rights and smartphone / internet penetration is low.
scoofy 24 minutes ago [-]
This is an unfalsifiable pet theory. It is hardly worth discussing.
peyton 1 hours ago [-]
Yep, the real answer’s electricity.
jrmg 3 hours ago [-]
This is really the message of Abundance.
I both liked Abundance and think there’s truth to what you’re saying.
But it wasn’t what I took away from the book (perhaps it was in there - but what I really got was ‘for a better future we need to stop shooting ourselves in the foot, and be prepared to enthusiastically think of and promote the greater good rather than protecting every single valuable individual thing’)
scoofy 2 hours ago [-]
I mean, I agree with what you're saying, but it misses that abundance means abundance. Consumer staples should cost near the price of production, and where margins are out of control, the government should step in and end the rent-seeking... that is what abundance is. If we live in a society where there is no price appreciation in owning an apartment to rent because another apartment can be build next door, then we live in a society where your dollar goes further, and cannot be captured by the wealthy cornering the market.
What we have now is the opposite. We know that housing demand will rise in the future, simply because there will be more people. Instead of the rich investing in housing production to meet this need, we have the rich investing in existing housing because we have effectively stopped production, thus the rich can capture all that value in price appreciation from rent-seeking alone (technically more of it), instead of wasting their time operating a business that builds things.
mullingitover 1 hours ago [-]
> we have the rich investing in existing housing because we have effectively stopped production
In my quite affluent city, the most affluent neighborhood has yard signs up every fifty feet expressing that they are furious that the city might develop city-owned parking lots (which are nowhere near their neighborhood) to be high density housing.
One-bedroom apartments in the city center are going for over $3,000 per month.
The rich aren't simply locking up existing housing, their principal concern is preventing any housing from being created, even if it has no effect on them.
yongjik 34 minutes ago [-]
I think there should be a relatively simple solution. Tax the homeowners proportional to their homes' market value. Either you get enough tax revenue to build more houses, or the tax burden is too high for those NIMBY to remain at their beautiful suburban homes, and their houses will be back on the market.
But no, when we propose that, all those affluent bourgeois feeding on the young are suddenly poor grandmas just wanting to live the rest of their lives in peace.
Make up your mind, people. Are we going to fix the problem, or are we going to blame Jeff Bezos because some suburban schmucks oppose building apartments. Frankly I don't think Jeff Bezos even cares about apartments. (He has enough money to buy a city block, why would he care.) But it sure feels more righteous to hate Jeff Bezos than argue about real estate tax.
scoofy 45 minutes ago [-]
“A society grows great when old men build five-over-ones whose shade will immediately cover their favorite park bench for 4 days per year.”
pj_mukh 3 hours ago [-]
Agreed with all of this but,
"cost of an apartment needs to be at-or-below the cost to build that apartment"
That's not true, its that the cost to build the apartment is far too high and the cost is totally passed on to a the public, thereby hovering up any disposable income that might go towards having a child.
There can be a profit margin, but the cost needs to be low.
scoofy 3 hours ago [-]
My point is only that we can see the value capture of the housing shortage by looking at the delta of housing development COGS and housing prices. I generally agree with you that there is plenty of room for profit margin, but when we see housing prices diverging significantly from lowest-cost construction prices, then we can measure our shortage.
My main point is that, because housing takes a very long time to build en masse, you'd want the housing to start being built before people need it.
It's like any other strategic reserve we have. Since demand can spike, and we can rarely see the spikes coming, but we know they will come, just be prepared by subsidizing the development of that thing. We do it for food, oil, weapons, vaccines, you name it. If we know we will need it in the future anyway, and it take a long time to produce, we create strategic reserves. We should do that for housing.
jiggawatts 2 hours ago [-]
I’m in my fourties’ unable to afford a three bedroom apartment in my city with an income in the top two or three percentile. I’ve had boomers tell me with a straight face that “they did it” so it can’t be that hard despite a 5x increase in housing costs relative to income.
I’d have to spend every single post tax dollar for two decades to afford an actual house. Not counting interest and other taxes and council rates. I’d have to work for 70+ years to afford a nice house in a nice suburb!
“Have more children!”
“Make housing affordable!”
“My retirement fund is all in property and banks!”
There’s your problem.
gradstudent 57 minutes ago [-]
> nice house in a nice suburb!
There's your problem. Everyone wants to live in the same set of well established well resourced neighbourhoods. But there's too many of us. Go out in the 'burbs and accept that owning a house implies a commute you will dislike (among a host of other compromises).
vkou 18 minutes ago [-]
Meanwhile, I grew up in an 800 sq ft apartment that housed my parents, my father's parents, me, and my sibling.
Objectively, you don't need a house with a lawn and a back yard to have children, and have them grow up healthy and successful.
46 minutes ago [-]
shimman 3 hours ago [-]
No, that is you are reading into what abundance is. Abundance is mostly neoliberal economic ideas repackaged for the current iteration of consultants where workers are entirely excluded from the processes, unions are the enemy, and regulation is actually evil this time (pinky swear this time!).
Thank fuck voters aren't buying this garbage.
I also find your retort equally misleading. Social housing is a solved issue. The problem is that we are letting greedy developers dictate the type of housing to be built. Kinda what the book abundance never mentions, who actually are the ones with power and how they are wielding it to thwart progress.
Blaming democratic societies is even more frankly bizarre too. America has always been deeply antidemocratic and has thwarted the will of the people at every opportunity of progress (every delegate voted against the bill of rights when first mentioned (took a threat of violence to add it), labor rights, ending slavery, universal suffrage); the problem has always been authoritarians against the people.
scoofy 3 hours ago [-]
You clearly did not read the book or understand the message. I say this as someone who thinks we need a wealth tax (or at least a tax on unrealized semi-liquid capital gains).
>America has always been deeply antidemocratic
Okay, buddy. No need to open a history book to understand what an undemocratic state actually looks like. There are plenty of actual, totalitarian monarchies that still exist.
rluna828 3 hours ago [-]
Some mathematicians ran some numbers and diferent societies have different lowlying fruit. None of his improvements get societies to 2.1, but will theoretically move them to ~1.8. I'll find the source if people ask. 1. End toxic masculinity (machismo) in middle east and LatAM. No woman who knows how to read want to beaten or enslaved. 2. Jobs and Housing: Europe and America respectively. More three bed-room houses would add kids in California for example. Jobs for young people would children in Spain. 3. End afterschool tutoring and add spaces at universities. In Japan, Korea, China having more than one child means less money for tutors for the first kid (boy or girl). This is the easy stuff. For the extreme right, male literacy is inversely proportional with fertility too. lol! For my lefty friends, women are currently having as many kids as they would like, that's a oppression or tragedy or unfair.
em-bee 3 hours ago [-]
incidentally a few years ago china banned tutoring, but to my understanding it was mainly because most tutoring places were scams, and maybe also because mostly rich parents would spend the money, thus giving them an advantage.
alehlopeh 2 hours ago [-]
How is machismo causing women in Latin America to not know how to read? And which ones are enslaved exactly? This is a ridiculous assertion.
trumpdong 2 hours ago [-]
They said women who can read don't like machismo.
onetimeusename 4 hours ago [-]
I was surprised to find that just as recently as 1970 the median age of first marriage for men was ~23 and ~21 for women.[1] The average age at first child birth for women in 1970 was ~22.[2] There was a change that took place in the late 70s it looks like, probably acquiring education, that started to pretty dramatically raise the age of first marriage and first childbirth. So for me this was realizing that there was nothing natural or inevitable about postponing children. People back then probably would think delaying it was unnatural and this really wasn't that long ago.
You have a huge confluence of societal changes over the course of the 20th century to explore here, that each ultimately contributed to women having actual choices and options in life other than just getting married and being a homemaker.
thanhhaimai 3 hours ago [-]
In 1970, a single minimum wage income can raise a family and save up for extra.
In 2026, a single minimum wage income can barely survive by themselves with no saving in most part of the US.
rluna828 3 hours ago [-]
as professional with a professional salary, wages are not enough. we need abundant housing. Imagine taking a year or two dedicate to helping your mate through pregnancy and early childcare? Or, taking a year or two get your dating life in order. This second one might be important in city with bad traffic or for demanding jobs. This is not possible right now for 99% of people because housing is too expensive.
Weird site, seems to completely ignore the oil shock and following grave errors with loose monetary policy. Goldbugs gonna goldbug I suppose.
Anyway I'm sure the current oil shock and (assuming the clowns get their way) loose monetary policy will be different this time!
hactually 3 hours ago [-]
house prices
3 hours ago [-]
conductr 6 hours ago [-]
This is a real thought process people are contending with. There's also just the simple fact that kids are liabilities more so than assets. That's not been the case through most of human civilization.
I wouldn't limit it to economics either. Socially children are restricting. If you want to be free to travel, move, leave the house on a whim, etc. then kids will interrupt your plans/logistics.
GeekyBear 4 hours ago [-]
It's worth remembering that schools in American farming regions would shut down during planting and harvest seasons just 100 years ago.
Large families were your source of farm labor.
shimman 3 hours ago [-]
Reminder that universal public high school education wasn't obtained in the US until the 1940s.
Large families were your source of labor because you never given a chance to make a better life for yourself.
forlorn_mammoth 5 hours ago [-]
Appreciate you putting it bluntly.
I've found having children the most rewarding thing to have done with my life. And even so, you are right about the costs. "Million dollar baby" is not just a catch-phrase.
conductr 4 hours ago [-]
Same. I contended with having children at all because I enjoyed my freedom. As much as I enjoy it and find it inspiring and rewarding, there’s a part of me that’s counting down to independence again. I was fortunate enough economically it doesn’t require sacrifices but I still see the tally and it’s enormous. When I see median numbers on common stats like home prices, incomes, groceries, etc. there’s no way I would have taken it on if that was my reality.
Gibbon1 3 hours ago [-]
You bring up assets. I think per-industrial economies the majority of couples have no ability to gain modern assets. Things like land and infrastructure was locked down. Unless you wanted to try to take stuff by force you were SOL. So only thing you could do is have a lot of children whose value was performing labor. Only encouraged by a high childhood mortality rate.
Switch to an industrial society. Having children to do raw physical labor competes directly with tractors and a backhoes. But you can acquire other assets and put more resources in upscaling children through education. And wage work means you can send wives and daughters out to make money.
I think it usually takes a society one or two generations to figure that out and act accordingly.
Adding a thing I harp on. Malthusian limits traditionally is thought to apply to just food and disease. But you can extended that to an industrial wage based economy and the resource restrictions still apply just not to food and disease. Industrialization probably results in structural population overshoot.
unmole 7 minutes ago [-]
This narrative simply doesn't hold up at the population level.
If you just look at India, richer and more developed states have lower fertility compared to poorer, less developed states.
Within states, richer and more educated couples have fewer children compared to poorer less educated children.
These patterns are pretty much universal.
happytoexplain 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, absolutely. I agreed with the parent too, but I think your explanation is not as different as it seems. I think your framing is just more direct and correct.
However, one big caveat:
"If you want a secured dignified life and basic prerequisites to starting a family"
What you're saying is more relevant to the state of already-developed nations, that are now all in a slow decline. Not so much to newly developed nations, slowly on the rise.
That context established:
The common "we can't afford children" explanation is certainly a significant part of the equation, but I have never bought that it is the biggest reason. Children are expensive, but highly subsidized, and just not expensive enough to explain the whole picture. Your explanation is, I think, the One Big Thing. So many adults today grew up seeing middle-class life as very attainable with a college education and a work ethic. Then, as they became adults, that "attainable" reality inched away as fast as they progressed toward that goal.
The big, tough thing to discuss (tough because of the modern obsession with attacking "entitlement"), is that humans react much more strongly to change in state than to the state itself. E.g. if Alice grows up in a local culture where most people are poor, and Bob grows up in a local culture where most people have little houses and little yards and low crime, and then Alice and Bob both end up poor, then Bob is a lot angrier than Alice. Bob shakes his fist at the world more, and is more likely than Alice to choose to delay having children until he attains what he thought was a totally reasonable American aspiration.
This is highly parallel to the parent's notion of "not having children in order to pursue other things". It's not just that people don't want children - it's that they want children and middle-class lives, and feel uneasy choosing children when it feels like one more bump on the path to a middle-class life.
nrclark 2 hours ago [-]
> Children are expensive, but highly subsidized, and just not expensive enough to explain the whole picture.
Highly subsidized? I have to assume you're not talking about America. I pay $3200/mo to send my kids to a very middle-of-the-road preschool. That's almost $40k/year just in childcare costs so that my wife and I can go to work. The difference between a 1-bedroom apartment and a 3-bedroom apartment is an extra $20k/yr or so in my area. Then there's health care premiums, taking them out for activities sometimes, etc.
I can ballpark the cost of having preschoolers in my area as $30k/yr each. And I don't know about you, but I don't exactly see any government subsidies helping me carry that burden.
trumpdong 2 hours ago [-]
I think the "entitlement" argument can be easily refuted by telling your interlocutor they're not entitled to you having children, and if they want America to have a million more children they should have them themselves.
zabriel_goss 4 hours ago [-]
Well put. Adding that for those who are looking to have kids, there are generational considerations. It's not only the parents wanting the middle-class life for themselves, but it's also understanding that raising a child with that level of access to resources is what ideally sets the child up for a better life onward. The impact is exponential down the line, and no one wants to be responsible for a move in the opposite direction generationally.
_DeadFred_ 3 hours ago [-]
If you are referring to the US in your unsupported decline assertion the numbers don't support what you are saying (I disagree the US is more in decline than it was in the 70s/80s. It has different structural problems today, like housing and wealth concentration, but that isn't the same thing).
There's much stronger relationships to religiosity and fertility rates (with a much larger than income based gaps), regional/cultural choices and fertility rates, than income. India, which we are discussion here, supposedly a country where the quality of life is rising, has surprisingly low fertility rates.
IN your example it's much more likely Bob is no longer religious, Bob has moved to an area (or a culture has set in) where having less children is the norm/social structure. Among my social group having a child was very much 'catching' with friends having clusters of children around the same time. A culture of not having children would create the same opposite effect. Instead of talk about coming babies, shared excitement, feeling left out/un-adult, surrounded by hormones, if you have a culture of talking about not having children/justifying delaying/etc you now have 'not having children' as the 'catching' social outbreak.
Paying people to have kids/social promotion has not changed things anywhere. Or in the case of India being discussed, improving conditions have resulted in less children. There is something else going on than your assertion that 'American's are just too aspirational' is impacting India's fertility rate.
snowwrestler 1 hours ago [-]
In the U.S., birth rates fell pretty much continuously for at least 150 years until WWII and the Baby Boom. Now they are slightly declining again. Many industrialized nations have a similar graph.
So that pretty much kills any explanation that depends on our recent experience, like pressure to get a degree, good job, etc. Seems like there is probably something far more fundamental at work to create a 200+ year trend with a one brief interruption for a couple decades.
33 minutes ago [-]
01100011 3 hours ago [-]
Agree and there are many reasons more.
I'll add religion to the mix. We're less religious now. Even folks who are religious now(at least in the Christian West) seem to practice a different religion than we did 50 years ago. Religion does many things, good and bad, but it definitely prizes children and reproduction. If it didn't, it would quickly get replaced by a mode of thought/belief which did. I'm not advocating for religion here, just stating that it likely plays a large role in reproduction.
Rury 28 minutes ago [-]
Yes, I don't think this is a single faceted issue. I've yet to see anyone here mention animals yet... but numerous animals in captivity have also been shown to have far lower breeding/fertility rates. Factors like restricted space, lack of mate choice, and disrupted natural instincts can all influence animal behavior, and I see no reason why the same can't apply to us?
I know for me personally, it's not economic reasons as to why I have not had children, but more a problem of finding the right mate at the right time. Some people just aren't socially fit for each other...
everdrive 5 hours ago [-]
Also, women's overall fertility drops off a cliff after 30, but this is downplayed because the extreme sensitivity of the issue.
pjc50 3 hours ago [-]
People forget that there's been a multi generational messaging of preventing women from having kids without economic security; this used to be done by the parents rejecting marriages that didn't bring enough dowry and extreme punishment for extra-marital relationships.
Now contraception has decoupled these things. You can have the relationship you want, and put off children until "sufficient" economic conditions have been reached.
(It is good news that India is at or below replacement rate! The conversation would be very different if in a few decades time India had to find twice as much food and oil!)
autoexec 3 hours ago [-]
> People forget that there's been a multi generational messaging of preventing women from having kids without economic security
I think it's probably a wise thing to advise against having children you can't afford to take care of. I don't think it was something that was explicitly hammered into me or my peers growing up, but we all saw enough examples of kids being raised in poverty to know that we wanted something better for our own children.
trumpdong 2 hours ago [-]
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Qem 1 hours ago [-]
> Also, women's overall fertility drops off a cliff after 30
Men's too, from 40s up. Not as severe, and not cliff-like in the end like menopause. But it compounds, as the typical couple ages are directly correlated.
True - but, honest question that I've always wondered: Do we know the degree of this problem as it relates to whether or not people have kids? I.e. yes, it takes longer to get pregnant, but how much less likely does it become to get pregnant at all?
everdrive 5 hours ago [-]
Nearly every metric gets worse
- likelihood to get pregnant
- likelihood to bring child to term
- health risk to mother during pregnancy and child birth
- health risk to baby during pregnancy and child birth
- increased likelihood of multiple birth defects
- increased likelihood of genetic abnormalities
I'm not casting aspersions. My wife and I had kids when she was 38 and 40 respectively. But, the numbers for the risks are stark.
happytoexplain 5 hours ago [-]
So even if it takes a year instead of one night to get pregnant, which wouldn't really affect long-scale statistics that much, more pregnancies fail, and more people may choose not to try at all because of the risks. That makes sense.
forlorn_mammoth 5 hours ago [-]
Yes it would, because if you don't start until you are 30, you've "lost" a decade of childbearing. That's a pretty serious reduction in the maximum number of children you are likely to produce.
m_fayer 5 hours ago [-]
That or go "one and done" after having enough fun with:
- Stress on the relationship of trying and failing for a long time
- Stress of fertility treatments, if needed
- Likelihood of dealing with inevitable miscarriages on the way to a birth
- Overall "medicalization" of pregnancy in middle age, and the stress of all that contact with the medical system
everdrive 5 hours ago [-]
It's got an effect but agreed it's not the biggest effect given what else is going on. I think time might be the bigger factor here when simply discussing biology. If you have kids every ~3 years and don't start until you're 35, you have maybe 1.75 years of kids left in you before it starts getting tenuous. (ie, before the woman is over 40) That same math works out differently if your first kid is at 20.
None of this touches on industrialization and higher education, which seem to be the more universal effects, even if one of their bigger effects is merely to delay motherhood.
Your source doesn't contradict the fact that women's fertility has a sharper and earlier cliff than men's. It doesn't even use the same age brackets for men and women. It compares men age over 45 against men age under 25, whereas for women the study compared those age > 35 vs age < 25.
Like it or not, fertility decline is substantially different between the sexes.
decimalenough 3 hours ago [-]
Gender does matter though. Men can sire offspring into their 60s, women have marked decline in fertility starting from 32 and hit an absolute wall (menopause) by their fifties.
Men offspring-ing in their 60's and dying 10 years later is perfect way to build a society where kids get to grow up without their fathers when they need them the most
niemandhier 4 hours ago [-]
There is the idea floating around in Europe, to nullify people’s student debts if they have children.
So two kids during university would mean even the measly amount you have to pay back for an European subsided degree would be gone.
I do hope that will be put into effect.
I also believe that this will be better for gender equality than all the other measures taken so far.
I was in too many meetings, where the CV of a young woman was critically evaluated for her propensity to get pregnant as soon as the probationary period was over.
hobo_mark 4 hours ago [-]
What are these European student debts you speak of, outside of the UK (which emphatically does not want to be considered part of Europe)?
niemandhier 4 hours ago [-]
In Germany the government pays your university time. You get about 800€ per month for housing and basic needs. At least if your family is not too well off.
50% of this have to be paid back, free of interest and capped at 10k€. That is not much, but keep in mind that we earn much less than Americans and have much higher taxes.
magicalhippo 3 hours ago [-]
Similar in Norway. Except you have to pass exams to get part of it written off, if not you have to pay back 100%.
em-bee 3 hours ago [-]
but this is support for living expenses, not tuition. if you are frugal you can get by not spending all of it. that's what i did. when it was time to pay, i was able to pay off all of it at once which afforded me another discount.
pjc50 3 hours ago [-]
> was in too many meetings, where the CV of a young woman was critically evaluated for her propensity to get pregnant as soon as the probationary period was over
When was this? In much of Europe that's been illegal employment discrimination for decades. But I suppose employers are less worried if they can be confident that it's unlikely that any of their employees will have children.
joe_mamba 3 hours ago [-]
>When was this? In much of Europe that's been illegal employment discrimination for decades.
Happens all the time in Austria. If you're a woman in your mid 20s to mid 30s, and employer will assume you'll get pregnant soon and go on childcare leave, so they'll pick other candidates if they can. Just because something is illegal doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Illegal things happen ALL THE TIME, and perps get away with it when there's no enforcement or the plaintiff doesn't have enough proof, time or money to fight said injustice. For example, on my street it's illegal to drive over 30kph, and yet half the cars that drive by go over 45 simply because there's no law enforcement nearby to catch them and fine them. If there's no enforcement with direct consequences at scale, then a law is virtually useless.
For an employer to get into legal trouble over pregnancy or racial or nationality discrimination with government authorities, that means the candidate would need to know upfront and have proof that they were discriminated against over those immutable characteristics, which is rarely the case as everyone just gets the same copy-paste legally safe rejection email from HR: "we regret to inform you that you didn't make the final cut because candidates with better experience/qualifications bla bla bla" and that's where it ends. You will never know what they discussed in private.
But that's not the reason women have few kids here. The reason is mostly cultural and environmental.
trumpdong 2 hours ago [-]
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bluescrn 5 hours ago [-]
We're also teaching the younger generation imminent climate apocalypse is coming, and therefore bringing kids into this dying world would be cruel, or at best contributing to the problem.
(And now there's also an AI apocalypse of some kind on the way even if the climate situation can be resolved/survived. And the ever-present threat of WW3 seems closer now than ever)
4 hours ago [-]
submain 5 hours ago [-]
I agree. It comes down to the opportunity cost for women to have babies.
On pre-industrialized societies, women have barely a choice. On industrialized ones they do. And it turns out that, when given the choice, they choose not to have babies.
happytoexplain 5 hours ago [-]
The implication of "and it turns out..." is that all else is equal, but clearly it's not. Would women still choose to have babies if they didn't have to work also? I admit that it's basically moot - we can't seem to figure out how to have a society where both members of a couple are free to choose whether or not to work. I'm only pointing out that this trend doesn't mean what you're implying about women's desires.
voiceofchoice 4 hours ago [-]
If you don't think child rearing is work then you won't understand why women choose not to have kids in the first place. You cannot be a parent and choose not to work, period. Just because you're not getting paid and ordered around by an adult boss doesn't mean being a trad wife is magically somehow not work. In fact, at least with a regular 9-5 you get PTO and time off.
If you scoff at the idea of flipping burgers your whole life then just imagine it's changing diapers instead.
yoyohello13 4 hours ago [-]
It should be framed as “taking a second job” rather than “not working”
jbxntuehineoh 53 minutes ago [-]
_obviously_ they meant "work" as in "employment", stop being obtuse
> your whole life
pretty sure the diaper changing part only lasts a couple years
hamdingers 5 hours ago [-]
While none of this is wrong, men are also choosing not to have babies, which points to a broader root cause.
trumpdong 2 hours ago [-]
[dead]
evo 3 hours ago [-]
Would it make sense to frame this as a Baumol's Cost Disease problem? E.g., the labor of child rearing has been historically offset by the inherent emotional surplus of the task, but the march of productivity in other sectors gradually increases that imputed loss until we reach a breaking point.
nikanj 3 hours ago [-]
Take an average 22-year old. Tell them they just won the lottery, and never have to worry about money ever again. Do you think they'll be interested in starting a family?
G3nD 2 hours ago [-]
This routinely happens for professional athletes. Don't have any stats, but American professional athletes seem well known for having many children (with many people).
asdff 2 hours ago [-]
Yup. People want a bit of hedonism. Who doesn't really? And society paints engaging in hedonism as fine in your 20s and evil for parents. Have kids? Goodbye partying. Goodbye hobbies. Goodbye a sense of agency. It doesn't have to be this way, but this is how it is framed both internally and externally.
theshackleford 2 hours ago [-]
This absolutely would have sealed it for me. It would still seal it for me now.
Being disabled, and having AI be a risk to the only work I can perform means financial concerns are at the heart of everything. There is simply too much financial risk even without children.
alongson 4 hours ago [-]
This is exactly it.
It’s simply the biological clock running out due to convenience and security.
It’ll require a huge culture shift to make kids convenient.
xeonmc 6 hours ago [-]
So support should be provided for incentivizing younger parenthood then, like guaranteed tuition assistance per children born?
thewebguyd 5 hours ago [-]
Tuition assistance per kid isn't going to cut it. That doesn't solve any other problem of: unaffordable housing, unaffordable child care, a hustle culture that mandates people be productive and climb the career ladder to barely get ahead, the loss of complete freedom and free time, etc.
The incentives just aren't there.
em-bee 5 hours ago [-]
both parents having to work fulltime, and the severe hit to your career if you pause working while the children are young is the primary hindrance in my view.
thewebguyd 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah the career thing is huge, and also just a general lack of flexibility at a lot of companies. Expectations to be in-office, butt in chair for 8 hours a day, etc.
When you have kids, you need the freedom to just get up and leave at any time to respond to things. School calls cause your kid is sick, emergencies, you name it. You gotta be there and be available for them, and we need a culture to where that doesn't become damaging to your career, and enough worker protections in place to where you cannot face disciplinary action for that.
em-bee 2 hours ago [-]
we need a culture to where that doesn't become damaging to your career
this is what i keep repeating over and over again.
thijson 5 hours ago [-]
Giving birth to future tax payers should confer sizable tax deductions for the parents.
I'm not sure that's enough to reverse the demographic slide though, it's been tried.
For our ancestors, they married young, and didn't have access to birth control. Babies weren't really planned, they just happened.
em-bee 5 hours ago [-]
they didn't just happen, they were expected and demanded. there was social pressure to have children. that's still true in china today. some not yet grandparents put a lot of pressure on their children to give them grandchildren (sometimes very violently too), and i remember a comment in an earlier thread where someone told about the experience of their parents or grandparents where the local pastor was having a concerned talk with a childless couple.
JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago [-]
> like guaranteed tuition assistance per children born?
It needs to be a massive package of subsidies.
Children used to be a private good. Child-labor laws and the cost of raising kids flipped that. Children remain a public benefit, but that benefit is realized without paying for the cost. In essence, the cost of all prenatal, neonatal and pediatric healthcare; schooling; the opportunity cost in career and recreation the parents incur from having to raise kids; and the direct costs of feeding, clothing, nannying, et cetera children need to be directly subsidized, probably with a cash bonus on top.
In America this would probably be a ca. $50k/child benefit at the low end.
submain 5 hours ago [-]
Is that enough though? Women change their entire bodies, sacrifice years of their lives, and go through considerable stress to have a baby. And at the end, the benefits of that ordeal are not clear.
Society would need to offer something to offset all those costs.
m_fayer 5 hours ago [-]
We need a whole new generation of fertility medicine aimed not just at conception but the rest of it as well.
bluescrn 5 hours ago [-]
'The benefits of continuing the existence of the species are not clear'
none2585 5 hours ago [-]
Unironically why care if this species continues?
pixl97 4 hours ago [-]
Because it will be very messy and involve a lot of suffering if unmanaged.
The population just doesn't disappear, it can pretty quickly shrink in just a generation or two leaving huge amounts of infrastructure unmaintained and falling apart with huge amounts of debt that will ensure what remains of society ends up in chaos.
That and the most likely part of the population to shrink is the ones we consider more stable and rational. Cults and religious breeding groups will increasing become the majority of the population leading to some 'interesting fun times'.
saintvlad 3 hours ago [-]
That's the neat part! You don't have to care. It will either way. But it's not looking great for liberalism (and that's good thing).
saintvlad 3 hours ago [-]
> Women change their entire bodies, sacrifice years of their lives, and go through considerable stress to have a baby.
"Humans extinct, women most affected"
Pretty amusing how it's always framed as some terrible burden on women to justify more gibs. As if they aren't also the beneficiaries of society thriving and men never make any sacrifices for society. Or that, well, women also "benefit" from reproducing in the Darwinian sense.
pjc50 3 hours ago [-]
We spent decades fighting teen pregnancy for this?
em-bee 2 hours ago [-]
the reason we have been fighting teen pregnancy is because as a society we decided not to support young parents, and because teen pregnancy happens out of wedlock with the fathers usually disappearing. i believe historically this comes from the fact that mothers used to stay at home, so as soon as you had a child you would not go to school anymore.
we could decide otherwise and create structures where young people, still in highschool or studying, are at the same time able to live together and have children.
happytoexplain 5 hours ago [-]
Right train of thought, but as others have pointed out, this is spitting on a fire.
em-bee 5 hours ago [-]
in germany education is free, and some places also offer free childcare. parents get $300 per child per month in financial support regardless of income. and yet all that is still not enough.
throwaway85825 5 hours ago [-]
Costs more than that.
em-bee 4 hours ago [-]
well, i did say it's not enough, but i disagree, if you assume free childcare, then the real cost according to statistics is not much higher than that because the bulk of the cost in those statistics comes from expensive childcare, yet, even free childcare does not help to motivate people to have more children.
4 hours ago [-]
Henchman21 5 hours ago [-]
Right why would we change the behavior that got us here? Just provide some incentives and problem solved right?
How about we undo the mess we’ve created through industrialization? Change the world so people WANT to have kids again?
nemomarx 5 hours ago [-]
Why did people want to have them in the past, and what shifts do you think could undo industrialization enough to return to that?
The economic value of kids and the relative surety that kids will provide for you in your old age are I think very hard to reclaim now, and that was a pretty strong motivator for most of history. You could end all retirement funds and pension systems and so on, maybe?
autoexec 5 hours ago [-]
> Why did people want to have them in the past
Most people are biologically wired to want children. "Survive and reproduce" is pretty much the driving motivation of all living things. Most children weren't conceived as a carefully planned retirement strategy. No cost/benefit calculation is required to convince most people to have children, but you can certainly force them into a position where they have to start thinking in those terms. We've just hit a point where societal and environmental factors are discouraging people from doing what they'd normally do.
voiceofchoice 4 hours ago [-]
Hard wired to want children and hard wired to want sex are two very different things.
When given the choice there are plenty of people putting the latter over the former, and the number of women stuck at home while their husband went out to have affairs suggests the reality of kids doesn't actually interest most people. Plenty of folks just want a status symbol, not the responsibility of raising a child.
autoexec 3 hours ago [-]
I think just about everyone wants more sex than children. That said, many people would love the responsibility of raising a child but don't feel like they can afford it.
nemomarx 5 hours ago [-]
I don't mean it as a cost benefit thing, but people thinking that family is important, that they want and need family there for them in their old age, and so on.
The need for all of that is considerably different in modernity and more people choose to live without their family close by, and certainly don't depend on them for housing and care as often?
em-bee 5 hours ago [-]
how about making your pension depend on the number of kids? take an average pension now: X=100%, take half of it as a base, and then add a quarter or one fifth per child. so a childless person gets half the current pension, 1 child gives you 75% or 70%, 2 children 100% or 90%, 3 children 125% or 110%, etc...
Daishiman 6 hours ago [-]
More like guaranteed housing because not even having a college degree is a sufficient condition to enter the middle class in this day and age.
asdff 3 hours ago [-]
Even wealthy nepo people wait until then to have kids. A big part of it is also societal expectations. Going out every weekend clubbing is seen as fine in your 20s. Even if that specifically isn't your thing, you probably are filling your time with something personally gratifying.
Meanwhile the narrative around having kids is that your life is over after you have them. Partying? Irresponsible parent! Round of golf? You must hate your kids. Triathlon training? Better happen before dawn. Hiking and camping trip? Absolutely not.
There is this sense in society that hedonism is something to be frowned upon, when by definition it is kind of what everyone is after at the end of the day. Pleasurable activities, how awful to engage in them, so the rhetoric goes.
I think we'd see people having kids earlier if there was more acknowledgement that a balance can be successfully struck. That you won't get CPS called if you uber home drunk. Unfortunately in a lot of ways we are still living under the shadow of the puritan society and it has created not only a mental health crisis, but a reproductive crisis.
stego-tech 14 minutes ago [-]
It’s a valid theory, and I certainly think it’s a contributor, but I would also argue that the “boom” years of fertility in modernity have been tied to periods of widespread benefit for most, if not all. When prospective parents and grandparents see the potential for a brighter future, there’s more societal pressure to have kids because their success will naturally boost your own. Then when the vice starts tightening, the idea is that having more kids improves your own prospects of survival and comfort in old age.
Then the systems of the world had to make a choice: pay for the old at the expense of the new, or support the new by capping benefits on the old. This takes the form of social welfare programs in most developed countries, but industrialization also clamped down wealth in the hands of those who owned the means of production, and kept it from the hands of labor absent mechanisms of redistribution. Industrialization by its nature necessitates a larger investment to begin competing with established players in ways former artisans and businesses lacked: machinery, labor, logistics, technology, real estate, and materials all require expensive, up-front, and lengthy investment before potential payoff in an industrialized world that pre-industry societies didn’t have to deal (as much) with, thus locking most Capital and wealth into the hands of those who already had it to begin with. An aristocracy on steroids, choking and hoarding the lifeblood of a healthy economy into their private coffers.
This plays out differently in each country depending on its economic maturity and what function it served in the global marketplace, but the outcome was the same: with entertainment being plentiful and cheap compared to the immense risks and costs of child rearing in an increasingly dim future lacking in a cohesive, collaborative narrative to be inspired by, fertility collapsed.
smallmancontrov 5 minutes ago [-]
"But we gave 1000 lucky participants $3.50 and a used bubblegum wrapper to share between them and it didn't measurably affect their marginal propensity to have children at all! Extractive economics couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fertility crisis!"
spullara 4 hours ago [-]
There are so many factors. I think the biggest one is that the developed world looked at women and said "hey, they are just as smart and capable as men and if they work at companies we have 2x the workers" which is obviously true but what it leads to is a DINK society - and it locks you in. It is just much, much harder to raise children when both parents work and they don't live near their parents and other familial support. Add that into your observation that the world is more fun and selfish and it multiplies.
A lot of the decrease is also correlated with access to birth control which drastically reduced accidental pregnancies which were a decent amount of the fertility rate. Then we attacked teenage pregnancy with a vengeance. In 1957 it was 96/100k teen women had babies, 62/100k in 1991 and now down to the current rate of 11/100k. The postponement of births expands the time between generations which compounds the problem. An 18 yr old could have a baby that has a baby at 18 before a 36+ year old mom has their first child.
All this leads to exponential decay of humanity. In the near term we don't have to worry about extinction but we do have to worry about the pyramid schemes we have to support non-workers (like social security). This will all play out much sooner in Asia where the TFRs can be half of the US/EU. Imagine due to China's one child policy a young working person will soon have to support 2 parents and 4 grandparents somehow. There will be some kind of reckoning and some of the speculation around what it will look like is quite grim.
decidu0us9034 7 minutes ago [-]
I love how the original post says this happens across vastly different societies regardless of all these different variables people are offering as possible explanations. For example, in India (which this article is about), women have a much lower rate of workforce participation than other industrialized countries. I think a lot of people who are replying are men and don't understand how physically tasking and painful pregnancy is. It seems like most women are fine having two if there's a high chance they'll make it to adulthood. That makes sense to me. Not sure why this is so confounding to people. Not much more of an explanation needed than that lol
linkregister 25 minutes ago [-]
I agree that women's employment is the common factor in all societies with reduced birth rates.
> In 1957 it was 96/100k teen women had babies, 62/100k in 1991 and now down to the current rate of 11/100k
That's per 1k, not 100k [1]. 96/100k would be an insignificant amount. 96/1000 of girls and women ages 15-19 means that any given year, 10% had a baby, which is a substantial contribution to overall birth rates.
Fortunately this exponential decay is very unlikely to continue forever. The present structure of society will not survive a 90% reduction in population. Abundant resources (especially housing) and insufficient humans to run a tight bureaucracy will probably lead back to people having babies for fun again and not coddling them to the extreme detriment of their own lives, and human population will stabilise.
em-bee 2 hours ago [-]
if they work at companies we have 2x the workers
i don't think that's what happened. i believe women wanting economic independence (rightly so) and thus pushing into work was a bigger factor.
just_mc 4 hours ago [-]
> A lot of the decrease is also correlated with access to birth control which drastically reduced accidental pregnancies which were a decent amount of the fertility rate
This was my first intuition.
pjc50 3 hours ago [-]
This is so obvious it's barely worth mentioning, table stakes for the debate? British TFR was about 3 when Marie Stopes got started, and malthusianism had not yet been conquered.
broken-kebab 1 hours ago [-]
For this theory to be plausible we need to imagine that hedonistic creatures couldn't find anything more hedonistic than caring for multiple kids before industrialization. It doesn't sound realistic, mildly speaking. The modern culture simply doesn't oblige you to marry, and procreate the way it did 1-2 (depending on where you are) generations before. In the times of my mother's youth not marrying before 25-26, and not having at least one kid before 30 could really negatively affect someone's social standing. There are segments of modern West where culture still prioritizes procreation (like Orthodox Jews you mention, or old school Catholics) and they do procreate successfully despite being the same creatures as everyone else. Preferred hedonism is in culture, not nature.
trgn 7 hours ago [-]
i put off children because it takes longer to establish a foothold. not because i loved to travel or eat out necessarily, or felt i needed to prioritize hedonistic activities over building a family. but, during that time of getting my degree, figuring out my career, get some savings, etc.. those were the things to fill up time with.
i'd trade it all for having kids younger though. it's just that they would have come at a time that any kind of grip on my future was still tenuous.
everdrive 6 hours ago [-]
Everyone claims it's the cost, but poor people used to have kids constantly. When I lived in Baltimore the guy on my block grew up there. They had 12 kids in a ~1100 sq foot row home with two bedrooms and 1 (or no?) bathroom. You can find similar stories everywhere.
Spooky23 5 hours ago [-]
Kids are cheap when you are poor because you aren’t seeking status. A home in a highly desirable suburban school district won’t support 12 kids in the lifestyle that people demand in those places.
Whoever has custody of the kids is fine. The social services benefits scale. They won’t get rich, but they’ll eat. People will be OK. The only people who lose are stupid men who have multiple children with multiple women.
Once you have a little cash, the formula changes completely.
WarmWash 5 hours ago [-]
You also have the state which pays for most of the top line expenses of having kids. Once you start making money, those benefits don't fade, they instantly disappear entirely.
m_fayer 6 hours ago [-]
We've gotten smarter, to our detriment.
laughing_man 6 hours ago [-]
If you fail to pass on your genetics, are your really smarter?
everdrive 5 hours ago [-]
Potentially. You're mixing "fitness" with "intelligence" -- there's no guarantee that "intelligence" will guarantee fitness.
trumpdong 2 hours ago [-]
If you fail to achieve goals, you're not smarter.
But passing on genes is a pretty arbitrary goal. It's the one encoded in our genes, but (looks around at random object) passing on teacup design is encoded in a teacup. The most teacups are the ones that make people look at them and say "I want a copy of that cup". It's just statistics, not the ultimate meaning of the universe. The humans who think it's the ultimate meaning of the universe may be more likely to replicate - but that's a genetically inherited delusion, not a fact. You can pass on your editor choice just as well as you can pass on your genes.
layer8 1 hours ago [-]
What does the individual get out of passing on their genetics?
wtetzner 5 hours ago [-]
That depends on whether or not you value passing on your genetics.
efilife 1 hours ago [-]
Is intelligence correlated with having kids?
cess11 6 hours ago [-]
Are you implying homosexuals et al are somehow inherently dumber?
Right, and you seemed to imply that smartness can be measured in how many live copies of one's genes one manages to produce.
laughing_man 4 hours ago [-]
Sort of. The idea that we're somehow smarter today is nonsense on stilts.
trumpdong 2 hours ago [-]
Smartest was 10-15 years ago. Flynn effect reversed.
em-bee 2 hours ago [-]
we are not smarter, but we have access to more knowledge
laughing_man 1 hours ago [-]
I wonder about that. How much of the knowledge we're exposed to is actually true?
pixl97 4 hours ago [-]
And other people are judging your comment as dumb and somewhat misunderstanding of genetics/fitness.
laughing_man 4 hours ago [-]
And I'm judging them in turn for not understanding intelligence or genetics or fitness and for being passive/aggressive.
SoftTalker 6 hours ago [-]
A lot of people think they need to do this but it's really not true. You don't need to have life all figured out before you have kids. And in terms of avoiding complications and having energy, 18-25 years old is probably the best time.
dh2022 5 hours ago [-]
In my city of Seattle you simply cannot have more than one kid in your twenties. You simply do not have the income to pay the Seattle rent / mortgages and pay daycare for more than one kid at the start of your career. Forget about going to a concert or a restaurant: there is simply no money for it.
Young people in Seattle either live in studios or 1 bedroom apartments, or live with roommates, or with their parents. You cannot raise more than 1 kid this way.
This is the calculus me nu my wife did when we chose to have one kid only. Looking back and seeing how life progressed we made the right choice.
asdff 2 hours ago [-]
Daycare used to be essentially free when I was growing up. Some workplaces had a little daycare wing. Gyms had them. So many adult sort of third places just had a place to plop your kids with a smattering of toys. Now people are paying $3000 a month so they can go to a spin class.
SoftTalker 5 hours ago [-]
And yet I bet there are thousands of young people in Seattle having kids. These limits are all about what kind of life you want for yourself, and not about what is possible.
Gareth321 3 hours ago [-]
Implied in their comment is that they don’t want to be homeless and hungry, which I think is a fair prerequisite before having children.
pixl97 4 hours ago [-]
I mean, living in a garbage dump is possible, millions of of people do it around the world.
The problem as a country you are doing to disappear demographically if you're choices are near suffering versus having kids.
Xirdus 5 hours ago [-]
You don't need to have life figured out before you have kids in the same sense you don't have to fix your car when the check engine light is on, or you don't have to replace a rusted water boiler. You won't immediately die from it. You can do it for years without issue if you're lucky, and many people do exactly that. But if you're in a position you can sort things out properly without financial strain, everyone will tell you to sort this out ASAP and you're stupid if you don't.
The problem is that it's literally impossible for most people to have life figured out before hitting 25, and very hard before 30. Importantly, that wasn't the case just one generation ago.
autoexec 3 hours ago [-]
> You don't need to have life all figured out before you have kids.
You do need to be able to afford to care for them and be reasonably capable of providing them with a stable and healthy environment to grow up in though. People who are one or two missed paychecks away from homelessness probably shouldn't be thinking about having children, and sadly that's a whole lot of people.
saintvlad 2 hours ago [-]
> You do need to be able to afford to care for them and be reasonably capable of providing them with a stable and healthy environment to grow up in though.
You kinda don't though? The government won't let you starve to death. Surprised there aren't more people welfaremaxxing, TBH.
trumpdong 2 hours ago [-]
The government absolutely lets people starve to death. Have you ever tried to get any welfare? It's gatekept to hell.
You should try it because I bet you'll find out why pretty fast. It just isn't worth it.
trumpdong 2 hours ago [-]
If you have kids and don't have life stability, everyone will call you irresponsible and the government may take your kids away, right?
foobarian 6 hours ago [-]
Maybe that is exactly the mechanism this happens with. People don't necessarily make these choices consciously, they might be railroaded into them by the environment in an industrialized society
theshackleford 2 hours ago [-]
> You don't need to have life all figured out before you have kids
My parents didn’t have their life figured out and I paid the price with extreme mental and physical abuse as their life entered a never ending downward spiral.
This had impacts on me, which extended to impacts on others.
I’m ok now, after years of intensive counselling reversed the violent tendencies that were beaten into me with their fists over two decades. It did contribute to me not having kids of my own as I didn’t want to repeat the cycle, but other things impacted it as well.
So yeah, maybe it turns out ok in some cases, maybe in others it doesn’t.
em-bee 1 hours ago [-]
but this comes from parents being expected to have their life figured out and not giving them any help. if we accept as normal that young parents will not have their life figured out then we will also make sure that we don't leave them alone but actually support them.
i think this is especially extreme in the US where some parents tell their kids that at their 18th birthday they are on their own. that's an insane attitude. not everyone is that extreme, but what ever you experienced is more a failure of society, and less a failure of your parents.
theshackleford 29 minutes ago [-]
I think you are correct, but not in a manner likely to happen.
My parents had all the support they needed from their parents, but it wasn’t enough, their life was interrupted before they found their footing and they just never developed that footing once children were added to the mix.
To your point though, maybe if there was more support of parents from society from a larger perspective, maybe it would have been different.
If my upbringing hadn’t been getting bashed into an inch of my life because apparently being unable to afford rent was my fault, I suspect I would have been far more amenable to children.
riversflow 5 hours ago [-]
I have more energy in my 30s than my 20s
Daishiman 6 hours ago [-]
> You don't need to have life all figured out before you have kids.
Sure, you just need to do away with international trips, going out, losing your group of friends, losing your chances for higher education and career progression and all of the associated prestige.
Spooky23 5 hours ago [-]
The only thing you lose there are the trips. If anything your social life can blossom.
My wife was a city treasurer and had a masters. I was a .gov and later a tech executive.
tasuki 4 hours ago [-]
> If anything your social life can blossom.
Yes, if you value spending time with parents of same-aged children. My social life is still fine, but the people I spend my time with are competely different. Not better, nor worse, just entirely different.
ninininino 6 hours ago [-]
Respectfully, you don't know why you put off children. You may tell yourself a story of why you have, but for example if there was an environmental contaminant shaping population level stats on endocrines and hormones that reduced human sex drive and desire for children, you wouldn't necessarily be conscious of that.
card_zero 6 hours ago [-]
That sounds more like "hormone-driven people don't know why they had children".
trumpdong 2 hours ago [-]
It sounds like "nobody knows why they do or don't have children"
zbentley 4 hours ago [-]
Eh, that argument works on any claim and is nonfalsifiable-ish, so I think it can be ignored.
People buying more chocolate ice cream than vanilla? Could be changing preferences or Hersheys marketing, or it could be undetected brain worms. People voting for one political party over others? Could be that party is campaigning/governing in a more popular way, could be brain worms.
If there’s evidence of contaminants or whatever influencing behavior strongly enough to change large scale demographic trends, then present it. Otherwise, your best chance at good data is to take people at their word when they say why they do things.
trumpdong 2 hours ago [-]
We know some of the pharmaceutical residues in our sewage turn frogs gay (that really happened, that wasn't AJ making something up). We know pharmaceuticals can greatly affect people's sex drive, general mood, and other psychological factors. It's definitely not a stretch to guess we might be doing it to ourselves.
dfee 6 hours ago [-]
both points are fair, but operate at different levels. the former: willpower. the latter: constraints.
and, the latter is indeed dependent on the former. but, arguing that humans have no free will is an argument that should be tried independently of rebutting the former comment.
ninininino 6 hours ago [-]
I didn't make a claim humans have no free will, moreso that we cannot accurately judge our own motivations/drives.
trgn 6 hours ago [-]
yeah make sense, we do things, rationalize them later, i get it, i certainly am sensitive to it.
close04 6 hours ago [-]
People are very conscious that a child costs a lot to raise and the reality is usually worse than their estimates. They know children will impact their career and promotion opportunities, so a lower expected income just when they need it more. They know they no longer live next to their parents so the support structure they have in place is flimsy.
You make a philosophical point while the reality is already clear enough. Everyone has a friend with kids so they hear the stories. The “scary” ones stick longer than the nice ones because it’s easier to understand financial woes, health issues, and problems of this kind.
6 hours ago [-]
aaarrm 6 hours ago [-]
Okay
boelboel 8 hours ago [-]
There's some evidence that mobile phone access is one of the biggest drivers in this. This talks about teen fertility but I'd imagine it's similar in other age categories as well.
Interesting. Once you have a cellphone to amuse yourself, perpetuating the species is just too much bother?
boelboel 6 hours ago [-]
Phone + PC/TV probably takes an hour or two of people their day on average. If they didn't have access to it I assume they'd be meeting up with other people out of boredom and that'd lead to sex, doesn't seem too strange.
wtetzner 5 hours ago [-]
I suspect on average it's much higher than an hour or two.
trumpdong 2 hours ago [-]
Maybe people don't meet in person any more because they call each other = less teen pregnancy instincts.
laughing_man 6 hours ago [-]
Or you spend all your time on your phone and can't understand why you're just not getting ahead in life.
dividefuel 4 hours ago [-]
I agree a lot with your hypothesis. Most people in my demographic (mid 30s American) that aren't having kids are choosing not to primarily because they don't want to really interfere with their current lifestyle. Money seems to be a part of it, but secondary to the high opportunity cost of children.
There are also social effects. When half your friends have kids and half don't, you can compare the lives of each and decide which you want to live. You won't be as isolated now if you choose not to have kids... in fact the trend seems to be that having children is the isolating choice.
mekdoonggi 9 hours ago [-]
Is it hedonism if a child-free adult gets fulfillment out of nurturing and caring for others, mentoring, caring for themselves and their community?
That's like, the complete opposite of the hedonistic young couple not using protection and accidentally getting pregnant.
TFNA 5 hours ago [-]
> Is it hedonism if a child-free adult gets fulfillment out of nurturing...
How many people in the developed world are really doing that? My social circle is largely child-free into our thirties and forties, and the big motivation is so that we have time for our hobbies and for travel. Almost no one is dedicating their time to altruism. Especially considering that I live in a long-running welfare state, where helping people in need is generally left to the state and private charity is rare (and often has dodgy religious-sect connotations).
MontyCarloHall 9 hours ago [-]
I'd call it hedonism if a couple wants to be able to go out on a date on a whim, easily take a vacation, watch adult-appropriate movies on a big TV in the living room, maintain good sleep/health habits, keep a flexible schedule unconstrained by school pickups/staying home with a sick kid, etc.
These are all real examples of why people I know delayed having kids, curtailed the number they had, or never had them altogether.
happytoexplain 9 hours ago [-]
It's unclear what you're saying. Obviously it's not hedonistic to "want" those things, as you say. You might use the term if they try to have their cake and eat it too, irresponsibly.
Hedonism has negative connotations, colloquially (and colloquially is how we are speaking).
MontyCarloHall 8 hours ago [-]
As I wrote in another reply, I meant “hedonism” in its non-colloquial, neutral sense, i.e. the pursuit of individual pleasure and happiness above all else, which was a mistake on my part. My general point is that all the activities I listed (which only become abundantly available in rich, industrialized societies) yield more individual pleasure than having children.
Supernaut 6 hours ago [-]
I've heard a lot of vox pops in recent years on the subject of why young couples where I live are not starting families, and by far the most common reason given is that the cost of living has risen to such an extent that they feel that rearing children has become unaffordable. It's not a yearning for hedonism that's dissuading them, it's the fact that they can't even afford to buy somewhere to live.
I won't comment on your assertion that the freedom to watch "adult-appropriate movies on a big TV in the living room" is a more fulfilling state of being than parenthood, except to say that I'm very grateful that I'm not that shallow.
MontyCarloHall 6 hours ago [-]
>[B]y far the most common reason given is that the cost of living has risen to such an extent that they feel that rearing children has become unaffordable.
That's certainly a factor, though very aggressive financial incentives for parents don't seem to work very well [0, 1, 2]. Not to mention that in rich countries, educational attainment and income are negatively correlated with fertility [3]. My theory there is that people's high-powered careers provide them more self-satisfaction than having kids.
>it's the fact that they can't even afford to buy somewhere to live.
It's funny you mention this. Some friends said they weren't having a second kid because they couldn't afford a three bedroom house, not realizing that kids sharing bedrooms was the norm for middle class families until very recently. Having one bedroom per kid was a luxury just 30-40 years ago.
>I won't comment on your assertion that the freedom to watch "adult-appropriate movies on a big TV in the living room" is a more fulfilling state of being than parenthood
It's not my assertion, it's something a couple deciding to not have another kid literally told me. They missed being able to have substantial amounts of adult time, and were actively counting down the days until their only child was old enough to amuse himself for long periods of time. Having another kid would reset that clock.
The incentives you mentioned are meek, the opposite of aggressive.
Here is a list of aggressive incentives that will never happen in the US:
1. Fully paid daycare for every week with more than 30 hours worked by any parent
2. Fully paid healthcare until 18 years old
3. Fully paid after elementary school care for every week with more than 30 hours worked by any parent.
nemomarx 5 hours ago [-]
How aggressive are those incentives really, compared to cost of childcare? Do they fully cover the cost of daycare and education for the kids for 18 years, alongside paying for a larger home?
> But financial and other inducements are failing to convince couples who cite skyrocketing child-rearing costs and property prices, a lack of well-paid jobs and the country’s cut-throat education system as obstacles to having bigger families.
I know South Korea has both expensive cram schools and a difficult housing market. If the incentives aren't as large as the additional costs from child raising, does it really tell us anything? Ideally you'd want it to exceed those costs.
Of course, that might be impractical or impossible for a government to fund, which is something.
mekdoonggi 9 hours ago [-]
And do you think this is bad?
MontyCarloHall 8 hours ago [-]
I never made any value judgment on whether it’s bad or good. “Hedonism” is simply the focus of individual pleasure and happiness above all else, and everything I listed is an example of things that lead to individual happiness that are antithetical to having many children.
aerodexis 5 hours ago [-]
Having children is profoundly more fulfilling and pleasurable than the surface-level pleasures you listed. "hedonism" doesn't create a lack of children, if anything people are not hedonistic enough, but for economic reasons pursue cheap low-quality pleasure over high-quality pleasure.
trumpdong 2 hours ago [-]
Not to mention that everyone finds unprotected sex pretty darn hedonistic.
bryanlarsen 8 hours ago [-]
Hedonism is bad because:
- hedonic pleasures are adaptive. The first time you experience them is incredible. The 1000th time, much less so.
- chasing hedonic pleasures is counter-productive. Studies show that people who actively seek out hedonic pleasure are less happy than those that don't.
OTOH, eudaimonic pleasure (aka fulfilment, satisfaction) is much more durable.
Work, hobbies, charity work, and children are avenues towards fulfilment. Far too many rely on work to provide it for them, but that's counter-productive for most.
Noumenon72 5 hours ago [-]
Happiness is the emotional reward for eudaimonia. Since I mostly reject eudaimonia as people and genes offering you carrots for doing what they want, not what you want, I naturally don't feel happiness like someone who's like "I'm winning, life is meaningful, others think well of me". I seek out hedonic pleasure because I think it's more real than happiness.
lukeschlather 7 hours ago [-]
I wonder how those who have experienced the pleasure of having 1000 children experience that compared to the first one.
Supernaut 7 hours ago [-]
It's a shame we can't ask Genghis Khan for his thoughts on the matter.
Daishiman 6 hours ago [-]
> OTOH, eudaimonic pleasure (aka fulfilment, satisfaction) is much more durable.
I am not actually sure that this is consistent across most people who have had children.
bryanlarsen 5 hours ago [-]
Certainly not. It's much more likely to be successful than getting it from work, though.
vkou 9 hours ago [-]
The degeneracy of these millennials who want to maintain healthy sleep habits...
vladms 3 hours ago [-]
Funny enough I know lots of millennials without children with horrible sleep patterns and habits.
But you might be up to something: people are too stressed/anxious/depressed (without children) that adding children seems to them like an impossible burden. Now, I am not sure children would not sometimes actually improve their state (biology kicking in), but definitely is a gamble.
swat535 8 hours ago [-]
I don't think most child-free adults are forgoing children to perform works of mercy. Perhaps some do, but it's not the majority.
The term "child-free" implies relieving oneself of a disease, the way one describes himself as "cancer-free" or "drug-free". As in caring for children is on par with imprisonment.
Now I don't mind mind people opting out of having children to live a hedonistic life, my only issue is describing it as a noble cause.
happytoexplain 7 hours ago [-]
>The term "child-free" implies relieving oneself of a disease, the way one describes himself as "cancer-free" or "drug-free".
Wow, this is an eyebrow-raising degree of uncharitability. There's no reason to attack straightforward words like this.
Also, the parent did not make this implication. They implied it's irresponsible to have children unintentionally or flippantly.
swat535 7 hours ago [-]
> Also, the parent did not make this implication
You're arguing a straw man, I didn't mention that the parent made the implication.
I simply refuted a portion of parent's claim that people are forgoing children to foster a care of their community or performing acts of service as they implied here:
"a child-free adult gets fulfillment out of nurturing and caring for others, mentoring, caring for themselves and their community"
> There's no reason to attack straightforward words like this.
If you feel like my interpretation of the term is an attack, that's on you. I simply voiced what the term communicates to me.
As an example, there's a reason Anti Abortionists rebranded the term to "Pro Life" because of the connotation.
Terms do have an intention behind them.
mekdoonggi 6 hours ago [-]
> refuted a portion of parent's claim that people are forgoing children to foster a care of their community or performing acts of service
You didn't refute, you just said you didn't think that's what people are doing. In any case it doesn't matter what they do with their time, because it's theirs.
> If you feel like my interpretation of the term is an attack, that's on you.
> Terms do have an intention behind them.
I don't know how you square that circle. You made some claims about the term child-free which are strictly your interpretation and then used it to describe their choice as ignoble.
In both cases you're just ascribing a nobility and morality to having children which just isn't there.
swat535 1 hours ago [-]
I’m not the one claiming having children is noble, parent was claiming that people are forgoing having children as a noble act.
Secondly, I’m allowed to express my opinion about a term. You can disagree and think the term child-free doesn’t have negative connotation but in my read it does. So im not sure what you’re trying to argue.
macNchz 6 hours ago [-]
My impression was that the term arose out of a desire to communicate it as more of a chosen state of being, where "childless" may imply or at least allow some sense of undesired absence.
mrtksn 1 hours ago [-]
> more activities that are simply more fun and rewarding than having children
Close but it’s not about fun, it’s about exploring the new possibilities. There’s simply no time for having kids when you just transition to a new way of life and you don’t know what to do. You maybe want to travel the world or build a house etc so you work more and spend more towards these. The next gen is having more kids.
Bulgaria used to be a prime example of population collapse but today has the highest birth rates in Europe(not just EU). The population will still shrink but as the dust settles people have certainty, know what to expect from life and can make a choice of having kids. Traveling the world can be just a phase in the early 20s, don’t have to grind as much for the basics, the definition of success isn’t getting rich through hard work so a simple and balanced life with kids becomes a feasible and desirable option.
aurareturn 6 hours ago [-]
Part of it is activities but I think the majority is that if you want a good living, you have to work in cities. But cities are very expensive to live in due to unaffordable housing. Not to mention people don’t feel secured when employment is so unstable. People don’t want to take the risk to have kids if they can’t afford a permanent home and stable employment.
Daishiman 6 hours ago [-]
This is likely a very significant factor as urbanization has been extremely rapid, and historically cities kept their populations afloat by a constant influx of people from rural areas.
gritspants 5 hours ago [-]
I grew up blue collar and pitched in with my father's work from a very young age. As a child I was able to balance out the time and expense of raising me by contributing back to the household. I have children and they just cannot contribute to my white collar job. They can participate in some chores, but they are essentially a massive money pit. Daycare is more than my mortgage. Public school gets out at like 2:30. It's just so exhausting sometimes.
asdff 2 hours ago [-]
They don't have afterschool care anymore in schools? We had that both formally and informally (e.g. through sports).
nkg 4 hours ago [-]
It takes a village.
happytoexplain 9 hours ago [-]
This seems like the obvious explanation, though I think your use of the term "hedonism" is distracting. People are inherently selfish (how could any entity not be "self"-ish to some degree?). The bottom line is that we do things because we want to. Even selfless activities feel good. That's fine, honestly. But having children is not intrinsically non-hedonistic. It's just one of many self-fulfilling activities we choose from.
MontyCarloHall 8 hours ago [-]
Agreed with everything you wrote. I meant “hedonism” in its non-colloquial, neutral sense, i.e. the pursuit of individual pleasure and happiness above all else, which judging by the other replies was a mistake on my part.
>But having children is not intrinsically non-hedonistic. It's just one of many self-fulfilling activities we choose from
Exactly, and my point is that all the activities I listed (which only become abundantly available in rich, industrialized societies) are more self-fulfilling than having children.
trumpdong 2 hours ago [-]
People who have children often report it being the most fulfilling thing they ever did, while other pleasures are temporary. So I don't know if I can buy this argument.
05 51 minutes ago [-]
Or: boring people who have nothing fulfilling in their lives often report having children is the most fulfilling?
ip26 1 hours ago [-]
Hard to assign that a value before you are a parent though. You can only understand it in the abstract.
I think it's not industrialization but urbanization.
laughing_man 5 hours ago [-]
That one ranks high on my list. If you're a farmer in the countryside children are an economic asset. They can feed the animals, plant, weed the crops, maintain fencing, etc. Once you move to the city, whatever else they are in terms of fulfillment, they're an economic liability.
Oddly enough, it's likely the US and Europe defused (and then some) Erlich's population bomb with farm subsidies which pushed people off farms and in to Nike factories in the developing world.
trumpdong 2 hours ago [-]
Is this still true when machines do the farming?
laughing_man 1 hours ago [-]
Not as much, but once you start mechanized farming you don't need many people in agriculture. There are few enough farmers in industrialized countries that they don't affect demographics much.
My sense is American farmers have more children than the population at large, but I don't have numbers to back it up. My farmer maternal great grandparents had 12 and 9 children -- I don't think that happens much anymore.
porridgeraisin 7 hours ago [-]
I would argue it is due to nuclearisation of families, that has always accompanied industrialisation. See my other comment on this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48416228
FeteCommuniste 6 hours ago [-]
Fascinating hypothesis. I wonder if technological and economic progress makes "nuclearisation" inevitable, i.e. people can just move wherever the best money is at.
em-bee 6 hours ago [-]
it's more like people are forced to move where the jobs are. mobility is demanded by the industry.
porridgeraisin 6 hours ago [-]
I would change it from `can` to `almost forced to`. Since I am seeing nuclearisation live, here are a few observations.
Industrialisation is an inherently compounding event. Thus, it gets concentrated geographically. So you get "hubs" like a tech hub, a manufacturing hub, a finance hub, etc,. So if you study CS, you cannot just take a tech job in a finance city or an export city. You got to move to a tech hub.
So unless your entire family is in roughly the same line of work, it is very difficult to keep a joint family. In fact, contrary to the "more money less kids" hypothesis, the traditional "family business" families that continue to do what their ancestors did, tend to have more kids and live in joint family homes.
Even if a set of parents happened to have 2.1 kids on average, the chance that in the next generation, the two siblings end up consistently living close by each other is very small. So it really only takes 30 years for TFR to fall off a cliff.
voiceofchoice 5 hours ago [-]
For the first time ever people can finally choose not to have kids.
Is it really any surprise people would opt out?
Go spend a day with kids and you'll see why people would rather not deal with the mess.
Especially women who actually end up doing the majority of the work.
Add to that the extinction level pressures like climate change and the absolute lack of any benefit whatsoever in being a parent, who is crazy enough to willingly sign up for this if you actually put any thought into it instead of just "that's the way things are though!!!"
Every day I praise the man who did my vasectomy lol
drdaeman 3 hours ago [-]
The way I understand it, the modern sentiment is to have children meaningfully, raising them being a project parents actively invest into. Contraception brought choice, choice brought up consideration and planning. This all opened the can of "what are we doing" and "why do we do it" and "how do we do it right", that tended to be ignored in previous eras (where having or not having children was not exactly a real choice).
And for little I know about raising children is that it's one hell of a job, that requires extensive knowledge, skill, and constant heavy investment, all being an unbreakable commitment for almost two decades. Messing anything up means another human suffers the consequences. In my mind, a would-be parents have to be really competent to be confident to be able to accept the responsibility, and even then screwups are a given. Skipping on any of that, even unintentionally or from inadequate skills, means a person out there will be left to figure out how to deal with the aftermath of their upbringing. The fact a lot of people skip on all of that and just do it is no excuse.
And thus, personally, I never felt like having children. Not seriously, not after thinking about it in any depth. I messed up two cats already, messing up a human is unnecessary.
IMHO, if a society really needs new people because can't figure out how to support old ones otherwise, it should invest into professional parenting and employ people who are genuinely enthusiastic about doing that work.
KellyCriterion 4 hours ago [-]
you are right IN:
a) there is a lot of fun to do "outside there"
but you are MASSIVLY wrong in:
b) children are meaningful, they give you more than the consumption you can have - rent one month into brothel and you will see! ;-)
(source: father of twins, and nearly bankrupt regardless of my tech-job, nontheless my kids me more than our usual career-shit)
dyauspitr 59 minutes ago [-]
It’s not that complicated. As soon as women are educated and have a choice of supporting themselves the birth rate drops. If you want a higher birth rate, stop educating women and disempower them. This is something republicans in the US intimately understand.
mitthrowaway2 6 hours ago [-]
The links you posted seem to say that government fertility support policies actually do have a big effect.
MSFT_Edging 6 hours ago [-]
I know the "bring them into this world" thing is overdone, but a big part of me feels it to my core.
I haven't seen a firefly in a couple years. If I had a child today, describing this bug to a child would be almost mythical.
How many things that we've taken for granted will a child born today never get to experience? Not shallow things like iPods, but genuine miracles of nature we're wiping out at an accelerating pace. I can't in good conscious bring a child into a world that so many are focused on absolutely destroying.
It's my protest to allow the pyramid of consumption to collapse. I will not bring a just another customer into the world. I won't bring a child here just so they can be a pawn to try to recover from poor planning.
We as humans need this population collapse. We need to learn how to organize society on long-term sustainability, not a pyramid scheme.
Every time I see this discussion, it's always framed like a call to action, that we need new children to bail out the sinking boat and keep it floating for another generation or two.
SamPatt 6 hours ago [-]
>I can't in good conscious bring a child into a world that so many are focused on absolutely destroying.
Who is focused on destroying the world?
I don't think hardly any super villains exist. People might have a different assessment of what destroying the world means than you do.
MSFT_Edging 6 hours ago [-]
Many people think a well manicured lawn sprayed with pesticides is preferable to local wildflowers and shrubs.
They "have a different assessment" but they're still contributing to an extinction event. You don't need to be a super villain. You can simply be selfish. Once scaled to many many selfish people, you have a collective villain.
forlorn_mammoth 4 hours ago [-]
SamPatt, it isn't necessarily individuals making individual decisions. Yeah, very few supervillains.
But perhaps you've heard talk of things like "6th mass extinction event" or "global climate change"?
both of which are direct consequences of our industrialized society?
Look, I'm personally grateful for modern medicine and indoor plumbing, to name a few things. I don't want to go back to some idealized hunter-gatherer past (yes, I've tried it).
And regardless of the actual truth of ecological and climate collapse, or your particular views on the actual truth of these, enough people see enough convincing evidence that the parent poster's view is supported by enough people to matter.
We live in a blessed window.
Larrikin 6 hours ago [-]
People shutting down efforts to transition from fossil fuels because they can make more money from fossil fuels and will be dead before they experience any of the consequences are the typical example.
taeric 6 hours ago [-]
An odd example, as fireflies are still pretty big in the places they have always been, aren't they? I know when I get to visit my childhood states, they are still there. Similar for cicadas and other bugs of my youth that I didn't realize were far more local than I expected.
MSFT_Edging 6 hours ago [-]
It was just a recently notable example. Even as of 2-3 years ago I used to see them a decent amount. They're a highly visible marker of an insect population that is dropping like a rock.
They're also a beautiful creature that I could imagine wishing a child of mine could experience the same way I did, which better illustrates the tragedy of the damage we're doing to the planet.
taeric 5 hours ago [-]
I'm assuming you still live in the same place? My understanding the last time I took a dive on this is that the numbers are going down, but not in any way that is going to see them gone. You will need to go to where they are, though. And, alas, the PNW is not a place to find them.
robotnikman 6 hours ago [-]
I hate to say it, but I have been feeling the same way recently. I just don't see humanity being sustainable on this planet if we are relying on constantly producing more and more people. There has to be an equilibrium of some kind.
vladms 3 hours ago [-]
I doubt anybody wants to produce more and more people. Most predictions for total population size I have seen are rather asymptotic.
We should discuss and reason about population size (where we are, where should we be, what should we do), but with a bit less passion. 30 years ago people were all doom about "over-population" and now I see all doom about "under-population".
trumpdong 2 hours ago [-]
I mean, a one child policy would be more sustainable than a zero child reality.
Arodex 6 hours ago [-]
One could make the point this is less about industrialization causing a change in behavior, and more chemical pollution destroying fertility. Of which we have plenty of concrete evidence.
SubmarineClub 6 hours ago [-]
Except evidence does not show that there are many more people trying and failing for kids as in past decades, so much as more people are delaying partnering up and having kids till later and later, along with many opting to be childless.
And most fertility issues people do encounter can primarily be explained by attempting to have children decades later than is biologically optimal.
KellyCriterion 4 hours ago [-]
you are right IN:
a) there is a lot of fun to do "outside there"
but you are MASSIVLY wrong in:
b) children are meaningful, they give you more than the consumption you can have - rent one month into brothel and you will see! ;-)
wonderwonder 2 hours ago [-]
My theory is different.
Decades of officials telling people that the world was overpopulated. That global warming was going to kill us all and any children born would be subjected to horrific conditions.
Well mission accomplished.
throwagyhv6886 7 hours ago [-]
India has barely industrialized though.
beAbU 6 hours ago [-]
wat
Why do you say so?
hgoel 6 hours ago [-]
Probably pretty obvious why they're saying so, given the fresh throwaway account.
VirusNewbie 6 hours ago [-]
>My hypothesis is that as societies industrialize, they afford their population more and more activities that are simply more fun and rewarding than having children.
But this is by and large not true. I've traveled, eaten at expensive restaurants, enjoyed a child free existence into my mid thirties and having kids is a blast[*]
My wife was adamantly against having kids when we got together in our twenties, and she changed her mind in her late thirties; she now says that was the best thing that has happened to her.
Finally, there are many studies showing that people lead happier lives when they focus on someone else, have a higher purpose beyond just hedonism or living selfishly.
[*] - I have a supportive partner who collaborates with me so we both get time away and time off from the occasional drudgery or exhaustion of parenting. I still get time to work out, see friends, have time with my wife, all of that. If I couldn't afford the occasional babysitter and had a partner who was absent most of the time, it would be a lot harder!
em-bee 5 hours ago [-]
having kids is a blast
true, but you didn't know until you had them, and society keeps telling us otherwise. we need to change the message and educate youth about becoming parents. but also create a culture where having children is welcome.
in the west we complain about kids running around, making noise, being not under control. and most importantly we blame the parents. in china every child is treated like a treasure. sometimes even to a fault. but at least parents are not being blamed for having children, or for bringing them along when they have noone else to care for them. for example children hanging out at their parents workplace after school is normal. in the west that's ground for getting fired.
VirusNewbie 4 hours ago [-]
>in china every child is treated like a treasure. sometimes even to a fault. but at least parents are not being blamed for having children,
huh, I didn't know this. Thank you for sharing about your culture :)
em-bee 4 hours ago [-]
i am not chinese, it's just an observation from living there.
dividefuel 4 hours ago [-]
How people feel about having kids doesn't seem to be a uniform thing. The majority of parents certainly seem to love their children, but I do see a lot of mixed opinions about whether they love being parents.
In my peer group, it's been about 50/50 between people who seem to really enjoy parenthood and others who are struggling. There are many reasons for struggling, like how they or their spouse handle the stress and how much help they have or pay for. But the biggest one is that kids largely take up a lot of time and energy.
It's hard for someone to expect that they'll enjoy parenthood when they look around and see many parents who are unhappy.
vladms 3 hours ago [-]
In my childless group of friends the ratio of happy to unhappy seems similar. What if it is not about the children but about the people? Each has its preferences, and damn I have seen a lot that have no clue what they like and continue doing things that makes them unhappy.
Maybe we should have like with "open university day", "open raise a child day". Some might like it more than imagine, some might hate it more than imagine.
inglor_cz 6 hours ago [-]
While this is generally true, the first derivative of the baby bust curve is far from uniform across the planet. Indian fertility drop has been very sharp and who knows where it will end.
myth_drannon 6 hours ago [-]
[*] All parts of the Israeli population have high birth rates, even the secular Jews. I find it misleading to single out Orthodox Jews as the main contributor. You don't do that to Evangelical Christians or Mormons, or some other groups in US.
I don't think the religion is the driver here.
canucker2016 6 hours ago [-]
It looks like a regional phenomenon - countries near to Israel have a similar fertility rate.
University students are predominantly female in Israel as in North America, so female education isn't a differentiator for fertility rate.
I recall reading an article about the culture of Israel is friendlier towards families/young children. Not sure how that cultural aspect would show up in stats.
jmyeet 2 hours ago [-]
Here are the figures by group in Israel [1]:
- As of 2022, the fertility rates in Israeli cities dominated by specific demographic groups were: Haredi 6.1, Bedouin 4.4, Jewish non-Haredi 2.4, Arab 2.2, Druze 1.8
So the GP's characterization is correct.
Yes, non-Haredi Jewish Israelis have a higher fertility rate than in Western nations. There seems to be a variety of reasons for this including cultural/religious pressure, institutional support and selection bias (in terms of who chooses to immigrate/emigrate).
Which is not a bad thing. We have limited resources. It’s not a bad thing to slow down. Even if we’re having fewer babies, we’re far from endangered, despite some (dishonest, IMO) narratives.
lo_zamoyski 2 hours ago [-]
The main problem is the culture of consumerism.
I wouldn't say we're hedonistic creatures by nature. It isn't good for us to be hedonists. I would say that hedonism is simply the nature and logic of consumerism, and consumerism—and indeed, hedonism—derails healthy human virtues, tastes, and habits like a drug and deranges one's ability to reason about reality and the good.
Consumerism is intrinsically market-oriented and thus all about satisfying the desires of the market. In a hyperliberal culture that privatizes and relativizes morality and makes "freedom" from all restraint the ultimate end of human existence—full stop—that means the market is effectively god and that no desire can be wrong (in practice, this is complicated by the unfeasibility of ultimately attaining such a state of affairs).
Naturally, hedonism doesn't sit still. Once it slakes its appetite for something, like a vampire, it wants to move onto something else. Its appetite only grows. Hedonism is a death spiral of indulgence of ever increasing depravity. In an amoral environment that produces people lacking proper moral and intellectual formation (apparently moral formation is "fascist"), and without at least the guardrails provided by law rightly understood, it is an easy death spiral to enter into.
If life is seen as objectively without meaning, then all that remains is hedonism. Our age is full of nihilist thinly papered over with hedonistic distractions.
So we're nihilists. We live in a nihilistic consumerist culture. Nihilism leads to nothingness and death.
cindyllm 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
Veserv 6 hours ago [-]
Except in [0] the birth rate is relatively flat between 1950-1970 and then suddenly starts a rapid reduction. Developed countries have already been industrialized for 100 years by that point. The modern work day and access to many modern fun and rewarding activitys have been available for literal decades. Mass urbanization already occurred. Many of the modern household appliances have been in use for decades. Antibiotics, vaccines, and childhood mortality had already been dramatically reduced to within the vicinity of modern norms. In developed countrys female workforce participation, education, and political activity were material with no clear fundamental shift in those metrics in the 1960s-1970s.
But you know what did occur in the 1960s-1970s? The invention and popularization of the birth control pill. Here is the US birth rate [1]. Rising from 1950-1960 then a sudden and precipitous drop in the 1960s until stabilization in the 1970-now range. This coincides with the global drop in fertility rate. How about Germany [2]? Growth from 1950 to late 1960s then a sudden drop until stabilization in the mid 1970s. France [3]? Flat and high until mid-1960s then a sudden drop until stabilization in 1980. UK [4]? Growth from 1950 to mid 1960s then a sudden drop until stabilization mid 1970s. Australia [5]? Growth until 1960 then drop until stabilization in 1980.
Every single developed country in the world is flat to growing and then sees a sudden and rapid decline in birth rate just a few years after mass availability of the birth control pill until stabilization around the time that the pre-birth control cohort ages past reproductive years. The birth control pill is so new that the reproductive cohort that lived prior to its invention is still alive.
My hypothesis is that fertility is just a function of access to cheap, effective contraceptives. The fertility rates we see today are the natural rates when pregnancy is a choice.
I think that is it. We have somewhat of a confirmation with Romania and Decree 770, which led to an increase in children (though that might have been temporary I'm not well versed in the history). I think there is no inherent desire to have children or if there is, it is far weaker than a lot of people think. And it makes sense, evolutionary. If you have a desire for self-preservation, a desire for the preservation of those close to you, a desire to nurture the young (once they are there, which also shows in seeing 'cuteness') and a desire for sex, then you don't really 'need' a desire for children directly, because the children will naturally follow from that chain of desires. It just fits with how evolution seems to works (I think at least), which often causes these daisy chains of things that work intermittently to cause something else.
b0rtb0rt 5 hours ago [-]
it’s funny how much mental gymnastics people will do to avoid this obvious answer
birth control and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race
in addition to the obvious birth rate effects, i think there are a lot of other sociological effects from everyone being on hormonal birth control that people don’t want to admit
inglor_cz 6 hours ago [-]
Yeah, the big secret out there is that half of people once born might have been unwanted and "accidental", if not more.
voiceofchoice 4 hours ago [-]
And those in turn might not want to be here themselves and when given the choice decide to break the chain.
pjc50 3 hours ago [-]
This is table stakes obvious, though? Again we see the weirdness of having an almost exclusively male conversation about the subject.
Women are choosing not to have children, and you need to ask them why and take the answers seriously.
b0rtb0rt 50 minutes ago [-]
because they are on a medication that makes their body think they are pregnant already
women have sex drives too, if they arent on birth control they are more likely to engage in behavior that can get them pregnant
firdunupsa2 1 hours ago [-]
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Auracle 7 hours ago [-]
I don’t necessarily disagree with your overall point, but for some reason at least in US society you’re no longer allowed to broadly talk having kids like you used to be able to. Let me break that norm for a second.
So, are other activities more fun than child rearing? Often, yeah. Definitely less stressful. Rewarding? Not in a million goddamned years. Nothing, absolutely nothing, compares to when your kid first walks, talks, tackles a problem they had a hard time doing before, or tells you that they love spending time with you completely unprompted.
For what it’s worth, I personally think a good portion of the birth rate dropping is environmental. Maybe it’s plastics, pfas, or something else nobody is looking at. Some people still have an urge to have kids, completely separate from the urge to have sex. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that testosterone and sperm counts have been dropping among humans and dogs, and that the deliberately child free people I know all veer on the (forgive the derisive slang term, but I don’t know how else to get the point across) “soyboy” type of person - both male and female.
That potential pollution aspect also explains this happening to industrial societies.
kentm 6 hours ago [-]
> but for some reason at least in US society you’re no longer allowed to broadly talk having kids like you used to be able to.
This has not been my experience. What has changed is that its now looked-down on to denigrate people who choose not to have kids (in some circles), and that people are no longer treated as heroes for having children. It had historically been the case that people who chose to not have kids were browbeaten about their choices.
I have had no issues talking about my children at all even with people who have remained childless. This is because I respect other peoples' decisions when doing so.
BigTTYGothGF 6 hours ago [-]
> you’re no longer allowed to broadly talk having kids like you used to be able to
I'm not sure that this is the case, could you expand?
somewhatgoated 6 hours ago [-]
I don’t buy that having children is the only really rewarding thing you could do as a human.
Like the only reasons you can come up with is mystery chemicals or soyboys - seriously?
I think it’s vastly more complex than “insert my favourite political reason” and includes many different factors.
Personally I think it’s telling that only the Orthodox Jews don’t seem to have that problem - with an extremely rigid, strict and misogynistic religion as their primary purpose.
Personally as a male I don’t mind having kids but if I were a woman no way in hell would I have one.
throw3578322 5 hours ago [-]
In surveys, Orthodox Jewish women rate their happiness with life higher than secular women. You could argue that this is subjective, but I think you would find the same if you look at other derived markers, like substance abuse, suicide, etc.
There can be multiple reasons why modern societies have less kids, but the main theme of Orthodoxy is to keep as much as possible the same as in previous generations. So they would be avoiding almost all the possible reasons given for the decline.
5 hours ago [-]
yks 5 hours ago [-]
> the deliberately child free people I know all veer on the “soyboy” type of person
If you were to actually know parents at your local area daycare centers/schools, it'd quickly become evident that the "masculine"/"feminine" types are a definite minority.
Der_Einzige 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
i_idiot 10 hours ago [-]
What's the strong case against population dwindling other than supporting aging population? Given the AI armageddon, it just makes sense to reduce the population. If there's less population, we need less production and less workers. Of course, countries have to deal with oldest population for a brief period of time.
FuriouslyAdrift 6 hours ago [-]
We only have one modern example of demographic crash to study... Japan.
Total economic stagnation, spiraling population numbers, loss of anything anchored to manual labor, and an aging population.
So far, it looks to be a way for slow extinction of a culture.
guyzero 6 hours ago [-]
Japan, a country famous for no one knowing what its culture is.
dyauspitr 55 minutes ago [-]
Reading about it in books and watching anime won’t prevent them from going functionally extinct in less than 200 years.
guyzero 26 minutes ago [-]
No one cares. Japanese culture today is nothing like it was 200 years ago.
everdrive 5 hours ago [-]
Ah yes, the hellscape that is Japan. The Japanese are currently fleeing to South Sudan and Darfur in hopes of a better life.
Unit327 43 minutes ago [-]
The impacts haven't really been seen yet because Japan is still on the flat apex of the population curve, but the rollercoaster is about to start diving.
Both New Zealand and Australia have about 30% of the population born overseas. Immigration does lead to some stresses but it also has bonuses. Immigration seems to clearly help in the short term.
But yes, immigration doesn't solve the demographics issue, because immigrant citizens also get old and expect government support.
Immigrants do often have good sized families so that brings in a fresh generation of New Zealanders. Plenty of my married friends are from mixed cultures.
In some cultures their children give more time to care for their own parents or elderly family. New Zealand born children seem less likely to do so.
The local born often whine because whinging is a significant part of our colonial heritage from England.
guyzero 4 hours ago [-]
Japan is already accepting immigrants! It's right there in the article I linked! It's just a question of raising the quota slightly.
It's hardly going to solve every problem, it will keep restaurants from closing.
9dev 4 hours ago [-]
"allowing to enter the country" and "accepting" are two very distinct things.
guyzero 4 hours ago [-]
In English they can, in fact, be used, at times, interchangeably!
It's causing massive issues in Japan, unless you read those Instagram posts that tell you everything is perfect.
vachina 10 hours ago [-]
The top 1% is freaking out at the thought of population shrinking because the cogs of the machine won’t turn itself.
btilly 9 hours ago [-]
The other 99% is even more dependent on the machine than the top 1%. They can build themselves reinforced bunkers, just in case. What is your plan if, say, the food distribution infrastructure breaks down?
Does that sound like an extremely unlikely outcome? Back in 2008, we came within hours of credit cards stopping working. Projections say that if credit cards stop working, food distribution breaks down. Mass hunger is not far behind that. And there is nothing like mass hunger to destroy a society.
Esoteric problems in financial markets have real world consequences. We've gone nearly a century since the last real demonstration of that. Don't discount the possibility that the next demonstration will be within your lifetime. And in our more interconnected world, it's likely to be a lot worse.
BigTTYGothGF 6 hours ago [-]
> if credit cards stop working, food distribution breaks down
Except for the very last step in the chain I find it hard to believe that credit cards play much of a role.
btilly 3 hours ago [-]
How does almost everyone pay for food at the grocery store? If stores don't have a good way to get money from customers, how do they pay the next step up the line?
trumpdong 2 hours ago [-]
During COVID we all saw how the government can just override all this and ensure what needs to be done is done and what cannot be done is avoided - something we always thought was impossible. Yet we all quickly forgot this happened and now we're back to assuming it can't happen.
Henchman21 5 hours ago [-]
You don’t think goods are acquired on credit?
Or are you focused pedantically on credit cards?
BigTTYGothGF 4 hours ago [-]
If OP hadn't said "credit cards" I wouldn't have commented.
toomuchtodo 9 hours ago [-]
This is a call for community and durable systems that serve the human instead of traditional systems built to aggregate and funnel capital to a few. The fertility crisis is a capital crisis (taxpayers needed to pay back debt issued today decades into the future, workers for corporate profits), not a crisis for the individual. I see it as an exciting opportunity to maintain and improve quality of life for humans while solving for decoupling from these suboptimal systems primarily built to extract and exploit. Solarpunk vibes.
(to your food example, the US harvests land the aggregate size of the state of Oregon just for biofuels, ethanol and biodiesel; this is, arguable, unnecessary, and there are many other examples of unnecessary economic activity that can be deprecated)
btilly 9 hours ago [-]
I could rant about the stupidity of spending fossil fuels, to grow biofuels, for no net gain in energy. But with a definite cost in engine wear.
That said, like Democracy, capitalism is the worst economic system, except all of the others that have been tried. And there have been enough alternate experiments that I wouldn't want to literally bet my life on the next one working better.
toomuchtodo 9 hours ago [-]
Europe has done fairly well imho balancing socialism with capitalism and free market mechanisms, good patterns exist today I argue, even if they need tweaks and improvement. Importantly, these demographic curves are locked in for decades into the future, so might as well get comfortable with forward curve of change, we aren't going back to the historical demographic growth curve in anyone's lifetime, if ever. Plan, forecast, and model accordingly.
(~71% of the world’s population now lives in countries with birth rates below the replacement level needed to maintain population size, the remainder will follow in time)
rekabis 5 hours ago [-]
> What is your plan if, say, the food distribution infrastructure breaks down?
300 acres on the westward-facing slope of the interior cascade temperate rainforest. Even if the entire region sees extended drying over the next 50, there will still be sufficient rainfall for crops. All it will need are a few holding pools to reliably produce a year-round supply.
It’s also reasonably remote, difficult to reach unless you know of the specific path, and reasonably defensible.
forlorn_mammoth 4 hours ago [-]
Great idea! Let's scale this out so that everyone can have this same basic security!
2 hours ago [-]
foobiekr 4 hours ago [-]
Until you get cancer.
Survivalist fantasies aren’t realistic.
theflyinghorse 9 hours ago [-]
Top 1% are too divorced from the real world to have ever seen a cog.
M95D 8 hours ago [-]
But they have some ideea how many people need to work to make them that much money.
foobiekr 4 hours ago [-]
Being able to punish and control others, especially sexual exploitation, is a huge part of the draw. You need lots of slaves for that.
Ajedi32 9 hours ago [-]
If the "cogs of the machine" freeze up and economy tanks the top 1% will be fine. You might not be.
danny_codes 6 hours ago [-]
Depends what we mean by freeze up. Revolutions usually mean some part of the elite class gets killed or exiled. Happens all the time.
OutOfHere 9 hours ago [-]
Isn't that what AI and robots are intended to be for? As for the customers, B2B could still work.
mystreamlincar 41 minutes ago [-]
You need consumers to buy whatever an economy builds, regardless of AI involvement. As people retire they consume less.
calepayson 9 hours ago [-]
Shot in the dark but my sense is that a lot of our economics presumes growth and, if we don’t get it, a lot of terrible stuff happens. I feel pretty confident that ai will eventually be a large driver of growth but I do worry about whether it'll come soon enough.
happytoexplain 9 hours ago [-]
>a lot of our economics presumes growth and, if we don’t get it, a lot of terrible stuff happens
What does this actually mean? Every time I try to wrap my head around why it's bad e.g. for a business to make a constant profit, rather than an increasing profit; or for the population to dip to some number and settle there, rather than increase; the explanations seem to become circular very quickly. I know it's partially my fault for not having a very strong economic education, but it also feels like something is fundamentally wrong with the theories - like they are making some underlying assumption about what is "good" that I don't share. But I can never seem to get down to it.
The only thing I understand is that as the ratio of old to young grows, more taxes are needed, of course. But that would only be painful during a significant rate of change, not after the number is stable, no? Is that really somehow apocalyptic?
boelboel 9 hours ago [-]
There's no reason to think things would stabilize but even if things roughly stabilize in terms of population there's problems.
When a certain region in a country gets a cluster of great companies or really any productive advantage you would want more buildings and people there. In a country with a growing population that would make most sense as you need to build houses regardless as there's more people entering the job market who need a home. In a country with a stagnant population for every home you build another needs to be abandoned. This is more expensive especially when this happens enough where a school in the 'abandoned town' closes and a new school should be made in the better town. You can see how the first is more efficient, you don't waste your fine buildings.
saintvlad 5 hours ago [-]
> more taxes are needed
Don't forget it's not just taxes, but the allocation of labor and resources. If the entire population magically turned 90 tomorrow, no amount of taxes would be able to provide for them.
quickthrowman 3 hours ago [-]
> What does this actually mean? Every time I try to wrap my head around why it's bad e.g. for a business to make a constant profit, rather than an increasing profit;
It’s very simple.
If you make $1M in profit in a year and the following year you also make $1M but inflation was 3%, you earned 3% less money than you did the year before. The nominal profit was the same but the real profit was lower.
To earn the same real return with 3% inflation you would need to earn $1.03M the year after you earn $1M. If your profits grew less than inflation, you made less money and your company is worth less as a result.
Monetary policy people figures out that a small amount of controlled inflation that incentivizes investing is better than deflation which encourages people to hoard cash. Some people disagree with that.
When the economy is growing, investment makes sense. Why put your money under the mattress when it could be out there, working for you?
When the reverse happens, investment stops making sense. Why risk your money when it becomes worth more while it is sitting under your mattress?
But stopping investment does not just mean stopping speculative investment. It means stopping investment in other things as well. Like maintenance. This guarantees that things are going to become worse over time. Which is a feedback loop that makes investment even less worthwhile.
This has happened in the USA before. The last time is called the Great Depression. Read through accounts of what it was like. Would you like to go through that now?
History also teaches that the longer it is between economic setbacks, the worse the next one tends to be. We've gone far longer since a depression than at any point in history. Our next one is likely to be correspondingly more terrible.
tzs 7 hours ago [-]
> When the economy is growing, investment makes sense. Why put your money under the mattress when it could be out there, working for you?
> When the reverse happens, investment stops making sense. Why risk your money when it becomes worth more while it is sitting under your mattress?
Is it necessary to have a growing population in order to have a growing economy?
For much of human history I'd guess the answer was yes, because the size of the economy was based almost entirely on how much physical work people did, but the modern economy is very different from historical economies.
NoGravitas 6 hours ago [-]
You've given a good explanation of how it works -- under a mode of production concerned primarily with the exchange value of goods, not their use value. If what you want to do is to provide adequate/growing use value, you can do that instead and allocate resources based on need rather than on investment value.
bpt3 4 hours ago [-]
Use value and exchange value are highly correlated for basically all goods other than collectibles and luxury items, and even then their "use" often is providing an emotional boost to their owner.
It seems like you're recommending socialism without coming out and saying it?
calepayson 9 hours ago [-]
Honestly great question. I think of it as:
I invest my wages to take advantage of compound interest. It’s kind of my only hope of having a family / owning a home / retiring. If stuff stops compounding, I’m fucked. Multiply by however many millions of people are on the same position.
I don’t necessarily think the theories are making any assumption about what is good (except for the “greed is good dicks”)but more acknowledging that this is how our system currently works and the first generation to step off this ride will have a horrible time.
tavavex 9 hours ago [-]
But isn't this just a more abstract example of the 'circular explanations' thing that OP mentioned? The reason why we need compound interest on our savings accounts instead of just being able to put away some money every year is a product of having to counteract inflation, which is the result of policies trying to induce growth by making saving less appealing than putting the money into more companies making more things for more profit. We need infinite growth because everything around us is designed to expect infinite growth. But what happens as we start running out of headroom? Is there really no other way at all?
bobson381 6 hours ago [-]
We are going to find out. See Limits to Growth.
mystreamlincar 38 minutes ago [-]
Growth has 2 parts, producers and consumers. AI might be able to take solve production due to lack of workers, but it cannot solve lack of consumers
lenkite 7 hours ago [-]
Gradual population decline empowers lower-income workers. As seen after the Black Death, a scarcity of labor drives real wages up and lower the cost of basic goods and rent.
Basically, the billionaires dislike it and hence are changing the message. They want you to be ants.
penteract 5 hours ago [-]
> As seen after the Black Death, a scarcity of labor drives real wages up and lower the cost of basic goods and rent.
Does this still hold when the majority of labor is no longer closely tied to a finite supply of land? At the time of the Black Death, the majority of men's labor was farming, and having more land directly made labor much more productive[1]. The modern economy feels much more complicated (e.g. if your job involves transporting things/people from A to B, it probably decreases in efficiency as the density of people decreases).
I'm not sure the Black Death is a good example of gradual population decline
g3f32r 6 hours ago [-]
> Gradual population decline empowers lower-income workers.
Remember this line the next time immigration/H1b debates heat up. The same mathematics are at play.
danny_codes 6 hours ago [-]
Except for outsourcing, of course. The labor pool isn't limited domestically for many kinds of work. And for tech specifically, the labor pool is highly mobile. So if another country becomes the best place to go, then the labor pool will move there. The simple analysis probably results in, counter-intuitively, the opposite of what you want, which is a decline in the competitiveness of American tech
throwaway613746 9 hours ago [-]
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ianm218 9 hours ago [-]
What is your case at all? AI could usher in a post scarcity world so why not have more humans who can enjoy better lives?
You just said AI Armageddon as if there is an already predetermined ending that is widely agreed upon.
pelotron 7 hours ago [-]
I love how "post scarcity world" is tossed around as if the earth has infinite natural resources.
ianm218 6 hours ago [-]
With renewables and nuclear we have basically unlimited energy, which can solve a lot of resource related issues.
What are you concerned we would run out of?
Daishiman 5 hours ago [-]
Helium? Rare earth minerals? Having to mine ever deeper because there are essentially no easily accessible mineral deposits? The fact that mining has enormous costs and the potential to permanently destroy sources of fresh water?
ianm218 4 hours ago [-]
Rare earth minerals are not particularly rare or needed in huge quantities.
Helium is probably more limited but for most cases there is alternatives I.e. I believe people use argon.
Idk none of this seems overly pressing in terms of preventing a lost scarcity world
geodel 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah, see those millions laid of last 5-10 years, everyone got better, more fulfilling jobs. Companies are falling over each other with ever more outrageous perks and salaries. Excellent healthcare, plentiful housing, unlimited education opportunities, nothing is scarce any more.
Thinking hard, the only thing we are having shortage is of AI tokens. Thats all we need to plan for or worry about in coming decades.
ianm218 4 hours ago [-]
Maybe if AI becomes deeply embedded enough in society/ government it will tell lawmakers "You should let people build housing in urban areas where there is demand" and that would be a nice step in the right direction!
yoyohello13 4 hours ago [-]
Well, when we get there people can have more kids.
red-iron-pine 8 hours ago [-]
it could. but it won't.
ai only solves labor, it doesn't solve human greed.
i_idiot 6 hours ago [-]
Well, isn't it already difficult for the not-rich to add to families? Add to that the uncertainty with income and future. Unless socialism is widely adopted, I am not sure humans can enjoy better lives especially with additional burden of kids. Hell, people can't afford homes now. I don't see a widely agreed upon or convincing positive ending. I already see (read about to be accurate) effects of AI on young graduates. I'd assume people hope for better ending, but would prepare for the worst.
ianm218 6 hours ago [-]
When people say "people can't afford homes now" your referring to places like NY, MA, and CA where people can't afford homes because the local governments have made it basically impossible to build to match the demand in the areas? I.e. Massachusetts despite being one of the most desirable places to live ranks 50th in housing production per capita.
You're not sure humans can enjoy better lives in the future? Like you think things could only get worse?
trumpdong 22 minutes ago [-]
That's not a weird one-off problem with those local governments, it's a symptom of something fundamental to human society.
10 hours ago [-]
dyauspitr 56 minutes ago [-]
Yeah but logically unless people start matching the replacement rate at some point it’s a lot of pain until you go extinct. Isn’t South Korea supposed to be functionally extinct in less than 100 years at this rate?
marcuskaz 10 hours ago [-]
The basis of capitalism is on growth. How can you continue to grow revenue constantly if there aren't more people to buy products or use your services. Additionally tax revenue decreases as fewer people are working, so less government services and employment would be available.
Schools is a good example, as there are less children, you need less schools and consolidate. So there are less jobs for teachers, now it looks like an equilibrium issue since over time it will balance out. But those teachers who are losing their jobs are adults, tax payers, consumers now and the loss of spending has a cascading effect.
red-iron-pine 8 hours ago [-]
e.g. how do you sell 100 million smartphones when the population is only 50 million, and can hardly afford to buy 1 (and certainly not more than 1)? this leads to layoffs
how do phone shops like verizon or t-mobile stay open if people aren't buying? same for phone repair places? more layoffs
more laid off people means less people going out to dinner, ordering pizza, taking trips, buying new cars. those businesses close, and layoff people.
less workers means less tax revinue, either income tax, payroll tax, or sales tax (cuz people ain't buying shit). government offices cut bodies (layoffs) and reduce services. there are now less cops and more potholes.
how do billionaires, whose wealth depends on publicly traded companies and their stocks, keep making money when no one can buy anything? spacex and tesla can make up numbers and stay afloat, somehow, but most stocks will tank.
M95D 7 hours ago [-]
> how do you sell 100 million smartphones when the population is only 50 million
You don't. You only sell 50 million.
> this leads to layoffs
Why? 50 million people instead of 100 million also means half the employees in the factory, making just 50 million phones instead of 100.
> government offices cut bodies (layoffs) and reduce services
Yeah, but no layoffs (same reason as the phone factory). Fewer people need fewer services. Potholes are indeed a problem. Some roads leading to abandoned places will need to be abandoned as well.
> most stocks will tank
By your argument, those people that can't buy a second phone, also can't buy any stocks anyway. I see no problem here.
marcuskaz 6 hours ago [-]
The population doesn't just go from 100m to 50m instantly. It gradually changes over time, 100 years from now the smaller population will work itself out, but none of us will be alive for that. We still have 100 years of discomfort to get through.
Fewer children mean all the industries and gov't services who are employed now to service children will need to downsize, these are lost jobs now before the fewer children grow to adults where they would take over those fewer jobs. All of this will have a effect across the economy.
Pediatricians, Teachers, Toys & Games companies, Children Furniture, School Supplies, Electronics, etc.... All of these are sized with the expectation of the same consumer demand, but when there are less kids to buy and service each of these will be forced to downsize. Again in the long run it works out, but in the short run say next 50 years for people in these markets will see downsizing over time. Can the rest of the economies pick that up?
M95D 6 hours ago [-]
Pediatricians - not enough of them now. Teachers - also not enough. Toys & Games companies - can switch to adult games, no problem. Children Furniture - can and do make adult furniture too. School Supplies? Electronics? Can also switch to adult products. Fewer people means fewer companies as well - not a problem.
Lots of new jobs will be needed in health and elderly care - you just ignored those.
> All of these are sized with the expectation of the same consumer demand, but when there are less kids to buy and service each of these will be forced to downsize.
Downsizing happens all the time. It's considered normal by most economists.
Yes, there are domains that are more affected than others. Reduction in population is slow enough to simply let the workers retire without hiring new ones.
You're acting like the birth rates are 0.2 instead of somewhere above 1 (too lazy to check). I remind you that Japan had lower birthrates than that for a very long time and nothing bad happend. In fact, their workplace conditions are improving. Salarymen are finally starting to work decent hours.
Why don't you admit that you're worried about your own quality of life at 70y old and you couldn't care less about future generations and their polution, resources, global warming, famine and refugee problems?
em-bee 5 hours ago [-]
Potholes are indeed a problem
actually, less people would mean less traffic, and less wear on the roads, therefore also less potholes.
M95D 5 hours ago [-]
That's not how potholes form. It depends on wheather, not traffic.
em-bee 3 hours ago [-]
weather, mainly rain, is only responsible for weakening the soil under the pavement, the actual holes are created by traffic. so as long as there is no traffic, holes would not form. especially holes getting larger also depends on traffic.
freezing and thawing can also be an issue, but obviously only in areas where it gets cold enough.
arbll 9 hours ago [-]
I don't think it's specific to capitalism. Any system needs workers to produce enough for retirees and children. If you have more retirees and less workers any system is going to struggle.
NoMoreNicksLeft 9 hours ago [-]
Growing, biological organisms need growth. Because once they stop growing, now they're in dying mode. It won't happen instantly, of course, but they're going to die. And it's this way with civilizations too. Rather than being one of the "disadvantages of capitalism", it may actually be a principle of life itself.
NoMoreNicksLeft 9 hours ago [-]
>What's the strong case against population dwindling other than supporting aging population? Given the AI armageddon,
Because you're not "dwindling the population" in the way you think. You're not taking an "8 billion" number and changing it to "4 billion". You're taking this growing organism, and switching it into a shrinking mode. Worse, you're changing it to "shrinking mode" in a way where you can't switch it out of that mode. It will, by necessity, shrink to nothing.
And it shrinks quicker than you could imagine. When fertility rates are at 1.0 (China), each generation is one half the size of the previous. It doesn't seem like much has changed... there are 4 or so older generations that are still large (but non-reproductive). When you have a 0.5 fertility rate (South Korea), each generation is one quarter the size of the previous.
Human extinction only takes about 12-14 generations at that rate. Less than 350 years. Even before it gets that far though, things get awful really quickly. It's not as if it's 350 years, and then everyone's gone. Those last few generations have no technology, they're huddled around in the dark trying not to starve.
>If there's less population, we need less production and less workers.
This isn't as true as it sounds. Some of our technology does not scale downward. If you need a nuclear power plant, this has a minimum number of workers. Even if you only want half the power, you can't get away with "half the workers". So, as there's less population, some technology will have to be abandoned. If you just employ people at the power plant despite that, then you're by necessity pulling those people from some other industry... it's an opportunity cost thing, and you have fewer opportunities.
Sub-replacement fertility is human extinction. Not in 10,000 years, but in just a couple of centuries.
ahtihn 5 hours ago [-]
> Those last few generations have no technology, they're huddled around in the dark trying not to starve.
At that point, the birth rate would quickly rise again, no?
Because if you're back to living in a pre-industrial society, kids suddenly have value again.
So it's likely that either there's a point of equilibrium or the population keeps swinging up and down. Total extinction seems unlikely.
geodel 5 hours ago [-]
Indeed. And in context of India since that's what Economist's article is about. Having higher population growth is just insanity to me. After destroying land, water, air, forests, mountains and still barely enough for hundreds of millions souls I am not sure how population deflation can be a important concern at this point.
bryanlarsen 7 hours ago [-]
> other than supporting aging population?
Isn't that enough? Imagine a world where a large percentage of the population are in nursing homes. A humane goal for a nursing home is 10:1 24/7. So that means 1 nurse for every 2.5 residents.
Besides that, it's all about the speed of change. Current Korean levels of population halving every generation is going to cause tremendous upheaval.
Shrinking and growing populations aren't necessarily problematic. What's problematic are populations that shrink or grow too quickly. Infrastructure adapted for N people works well for a number close to N, but not so well for 2N or 0.5N.
There aren't too many people besides Elon Musk that are significantly worried that the US's replacement rate is 1.8 compared to the 2.1 constant population level. But numbers much below that do alarm many.
ndiddy 9 hours ago [-]
The problem isn't if the population gradually shrinks, it's if there's an uncontrolled downward spiral in fertility. If the birthrate gets below a certain point, then most people won't have any experience whatsoever interacting with babies or young children in their day-to-day life, and cultural norms will shift to make childlessness the default option. This marginalizes people who choose to have children, which pushes the birthrate down even further. This has happened in South Korea, where children are barred from many public places and it's hard to find housing in urban areas if you have children because the noise they make will piss off the neighbors. The birthrate is currently ~0.7 births per woman, meaning that every 100 South Koreans will have around 12 grandchildren. Here's a good article if you're interested: https://archive.ph/bM4Ff
A few quotes:
> Very little in Korean society seems to give young people the impression that child rearing might be rewarding or delightful. I met a stylish twentysomething news reporter at an airy, silent café in Seoul’s lively Itaewon district. “People hate kids here,” she told me. “They see kids and say, ‘Ugh.’ ” This ambient resentment finds an outlet in disdain for mothers. She said, “People call moms ‘bugs’ or ‘parasites.’ If your kids make a little noise, someone will glare at you.” She had recently vacationed in Rome, where adults drank at bars while their kids ran amok. She said, “Here, people would say, ‘What the hell are you doing?’
> An artist named Daum told me that, when he was young, “if you kicked a ball into someone else’s property, you went and rang the doorbell and got it back.” That city no longer existed: “Now you get yelled at—‘You could’ve broken my window!’ ” There’s a special word for noise between floors. Complaints forced Daum and his wife, Dani, to leave their previous building; one neighbor said, “I can’t stand your children anymore!”
> In the southern city of Gangjin, I stopped at a coffee shop and encountered a sign on the entrance that read “This is a no-kids zone. The child is not at fault. The problem is the parents who do not take care of the child.” The doors of Korean establishments are frequently emblazoned with such prohibitions. The only children I saw on Seoul’s public transit were foreigners. Kim Kyu-jin, who is by all accounts part of Korea’s first openly lesbian couple with a child, told me, “Five years ago, we didn’t think too deeply about ‘no-kids zones.’ Now we think it’s discriminatory. We always call places beforehand to ask if we can bring our daughter.”
UtopiaPunk 8 hours ago [-]
Is the concern that we'd marginalize parents and kids? As a parent of little kids, that's a concern that wasn't even on my radar. I had no idea that that was a major concern of people. Wild. I'm not saying it is a fabricated or unfounded fear, I just don't have that concern at all for myself.
As a parent of little kids, I worry much more about them living fulfilling lives as they grow up in the future. I'm concerned about climate change, wars, and an economic system that will allow them to live self-actualized lives. I have no doubt that the population number plays some factor in that, creating problems that must be solved. But ultimately, humans have created amazing technologies and the Earth is bountiful. We can support whatever number of people is on the horizon (whether that number is larger or smaller), but society must choose to do so and adapt.
My greatest fears are that governments and corporations consolidate their wealth and power to only an elite few, bending society to serve that elite. That is a fear exists regardless of the fertility rate.
Thank you for sharing your article. It's from a view so unlike my own, and it's been eye opening.
ndiddy 6 hours ago [-]
The concern is that if the birthrate drops low enough that having kids becomes unusual, it causes societal changes that create a negative feedback loop that will continue pushing the birthrate lower and lower. If the number of elderly far exceeds the number of working people (which is already locked in for South Korea), you then have to figure out how to restructure society around this while maintaining social order.
stavros 10 hours ago [-]
That's the same question I have as well. We're a cancer that's spreading on the earth and we're worrying we aren't spreading fast enough. Yeah, I get that we want to support the aging population, but at this point we're doing it at the expense of humanity as a whole.
phendrenad2 9 hours ago [-]
People are replying that it'll lead to uncontrolled population collapse, and it'll disproportionately affect the poor. But the alternative is to keep growing the population until we run into a much harder problem to solve (water, food, climate) and then collapse. And won't that disproportionately affect the poor? And won't it be much worse, because the population will be much larger then?
Hongwei 6 hours ago [-]
Our entire social contract relies on the a redistribution of wealth from young to old. Boomer Communism, it's currently called.
If you are currently paying taxes, you are funding Medicare and Social Security (insert whatever name for your country). The deal is that when you retire, the next generation funds your entitlements.
If the next generation is not large enough, that deal breaks down, leading to almost impossible political choices. Do we increase taxes on the remaining working population to fund the larger retired one? Do we defund entitlements and tell retirees to figure it out, when they themselves paid into the system that is now bankrupt?
Ajedi32 10 hours ago [-]
Well, in the extreme case, human extinction seems like a pretty bad thing.
kranke155 10 hours ago [-]
a large organism (human populaton on earth) reaching equilibrium and ceasing to grow does not equal to human extinction... it far more likely is just a temporary contraction that will then reverse when the conditions are set for it.
btilly 9 hours ago [-]
Populations do not tend to grow to equilibrium and then stop. They tend to overgrow their environment, outstrip resources, and then collapse.
The result may not be extinction. But losing 90% of the human population won't feel that different if you're living through it.
A relevant book recommend, https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Societies-Choose-Succeed-Rev.... It walks through a variety of past examples of human societies that went through this. There is no reason to believe that our current world-wide society will fare better.
Ajedi32 9 hours ago [-]
> They tend to overgrow their environment, outstrip resources, and then collapse.
That's not what's happening here. Birth rates are below 2.1 in many countries who are no where close to "outstripping their resources". There are other factors causing the contraction which have nothing to do with resource limitations.
In fact it seems like it's the opposite: richer nations with more resources tend to have lower birth rates. That's the scary part because it means there's no equilibrium to be reached. Birth rates could, in theory, remain low until humanity ceases to exist.
kranke155 9 hours ago [-]
Has any organism ever extinguished itself as you describe ? This whole human extinction thing… isn’t that catastrophising? We are a 7-8 billion individuals away from extinction.
Ajedi32 8 hours ago [-]
All plausible theories I've heard for the cause of humanity's unprecedented, historically low birth rates are things that could not occur in less intelligent species. (Birth control, women's rights, hedonism enabled by modern technology, etc.)
> isn’t that catastrophising
Yes, I'm only putting that forward as the worst case scenario to make the point that this can't just be ignored. As I said in other comments, this almost certainly won't actually result in extinction because there are other corrective factors which would occur long before that, but none of those scenarios are particularly desirable either. (E.g. Civilizational collapse returning humanity to pre-industrical birth rates, global takeover by theocratic governments that ban birth control, etc.)
The only non-catastrophic corrective factors that sound plausible to me involve some kind of intentional collective action on our part that reverses the trend, which won't happen if everyone's attitude is the same as the root commenter's. (Granted, maybe there are other possible corrective factors I haven't thought of, but if so I'd like to discuss what those are rather than just have the problem dismissed with a hand wave.)
kranke155 8 hours ago [-]
Neither the fall in birth rates nor its rise is intentional. I struggle to understand why people think a mega fauna of 7-8 billion people takes intentional decisions. An individual takes intentional decisions. Humanity … not so much I think.
Ajedi32 8 hours ago [-]
Correct, but my point is unless we find a way to intentionally fix the problem we're going to unintentionally walk into a disaster.
I don't fault your logic, but I don't want to accept that disaster is inevitable.
Eventually Universe 25 took another disturbing turn. Mice born into the chaos couldn’t form normal social bonds or engage in complex social behaviors such as courtship, mating, and pup-rearing. Instead of interacting with their peers, males compulsively groomed themselves; females stopped getting pregnant. Effectively, says Ramsden, they became “trapped in an infantile state of early development,” even when removed from Universe 25 and introduced to “normal” mice. Ultimately, the colony died out. “There’s no recovery, and that’s what was so shocking to [Calhoun],” says Ramsden.
Like the mice, our population is going into reverse. And that description of behavior, looks awfully prescient when I compare to humans on social media today...
Ajedi32 8 hours ago [-]
Lack of personal space is certainly not the cause of our declining birth rates. People in wealthy countries with lots of personal space actually tend to have lower birth rates than poorer countries with less. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?most_rec...
M95D 7 hours ago [-]
> People in wealthy countries with lots of personal space
How did you reach that conclusion?
Ajedi32 9 hours ago [-]
The population is not "reaching equilibrium", it's shrinking. If it was reaching equilibrium you'd expect the births per women to be slowly reducing until it approaches 2.1 and then staying there. It's dropping substantially below that. And there doesn't seem to be any evidence that the contraction is temporary, the causal factors seem largely unrelated to the existing population size.
kranke155 9 hours ago [-]
How can you say it’s not temporary if it’s just started?
Ajedi32 8 hours ago [-]
Because all plausible theorized causes (birth control, global reduction in poverty enabled by technology, women's rights) are not temporary conditions. (Or at least we better hope they aren't.)
kranke155 8 hours ago [-]
Those are just hypothesis. Here’s ankther likely hypothesis - isn’t this is a mega fauna arriving at capacity?
Ajedi32 8 hours ago [-]
The problem is that's not a likely hypothesis. There's no evidence lack of capacity is the cause of declining birth rates. In fact there's strong evidence for the opposite: countries with more resources to go around tend to have lower birth rates than countries with less resources. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?most_rec... There's no equilibrium here, if anything the feedback loop is positive rather than negative. That's the concerning part.
I thought this was common knowledge, but given the reaction I'm getting in this thread I guess it's not as common as I thought and I should have explained myself better in my original comment.
kranke155 8 hours ago [-]
You’re right. I mean that’s certainly interesting, I just keep struggling with the question of - why is this a disaster? Seems like it’s only a disaster under a narrow set of conditions - capitalism, economies that need to grow to survive, lack of robotisation of elderly care.
Ajedi32 7 hours ago [-]
Well, like I said, if the trend is caused by something that's not easily reversible, and there's no negative feedback loop which would naturally cause birth rates to come back up in the future, then unless something happens to reverse the trend then mathematically speaking the end result of global birth rates below replacement rate is human extinction.
Granted that's not an imminent threat, it would take quite a few generations at current first-world birth rates. But I still find it a concerning long-term trend, and there are a lot of less severe negative consequences that could occur between now and then. If you care to dig into it more, this podcast episode has a good discussion of the short-term problems, which go beyond just elderly care: https://www.thepoliticalorphanage.com/p/the-great-baby-short...
kranke155 4 hours ago [-]
Why are you concerned about something that’s so far away from your lifetime ? There are so many problems - this one might even be self correcting - yet you seem prone to seeing it as an imminent catastrophe where you have to focus your attention on?
Ajedi32 3 hours ago [-]
I literally just said it's not imminent. I'm focusing my attention on it in this thread because that's what this thread is about. Not like I walk the streets proclaiming our doom on my days off. :P
Also, as I just said, there are less severe short and medium-term problems caused by low birth rates as well so it's not just the looming threat of human extinction I'm concerned about; that's just the biggest and most obvious consequence so it's a convenient counterpoint to people asserting that low birth rates are not a problem at all.
ninininino 6 hours ago [-]
It's a disaster from many quality of living standards (healthcare worker availability, funding for social safety net and social security and elderly care/retirement, ability for a society to fund new infrastructure or maintain existing infrastructure, etc).
Under another set of criteria (environmental concerns), it's probably a positive.
saintvlad 4 hours ago [-]
I mean "capacity" isn't some magic barrier. Usually it involves increased chances for the organism in question to starve to death due to reduced availability of food. We don't seem to be that close to reaching that.
kranke155 4 hours ago [-]
We seem to have reached, maybe, the point where more human beings is not necessarily a positive. Capitalist society through supply and demand seems to be signalling this - we seem to be running out of transformative capacity to keep building essential stuff like housing in many countries, without increasing our already fairly disruptive footprint.
This just seems self correcting to me - on both axis. It’s an organism not a linear process. It will fix itself later same as it seems to be doing now.
saintvlad 4 hours ago [-]
> we seem to be running out of transformative capacity to keep building essential stuff like housing in many countries
Eh, I think we all know that we could build the housing if we really wanted to.
> This just seems self correcting to me - on both axis.
I agree, but it could a rough ride if the correction is too fast or too far. I think quite a lot of people would prefer the industrial system to keep running, and there is probably a minimum population below which it cannot run.
phendrenad2 9 hours ago [-]
That's... not how equilibrium works. A self-balancing segway or robot doesn't reach the balance point and then freeze in place. There are oscillations. And it isn't a pretty sine wave either. Considering the massive number of factors that go into something like "global population growth", expect a VERY chaotic graph indeed, like the stock market, but worse.
kranke155 8 hours ago [-]
Yeah fair so what.
The argument is - our current economic system can’t handle it.
Well then that’s an argument for changing it.
calepayson 9 hours ago [-]
Ya but I’m 28 and have had enough with these contractions. For Christ sake can I get a sane decade so I can actually build a career. :)
kranke155 9 hours ago [-]
its unlikely that will happen. If you read Arrighi, his hegemonic cycle narrative says that the interregnum between two hegemons is decades of chaos as the system reorganises. We seem to be heading for a US to China transition.
The last transition was British Empire to US and that was 1900-1945.
We can only hope for something better.
calepayson 9 hours ago [-]
Yay.
AndrewKemendo 9 hours ago [-]
I mean you can always be a farrier, lineman, septic sumper, cobbler etc…
What’s stopping you from being a welder or dentist?
calepayson 9 hours ago [-]
I feel like this is a joke but honest answer: I worked ocean rescue for 4 years then lived with some tech folks in sf who were making literally 5-10x my salary.
What’s stopping me? Probably some combo of wanting to one day afford a home and a family without having to move to Memphis and the a sense that I’d get bored as a welder and therefore be a bad one.
Man, septic pumper tho…
M95D 7 hours ago [-]
> some tech folks in sf who were making literally 5-10x my salary
Don't worry. It's temporary.
AndrewKemendo 6 hours ago [-]
Not a joke, I tried to start a trash company and be a handler on the back, but unfortunately my epilepsy got in the way
liglam 9 hours ago [-]
[dead]
saulpw 9 hours ago [-]
Humans are the second most populous animal on the planet. We are in no danger of extinction.
BobaFloutist 8 hours ago [-]
I don't know where you got that idea, but we're not even the most populous species of vertebrates on the planet (that might be chickens).
If you include arthropods, ants make it not even remotely close.
Ajedi32 9 hours ago [-]
If the trend doesn't reverse, it's mathematically guaranteed.
But realistically, I agree. Civilizational collapse would happen long before extinction, which seems like it would almost certainly return the birth rate back to pre-industrial levels. I just don't think that's a desirable outcome either.
Or, even more realistically, nations with state religions that effectively outlaw birth control and/or women's rights will take over the world, and nations which don't do those things will collapse. That also seems like a bad outcome to me.
Point is, I don't think it's wise to treat this like it's not a problem.
It's virtually flat for eons, and then in the last 100 years it shoots up like a rocket. We didn't hit the first billion people until 1800, but the 8th billion took only 11 years. (2011-2022)
This rate of exponential growth was never sustainable, and it's normal and natural that it's leveling off now.
BrainInAJar 10 hours ago [-]
human extinction is far more likely if we keep reproducing than if we slow down. See: climate change etc
fangorn 5 hours ago [-]
FT's "Why birth rates are falling everywhere all at once" was published, and discussed, recently:
Also it’s not ok anymore to rape/get married to 13yo girls.
And now with a smartphone every girl knows that it is not ok.
croisillon 3 hours ago [-]
but then how do you get elected by Republicans?
onesociety2022 4 hours ago [-]
Naive question- why does the human population need to keep growing? Why can’t we let it shrink? If AI and robotics are going to come to fruition in the next 50 years, why do we need so many people?
mauvehaus 4 hours ago [-]
Not that I disagree with you, but as US society, and AIUI many other modern societies, are organized around a growing population. In order to have Medicare and Social Security in their current forms, you need n increasing number of working age people to keep the programs solvent.
Changing this, and moving to a society where AI and robots solve the problem of letting people retire (presuming that's possible, technologically) would require a massive shift in how people are, for lack of a better word, valued by society. Right now, we assign a lot of value to individuals based on their level of economic productivity.
It would be a change of considerable magnitude to let AI and robots create the economic value and then distribute it to individuals on some "fair" basis. I suggest that based on the current situation, finding agreement on what constitutes "fair" would be challenging, at best.
nashashmi 4 hours ago [-]
AI and robotics will still need maintenance. The expertise for the maintainers will be quite expensive to develop (longer years of schooling). Larger portions of society will now be necessary dedicated to new tech.
More people are needed to fulfill future needs.
dagurp 3 hours ago [-]
it wouldn't be a bad thing except that we're heading towards a future where there's too many old people for the economy to sustain itself.
croes 3 hours ago [-]
This will happen either way because there is no infinite growth
IncreasePosts 4 hours ago [-]
We can't do anything, because in almost the entire world, the only thing stopping you from having a baby is your biology and your willingness.
epestr 1 hours ago [-]
There seems to be a lot of discussion on economic incentives (harder to raise, stronger pensions and less personal involvement) and other modes of entertainment being the reason for this trend, but I wonder if it could be attributed to more understanding on proper upbringing and awareness of such, and self-doubt on people to meet that demands.
Maybe the TV and schooling discussed is indirectly related, such as better understanding of proper upbringing, or more ways to see how things can be messed up, and having larger support group beyond family (and children) for said women in poorer countries.
In general there is more focus put on raising a child better and more involvement beyond hedonistic, time or economic reasons and better parenting expected that some don't think they meet the needs or find it harder to do the same for more than one child.
This is a bit of extrapolating from a small anecdotal group, but I wonder how statistically significant said group is.
51 minutes ago [-]
mekdoonggi 9 hours ago [-]
Infinite economic growth depends on women having babies above replacement. Therefore, the economic value of a woman having three babies is virtually unlimited, and the economic destruction of a woman having less is also unlimited (when projecting far enough into the future).
It really makes you wonder if some actors would feel a need to exercise control over this scarce and limited resource...
phendrenad2 6 hours ago [-]
That's the basic background in the book The Handmaids Tale, but ironically the book might be used to fearmonger against anyone trying to incentivize births.
hedora 10 hours ago [-]
What’s the problem? We’re committed to destroying livable human habitat for 100M’s to 1B’s of people via global warming.
That’ll be less painful if there are fewer people. Lower populations should lead to lower emissions growth too.
arbll 10 hours ago [-]
There's a significant risk it will lead to a large reduction in living standards. A lot of things like retirement funds are built with the assumption of infinite growth. This assumption will obviously break one day and when it does I don't see how it could go smoothly.
On the plus side, it will likely lead to lower emissions, assuming it doesn't lead to massive wars or other destructive behaviors due to the instability it will bring.
triceratops 9 hours ago [-]
> retirement funds are built with the assumption of infinite growth
Of workers. Because retirement funds take money from workers to pay for retirees.
Assets and productivity, on the other hand, can grow a lot more than the population. Right now it's considered communism to tax assets. Once we get over that taboo things'll go a lot smoother.
RickJWagner 9 hours ago [-]
That would destroy the incentive to save. Why put aside a dollar now, only to have it taxed every year? Better to spend it while it’s whole.
That changes future value calculations, too.
These are things not to mess with lightly.
triceratops 9 hours ago [-]
> That would destroy the incentive to save. Why put aside a dollar now, only to have it taxed every year?
Ok? If you choose to spend a dollar instead of saving it, that implies some business will get that dollar. That implies someone will still invest in, build, and run businesses.
> These are things not to mess with lightly.
I agree. It requires a lot of thinking, discussion, deliberation and all that. But the basic math doesn't lie. We will have fewer workers in the future. Machines will make more and more stuff. If you want to continue supporting retirees as promised, then taxing the machines is the only answer.
Otherwise you'll have to break some promises to retirees and pensioners; now that's a real disincentive to save.
danny_codes 6 hours ago [-]
Depends on implementation. For example, a wealth tax that has a "cap" at some ludicrous amount of wealth, like $10M, would effect very few people and therefore be insignificant for the average worker. So 99% of people would continue saving with no change at all to their behavior. The externalities could be nice though, since it'd distribute capital more efficiently. Sort of a general stimulant to the economy.
WarmWash 5 hours ago [-]
This line of thinking though assumes it would have no impact on the largest players though. It hinges on a "calling their bluff", that high NW individuals won't change anything despite now being forced to annually liquidate assets to cover taxes. And this doesn't even touch on the immense impracticality of annually valuing assets. Or how to manage assets in illiquid markets, or how to sell 30% of a painting to cover 1% of it's mark-to-market value by year end.
The reason wealth taxes never go anywhere is because when you sit down and learn what wealth is, how it works, and what is practical, it makes the most sense by far to just tax things whenever they go back to cash.
Really the only genuine tax loop-hole is the step-up basis on inheritance. Everything else is just an elaborate deferral to pay taxes later.
triceratops 11 minutes ago [-]
> despite now being forced to annually liquidate assets to cover taxes
Allow paying the tax with assets. Put the assets into a black box sovereign wealth fund that's controlled by some mechanical algorithm which sells things at random as needed to fund the government budget. At scale this will be indistinguishable from a whole-economy index fund.
The best part about this is rich people can't beg off by saying "I have to liquidate stuff".
How do you pay with assets for real estate or boats or paintings? An IOU that can be cashed in when the asset is sold. Oh the boat is owned by an LLC so it never changes hands? No problem, the government has a share in the LLC too. (IANAL, IANAA so working out the loopholes is left as an exercise for the reader).
A second benefit is startup shares don't have to get hit with a capital gains tax before the startup goes public. Right now that's a big problem, where people pay taxes on shares that are eventually worth zero. If instead this tax could be paid in startup shares, then there's no problem.
As a condition of paying in assets, make it so that the government can't exercise any control over them. No shareholder voting, no board seats, nothing.
Additionally, this tax can't be on top of income tax. The whole point is to fix the worker-funded tax pyramid scheme. It has to be revenue-neutral with respect to income tax.
vladms 3 hours ago [-]
While I agree with "it's more complex than it seems", some simple things are not done because of FUD and politicians.
we have property taxes, and its taxed every year. and somehow people keep trying to buy yet more property.
plenty of incentive to put money there, ditto for saving.
a saved dollar does not stimulate the economy, either. the whole idea of microloans is that the money gets spent ASAP and goes straight into the economy
thrance 8 hours ago [-]
> Better to spend it while it’s whole.
Yes, that's the whole point. That's a good thing. Money is meant to be spent, not be hoarded and slept on forever. Money velocity is terrible right now, capital generates more income than wages, this is neither healthy nor sustainable, and certainly isn't fair to the ones actually doing the productive work.
In the ideal society there'd be no Epstein or Thiel, everyone would have a rewarding and productive economic activity.
3stacks 7 minutes ago [-]
You are so delusional
profdevloper 6 hours ago [-]
Who's 'we' in this context? USA? China? Developing nations?
MSFT_Edging 6 hours ago [-]
Global economy. You cannot shift the consumption blame onto the country producing the good for another. The pollution in China created to make phones for Americans is part of the same transaction.
It's like when the US used to ship our plastic waste to China, and China stopped accepting it. China only had a plastics pollution problem because it was a cheap buck to sweep an American problem under a Chinese rug.
jorblumesea 9 hours ago [-]
most retirement systems assume at least stable population growth. if the system can't sustain itself, debt borrowing can be done but eventually creditors will come calling.
what it means in practical terms is the destruction of the modern social safety net. some declining birth rates are ok but places like Japan, Spain, and South Korea look disastrous.
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
hilariously 10 hours ago [-]
What indicators do we have that we care enough to solve the problem? It may be doomer to think we must slow down, but "the other side" just hand waves all the problems and says we'll magically fix them with future technology magic - its not reassuring.
chipsrafferty 10 hours ago [-]
Ah yes let's "make progress" on a planet where people refuse to consume less and we have finite resources.
hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm 10 hours ago [-]
More zero sum thinking.
6 hours ago [-]
6 hours ago [-]
pelagicAustral 10 hours ago [-]
> But as India and others hurtle through their demographic transition, the consequences will not be pain-free.
Pain for whom? The people profiting from cheap labor probably.
Why is such a massive sin to scale down? To slow down a bit, I don't think the whole world is about to collapse, but even if it was, I rather that than turning it all into the hellscapes we see on some of the most overpopulated places in the world just so a mere 1% of the population can indulge.
4 hours ago [-]
arjie 4 hours ago [-]
Well, the welfare state for most nations will suffer. The reason it's a massive sin to scale down is that with a scaled down economy you can't sustain the old without greater sacrifices by the young. So you need someone to pay the price and neither wishes to. For my part, I think. one way or the other my Millennial generation should probably give up the US welfare state. We can still save the next generations.
thinkthatover 4 hours ago [-]
why not just eliminate the $170K payroll cap? that gets us most (certainly not all) of the way there.
calepayson 9 hours ago [-]
> Pain for whom? The people profiting from cheap labor probably.
A pretty consistent trend throughout history is that shit rolls downhill.
vkou 9 hours ago [-]
What about the pain from overpopulation and a glut of uneducated labour? Doesn't that shit roll downhill, too?
"The poor will always pay for it" is a thought-terminating cliche that is often trotted out in support of the status quo (or some mythical past status quo).
How do you know that past status quo isn't actually worse for them than the direction things are trending? Do you think we somehow stumbled upon some global maximum for them [1], and any deviation from that, in any direction is going to make things worse for them?
[1] In spite of, as you say, shit flowing downhill.
BobaFloutist 8 hours ago [-]
What overpopulation?
danny_codes 6 hours ago [-]
Visit Jakarta
vkou 7 hours ago [-]
The kind you'd find in any place with a housing or food shortage, (or a job shortage if you are the sort of person who has #firstworldproblems) or really any other shortage where some public demand cannot be met by limited supply.
We don't see a lot of food shortages these days, but with climate change fucking with agriculture sufficiently, regular famines in the global south might make a comeback... Or might not, if population growth and degrowth projections solve that problem before crop yields are seriously impacted.
diddid 3 hours ago [-]
I’m always a bit confused by this, don’t we want this? If the end goal is to have ai and robots do it all, and there are no jobs left, what would children provide if they aren’t down payments on a future work force? Only people that wanted children would have children as all the old childless people would be taken care of by the states robots. I mean not exactly like that but something like that. Ai isn’t taken anyone’s job is there is nobody there to take it from. Or is that line of think too… something.
mekdoonggi 9 hours ago [-]
If they have the freedom to choose otherwise, they will. The global fertility "crisis" is simply individuals exercising their choices.
Kids are really expensive, and if you want people to willingly have them outside of accidents, you're going to need to pay them a lot of money.
exitb 9 hours ago [-]
Rising kids also has a time, effort and opportunity costs which are not easily offset with money. I don’t think there’s a way to frame modern parenting in a way where it „pays off” in the same sense as it did in the past. As of now, it’s essentially a hobby.
danny_codes 6 hours ago [-]
I mean, it can be offset with money.
- Kids take time - Yes, so does working. If you cutout the 90h my partner and I spend working, that's a lot of time to put into raising children.
- Kids take effort - Yes, so does working. If I didn't need to work this becomes much easier.
- Opportunity cost - Yes, just pay me for the opportunity cost. Pay for my PhD after my kids are in grade school.
It's just that these policies are very expensive, and right now we allocate our money mostly to make rich people richer and maintain very high QoL for our elderly population. That's a choice we make in setting up our society.
aidenn0 5 hours ago [-]
Exiting the workforce for a decade (Replacement fertility rate is 2.1 implying some people will have 3 kids, spaced 2 years apart plus 5 years of child-rearing until kindergarten) has an opportunity cost that is potentially in the millions of dollars, depending on the industry, and the time costs of child rearing doesn't suddenly end at 5 either.
mrguyorama 4 hours ago [-]
It just has to be a "Job" you get paid to do. People will absolutely sign up.
The problem is that there will be far too many people wanting that job, so you have to filter somehow, and that's basically eugenics which isn't the most fun, so I guess you'd have to have a lottery and deal with the fact that like 10% of the population will constantly riot about someone who "doesn't deserve it" getting paid to raise kids.
em-bee 2 hours ago [-]
there will be far too many people wanting that job
i don't think so. you can control it with how high the pay is, or only pay for the first two children or something like that...
vkou 9 hours ago [-]
There's no amount of money (that society could ever afford to pay) that could convince my wife to have children.
mekdoonggi 9 hours ago [-]
Yep. And that's good! That's freedom of choice. Similarly, my wife wanted children, and there's no amount of money that could replace the joy of having our child.
Everything is better when we have the freedom to make a choice.
kixiQu 7 hours ago [-]
I wish society had taxed me (desired path zero children) more in some way that would have routed the resources to my friend who would have wanted to start having kids earlier and have more. Instead, the combination of regional housing crisis with contemporary parenting standards meant she and her husband waited for career progression to have the money for the space to start.
g3f32r 6 hours ago [-]
> Yep. And that's good! That's freedom of choice.
Is it? Was it actually her choice? Or was she propagandized into being a fully-available consumer?
Was she fed a steady diet of anti-natalist/anti-family formation and pro-independence (pro-consume) media and government policies from the moment she was born?
scbrg 3 hours ago [-]
An alternative take is that we've endured thousands of years of propaganda aimed at keeping women as child bearing, house keeping slaves, and we're finally starting to see the end of that in at least some cultures.
But of course, it's only "propaganda" when you don't like it.
blockmarker 2 hours ago [-]
On one hand we have propaganda not even a century old, only possible by the invention of birth control, the creation of tv, radio and newspapers, which itself required the invention of many things such as communications faster than horseback, the existence of strong centralized states which guarantee welfare to the elderly even if they don't have children to maintain it, and technological advances and social changes which make children an expense instead of an economic asset. And this propaganda leads to societies slowly economically collapse and their populations go extinct.
On the other hand, we have the "propaganda" which has existed for thousands if not millions of years, needed no technological, scientific or economic advances to exist, and the societies that followed it grew and made all the advances required for the other.
Of the two, I know which seems to be truer and more natural.
mekdoonggi 5 hours ago [-]
I will assume that she has the same ability to reason and make an informed choice as you.
vkou 5 hours ago [-]
Thank you for bringing up this incredibly rational, and not at all offensive or infantalizing presumption - one that hypothesizes that my spouse is incapable of thinking and deciding for herself.
You are, of course, the sole free-thinking, unpropagandized person in the world.
saintvlad 4 hours ago [-]
FWIW, I think we all (I am including myself here) underestimate the degree to which our beliefs are formed by the culture we inhabit.
liglam 9 hours ago [-]
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wg0 10 hours ago [-]
Maybe economic struggle is not letting people take such a delicate and demanding responsibility. It's getting very difficult everywhere. It's not that just cost of living or housing affordability is a Western problem.
staminade 10 hours ago [-]
Unless they roll-back women's rights and improvements in child mortality, societies will need to radically overhaul their entire relationship to supporting parenthood in order to reverse this trend. The economic costs of having children at a replacement rate are simply too high.
We need universal childcare services, provided by the state and available to all, and other childcare-enabling reforms like automatic right to work from home and other flexible working arrangements for those with children.
These won't be popular with everyone, but you'll won't solve the demographic crisis without them.
9cb14c1ec0 10 hours ago [-]
> We need universal childcare services
Birth rates have been falling worldwide, regardless of the level of government support. It's much more a matter of attitudes about having children.
> The economic costs of having children at a replacement rate are simply too high
Nope. My wife and I have 4 children, on a lower-middle-class income in the US. Your lifestyle choices matter a lot. If you want to have children, you can find a way to afford them.
aidenn0 5 hours ago [-]
The worse the primary-caregiver's job prospects are, the cheaper the opportunity costs are to have kids. My wife quickly realized she didn't want to be an English teacher, and couldn't do a whole lot of other things with that degree, so her staying home to raise our 4 kids was very affordable for us. If she had been a software developer, the opportunity costs would have been higher.
win311fwg 9 hours ago [-]
> It's much more a matter of attitudes about having children.
That is the story right there. We as a society spent decades upon decades demonizing having children at a young-ish age. "Your career is more important", they said. We got shows like "16 and Pregnant" to dissuade viewers from having children. People have become genuinely afraid of having kids.
Not until you are in your 30s does the social messaging shift from "only failures have children" to "why haven't you had a child yet?" That change in social pressure often compels one to start to change their mind, but at that point one becomes biologically limited in how many children they can reasonably birth.
jacobgkau 6 hours ago [-]
Sounds more like it's a matter of attitudes about personal economics than attitudes about having children. If you want to wallow in poverty (and don't mind if your children do as well), then of course you can "find a way."
9cb14c1ec0 6 hours ago [-]
As per usual arrangement, the internet can't stand a nuanced opinion, but instead jumps straight to extreme conclusions. Nowhere did I say anything about wallowing in poverty.
jacobgkau 5 hours ago [-]
Of course, "If you want to have children, you can find a way to afford them." is a very nuanced statement for you to have made.
4 kids on a lower-middle-class income in the US makes me picture poverty, as someone on a lower-middle-class income whose girlfriend is legally in poverty (and with that being the primary reason we haven't gotten married and had kids yet). If you disagree, feel free to describe your circumstances in more nuanced detail. I wonder if it will really end up being a description of lower-middle-class.
hgoel 6 hours ago [-]
Sorry for wanting my children to not grow up in poverty with immature young adult parents.
b65e8bee43c2ed0 4 hours ago [-]
>but you'll won't solve the demographic crisis without them.
you won't solve it with them either. all of that feel good crap would bump the TFR of an average civilized country by 0.2. how can you have access to all the data in the world and still believe that the reasons are economical and not cultural?
dividefuel 3 hours ago [-]
I agree it's primarily cultural. I wonder whether there's anything that a non-totalitarian government can do that would significantly change the cultural side of it.
b65e8bee43c2ed0 2 hours ago [-]
I don't think even totalitarian governments can do anything about it now. with few exceptions, the only places on Earth with TFR above replacement are undeveloped countries or underdeveloped areas within developed countries. what could China or Russia even do, undeveloped themselves? dismantle their cities and uneducate their people?
kakacik 10 hours ago [-]
Yeah I am not sure I will call that plumber or electrician which only works from home... some folks really live in bubbles, big or small
jacobgkau 5 hours ago [-]
I think jobs that can't be done remotely is where the universal childcare services they mentioned would come into play.
9 hours ago [-]
dmode 2 hours ago [-]
Anecdotally, every single family member I have in India has 1 or 0 kids.
madhacker 3 hours ago [-]
Less children less taxing on the planet. Not everyone needs a replacement copy of themselves. The world population in 2026 is approximately 8.3 billion people. It is projected to continue growing, reaching around 10 billion by 2060.
voxleone 10 hours ago [-]
Other Global South countries show the same trend. At roughly 1.6, Brazil is now in a similar range to countries such as the United States (slightly below replacement).
boelboel 8 hours ago [-]
Brazil is under 1.5 at this point and not nearly the worst off, thailand has a tfr of about 0.7 this year.
messh 2 hours ago [-]
We're becoming people that care only about money and career, and kids are not exactly helping...
throwaway85825 5 hours ago [-]
As communication increases the perception of competition also increases. The cost of raising a child that can compete in the world is now known to be higher. Eg cost of tutoring, after school activities, college etc. People who now know they dont have the economic resources to compete at a high level opt out of having children alltogether.
voiceofchoice 4 hours ago [-]
I encourage anyone surprised that people would opt out of babies and raising kids actually spend time with kids.
Not just like for the holidays and pass them back when they start crying, but an actual extended period of time dealing with all the issues that they bring.
You've got to be a special kind of idealistic romantic to still see the appeal afterwards. Which is great for you of course if you do. But there's a reason authoritarians across the world are banning abortion and targeting birth control.
zbentley 4 hours ago [-]
> there's a reason authoritarians across the world are banning abortion and targeting birth control
I don’t think that’s because of birth rate decline. While authoritarians give lip service to that occasionally, it’s never their primary cited reason (which is usually some combo of religion, purported return to “traditional” prosperity via reduced promiscuity, aggression against feminist political opponents, etc). Also, most authoritarians aren’t that long-term in their goals.
em-bee 2 hours ago [-]
there are several comments here contradicting you directly and talking about how kids are a great experience.
"In many places birth rates are plunging despite marriage remaining near-universal and even though few women have formal jobs."
This is not just about women entering the workforce, etc. Something is affecting Human society more "horizontally".
nashashmi 4 hours ago [-]
Lots of theories here. Industrialization. Wealth. Education. First world transformation. Kids' expense.
All of these are second-round of reasons.
Primary reason: Materialistic wealth or wealth in general is preferred over human contact.
Effect: People connection drops. Community drops. Independence and Individualism prosper.
Secondary effect: The seeds for family development (community, human connection, village camaraderie) go missing. Growing a family now requires artificial support. When family members grow up, their time is now spread across materialisms and career development. Career development goes up and takes priority. Wealth acquisition takes priority. Except everyone is doing this so basic needs have to be fulfilled with limited resources. All prices are now going up. What was the point of everyone working now? Wealth acquisition. hmm.
Tertiary Effect: Huge workforce looking for work. Wages diminish because supply went up. Businesses prosper. Market caps go up. Business becomes easier. Dominance becomes easier.
4th Effect: Debt goes up to fulfill materialistic quests. Interest locks in people into a debt that grows over time even if the supply of money does not go up. Now people are perpetually looking to complete paying off their debt. And they will perpetually need to work. And worker supply perpetually increases. Freedoms go away. Wealth centers on to certain people. They take over media, entertainment, recreation, and tourism. We end up with a tale of two worlds.
Edit: Before the primary reason goes into effect, I will acknowledge industrialization improved people's access to wealth and materialism. And that replaced human connection.
zbentley 3 hours ago [-]
> I will acknowledge industrialization improved people's access to wealth and materialism.
And reduced illness, increased education, increased access to better nutrition, increased lifespan, increased able lifespan (knees/back/teeth don’t give out as early), and lots more.
Like, even if I grant that this replaced human connection (and I’m not sure that’s true, nor am I sure if it is meaningfully true—access to water replaces thirst, too), some very substantial benefits were acquired in return.
dyauspitr 1 hours ago [-]
Not a surprise. It has been below replacement rate since 2019.
zkmon 10 hours ago [-]
This has a religious angle. Some religions believe in having as many babies as possible. Other religions are seeing the effect and realizing their mistake.
snihalani 5 hours ago [-]
I keep hearing some religions push for this. I don't understand how it benefits them
em-bee 4 hours ago [-]
you need to look at the origin. if we accept that this is written in the holy scriptures of the espective religions then the question is how did it benefit the people at the time it was written. never mind today because religions aren't free to just change scripture.
if we further assume that those scriptures were actually inspired by god or some other non human entity then the question is practically unanswerable because the benefit for that creator lie beyond our human life experience.
there are however a few potential theories for why it makes sense. for one god is described as existing beyond space and time. so god would know that birthrates were necessary to spread humanity across the planet, and maybe that was the goal. god would also know that the birthrate would eventually decline, so this would help be to counteract that decline.
we can also ask ourselves, what would be the benefit of a growing population today?
if the purpose of humanity is to push forward an ever advancing civilization, that is, to develop and to thrive, then maybe the goal is to maximize the potential of this planet to feed that many people, or to challenge us to be more efficient at food production. isn't population growth one potential driver for innovation?
or thinking beyond, maybe the goal is to actually push us to colonize space.
hamdingers 5 hours ago [-]
It's significantly harder to convert an adult than it is to indoctrinate a child.
unclad5968 2 hours ago [-]
Why does it have to benefit them?
xaxaxb 9 hours ago [-]
"It is not just rich places that are becoming less fertile." Yes, good to know the "rich places" are not alone.
9 hours ago [-]
NoMoreNicksLeft 10 hours ago [-]
>But when Indian school textbooks are reprinted this summer, they will carry a very different message. They will warn not of the dangers of having too many babies, but of the risks of having too few.
The Chinese have discovered that it is easy to crank down the fertility rate, but impossible to raise it again when you want to do that. And they have brutal totalitarianism on their side.
trumpdong 21 minutes ago [-]
I think the Chinese discovered that because they lowered fertility rates at a time they were naturally lowering anyway (as we see everywhere else). They can accelerate or, probably, slow down the natural progression but can't reverse it.
geodel 4 hours ago [-]
Right. That will just turn the clock back. Because people are so clueless, stupid, they don't see around and notice this endless overcrowding is making their lives living hell. They don't read or see about lack of jobs, constant layoffs, housing shortage or anything else.
Just a warning about lack of cheap labor for 1 percenters in India should make every boy and girl in India to fulfill national duty to make more babies.
BTW, the fertility rate is _increasing_ now (granted from an existing base of 1.2TFR) in the richer states of india, due to better availability of IVF and in general healthcare.
The combination of lack of prosperity as well as the effect of nuclearisation that I mentioned above was what made it go weirdly low. It's not that low if you exclude unintentionally non-reproducing couples. I'm not saying its replacement rate, but its also not 1.2.
Many poorer states of india will face the same nuclearisation of the family unit, but crucially when healthcare is more generally available, so you won't see those parts go as low as 1.2. Again, replacement rate is almost impossible in a nuclear family unit, unless you manage to substitute something else that contributes the benefits, i.e reinvent joint families from first principles (and maybe it will be better!)
eudamoniac 8 hours ago [-]
The desire to procreate above replacement levels is probably heritable, so it will all work itself out naturally.
John7878781 6 hours ago [-]
Given that intelligence is ~60% genetic, if well-educated people are having kids less, then are we going to start getting dumber?
> But demographers have long shown that what really counts is girls’ education.
That makes sense. I know that having less people is not a good thing, but I was brought up with the "impending population crisis" thing drilled into my head, so it's difficult for me to be alarmed.
I'm also all for getting women into parity with men. I know that there are a lot of men that will say that this is a bad thing, but I was raised amongst a lot of extremely capable women.
I feel that we need to support parents, if we want more kids. Right now, in the US, having kids is economically devastating, and there's almost no support from the government. I'll bet India is worse (but I could be wrong).
I feel that nature has controls built in. We see it all the time, in other species. I feel that if we drop too far down, the switch will be turned back on again.
[EDITED TO REMOVE TRIGGER WORDS]
9 hours ago [-]
miroljub 10 hours ago [-]
> I'm also all for getting women into parity with men. I know that there are a lot of men revealing recessive neanderthal genes, that will say that this is a bad thing, but I'm afraid those genes seem to have skipped me.
You understand that your statement here is very racist? You basically dehumanize people you don't agree with and describe them as lower beings. Basically Untermenschen?
hilariously 9 hours ago [-]
If you think that was a comment on indian genes, take a step back and read it again. Its a farcical comment about how men do not treat women equally and those who don't are recessive morons.
It's highly ironic to say "its dehumanizing!!" to say to a man that his treatment of women makes him a lesser being with the amount of abuse, neglect, and forced labor women are expected to take on by the men "dehumanized" here.
kaan0200 9 hours ago [-]
I think he's making a sarcastic statement about the revealing of sexist men, who think that, "because they are men, they are superior" when reality is just balancing out the ingrained sexism in all of our societies.
He's not even talking about race, so, not racist?
ChrisMarshallNY 10 hours ago [-]
Racist? I agree that it's not a particularly nice thing to say, and I'll change it, to avoid triggering people, but this is a new definition of the word "racist." Thanks for educating me.
chipsrafferty 9 hours ago [-]
It's racist to say that people who don't believe women should have equal rights and opportunities and are equally capable as men - are neanderthals?
ChrisMarshallNY 9 hours ago [-]
You're right. It insults neanderthals, who we are learning were surprisingly advanced.
kylehotchkiss 3 hours ago [-]
Is this a surprise to people there though? There was a big boom around independence and people wanted to give their own children a better life. India doesn't have a free national public school system like other countries do, which I believe is a big factor.
mywittyname 10 hours ago [-]
> One study showed how the arrival of cable television in Indian villages in the 2000s led to a moderate fall in fertility. Soap operas depicting urban, middle-class women with small families may have changed norms (though some wonder whether people were just watching TV rather than having sex).
The latter part seems like the most meaningful cause world wide. Sex is a boredom activity and we just aren't bored in the slightest, ever. I think most married people know that long power outages are the most romantic thing that can happen (though, less now with cell phones).
red-iron-pine 8 hours ago [-]
> Sex is a boredom activity
making a pretty strong statement about yourself there mon ami. that ain't the case for plenty of people
and keep in mind that India has arranged marriages
wolfi1 10 hours ago [-]
when there is a power outage it is most likely that the cell towers are down, too
kuhsaft 9 hours ago [-]
Cell phone towers and communication systems have backup power for emergency communication during power outages.
If you have backup power for your router and ONT/Modem, you should also still have internet service during a power outage. The ISP-owned ONT for a place I lived had a little lead-acid battery attached to it, and during power outages I still had internet service.
toast0 6 hours ago [-]
I live somewhere with two nines of utility power reliability, I mention that to say everybody's backup (or lack thereof) is well tested. I've got UPSes on most of my computers and a standby generator that pops on after about 10 seconds. DSL from my ILEC has zero backup power; sync drops when the power drops. I don't know about the cable. Municipal fiber doesn't drop so far, but I haven't had a long outage since I got it; my ISP has a generator where they route customer packets. We get cell coverage for about 4-8 hours, depending on which network you're on and if the outage started overnight coverage usually lasts until people wake up.
After that, communicating with the outside world is hard for most people. Time to make babies ... anyway it's often cold, so snuggling is likely.
btilly 10 hours ago [-]
Most power outages are local, not regional. And cellphone towers will work at a surprising distance.
Therefore my experience has been that cellphones tend to remain up, even though the power is down.
fhdkweig 10 hours ago [-]
In the US, cell towers have battery backups so emergency calls can still go through. I imagine most countries do too.
ssl-3 9 hours ago [-]
My experience in the US is that when the power drops, the cell networks immediately become mostly useless.
I've theorize that they become overburdened by the pocket supercomputers that automatically start using it instead of local wifi.
The purpose of life is reproduction and having your own kids is the greatest joy in life. I am a very successful and wealthy entrepreneur who can do anything I wish with my time and I have done everything; travel, rock climbing, super cars, wine tasting, etc etc. Time with my kids is all that matters to me.
dismalaf 6 hours ago [-]
A big part of people having lots of kids was infant mortality, the need for physical labour (farming) and lack of old age security (kids take care of parents). All 3 of these issues are mostly gone so now parents try to focus resources into ensuring their children are as successful as possible instead of as numerous as possible.
ggm 10 hours ago [-]
... as predicted by demographers for the last ?10? Years? Longer?
H8crilA 10 hours ago [-]
Every single population goes through a baby bust when a certain level of development is achieved - women education seems to be a particularly strongly correlated sub-component.
kakacik 10 hours ago [-]
Could be easily verified in wealthy societies where women are still delegated into mostly keeping household & raise kids roles (I don't think I need to name few samples).
polski-g 10 hours ago [-]
They've tried nothing and it didn't work!
fred_is_fred 9 hours ago [-]
Every single population growth and peak chart for the last 10 years (and maybe 20) has been wrong with growth slowing much faster than expected. It's basically the opposite of all the solar power growth predictions. I predict this article is wrong too and the growth continues to fall. Just wait until no kids becomes the norm for couples in their 30s in India like it is here in the US.
martythemaniak 6 hours ago [-]
Am I the only one that doesn't with about this "crisis". The world's population isn't going to fall, it'll level off around 2100, nobody is enough to read this will be around, our kids and grandkids can decide for themselves.
Local populations will see very different trajectories, yes. Africa will see population growth and many other places will see steep decline. Societies can choose to keep their current system and take in immigrants, or choose to keep their "national character" (or whatever) and rejig their societies so the remaining productive parts pay for increasing numbers of old people. Grifters (Brexiters, MAGA, Le Pen, etc) will attempt to sidestep such obvious tradeoffs, but they will fail, hastening the decline of these societies.
theturtle 8 hours ago [-]
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cboyardee 10 hours ago [-]
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simbosambo 9 hours ago [-]
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davidedwardc 10 hours ago [-]
Will this result in Indian immigration slowing into western countries?
wg0 10 hours ago [-]
No. Immigrants are brave people. Whole of the human history is full of people leaving their known circumstances towards unknown circumstances with hopes for a better outcome.
vachina 9 hours ago [-]
Not sure if this is satire. Economic migrants aren’t brave they’re here to suck off any excess job market liquidity.
wg0 8 hours ago [-]
Brave up, get skilled there's plenty of game out there.
vachina 8 hours ago [-]
You mean skilled in inflating my capabilities and defrauding potential employers. Sure thing.
shell0x 2 hours ago [-]
I’m sure they will continue ruining every single place they go to.
When you imports loads of people from a low-trust society, which is mainly famous for scamming and the caste system, it’s just a matter of time before you reach the tipping point.
vachina 10 hours ago [-]
They’re already in your country. Initiating baby production sequence.
10 hours ago [-]
sleepyguy 10 hours ago [-]
Doubtful, they have been exporting their poverty for the last 100 years. The next phase will be Global warming. They have destroyed their natural environment and made parts of India uninhabitable. I predict this will cause more migration.
throwaway123bc4 2 hours ago [-]
So many theories for why people stop having babies. I haven't heard anyone talk about romanticism as its cause. The second millenium began this trend of valuing more "feelings" than "duty". What before was considered madness (falling in love) became a core value. As everyone knows that feeling doesnt last long. We have been conditioned to think that anything "wrong" in the way we feel can be fixed with changing the externalities of our life: a new marriage, a new car, etc. God forbid we tell people they are having less kids or getting divorced more because they avoid their duty and are too self centered. The tragedy is that everyone is so blinded by themselves that it's far easier to tell them it's because the gov't doesn't pay childcare or xyz. Breaks are off and we are close the bottom
nercht12 4 hours ago [-]
The problem with society is that people are commonly selfish, so the majority of people only do things that benefit them. Children benefited ancient societies.
The problem with industrialized societies is that people lost all markers of adulthood. Everything became about worshiping convenience, and once convenience (for short-term pleasure) became "god", people wanted to avoid things they saw as unnecessarily difficult.
To reverse the trend, we need people to understand that the difficulty of life isn't a bad thing, that struggle and suffering aren't bad, they are essential for growth in becoming a better, happier person in the long run.
Would you rather be an ever-weakening wimp? Most people unconsciously say "yes", afraid of the world.
Kids are afraid of the chaos in life - suffering that happens when life throws you curve balls, like "what would I do without monetary support?". Even "adults" now are really kids are heart - afraid of losing social security, medicare, etc. "Welfare" programs don't end the dilemma - they only reinforce the childishness and dependency on gov for support.
We need more bold people, people who aren't afraid to suffer because they see the light at the end of the road. Courage separates the men from the boys.
co-ent 3 hours ago [-]
Oh look at that: the poster advocating for an effective, positive, and personal change instead of thrashing about in the status quo is downvoted. Imagine that. Personal responsibility is an anathema and we are doomed to this path for it.
cindyllm 3 hours ago [-]
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nercht12 3 hours ago [-]
The downvotes explain why the world is declining in population. Most people fail to see this is the problem.
My hypothesis is that as societies industrialize, they afford their population more and more activities that are simply more fun and rewarding than having children. So many people I know put off having children (or curtailed the number they had) because they were reluctant to give up the activities only available in a childfree/one-and-done life. Ultimately, we are hedonistic creatures, and having kids is antithetical to the myriad hedonic pursuits available in wealthy, industrialized societies.
[*] Israel is the lone exception, due to its Orthodox Jewish population.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/global-decline-fertility-rate
[1] https://pub.nordregio.org/r-2024-13-state-of-the-nordic-regi...
[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10049131/
Basically, our economic reality and expectations have come into conflict with biology and human lifespan.
If you want a secured dignified life and basic prerequisites to starting a family, every year that takes a little longer. And these days, almost everyone wants that dignified middle class life before they start a family.
A degree, an advanced degree, a good enough job, sufficient housing, a little fun to boot. Not until 25, 28, 30, 33, 35.
But we're supposed to have children in our early 20s. That's when we're strong and energetic enough, with good backs, and grand parents fit and willing to pitch in.
When we finally feel ready in our mid 30s, we find that time has conspired against us. Our parents are far away and often ailing and demanding care and attention. We have less energy and more stress and dread the lost sleep. We have the wisdom and worldliness to know just how hard this is going to be. And once we've metabolised all those things, that's when we realize that conception is no longer a question of a great night out and a few drinks. How many kids will be born at the end of that gauntlet? We're finding out right now.
If you want people to have kids, you need to make sure they are economically secure by the time they are of childbearing age... which means before they are 30. To do that, you cannot have supply constrained zero-sum shortage anywhere in society. It means that the cost of an apartment needs to be at-or-below the cost to build that apartment so people can just save up and buy one early on in their career.
We need to not just allowing housing to get built, but actually we need to go as far as subsiding housing that nobody needs so that it's built before that need ever arises.
This is effectively impossible in a democratic society, and we are going to learn just how impossible it is as western society slowly collapses under the weight of its own social programs. It's honestly horrifying to watch.
1. The Economics of Fertility: A New Era, p50, https://www.nber.org/papers/w29948
As long as your saving is being eaten by asset inflation, no matter how fast you’re running, you’re still on a treadmill.
Smartphones are why we don't have kids.
Unlimited dopamine is why we don't have kids.
The internet is why we don't have kids.
Women like having fun and independence and don't want to be stay at home nannies.
Modern life is TOO FUN.
Fun is why there are no more babies.
Babies are not fun.
Babies are what you do in the 1950's when you're bored out of your mind with nothing to do.
Babies are what you do when you have to wait until next week for your Reader's Digest to arrive in the mail.
Babies are the anti-dopamine.
For the first time in history, we're not bored out of our fucking minds 24/7. Our brains are fully occupied.
There isn't space for babies now that we have the internet.
----
Thought experiment: if you had five million dollars extra right now, would you have a kid tonight?
The answer is probably "fuck no".
And you know why.
Look at the countries still having kids - they're mostly places where women don't have equal rights and smartphone / internet penetration is low.
I both liked Abundance and think there’s truth to what you’re saying.
But it wasn’t what I took away from the book (perhaps it was in there - but what I really got was ‘for a better future we need to stop shooting ourselves in the foot, and be prepared to enthusiastically think of and promote the greater good rather than protecting every single valuable individual thing’)
What we have now is the opposite. We know that housing demand will rise in the future, simply because there will be more people. Instead of the rich investing in housing production to meet this need, we have the rich investing in existing housing because we have effectively stopped production, thus the rich can capture all that value in price appreciation from rent-seeking alone (technically more of it), instead of wasting their time operating a business that builds things.
In my quite affluent city, the most affluent neighborhood has yard signs up every fifty feet expressing that they are furious that the city might develop city-owned parking lots (which are nowhere near their neighborhood) to be high density housing.
One-bedroom apartments in the city center are going for over $3,000 per month.
The rich aren't simply locking up existing housing, their principal concern is preventing any housing from being created, even if it has no effect on them.
But no, when we propose that, all those affluent bourgeois feeding on the young are suddenly poor grandmas just wanting to live the rest of their lives in peace.
Make up your mind, people. Are we going to fix the problem, or are we going to blame Jeff Bezos because some suburban schmucks oppose building apartments. Frankly I don't think Jeff Bezos even cares about apartments. (He has enough money to buy a city block, why would he care.) But it sure feels more righteous to hate Jeff Bezos than argue about real estate tax.
"cost of an apartment needs to be at-or-below the cost to build that apartment"
That's not true, its that the cost to build the apartment is far too high and the cost is totally passed on to a the public, thereby hovering up any disposable income that might go towards having a child.
There can be a profit margin, but the cost needs to be low.
My main point is that, because housing takes a very long time to build en masse, you'd want the housing to start being built before people need it.
It's like any other strategic reserve we have. Since demand can spike, and we can rarely see the spikes coming, but we know they will come, just be prepared by subsidizing the development of that thing. We do it for food, oil, weapons, vaccines, you name it. If we know we will need it in the future anyway, and it take a long time to produce, we create strategic reserves. We should do that for housing.
I’d have to spend every single post tax dollar for two decades to afford an actual house. Not counting interest and other taxes and council rates. I’d have to work for 70+ years to afford a nice house in a nice suburb!
“Have more children!”
“Make housing affordable!”
“My retirement fund is all in property and banks!”
There’s your problem.
There's your problem. Everyone wants to live in the same set of well established well resourced neighbourhoods. But there's too many of us. Go out in the 'burbs and accept that owning a house implies a commute you will dislike (among a host of other compromises).
Objectively, you don't need a house with a lawn and a back yard to have children, and have them grow up healthy and successful.
Thank fuck voters aren't buying this garbage.
I also find your retort equally misleading. Social housing is a solved issue. The problem is that we are letting greedy developers dictate the type of housing to be built. Kinda what the book abundance never mentions, who actually are the ones with power and how they are wielding it to thwart progress.
Blaming democratic societies is even more frankly bizarre too. America has always been deeply antidemocratic and has thwarted the will of the people at every opportunity of progress (every delegate voted against the bill of rights when first mentioned (took a threat of violence to add it), labor rights, ending slavery, universal suffrage); the problem has always been authoritarians against the people.
>America has always been deeply antidemocratic
Okay, buddy. No need to open a history book to understand what an undemocratic state actually looks like. There are plenty of actual, totalitarian monarchies that still exist.
[1]: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizat...
[2]: https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/gu...
In 2026, a single minimum wage income can barely survive by themselves with no saving in most part of the US.
As usual...
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
Anyway I'm sure the current oil shock and (assuming the clowns get their way) loose monetary policy will be different this time!
I wouldn't limit it to economics either. Socially children are restricting. If you want to be free to travel, move, leave the house on a whim, etc. then kids will interrupt your plans/logistics.
Large families were your source of farm labor.
Large families were your source of labor because you never given a chance to make a better life for yourself.
I've found having children the most rewarding thing to have done with my life. And even so, you are right about the costs. "Million dollar baby" is not just a catch-phrase.
Switch to an industrial society. Having children to do raw physical labor competes directly with tractors and a backhoes. But you can acquire other assets and put more resources in upscaling children through education. And wage work means you can send wives and daughters out to make money.
I think it usually takes a society one or two generations to figure that out and act accordingly.
Adding a thing I harp on. Malthusian limits traditionally is thought to apply to just food and disease. But you can extended that to an industrial wage based economy and the resource restrictions still apply just not to food and disease. Industrialization probably results in structural population overshoot.
If you just look at India, richer and more developed states have lower fertility compared to poorer, less developed states.
Within states, richer and more educated couples have fewer children compared to poorer less educated children.
These patterns are pretty much universal.
However, one big caveat:
"If you want a secured dignified life and basic prerequisites to starting a family"
What you're saying is more relevant to the state of already-developed nations, that are now all in a slow decline. Not so much to newly developed nations, slowly on the rise.
That context established:
The common "we can't afford children" explanation is certainly a significant part of the equation, but I have never bought that it is the biggest reason. Children are expensive, but highly subsidized, and just not expensive enough to explain the whole picture. Your explanation is, I think, the One Big Thing. So many adults today grew up seeing middle-class life as very attainable with a college education and a work ethic. Then, as they became adults, that "attainable" reality inched away as fast as they progressed toward that goal.
The big, tough thing to discuss (tough because of the modern obsession with attacking "entitlement"), is that humans react much more strongly to change in state than to the state itself. E.g. if Alice grows up in a local culture where most people are poor, and Bob grows up in a local culture where most people have little houses and little yards and low crime, and then Alice and Bob both end up poor, then Bob is a lot angrier than Alice. Bob shakes his fist at the world more, and is more likely than Alice to choose to delay having children until he attains what he thought was a totally reasonable American aspiration.
This is highly parallel to the parent's notion of "not having children in order to pursue other things". It's not just that people don't want children - it's that they want children and middle-class lives, and feel uneasy choosing children when it feels like one more bump on the path to a middle-class life.
Highly subsidized? I have to assume you're not talking about America. I pay $3200/mo to send my kids to a very middle-of-the-road preschool. That's almost $40k/year just in childcare costs so that my wife and I can go to work. The difference between a 1-bedroom apartment and a 3-bedroom apartment is an extra $20k/yr or so in my area. Then there's health care premiums, taking them out for activities sometimes, etc.
I can ballpark the cost of having preschoolers in my area as $30k/yr each. And I don't know about you, but I don't exactly see any government subsidies helping me carry that burden.
There's much stronger relationships to religiosity and fertility rates (with a much larger than income based gaps), regional/cultural choices and fertility rates, than income. India, which we are discussion here, supposedly a country where the quality of life is rising, has surprisingly low fertility rates.
IN your example it's much more likely Bob is no longer religious, Bob has moved to an area (or a culture has set in) where having less children is the norm/social structure. Among my social group having a child was very much 'catching' with friends having clusters of children around the same time. A culture of not having children would create the same opposite effect. Instead of talk about coming babies, shared excitement, feeling left out/un-adult, surrounded by hormones, if you have a culture of talking about not having children/justifying delaying/etc you now have 'not having children' as the 'catching' social outbreak.
Paying people to have kids/social promotion has not changed things anywhere. Or in the case of India being discussed, improving conditions have resulted in less children. There is something else going on than your assertion that 'American's are just too aspirational' is impacting India's fertility rate.
So that pretty much kills any explanation that depends on our recent experience, like pressure to get a degree, good job, etc. Seems like there is probably something far more fundamental at work to create a 200+ year trend with a one brief interruption for a couple decades.
I'll add religion to the mix. We're less religious now. Even folks who are religious now(at least in the Christian West) seem to practice a different religion than we did 50 years ago. Religion does many things, good and bad, but it definitely prizes children and reproduction. If it didn't, it would quickly get replaced by a mode of thought/belief which did. I'm not advocating for religion here, just stating that it likely plays a large role in reproduction.
I know for me personally, it's not economic reasons as to why I have not had children, but more a problem of finding the right mate at the right time. Some people just aren't socially fit for each other...
Now contraception has decoupled these things. You can have the relationship you want, and put off children until "sufficient" economic conditions have been reached.
(It is good news that India is at or below replacement rate! The conversation would be very different if in a few decades time India had to find twice as much food and oil!)
I think it's probably a wise thing to advise against having children you can't afford to take care of. I don't think it was something that was explicitly hammered into me or my peers growing up, but we all saw enough examples of kids being raised in poverty to know that we wanted something better for our own children.
Men's too, from 40s up. Not as severe, and not cliff-like in the end like menopause. But it compounds, as the typical couple ages are directly correlated.
- likelihood to get pregnant
- likelihood to bring child to term
- health risk to mother during pregnancy and child birth
- health risk to baby during pregnancy and child birth
- increased likelihood of multiple birth defects
- increased likelihood of genetic abnormalities
I'm not casting aspersions. My wife and I had kids when she was 38 and 40 respectively. But, the numbers for the risks are stark.
- Stress on the relationship of trying and failing for a long time - Stress of fertility treatments, if needed - Likelihood of dealing with inevitable miscarriages on the way to a birth - Overall "medicalization" of pregnancy in middle age, and the stress of all that contact with the medical system
None of this touches on industrialization and higher education, which seem to be the more universal effects, even if one of their bigger effects is merely to delay motherhood.
Even above age 35, 85% of men are able to conceive within 12 months: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11026002/
Like it or not, fertility decline is substantially different between the sexes.
So two kids during university would mean even the measly amount you have to pay back for an European subsided degree would be gone.
I do hope that will be put into effect.
I also believe that this will be better for gender equality than all the other measures taken so far.
I was in too many meetings, where the CV of a young woman was critically evaluated for her propensity to get pregnant as soon as the probationary period was over.
50% of this have to be paid back, free of interest and capped at 10k€. That is not much, but keep in mind that we earn much less than Americans and have much higher taxes.
When was this? In much of Europe that's been illegal employment discrimination for decades. But I suppose employers are less worried if they can be confident that it's unlikely that any of their employees will have children.
Happens all the time in Austria. If you're a woman in your mid 20s to mid 30s, and employer will assume you'll get pregnant soon and go on childcare leave, so they'll pick other candidates if they can. Just because something is illegal doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Illegal things happen ALL THE TIME, and perps get away with it when there's no enforcement or the plaintiff doesn't have enough proof, time or money to fight said injustice. For example, on my street it's illegal to drive over 30kph, and yet half the cars that drive by go over 45 simply because there's no law enforcement nearby to catch them and fine them. If there's no enforcement with direct consequences at scale, then a law is virtually useless.
For an employer to get into legal trouble over pregnancy or racial or nationality discrimination with government authorities, that means the candidate would need to know upfront and have proof that they were discriminated against over those immutable characteristics, which is rarely the case as everyone just gets the same copy-paste legally safe rejection email from HR: "we regret to inform you that you didn't make the final cut because candidates with better experience/qualifications bla bla bla" and that's where it ends. You will never know what they discussed in private.
But that's not the reason women have few kids here. The reason is mostly cultural and environmental.
(And now there's also an AI apocalypse of some kind on the way even if the climate situation can be resolved/survived. And the ever-present threat of WW3 seems closer now than ever)
On pre-industrialized societies, women have barely a choice. On industrialized ones they do. And it turns out that, when given the choice, they choose not to have babies.
If you scoff at the idea of flipping burgers your whole life then just imagine it's changing diapers instead.
> your whole life
pretty sure the diaper changing part only lasts a couple years
Being disabled, and having AI be a risk to the only work I can perform means financial concerns are at the heart of everything. There is simply too much financial risk even without children.
It’s simply the biological clock running out due to convenience and security.
It’ll require a huge culture shift to make kids convenient.
The incentives just aren't there.
When you have kids, you need the freedom to just get up and leave at any time to respond to things. School calls cause your kid is sick, emergencies, you name it. You gotta be there and be available for them, and we need a culture to where that doesn't become damaging to your career, and enough worker protections in place to where you cannot face disciplinary action for that.
this is what i keep repeating over and over again.
I'm not sure that's enough to reverse the demographic slide though, it's been tried.
For our ancestors, they married young, and didn't have access to birth control. Babies weren't really planned, they just happened.
It needs to be a massive package of subsidies.
Children used to be a private good. Child-labor laws and the cost of raising kids flipped that. Children remain a public benefit, but that benefit is realized without paying for the cost. In essence, the cost of all prenatal, neonatal and pediatric healthcare; schooling; the opportunity cost in career and recreation the parents incur from having to raise kids; and the direct costs of feeding, clothing, nannying, et cetera children need to be directly subsidized, probably with a cash bonus on top.
In America this would probably be a ca. $50k/child benefit at the low end.
Society would need to offer something to offset all those costs.
The population just doesn't disappear, it can pretty quickly shrink in just a generation or two leaving huge amounts of infrastructure unmaintained and falling apart with huge amounts of debt that will ensure what remains of society ends up in chaos.
That and the most likely part of the population to shrink is the ones we consider more stable and rational. Cults and religious breeding groups will increasing become the majority of the population leading to some 'interesting fun times'.
"Humans extinct, women most affected"
Pretty amusing how it's always framed as some terrible burden on women to justify more gibs. As if they aren't also the beneficiaries of society thriving and men never make any sacrifices for society. Or that, well, women also "benefit" from reproducing in the Darwinian sense.
we could decide otherwise and create structures where young people, still in highschool or studying, are at the same time able to live together and have children.
How about we undo the mess we’ve created through industrialization? Change the world so people WANT to have kids again?
The economic value of kids and the relative surety that kids will provide for you in your old age are I think very hard to reclaim now, and that was a pretty strong motivator for most of history. You could end all retirement funds and pension systems and so on, maybe?
Most people are biologically wired to want children. "Survive and reproduce" is pretty much the driving motivation of all living things. Most children weren't conceived as a carefully planned retirement strategy. No cost/benefit calculation is required to convince most people to have children, but you can certainly force them into a position where they have to start thinking in those terms. We've just hit a point where societal and environmental factors are discouraging people from doing what they'd normally do.
When given the choice there are plenty of people putting the latter over the former, and the number of women stuck at home while their husband went out to have affairs suggests the reality of kids doesn't actually interest most people. Plenty of folks just want a status symbol, not the responsibility of raising a child.
The need for all of that is considerably different in modernity and more people choose to live without their family close by, and certainly don't depend on them for housing and care as often?
Meanwhile the narrative around having kids is that your life is over after you have them. Partying? Irresponsible parent! Round of golf? You must hate your kids. Triathlon training? Better happen before dawn. Hiking and camping trip? Absolutely not.
There is this sense in society that hedonism is something to be frowned upon, when by definition it is kind of what everyone is after at the end of the day. Pleasurable activities, how awful to engage in them, so the rhetoric goes.
I think we'd see people having kids earlier if there was more acknowledgement that a balance can be successfully struck. That you won't get CPS called if you uber home drunk. Unfortunately in a lot of ways we are still living under the shadow of the puritan society and it has created not only a mental health crisis, but a reproductive crisis.
Then the systems of the world had to make a choice: pay for the old at the expense of the new, or support the new by capping benefits on the old. This takes the form of social welfare programs in most developed countries, but industrialization also clamped down wealth in the hands of those who owned the means of production, and kept it from the hands of labor absent mechanisms of redistribution. Industrialization by its nature necessitates a larger investment to begin competing with established players in ways former artisans and businesses lacked: machinery, labor, logistics, technology, real estate, and materials all require expensive, up-front, and lengthy investment before potential payoff in an industrialized world that pre-industry societies didn’t have to deal (as much) with, thus locking most Capital and wealth into the hands of those who already had it to begin with. An aristocracy on steroids, choking and hoarding the lifeblood of a healthy economy into their private coffers.
This plays out differently in each country depending on its economic maturity and what function it served in the global marketplace, but the outcome was the same: with entertainment being plentiful and cheap compared to the immense risks and costs of child rearing in an increasingly dim future lacking in a cohesive, collaborative narrative to be inspired by, fertility collapsed.
A lot of the decrease is also correlated with access to birth control which drastically reduced accidental pregnancies which were a decent amount of the fertility rate. Then we attacked teenage pregnancy with a vengeance. In 1957 it was 96/100k teen women had babies, 62/100k in 1991 and now down to the current rate of 11/100k. The postponement of births expands the time between generations which compounds the problem. An 18 yr old could have a baby that has a baby at 18 before a 36+ year old mom has their first child.
All this leads to exponential decay of humanity. In the near term we don't have to worry about extinction but we do have to worry about the pyramid schemes we have to support non-workers (like social security). This will all play out much sooner in Asia where the TFRs can be half of the US/EU. Imagine due to China's one child policy a young working person will soon have to support 2 parents and 4 grandparents somehow. There will be some kind of reckoning and some of the speculation around what it will look like is quite grim.
> In 1957 it was 96/100k teen women had babies, 62/100k in 1991 and now down to the current rate of 11/100k
That's per 1k, not 100k [1]. 96/100k would be an insignificant amount. 96/1000 of girls and women ages 15-19 means that any given year, 10% had a baby, which is a substantial contribution to overall birth rates.
1. Teen Births in the United States: Overview and Recent Trends, https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45184
i don't think that's what happened. i believe women wanting economic independence (rightly so) and thus pushing into work was a bigger factor.
This was my first intuition.
i'd trade it all for having kids younger though. it's just that they would have come at a time that any kind of grip on my future was still tenuous.
Whoever has custody of the kids is fine. The social services benefits scale. They won’t get rich, but they’ll eat. People will be OK. The only people who lose are stupid men who have multiple children with multiple women.
Once you have a little cash, the formula changes completely.
But passing on genes is a pretty arbitrary goal. It's the one encoded in our genes, but (looks around at random object) passing on teacup design is encoded in a teacup. The most teacups are the ones that make people look at them and say "I want a copy of that cup". It's just statistics, not the ultimate meaning of the universe. The humans who think it's the ultimate meaning of the universe may be more likely to replicate - but that's a genetically inherited delusion, not a fact. You can pass on your editor choice just as well as you can pass on your genes.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/no-bitch-dats-a-whole-new-x-w...
Young people in Seattle either live in studios or 1 bedroom apartments, or live with roommates, or with their parents. You cannot raise more than 1 kid this way.
This is the calculus me nu my wife did when we chose to have one kid only. Looking back and seeing how life progressed we made the right choice.
The problem as a country you are doing to disappear demographically if you're choices are near suffering versus having kids.
The problem is that it's literally impossible for most people to have life figured out before hitting 25, and very hard before 30. Importantly, that wasn't the case just one generation ago.
You do need to be able to afford to care for them and be reasonably capable of providing them with a stable and healthy environment to grow up in though. People who are one or two missed paychecks away from homelessness probably shouldn't be thinking about having children, and sadly that's a whole lot of people.
You kinda don't though? The government won't let you starve to death. Surprised there aren't more people welfaremaxxing, TBH.
My parents didn’t have their life figured out and I paid the price with extreme mental and physical abuse as their life entered a never ending downward spiral.
This had impacts on me, which extended to impacts on others.
I’m ok now, after years of intensive counselling reversed the violent tendencies that were beaten into me with their fists over two decades. It did contribute to me not having kids of my own as I didn’t want to repeat the cycle, but other things impacted it as well.
So yeah, maybe it turns out ok in some cases, maybe in others it doesn’t.
i think this is especially extreme in the US where some parents tell their kids that at their 18th birthday they are on their own. that's an insane attitude. not everyone is that extreme, but what ever you experienced is more a failure of society, and less a failure of your parents.
My parents had all the support they needed from their parents, but it wasn’t enough, their life was interrupted before they found their footing and they just never developed that footing once children were added to the mix.
To your point though, maybe if there was more support of parents from society from a larger perspective, maybe it would have been different.
If my upbringing hadn’t been getting bashed into an inch of my life because apparently being unable to afford rent was my fault, I suspect I would have been far more amenable to children.
Sure, you just need to do away with international trips, going out, losing your group of friends, losing your chances for higher education and career progression and all of the associated prestige.
My wife was a city treasurer and had a masters. I was a .gov and later a tech executive.
Yes, if you value spending time with parents of same-aged children. My social life is still fine, but the people I spend my time with are competely different. Not better, nor worse, just entirely different.
People buying more chocolate ice cream than vanilla? Could be changing preferences or Hersheys marketing, or it could be undetected brain worms. People voting for one political party over others? Could be that party is campaigning/governing in a more popular way, could be brain worms.
If there’s evidence of contaminants or whatever influencing behavior strongly enough to change large scale demographic trends, then present it. Otherwise, your best chance at good data is to take people at their word when they say why they do things.
and, the latter is indeed dependent on the former. but, arguing that humans have no free will is an argument that should be tried independently of rebutting the former comment.
You make a philosophical point while the reality is already clear enough. Everyone has a friend with kids so they hear the stories. The “scary” ones stick longer than the nice ones because it’s easier to understand financial woes, health issues, and problems of this kind.
https://homepages.uc.edu/~moscoshn/Personal_webpage/papers/S...
There are also social effects. When half your friends have kids and half don't, you can compare the lives of each and decide which you want to live. You won't be as isolated now if you choose not to have kids... in fact the trend seems to be that having children is the isolating choice.
That's like, the complete opposite of the hedonistic young couple not using protection and accidentally getting pregnant.
How many people in the developed world are really doing that? My social circle is largely child-free into our thirties and forties, and the big motivation is so that we have time for our hobbies and for travel. Almost no one is dedicating their time to altruism. Especially considering that I live in a long-running welfare state, where helping people in need is generally left to the state and private charity is rare (and often has dodgy religious-sect connotations).
These are all real examples of why people I know delayed having kids, curtailed the number they had, or never had them altogether.
Hedonism has negative connotations, colloquially (and colloquially is how we are speaking).
I won't comment on your assertion that the freedom to watch "adult-appropriate movies on a big TV in the living room" is a more fulfilling state of being than parenthood, except to say that I'm very grateful that I'm not that shallow.
That's certainly a factor, though very aggressive financial incentives for parents don't seem to work very well [0, 1, 2]. Not to mention that in rich countries, educational attainment and income are negatively correlated with fertility [3]. My theory there is that people's high-powered careers provide them more self-satisfaction than having kids.
>it's the fact that they can't even afford to buy somewhere to live.
It's funny you mention this. Some friends said they weren't having a second kid because they couldn't afford a three bedroom house, not realizing that kids sharing bedrooms was the norm for middle class families until very recently. Having one bedroom per kid was a luxury just 30-40 years ago.
>I won't comment on your assertion that the freedom to watch "adult-appropriate movies on a big TV in the living room" is a more fulfilling state of being than parenthood
It's not my assertion, it's something a couple deciding to not have another kid literally told me. They missed being able to have substantial amounts of adult time, and were actively counting down the days until their only child was old enough to amuse himself for long periods of time. Having another kid would reset that clock.
[0] https://www.economist.com/europe/2026/03/19/viktor-orbans-pr...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/28/south-korea-fe...
[2] https://worldcrunch.com/culture-society/boosting-birth-rates...
[3] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/society-at-a-glance-202...
Here is a list of aggressive incentives that will never happen in the US: 1. Fully paid daycare for every week with more than 30 hours worked by any parent
2. Fully paid healthcare until 18 years old
3. Fully paid after elementary school care for every week with more than 30 hours worked by any parent.
> But financial and other inducements are failing to convince couples who cite skyrocketing child-rearing costs and property prices, a lack of well-paid jobs and the country’s cut-throat education system as obstacles to having bigger families.
I know South Korea has both expensive cram schools and a difficult housing market. If the incentives aren't as large as the additional costs from child raising, does it really tell us anything? Ideally you'd want it to exceed those costs.
Of course, that might be impractical or impossible for a government to fund, which is something.
- hedonic pleasures are adaptive. The first time you experience them is incredible. The 1000th time, much less so. - chasing hedonic pleasures is counter-productive. Studies show that people who actively seek out hedonic pleasure are less happy than those that don't.
OTOH, eudaimonic pleasure (aka fulfilment, satisfaction) is much more durable.
Work, hobbies, charity work, and children are avenues towards fulfilment. Far too many rely on work to provide it for them, but that's counter-productive for most.
I am not actually sure that this is consistent across most people who have had children.
But you might be up to something: people are too stressed/anxious/depressed (without children) that adding children seems to them like an impossible burden. Now, I am not sure children would not sometimes actually improve their state (biology kicking in), but definitely is a gamble.
The term "child-free" implies relieving oneself of a disease, the way one describes himself as "cancer-free" or "drug-free". As in caring for children is on par with imprisonment.
Now I don't mind mind people opting out of having children to live a hedonistic life, my only issue is describing it as a noble cause.
Wow, this is an eyebrow-raising degree of uncharitability. There's no reason to attack straightforward words like this.
Also, the parent did not make this implication. They implied it's irresponsible to have children unintentionally or flippantly.
You're arguing a straw man, I didn't mention that the parent made the implication.
I simply refuted a portion of parent's claim that people are forgoing children to foster a care of their community or performing acts of service as they implied here:
"a child-free adult gets fulfillment out of nurturing and caring for others, mentoring, caring for themselves and their community"
> There's no reason to attack straightforward words like this.
If you feel like my interpretation of the term is an attack, that's on you. I simply voiced what the term communicates to me.
As an example, there's a reason Anti Abortionists rebranded the term to "Pro Life" because of the connotation.
Terms do have an intention behind them.
You didn't refute, you just said you didn't think that's what people are doing. In any case it doesn't matter what they do with their time, because it's theirs.
> If you feel like my interpretation of the term is an attack, that's on you.
> Terms do have an intention behind them.
I don't know how you square that circle. You made some claims about the term child-free which are strictly your interpretation and then used it to describe their choice as ignoble.
In both cases you're just ascribing a nobility and morality to having children which just isn't there.
Secondly, I’m allowed to express my opinion about a term. You can disagree and think the term child-free doesn’t have negative connotation but in my read it does. So im not sure what you’re trying to argue.
Close but it’s not about fun, it’s about exploring the new possibilities. There’s simply no time for having kids when you just transition to a new way of life and you don’t know what to do. You maybe want to travel the world or build a house etc so you work more and spend more towards these. The next gen is having more kids.
Bulgaria used to be a prime example of population collapse but today has the highest birth rates in Europe(not just EU). The population will still shrink but as the dust settles people have certainty, know what to expect from life and can make a choice of having kids. Traveling the world can be just a phase in the early 20s, don’t have to grind as much for the basics, the definition of success isn’t getting rich through hard work so a simple and balanced life with kids becomes a feasible and desirable option.
>But having children is not intrinsically non-hedonistic. It's just one of many self-fulfilling activities we choose from
Exactly, and my point is that all the activities I listed (which only become abundantly available in rich, industrialized societies) are more self-fulfilling than having children.
Oddly enough, it's likely the US and Europe defused (and then some) Erlich's population bomb with farm subsidies which pushed people off farms and in to Nike factories in the developing world.
My sense is American farmers have more children than the population at large, but I don't have numbers to back it up. My farmer maternal great grandparents had 12 and 9 children -- I don't think that happens much anymore.
Industrialisation is an inherently compounding event. Thus, it gets concentrated geographically. So you get "hubs" like a tech hub, a manufacturing hub, a finance hub, etc,. So if you study CS, you cannot just take a tech job in a finance city or an export city. You got to move to a tech hub.
So unless your entire family is in roughly the same line of work, it is very difficult to keep a joint family. In fact, contrary to the "more money less kids" hypothesis, the traditional "family business" families that continue to do what their ancestors did, tend to have more kids and live in joint family homes.
Even if a set of parents happened to have 2.1 kids on average, the chance that in the next generation, the two siblings end up consistently living close by each other is very small. So it really only takes 30 years for TFR to fall off a cliff.
Is it really any surprise people would opt out?
Go spend a day with kids and you'll see why people would rather not deal with the mess.
Especially women who actually end up doing the majority of the work.
Add to that the extinction level pressures like climate change and the absolute lack of any benefit whatsoever in being a parent, who is crazy enough to willingly sign up for this if you actually put any thought into it instead of just "that's the way things are though!!!"
Every day I praise the man who did my vasectomy lol
And for little I know about raising children is that it's one hell of a job, that requires extensive knowledge, skill, and constant heavy investment, all being an unbreakable commitment for almost two decades. Messing anything up means another human suffers the consequences. In my mind, a would-be parents have to be really competent to be confident to be able to accept the responsibility, and even then screwups are a given. Skipping on any of that, even unintentionally or from inadequate skills, means a person out there will be left to figure out how to deal with the aftermath of their upbringing. The fact a lot of people skip on all of that and just do it is no excuse.
And thus, personally, I never felt like having children. Not seriously, not after thinking about it in any depth. I messed up two cats already, messing up a human is unnecessary.
IMHO, if a society really needs new people because can't figure out how to support old ones otherwise, it should invest into professional parenting and employ people who are genuinely enthusiastic about doing that work.
a) there is a lot of fun to do "outside there"
but you are MASSIVLY wrong in:
b) children are meaningful, they give you more than the consumption you can have - rent one month into brothel and you will see! ;-)
(source: father of twins, and nearly bankrupt regardless of my tech-job, nontheless my kids me more than our usual career-shit)
I haven't seen a firefly in a couple years. If I had a child today, describing this bug to a child would be almost mythical.
How many things that we've taken for granted will a child born today never get to experience? Not shallow things like iPods, but genuine miracles of nature we're wiping out at an accelerating pace. I can't in good conscious bring a child into a world that so many are focused on absolutely destroying.
It's my protest to allow the pyramid of consumption to collapse. I will not bring a just another customer into the world. I won't bring a child here just so they can be a pawn to try to recover from poor planning.
We as humans need this population collapse. We need to learn how to organize society on long-term sustainability, not a pyramid scheme.
Every time I see this discussion, it's always framed like a call to action, that we need new children to bail out the sinking boat and keep it floating for another generation or two.
Who is focused on destroying the world?
I don't think hardly any super villains exist. People might have a different assessment of what destroying the world means than you do.
They "have a different assessment" but they're still contributing to an extinction event. You don't need to be a super villain. You can simply be selfish. Once scaled to many many selfish people, you have a collective villain.
But perhaps you've heard talk of things like "6th mass extinction event" or "global climate change"?
both of which are direct consequences of our industrialized society?
Look, I'm personally grateful for modern medicine and indoor plumbing, to name a few things. I don't want to go back to some idealized hunter-gatherer past (yes, I've tried it).
And regardless of the actual truth of ecological and climate collapse, or your particular views on the actual truth of these, enough people see enough convincing evidence that the parent poster's view is supported by enough people to matter.
We live in a blessed window.
They're also a beautiful creature that I could imagine wishing a child of mine could experience the same way I did, which better illustrates the tragedy of the damage we're doing to the planet.
We should discuss and reason about population size (where we are, where should we be, what should we do), but with a bit less passion. 30 years ago people were all doom about "over-population" and now I see all doom about "under-population".
And most fertility issues people do encounter can primarily be explained by attempting to have children decades later than is biologically optimal.
a) there is a lot of fun to do "outside there"
but you are MASSIVLY wrong in:
b) children are meaningful, they give you more than the consumption you can have - rent one month into brothel and you will see! ;-)
Well mission accomplished.
Why do you say so?
But this is by and large not true. I've traveled, eaten at expensive restaurants, enjoyed a child free existence into my mid thirties and having kids is a blast[*]
My wife was adamantly against having kids when we got together in our twenties, and she changed her mind in her late thirties; she now says that was the best thing that has happened to her.
Finally, there are many studies showing that people lead happier lives when they focus on someone else, have a higher purpose beyond just hedonism or living selfishly.
[*] - I have a supportive partner who collaborates with me so we both get time away and time off from the occasional drudgery or exhaustion of parenting. I still get time to work out, see friends, have time with my wife, all of that. If I couldn't afford the occasional babysitter and had a partner who was absent most of the time, it would be a lot harder!
true, but you didn't know until you had them, and society keeps telling us otherwise. we need to change the message and educate youth about becoming parents. but also create a culture where having children is welcome.
in the west we complain about kids running around, making noise, being not under control. and most importantly we blame the parents. in china every child is treated like a treasure. sometimes even to a fault. but at least parents are not being blamed for having children, or for bringing them along when they have noone else to care for them. for example children hanging out at their parents workplace after school is normal. in the west that's ground for getting fired.
huh, I didn't know this. Thank you for sharing about your culture :)
In my peer group, it's been about 50/50 between people who seem to really enjoy parenthood and others who are struggling. There are many reasons for struggling, like how they or their spouse handle the stress and how much help they have or pay for. But the biggest one is that kids largely take up a lot of time and energy.
It's hard for someone to expect that they'll enjoy parenthood when they look around and see many parents who are unhappy.
Maybe we should have like with "open university day", "open raise a child day". Some might like it more than imagine, some might hate it more than imagine.
I don't think the religion is the driver here.
see (Middle East fertility rates) https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...
and (OECD fertility rates)
https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/fertility-rates.html
I recall reading an article about the culture of Israel is friendlier towards families/young children. Not sure how that cultural aspect would show up in stats.
- As of 2022, the fertility rates in Israeli cities dominated by specific demographic groups were: Haredi 6.1, Bedouin 4.4, Jewish non-Haredi 2.4, Arab 2.2, Druze 1.8
So the GP's characterization is correct.
Yes, non-Haredi Jewish Israelis have a higher fertility rate than in Western nations. There seems to be a variety of reasons for this including cultural/religious pressure, institutional support and selection bias (in terms of who chooses to immigrate/emigrate).
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Israel
I wouldn't say we're hedonistic creatures by nature. It isn't good for us to be hedonists. I would say that hedonism is simply the nature and logic of consumerism, and consumerism—and indeed, hedonism—derails healthy human virtues, tastes, and habits like a drug and deranges one's ability to reason about reality and the good.
Consumerism is intrinsically market-oriented and thus all about satisfying the desires of the market. In a hyperliberal culture that privatizes and relativizes morality and makes "freedom" from all restraint the ultimate end of human existence—full stop—that means the market is effectively god and that no desire can be wrong (in practice, this is complicated by the unfeasibility of ultimately attaining such a state of affairs).
Naturally, hedonism doesn't sit still. Once it slakes its appetite for something, like a vampire, it wants to move onto something else. Its appetite only grows. Hedonism is a death spiral of indulgence of ever increasing depravity. In an amoral environment that produces people lacking proper moral and intellectual formation (apparently moral formation is "fascist"), and without at least the guardrails provided by law rightly understood, it is an easy death spiral to enter into.
If life is seen as objectively without meaning, then all that remains is hedonism. Our age is full of nihilist thinly papered over with hedonistic distractions.
So we're nihilists. We live in a nihilistic consumerist culture. Nihilism leads to nothingness and death.
But you know what did occur in the 1960s-1970s? The invention and popularization of the birth control pill. Here is the US birth rate [1]. Rising from 1950-1960 then a sudden and precipitous drop in the 1960s until stabilization in the 1970-now range. This coincides with the global drop in fertility rate. How about Germany [2]? Growth from 1950 to late 1960s then a sudden drop until stabilization in the mid 1970s. France [3]? Flat and high until mid-1960s then a sudden drop until stabilization in 1980. UK [4]? Growth from 1950 to mid 1960s then a sudden drop until stabilization mid 1970s. Australia [5]? Growth until 1960 then drop until stabilization in 1980.
Every single developed country in the world is flat to growing and then sees a sudden and rapid decline in birth rate just a few years after mass availability of the birth control pill until stabilization around the time that the pre-birth control cohort ages past reproductive years. The birth control pill is so new that the reproductive cohort that lived prior to its invention is still alive.
My hypothesis is that fertility is just a function of access to cheap, effective contraceptives. The fertility rates we see today are the natural rates when pregnancy is a choice.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...
[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/deu/ger...
[3] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/fra/fra...
[4] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/gbr/uni...
[5] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/aus/aus...
birth control and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race
in addition to the obvious birth rate effects, i think there are a lot of other sociological effects from everyone being on hormonal birth control that people don’t want to admit
Women are choosing not to have children, and you need to ask them why and take the answers seriously.
women have sex drives too, if they arent on birth control they are more likely to engage in behavior that can get them pregnant
So, are other activities more fun than child rearing? Often, yeah. Definitely less stressful. Rewarding? Not in a million goddamned years. Nothing, absolutely nothing, compares to when your kid first walks, talks, tackles a problem they had a hard time doing before, or tells you that they love spending time with you completely unprompted.
For what it’s worth, I personally think a good portion of the birth rate dropping is environmental. Maybe it’s plastics, pfas, or something else nobody is looking at. Some people still have an urge to have kids, completely separate from the urge to have sex. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that testosterone and sperm counts have been dropping among humans and dogs, and that the deliberately child free people I know all veer on the (forgive the derisive slang term, but I don’t know how else to get the point across) “soyboy” type of person - both male and female.
That potential pollution aspect also explains this happening to industrial societies.
This has not been my experience. What has changed is that its now looked-down on to denigrate people who choose not to have kids (in some circles), and that people are no longer treated as heroes for having children. It had historically been the case that people who chose to not have kids were browbeaten about their choices.
I have had no issues talking about my children at all even with people who have remained childless. This is because I respect other peoples' decisions when doing so.
I'm not sure that this is the case, could you expand?
Like the only reasons you can come up with is mystery chemicals or soyboys - seriously?
I think it’s vastly more complex than “insert my favourite political reason” and includes many different factors.
Personally I think it’s telling that only the Orthodox Jews don’t seem to have that problem - with an extremely rigid, strict and misogynistic religion as their primary purpose.
Personally as a male I don’t mind having kids but if I were a woman no way in hell would I have one.
There can be multiple reasons why modern societies have less kids, but the main theme of Orthodoxy is to keep as much as possible the same as in previous generations. So they would be avoiding almost all the possible reasons given for the decline.
If you were to actually know parents at your local area daycare centers/schools, it'd quickly become evident that the "masculine"/"feminine" types are a definite minority.
Total economic stagnation, spiraling population numbers, loss of anything anchored to manual labor, and an aging population.
So far, it looks to be a way for slow extinction of a culture.
https://www.ipss.go.jp/pp-zenkoku/e/zenkoku_e2023/pp_zenkoku...
but it's a problem easily solved by just letting in more immigrants.
But yes, immigration doesn't solve the demographics issue, because immigrant citizens also get old and expect government support.
Immigrants do often have good sized families so that brings in a fresh generation of New Zealanders. Plenty of my married friends are from mixed cultures.
In some cultures their children give more time to care for their own parents or elderly family. New Zealand born children seem less likely to do so.
The local born often whine because whinging is a significant part of our colonial heritage from England.
It's hardly going to solve every problem, it will keep restaurants from closing.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/accept
Accept: to give admittance
Why is every argument against any level of immigration that the people of Japan are unchangeably xenophobic? Japan is bringing in more immigrants than ever: https://soranews24.com/2025/08/13/foreign-population-in-japa...
Does that sound like an extremely unlikely outcome? Back in 2008, we came within hours of credit cards stopping working. Projections say that if credit cards stop working, food distribution breaks down. Mass hunger is not far behind that. And there is nothing like mass hunger to destroy a society.
Esoteric problems in financial markets have real world consequences. We've gone nearly a century since the last real demonstration of that. Don't discount the possibility that the next demonstration will be within your lifetime. And in our more interconnected world, it's likely to be a lot worse.
Except for the very last step in the chain I find it hard to believe that credit cards play much of a role.
Or are you focused pedantically on credit cards?
https://ilsr.org/ is one resource, there are more.
(to your food example, the US harvests land the aggregate size of the state of Oregon just for biofuels, ethanol and biodiesel; this is, arguable, unnecessary, and there are many other examples of unnecessary economic activity that can be deprecated)
That said, like Democracy, capitalism is the worst economic system, except all of the others that have been tried. And there have been enough alternate experiments that I wouldn't want to literally bet my life on the next one working better.
The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 - August 2025 (400 comments)
(~71% of the world’s population now lives in countries with birth rates below the replacement level needed to maintain population size, the remainder will follow in time)
300 acres on the westward-facing slope of the interior cascade temperate rainforest. Even if the entire region sees extended drying over the next 50, there will still be sufficient rainfall for crops. All it will need are a few holding pools to reliably produce a year-round supply.
It’s also reasonably remote, difficult to reach unless you know of the specific path, and reasonably defensible.
Survivalist fantasies aren’t realistic.
What does this actually mean? Every time I try to wrap my head around why it's bad e.g. for a business to make a constant profit, rather than an increasing profit; or for the population to dip to some number and settle there, rather than increase; the explanations seem to become circular very quickly. I know it's partially my fault for not having a very strong economic education, but it also feels like something is fundamentally wrong with the theories - like they are making some underlying assumption about what is "good" that I don't share. But I can never seem to get down to it.
The only thing I understand is that as the ratio of old to young grows, more taxes are needed, of course. But that would only be painful during a significant rate of change, not after the number is stable, no? Is that really somehow apocalyptic?
When a certain region in a country gets a cluster of great companies or really any productive advantage you would want more buildings and people there. In a country with a growing population that would make most sense as you need to build houses regardless as there's more people entering the job market who need a home. In a country with a stagnant population for every home you build another needs to be abandoned. This is more expensive especially when this happens enough where a school in the 'abandoned town' closes and a new school should be made in the better town. You can see how the first is more efficient, you don't waste your fine buildings.
Don't forget it's not just taxes, but the allocation of labor and resources. If the entire population magically turned 90 tomorrow, no amount of taxes would be able to provide for them.
It’s very simple.
If you make $1M in profit in a year and the following year you also make $1M but inflation was 3%, you earned 3% less money than you did the year before. The nominal profit was the same but the real profit was lower.
To earn the same real return with 3% inflation you would need to earn $1.03M the year after you earn $1M. If your profits grew less than inflation, you made less money and your company is worth less as a result.
Monetary policy people figures out that a small amount of controlled inflation that incentivizes investing is better than deflation which encourages people to hoard cash. Some people disagree with that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_and_nominal_value
When the economy is growing, investment makes sense. Why put your money under the mattress when it could be out there, working for you?
When the reverse happens, investment stops making sense. Why risk your money when it becomes worth more while it is sitting under your mattress?
But stopping investment does not just mean stopping speculative investment. It means stopping investment in other things as well. Like maintenance. This guarantees that things are going to become worse over time. Which is a feedback loop that makes investment even less worthwhile.
This has happened in the USA before. The last time is called the Great Depression. Read through accounts of what it was like. Would you like to go through that now?
History also teaches that the longer it is between economic setbacks, the worse the next one tends to be. We've gone far longer since a depression than at any point in history. Our next one is likely to be correspondingly more terrible.
> When the reverse happens, investment stops making sense. Why risk your money when it becomes worth more while it is sitting under your mattress?
Is it necessary to have a growing population in order to have a growing economy?
For much of human history I'd guess the answer was yes, because the size of the economy was based almost entirely on how much physical work people did, but the modern economy is very different from historical economies.
It seems like you're recommending socialism without coming out and saying it?
I invest my wages to take advantage of compound interest. It’s kind of my only hope of having a family / owning a home / retiring. If stuff stops compounding, I’m fucked. Multiply by however many millions of people are on the same position.
I don’t necessarily think the theories are making any assumption about what is good (except for the “greed is good dicks”)but more acknowledging that this is how our system currently works and the first generation to step off this ride will have a horrible time.
Basically, the billionaires dislike it and hence are changing the message. They want you to be ants.
Does this still hold when the majority of labor is no longer closely tied to a finite supply of land? At the time of the Black Death, the majority of men's labor was farming, and having more land directly made labor much more productive[1]. The modern economy feels much more complicated (e.g. if your job involves transporting things/people from A to B, it probably decreases in efficiency as the density of people decreases).
[1] https://acoup.blog/2025/09/12/collections-life-work-death-an...
Remember this line the next time immigration/H1b debates heat up. The same mathematics are at play.
You just said AI Armageddon as if there is an already predetermined ending that is widely agreed upon.
What are you concerned we would run out of?
Helium is probably more limited but for most cases there is alternatives I.e. I believe people use argon.
Idk none of this seems overly pressing in terms of preventing a lost scarcity world
Thinking hard, the only thing we are having shortage is of AI tokens. Thats all we need to plan for or worry about in coming decades.
ai only solves labor, it doesn't solve human greed.
You're not sure humans can enjoy better lives in the future? Like you think things could only get worse?
Schools is a good example, as there are less children, you need less schools and consolidate. So there are less jobs for teachers, now it looks like an equilibrium issue since over time it will balance out. But those teachers who are losing their jobs are adults, tax payers, consumers now and the loss of spending has a cascading effect.
how do phone shops like verizon or t-mobile stay open if people aren't buying? same for phone repair places? more layoffs
more laid off people means less people going out to dinner, ordering pizza, taking trips, buying new cars. those businesses close, and layoff people.
less workers means less tax revinue, either income tax, payroll tax, or sales tax (cuz people ain't buying shit). government offices cut bodies (layoffs) and reduce services. there are now less cops and more potholes.
how do billionaires, whose wealth depends on publicly traded companies and their stocks, keep making money when no one can buy anything? spacex and tesla can make up numbers and stay afloat, somehow, but most stocks will tank.
You don't. You only sell 50 million.
> this leads to layoffs
Why? 50 million people instead of 100 million also means half the employees in the factory, making just 50 million phones instead of 100.
> government offices cut bodies (layoffs) and reduce services
Yeah, but no layoffs (same reason as the phone factory). Fewer people need fewer services. Potholes are indeed a problem. Some roads leading to abandoned places will need to be abandoned as well.
> most stocks will tank
By your argument, those people that can't buy a second phone, also can't buy any stocks anyway. I see no problem here.
Fewer children mean all the industries and gov't services who are employed now to service children will need to downsize, these are lost jobs now before the fewer children grow to adults where they would take over those fewer jobs. All of this will have a effect across the economy.
Pediatricians, Teachers, Toys & Games companies, Children Furniture, School Supplies, Electronics, etc.... All of these are sized with the expectation of the same consumer demand, but when there are less kids to buy and service each of these will be forced to downsize. Again in the long run it works out, but in the short run say next 50 years for people in these markets will see downsizing over time. Can the rest of the economies pick that up?
Lots of new jobs will be needed in health and elderly care - you just ignored those.
> All of these are sized with the expectation of the same consumer demand, but when there are less kids to buy and service each of these will be forced to downsize.
Downsizing happens all the time. It's considered normal by most economists.
Yes, there are domains that are more affected than others. Reduction in population is slow enough to simply let the workers retire without hiring new ones.
You're acting like the birth rates are 0.2 instead of somewhere above 1 (too lazy to check). I remind you that Japan had lower birthrates than that for a very long time and nothing bad happend. In fact, their workplace conditions are improving. Salarymen are finally starting to work decent hours.
Why don't you admit that you're worried about your own quality of life at 70y old and you couldn't care less about future generations and their polution, resources, global warming, famine and refugee problems?
actually, less people would mean less traffic, and less wear on the roads, therefore also less potholes.
freezing and thawing can also be an issue, but obviously only in areas where it gets cold enough.
Because you're not "dwindling the population" in the way you think. You're not taking an "8 billion" number and changing it to "4 billion". You're taking this growing organism, and switching it into a shrinking mode. Worse, you're changing it to "shrinking mode" in a way where you can't switch it out of that mode. It will, by necessity, shrink to nothing.
And it shrinks quicker than you could imagine. When fertility rates are at 1.0 (China), each generation is one half the size of the previous. It doesn't seem like much has changed... there are 4 or so older generations that are still large (but non-reproductive). When you have a 0.5 fertility rate (South Korea), each generation is one quarter the size of the previous.
Human extinction only takes about 12-14 generations at that rate. Less than 350 years. Even before it gets that far though, things get awful really quickly. It's not as if it's 350 years, and then everyone's gone. Those last few generations have no technology, they're huddled around in the dark trying not to starve.
>If there's less population, we need less production and less workers.
This isn't as true as it sounds. Some of our technology does not scale downward. If you need a nuclear power plant, this has a minimum number of workers. Even if you only want half the power, you can't get away with "half the workers". So, as there's less population, some technology will have to be abandoned. If you just employ people at the power plant despite that, then you're by necessity pulling those people from some other industry... it's an opportunity cost thing, and you have fewer opportunities.
Sub-replacement fertility is human extinction. Not in 10,000 years, but in just a couple of centuries.
At that point, the birth rate would quickly rise again, no?
Because if you're back to living in a pre-industrial society, kids suddenly have value again.
So it's likely that either there's a point of equilibrium or the population keeps swinging up and down. Total extinction seems unlikely.
Isn't that enough? Imagine a world where a large percentage of the population are in nursing homes. A humane goal for a nursing home is 10:1 24/7. So that means 1 nurse for every 2.5 residents.
Besides that, it's all about the speed of change. Current Korean levels of population halving every generation is going to cause tremendous upheaval.
Shrinking and growing populations aren't necessarily problematic. What's problematic are populations that shrink or grow too quickly. Infrastructure adapted for N people works well for a number close to N, but not so well for 2N or 0.5N.
There aren't too many people besides Elon Musk that are significantly worried that the US's replacement rate is 1.8 compared to the 2.1 constant population level. But numbers much below that do alarm many.
A few quotes:
> Very little in Korean society seems to give young people the impression that child rearing might be rewarding or delightful. I met a stylish twentysomething news reporter at an airy, silent café in Seoul’s lively Itaewon district. “People hate kids here,” she told me. “They see kids and say, ‘Ugh.’ ” This ambient resentment finds an outlet in disdain for mothers. She said, “People call moms ‘bugs’ or ‘parasites.’ If your kids make a little noise, someone will glare at you.” She had recently vacationed in Rome, where adults drank at bars while their kids ran amok. She said, “Here, people would say, ‘What the hell are you doing?’
> An artist named Daum told me that, when he was young, “if you kicked a ball into someone else’s property, you went and rang the doorbell and got it back.” That city no longer existed: “Now you get yelled at—‘You could’ve broken my window!’ ” There’s a special word for noise between floors. Complaints forced Daum and his wife, Dani, to leave their previous building; one neighbor said, “I can’t stand your children anymore!”
> In the southern city of Gangjin, I stopped at a coffee shop and encountered a sign on the entrance that read “This is a no-kids zone. The child is not at fault. The problem is the parents who do not take care of the child.” The doors of Korean establishments are frequently emblazoned with such prohibitions. The only children I saw on Seoul’s public transit were foreigners. Kim Kyu-jin, who is by all accounts part of Korea’s first openly lesbian couple with a child, told me, “Five years ago, we didn’t think too deeply about ‘no-kids zones.’ Now we think it’s discriminatory. We always call places beforehand to ask if we can bring our daughter.”
As a parent of little kids, I worry much more about them living fulfilling lives as they grow up in the future. I'm concerned about climate change, wars, and an economic system that will allow them to live self-actualized lives. I have no doubt that the population number plays some factor in that, creating problems that must be solved. But ultimately, humans have created amazing technologies and the Earth is bountiful. We can support whatever number of people is on the horizon (whether that number is larger or smaller), but society must choose to do so and adapt.
My greatest fears are that governments and corporations consolidate their wealth and power to only an elite few, bending society to serve that elite. That is a fear exists regardless of the fertility rate.
I think Charlie Chaplin's speech at the end of The Great Dictator is relevant and inspirational: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7GY1Xg6X20&t=2s
Thank you for sharing your article. It's from a view so unlike my own, and it's been eye opening.
If you are currently paying taxes, you are funding Medicare and Social Security (insert whatever name for your country). The deal is that when you retire, the next generation funds your entitlements.
If the next generation is not large enough, that deal breaks down, leading to almost impossible political choices. Do we increase taxes on the remaining working population to fund the larger retired one? Do we defund entitlements and tell retirees to figure it out, when they themselves paid into the system that is now bankrupt?
The result may not be extinction. But losing 90% of the human population won't feel that different if you're living through it.
A relevant book recommend, https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Societies-Choose-Succeed-Rev.... It walks through a variety of past examples of human societies that went through this. There is no reason to believe that our current world-wide society will fare better.
That's not what's happening here. Birth rates are below 2.1 in many countries who are no where close to "outstripping their resources". There are other factors causing the contraction which have nothing to do with resource limitations.
In fact it seems like it's the opposite: richer nations with more resources tend to have lower birth rates. That's the scary part because it means there's no equilibrium to be reached. Birth rates could, in theory, remain low until humanity ceases to exist.
> isn’t that catastrophising
Yes, I'm only putting that forward as the worst case scenario to make the point that this can't just be ignored. As I said in other comments, this almost certainly won't actually result in extinction because there are other corrective factors which would occur long before that, but none of those scenarios are particularly desirable either. (E.g. Civilizational collapse returning humanity to pre-industrical birth rates, global takeover by theocratic governments that ban birth control, etc.)
The only non-catastrophic corrective factors that sound plausible to me involve some kind of intentional collective action on our part that reverses the trend, which won't happen if everyone's attitude is the same as the root commenter's. (Granted, maybe there are other possible corrective factors I haven't thought of, but if so I'd like to discuss what those are rather than just have the problem dismissed with a hand wave.)
I don't fault your logic, but I don't want to accept that disaster is inevitable.
Eventually Universe 25 took another disturbing turn. Mice born into the chaos couldn’t form normal social bonds or engage in complex social behaviors such as courtship, mating, and pup-rearing. Instead of interacting with their peers, males compulsively groomed themselves; females stopped getting pregnant. Effectively, says Ramsden, they became “trapped in an infantile state of early development,” even when removed from Universe 25 and introduced to “normal” mice. Ultimately, the colony died out. “There’s no recovery, and that’s what was so shocking to [Calhoun],” says Ramsden.
Like the mice, our population is going into reverse. And that description of behavior, looks awfully prescient when I compare to humans on social media today...
How did you reach that conclusion?
I thought this was common knowledge, but given the reaction I'm getting in this thread I guess it's not as common as I thought and I should have explained myself better in my original comment.
Granted that's not an imminent threat, it would take quite a few generations at current first-world birth rates. But I still find it a concerning long-term trend, and there are a lot of less severe negative consequences that could occur between now and then. If you care to dig into it more, this podcast episode has a good discussion of the short-term problems, which go beyond just elderly care: https://www.thepoliticalorphanage.com/p/the-great-baby-short...
Also, as I just said, there are less severe short and medium-term problems caused by low birth rates as well so it's not just the looming threat of human extinction I'm concerned about; that's just the biggest and most obvious consequence so it's a convenient counterpoint to people asserting that low birth rates are not a problem at all.
Under another set of criteria (environmental concerns), it's probably a positive.
This just seems self correcting to me - on both axis. It’s an organism not a linear process. It will fix itself later same as it seems to be doing now.
Eh, I think we all know that we could build the housing if we really wanted to.
> This just seems self correcting to me - on both axis.
I agree, but it could a rough ride if the correction is too fast or too far. I think quite a lot of people would prefer the industrial system to keep running, and there is probably a minimum population below which it cannot run.
The argument is - our current economic system can’t handle it.
Well then that’s an argument for changing it.
The last transition was British Empire to US and that was 1900-1945.
We can only hope for something better.
What’s stopping you from being a welder or dentist?
What’s stopping me? Probably some combo of wanting to one day afford a home and a family without having to move to Memphis and the a sense that I’d get bored as a welder and therefore be a bad one.
Man, septic pumper tho…
Don't worry. It's temporary.
If you include arthropods, ants make it not even remotely close.
But realistically, I agree. Civilizational collapse would happen long before extinction, which seems like it would almost certainly return the birth rate back to pre-industrial levels. I just don't think that's a desirable outcome either.
Or, even more realistically, nations with state religions that effectively outlaw birth control and/or women's rights will take over the world, and nations which don't do those things will collapse. That also seems like a bad outcome to me.
Point is, I don't think it's wise to treat this like it's not a problem.
It's virtually flat for eons, and then in the last 100 years it shoots up like a rocket. We didn't hit the first billion people until 1800, but the 8th billion took only 11 years. (2011-2022)
This rate of exponential growth was never sustainable, and it's normal and natural that it's leveling off now.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48168928
https://www.ft.com/content/fba35eca-df3a-4ad6-b42d-eb08eb7c9...
https://archive.is/6VpWy
Spoiler: smartphones, social media, housing.
And now with a smartphone every girl knows that it is not ok.
Changing this, and moving to a society where AI and robots solve the problem of letting people retire (presuming that's possible, technologically) would require a massive shift in how people are, for lack of a better word, valued by society. Right now, we assign a lot of value to individuals based on their level of economic productivity.
It would be a change of considerable magnitude to let AI and robots create the economic value and then distribute it to individuals on some "fair" basis. I suggest that based on the current situation, finding agreement on what constitutes "fair" would be challenging, at best.
More people are needed to fulfill future needs.
Maybe the TV and schooling discussed is indirectly related, such as better understanding of proper upbringing, or more ways to see how things can be messed up, and having larger support group beyond family (and children) for said women in poorer countries.
In general there is more focus put on raising a child better and more involvement beyond hedonistic, time or economic reasons and better parenting expected that some don't think they meet the needs or find it harder to do the same for more than one child.
This is a bit of extrapolating from a small anecdotal group, but I wonder how statistically significant said group is.
It really makes you wonder if some actors would feel a need to exercise control over this scarce and limited resource...
That’ll be less painful if there are fewer people. Lower populations should lead to lower emissions growth too.
On the plus side, it will likely lead to lower emissions, assuming it doesn't lead to massive wars or other destructive behaviors due to the instability it will bring.
Of workers. Because retirement funds take money from workers to pay for retirees.
Assets and productivity, on the other hand, can grow a lot more than the population. Right now it's considered communism to tax assets. Once we get over that taboo things'll go a lot smoother.
That changes future value calculations, too.
These are things not to mess with lightly.
Ok? If you choose to spend a dollar instead of saving it, that implies some business will get that dollar. That implies someone will still invest in, build, and run businesses.
> These are things not to mess with lightly.
I agree. It requires a lot of thinking, discussion, deliberation and all that. But the basic math doesn't lie. We will have fewer workers in the future. Machines will make more and more stuff. If you want to continue supporting retirees as promised, then taxing the machines is the only answer.
Otherwise you'll have to break some promises to retirees and pensioners; now that's a real disincentive to save.
The reason wealth taxes never go anywhere is because when you sit down and learn what wealth is, how it works, and what is practical, it makes the most sense by far to just tax things whenever they go back to cash.
Really the only genuine tax loop-hole is the step-up basis on inheritance. Everything else is just an elaborate deferral to pay taxes later.
Allow paying the tax with assets. Put the assets into a black box sovereign wealth fund that's controlled by some mechanical algorithm which sells things at random as needed to fund the government budget. At scale this will be indistinguishable from a whole-economy index fund.
The best part about this is rich people can't beg off by saying "I have to liquidate stuff".
How do you pay with assets for real estate or boats or paintings? An IOU that can be cashed in when the asset is sold. Oh the boat is owned by an LLC so it never changes hands? No problem, the government has a share in the LLC too. (IANAL, IANAA so working out the loopholes is left as an exercise for the reader).
A second benefit is startup shares don't have to get hit with a capital gains tax before the startup goes public. Right now that's a big problem, where people pay taxes on shares that are eventually worth zero. If instead this tax could be paid in startup shares, then there's no problem.
As a condition of paying in assets, make it so that the government can't exercise any control over them. No shareholder voting, no board seats, nothing.
Additionally, this tax can't be on top of income tax. The whole point is to fix the worker-funded tax pyramid scheme. It has to be revenue-neutral with respect to income tax.
There are countries (ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_the_Netherlands#Bo...) that do tax wealth assets (maybe not all, and maybe not perfectly) and they seem to be doing just fine.
plenty of incentive to put money there, ditto for saving.
a saved dollar does not stimulate the economy, either. the whole idea of microloans is that the money gets spent ASAP and goes straight into the economy
Yes, that's the whole point. That's a good thing. Money is meant to be spent, not be hoarded and slept on forever. Money velocity is terrible right now, capital generates more income than wages, this is neither healthy nor sustainable, and certainly isn't fair to the ones actually doing the productive work.
In the ideal society there'd be no Epstein or Thiel, everyone would have a rewarding and productive economic activity.
It's like when the US used to ship our plastic waste to China, and China stopped accepting it. China only had a plastics pollution problem because it was a cheap buck to sweep an American problem under a Chinese rug.
what it means in practical terms is the destruction of the modern social safety net. some declining birth rates are ok but places like Japan, Spain, and South Korea look disastrous.
Pain for whom? The people profiting from cheap labor probably.
Why is such a massive sin to scale down? To slow down a bit, I don't think the whole world is about to collapse, but even if it was, I rather that than turning it all into the hellscapes we see on some of the most overpopulated places in the world just so a mere 1% of the population can indulge.
A pretty consistent trend throughout history is that shit rolls downhill.
"The poor will always pay for it" is a thought-terminating cliche that is often trotted out in support of the status quo (or some mythical past status quo).
How do you know that past status quo isn't actually worse for them than the direction things are trending? Do you think we somehow stumbled upon some global maximum for them [1], and any deviation from that, in any direction is going to make things worse for them?
[1] In spite of, as you say, shit flowing downhill.
We don't see a lot of food shortages these days, but with climate change fucking with agriculture sufficiently, regular famines in the global south might make a comeback... Or might not, if population growth and degrowth projections solve that problem before crop yields are seriously impacted.
Kids are really expensive, and if you want people to willingly have them outside of accidents, you're going to need to pay them a lot of money.
It's just that these policies are very expensive, and right now we allocate our money mostly to make rich people richer and maintain very high QoL for our elderly population. That's a choice we make in setting up our society.
The problem is that there will be far too many people wanting that job, so you have to filter somehow, and that's basically eugenics which isn't the most fun, so I guess you'd have to have a lottery and deal with the fact that like 10% of the population will constantly riot about someone who "doesn't deserve it" getting paid to raise kids.
i don't think so. you can control it with how high the pay is, or only pay for the first two children or something like that...
Everything is better when we have the freedom to make a choice.
Is it? Was it actually her choice? Or was she propagandized into being a fully-available consumer?
Was she fed a steady diet of anti-natalist/anti-family formation and pro-independence (pro-consume) media and government policies from the moment she was born?
But of course, it's only "propaganda" when you don't like it.
On the other hand, we have the "propaganda" which has existed for thousands if not millions of years, needed no technological, scientific or economic advances to exist, and the societies that followed it grew and made all the advances required for the other.
Of the two, I know which seems to be truer and more natural.
You are, of course, the sole free-thinking, unpropagandized person in the world.
We need universal childcare services, provided by the state and available to all, and other childcare-enabling reforms like automatic right to work from home and other flexible working arrangements for those with children.
These won't be popular with everyone, but you'll won't solve the demographic crisis without them.
Birth rates have been falling worldwide, regardless of the level of government support. It's much more a matter of attitudes about having children.
> The economic costs of having children at a replacement rate are simply too high
Nope. My wife and I have 4 children, on a lower-middle-class income in the US. Your lifestyle choices matter a lot. If you want to have children, you can find a way to afford them.
That is the story right there. We as a society spent decades upon decades demonizing having children at a young-ish age. "Your career is more important", they said. We got shows like "16 and Pregnant" to dissuade viewers from having children. People have become genuinely afraid of having kids.
Not until you are in your 30s does the social messaging shift from "only failures have children" to "why haven't you had a child yet?" That change in social pressure often compels one to start to change their mind, but at that point one becomes biologically limited in how many children they can reasonably birth.
4 kids on a lower-middle-class income in the US makes me picture poverty, as someone on a lower-middle-class income whose girlfriend is legally in poverty (and with that being the primary reason we haven't gotten married and had kids yet). If you disagree, feel free to describe your circumstances in more nuanced detail. I wonder if it will really end up being a description of lower-middle-class.
you won't solve it with them either. all of that feel good crap would bump the TFR of an average civilized country by 0.2. how can you have access to all the data in the world and still believe that the reasons are economical and not cultural?
Not just like for the holidays and pass them back when they start crying, but an actual extended period of time dealing with all the issues that they bring.
You've got to be a special kind of idealistic romantic to still see the appeal afterwards. Which is great for you of course if you do. But there's a reason authoritarians across the world are banning abortion and targeting birth control.
I don’t think that’s because of birth rate decline. While authoritarians give lip service to that occasionally, it’s never their primary cited reason (which is usually some combo of religion, purported return to “traditional” prosperity via reduced promiscuity, aggression against feminist political opponents, etc). Also, most authoritarians aren’t that long-term in their goals.
This is not just about women entering the workforce, etc. Something is affecting Human society more "horizontally".
All of these are second-round of reasons.
Primary reason: Materialistic wealth or wealth in general is preferred over human contact.
Effect: People connection drops. Community drops. Independence and Individualism prosper.
Secondary effect: The seeds for family development (community, human connection, village camaraderie) go missing. Growing a family now requires artificial support. When family members grow up, their time is now spread across materialisms and career development. Career development goes up and takes priority. Wealth acquisition takes priority. Except everyone is doing this so basic needs have to be fulfilled with limited resources. All prices are now going up. What was the point of everyone working now? Wealth acquisition. hmm.
Tertiary Effect: Huge workforce looking for work. Wages diminish because supply went up. Businesses prosper. Market caps go up. Business becomes easier. Dominance becomes easier.
4th Effect: Debt goes up to fulfill materialistic quests. Interest locks in people into a debt that grows over time even if the supply of money does not go up. Now people are perpetually looking to complete paying off their debt. And they will perpetually need to work. And worker supply perpetually increases. Freedoms go away. Wealth centers on to certain people. They take over media, entertainment, recreation, and tourism. We end up with a tale of two worlds.
Edit: Before the primary reason goes into effect, I will acknowledge industrialization improved people's access to wealth and materialism. And that replaced human connection.
And reduced illness, increased education, increased access to better nutrition, increased lifespan, increased able lifespan (knees/back/teeth don’t give out as early), and lots more.
Like, even if I grant that this replaced human connection (and I’m not sure that’s true, nor am I sure if it is meaningfully true—access to water replaces thirst, too), some very substantial benefits were acquired in return.
if we further assume that those scriptures were actually inspired by god or some other non human entity then the question is practically unanswerable because the benefit for that creator lie beyond our human life experience.
there are however a few potential theories for why it makes sense. for one god is described as existing beyond space and time. so god would know that birthrates were necessary to spread humanity across the planet, and maybe that was the goal. god would also know that the birthrate would eventually decline, so this would help be to counteract that decline.
we can also ask ourselves, what would be the benefit of a growing population today?
if the purpose of humanity is to push forward an ever advancing civilization, that is, to develop and to thrive, then maybe the goal is to maximize the potential of this planet to feed that many people, or to challenge us to be more efficient at food production. isn't population growth one potential driver for innovation?
or thinking beyond, maybe the goal is to actually push us to colonize space.
The Chinese have discovered that it is easy to crank down the fertility rate, but impossible to raise it again when you want to do that. And they have brutal totalitarianism on their side.
Just a warning about lack of cheap labor for 1 percenters in India should make every boy and girl in India to fulfill national duty to make more babies.
BTW, the fertility rate is _increasing_ now (granted from an existing base of 1.2TFR) in the richer states of india, due to better availability of IVF and in general healthcare.
The combination of lack of prosperity as well as the effect of nuclearisation that I mentioned above was what made it go weirdly low. It's not that low if you exclude unintentionally non-reproducing couples. I'm not saying its replacement rate, but its also not 1.2.
Many poorer states of india will face the same nuclearisation of the family unit, but crucially when healthcare is more generally available, so you won't see those parts go as low as 1.2. Again, replacement rate is almost impossible in a nuclear family unit, unless you manage to substitute something else that contributes the benefits, i.e reinvent joint families from first principles (and maybe it will be better!)
https://ourworldindata.org/population-simulation-tool?demogr...
That makes sense. I know that having less people is not a good thing, but I was brought up with the "impending population crisis" thing drilled into my head, so it's difficult for me to be alarmed.
I'm also all for getting women into parity with men. I know that there are a lot of men that will say that this is a bad thing, but I was raised amongst a lot of extremely capable women.
I feel that we need to support parents, if we want more kids. Right now, in the US, having kids is economically devastating, and there's almost no support from the government. I'll bet India is worse (but I could be wrong).
I feel that nature has controls built in. We see it all the time, in other species. I feel that if we drop too far down, the switch will be turned back on again.
[EDITED TO REMOVE TRIGGER WORDS]
You understand that your statement here is very racist? You basically dehumanize people you don't agree with and describe them as lower beings. Basically Untermenschen?
It's highly ironic to say "its dehumanizing!!" to say to a man that his treatment of women makes him a lesser being with the amount of abuse, neglect, and forced labor women are expected to take on by the men "dehumanized" here.
He's not even talking about race, so, not racist?
The latter part seems like the most meaningful cause world wide. Sex is a boredom activity and we just aren't bored in the slightest, ever. I think most married people know that long power outages are the most romantic thing that can happen (though, less now with cell phones).
making a pretty strong statement about yourself there mon ami. that ain't the case for plenty of people
and keep in mind that India has arranged marriages
If you have backup power for your router and ONT/Modem, you should also still have internet service during a power outage. The ISP-owned ONT for a place I lived had a little lead-acid battery attached to it, and during power outages I still had internet service.
After that, communicating with the outside world is hard for most people. Time to make babies ... anyway it's often cold, so snuggling is likely.
Therefore my experience has been that cellphones tend to remain up, even though the power is down.
I've theorize that they become overburdened by the pocket supercomputers that automatically start using it instead of local wifi.
Local populations will see very different trajectories, yes. Africa will see population growth and many other places will see steep decline. Societies can choose to keep their current system and take in immigrants, or choose to keep their "national character" (or whatever) and rejig their societies so the remaining productive parts pay for increasing numbers of old people. Grifters (Brexiters, MAGA, Le Pen, etc) will attempt to sidestep such obvious tradeoffs, but they will fail, hastening the decline of these societies.
When you imports loads of people from a low-trust society, which is mainly famous for scamming and the caste system, it’s just a matter of time before you reach the tipping point.
The problem with industrialized societies is that people lost all markers of adulthood. Everything became about worshiping convenience, and once convenience (for short-term pleasure) became "god", people wanted to avoid things they saw as unnecessarily difficult.
To reverse the trend, we need people to understand that the difficulty of life isn't a bad thing, that struggle and suffering aren't bad, they are essential for growth in becoming a better, happier person in the long run.
Would you rather be an ever-weakening wimp? Most people unconsciously say "yes", afraid of the world. Kids are afraid of the chaos in life - suffering that happens when life throws you curve balls, like "what would I do without monetary support?". Even "adults" now are really kids are heart - afraid of losing social security, medicare, etc. "Welfare" programs don't end the dilemma - they only reinforce the childishness and dependency on gov for support.
We need more bold people, people who aren't afraid to suffer because they see the light at the end of the road. Courage separates the men from the boys.