200 years ago you would have ten children, a few would survive until adulthood, and you needed to have children or nobody would look after you in old age, help you out when they're grown or take over your farm when you became infirm - and besides, everyone else has children, so if you don't you're the odd one out.
Now, you have both parents in the workforce - even with generous parental leave the mother loses a lot of opportunity in the prime of her career.
Then you have to pay for childcare if both are working (or lose out on one income if they aren't), food, clothing, schooling, extracurriculars. And you're competing in the workforce against all couples with less children. And then when you get old you aren't relying on your children to look after you - this is frowned upon, and you get paid out from your investments or the government pays you a pension. Basically most of modern life is set up economically against having children, and the main reason to is purely the biological drive.
I think all these factors need to be taken into account when devising economic incentives for people to have more children, and the current levels in any country are too low to have enough of an effect.
koliber · 14h ago
…you get paid out from your investments or the government pays you a pension.
Your investments and the government pension are financed by the active work of someone’s children. If there won’t be enough of them around your retirement will not be as comfortable as you planned.
Retirement is still dependent on children. Before it was your children. Now it’s a collective mass of children.
bluecalm · 14h ago
>>Retirement is still dependent on children. Before it was your children. Now it’s a collective mass of children.
Which messes up the incentive structure. People with many children are subsidizing those with fewer/none.
toomuchtodo · 13h ago
We say people, but broadly speaking, the global population ballooned because women were not educated and empowered. Now that they are, witness the rapid global total fertility rate decline (educated, empowered women delay childbirth, have less children, or no children). Socioeconomic systems have been freeloading off of uncompensated labor of women in the aggregate. How will they change? That remains to be seen.
drentost · 11h ago
>Socioeconomic systems have been freeloading off of uncompensated labor of women
What an extraordinarily perverse view of recent history. Who do you think built and maintained the socioeconomic systems that allowed women to focus on creating and raising children? You could even more easily twist your perceptions such that men have been forced to work hard and short lives serving the whims of women who have enjoyed the luxury of sitting around making babies, singing nursery rhymes, and gossiping over afternoon tea with their friends.
Women have stopped making babies. So men have stopped wanting to make civilisation. We are indeed seeing the consequences of the collapse of this social contract.
owebmaster · 10h ago
Do you see yourself as a civilisation maker?
nathanaldensr · 9h ago
It's an "in the aggregate" observation. There are exceptions to every rule, of course, but the facts are that men, not women, build civilization. The social contract, as referenced by GP, provides the incentive to do so. The incentive is important; men aren't going to continue slaving away for no reason.
ethbr1 · 7h ago
> the facts are that men, not women, build civilization
Could you or someone enumerate them?
Because I'm having a hard time thinking of anything that wasn't supported or enabled with women.
owebmaster · 7h ago
I think you are getting attached to a "social contract" that never existed, nobody asked you to slave way for no reason and no woman is a walking womb. And in fact, as obvious as it sounds, I have to remind you that you alone have zero capability of civilization building.
tuesdaynight · 6h ago
It's funny how some men don't see that. And it's funny how that idea changes when they have kids. How many dads are protesting for more paternity leave if it's so easier to spend time raising a child than working? How common is to find a solo father? If it's a "luxury", why women have to take the burden most of the time? If given the option, 99% of men would prefer working outside than being the parent that stays home raising the kids and taking care of the house. It's not a luxury or easier, it's just another type of work. They know it's hard work, they just don't care enough to really think about the topic.
holsta · 6h ago
> Who do you think built and maintained the socioeconomic systems that allowed women to focus on creating and raising children?
This statement completely ignores how our current world is shaped by white supremacy and the patriarchy. Women were prohibited from taking part in anything expect raising children (which even today is seen as contributing nothing).
Women who dared venture outside the home had their work ignored or credit stolen. Eunice Foote and Rosalind Franklin are two obvious examples.
Later, textiles, telecoms and computing were powered by women labour and they were expected to stay in their lane so the men could take credit and the money.
> Women have stopped making babies.
Couples have stopped making babies.
morepedantic · 14h ago
Perhaps there should be a social security deduction for every dependent child you had that tax year? For example, each dependent child that year could be a refund of 3.1% of income up to the social security maximum, such that at 4 children all 12.4% is returned to you?
bluecalm · 13h ago
You want incentives for both having children and raising them well. That's why imo your retirement should depend on % of your children's taxes not yours.
lores · 11h ago
Then you're double-whamming childless people who did not take any public resources for their children and likely paid more taxes throughout their life, declaring infertile people a disposable class, incentivising child abuse and a glut of poor doctors/engineers/MBAs, and not least incentivising financial benefit and self-interest in one of the last places that's still largely about love, truly a capitalism end goal.
mym1990 · 14h ago
This just isn't true. How many children my neighbor has impacts my social security payments or other retirement disbursements in no tangible way. It certainly doesn't impact my 401k or other retirement savings unless you are linking population growth to the growth of the asset markets and the structural integrity of the social security system(I can see the point of view here, but I wouldn't call this a "subsidy").
mordae · 14h ago
By saving you are in fact betting on your ability to threaten young people with material deprivation to force them to take care of you.
You could make a different bet, e.g. invest into whatever infrastructure they'll need to take care of aging population. But your savings fund likely invests in luxuries for aging big spenders, so...
I am rather curious how this plays out long-term, since there is no investment instrument for "please build train / underground closer to my house".
mym1990 · 14h ago
The whole comment is a bit non-sensical, so I am not sure how to respond. If you are not from the US, you should know that social security is not an option, it is a mandatory program. Things like 401k plans are tax incentivized, and as we know, humans love incentives. Most 401k plans are in index funds, which track a large number of companies, so I am not sure what "luxuries for aging big spenders" means but it sounds like you have it figured out.
alexey-salmin · 13h ago
> Most 401k plans are in index funds, which track a large number of companies
Who will work in these companies? Who will buy their products and fuel their revenues?
mym1990 · 6h ago
People of all shapes, sizes, and economic levels…not sure what your point is?
alexey-salmin · 3h ago
That's the respond to your statement above:
> How many children my neighbor has impacts my social security payments or other retirement disbursements in no tangible way.
All the retirement savings you have, whether state-managed or private-managed, are just some coupons for your share in the economy of the future. If the economy of the future shrinks your coupons will be worthless.
The number of kids you and your neighbor have not only have an impact on your retirement, these kids are your retirement.
anotherhue · 1h ago
Fewer people means fewer customers.
mordae · 13h ago
Holding company shares does nothing. Those shares are used as a medium of exchange with people actually doing some productive investment elsewhere.
The investment happens when somebody sells you the shares in exchange for fiat used to pay off the workers. Who do you buy your shares from? That's where you invest.
As for the first part, holding fiat or assets convertible to fiat when fiat has been issued with interest and must be eventually repaid under threat of confiscation of assets. :shrug: It's basically a game of chicken.
Fire-Dragon-DoL · 3h ago
Cool, then give pension only to people with children! (mostly joking, I have kids so this works great for me)
CaptArmchair · 14h ago
If a pension system is purely based on repartition: yes. But that's not the case in most countries. Pension plans mostly involve pension funds which are rooted in the financial markets. It's the individuals responsibility to max out their pension plan, and fiscal policies are used to incentivize this.
Ownership of assets, like home ownership, also contributes towards the totality of a pension.
In that sense, not owning a home, having to pay rent in old age, is a form of impoverishment. If that rent isn't offset by other sources of income like financial investments.
bot403 · 14h ago
Financial markets are fueled by growth. Growth in real terms (not merely inflation) requires increases in GDP which requires real output by people at it's core.
I'd be worried about expected financial growth of any retirement fund over the long term if population is flat or declining.
tremon · 9h ago
Financial markets are fueled by growth
Infinite productivity growth is just as detrimental to society as cancer is to the body. We need more sustainable economic models.
alexey-salmin · 14h ago
Who will work in these companies that you own? Who will consume the goods they produce and fuel revenues?
The home ownership is real, but you can't feed of that. You can live in your home yourself if you'd like, but if you plan to rent it out for profit you'll need young people to work and pay the rent.
tokioyoyo · 14h ago
200 years ago, you also didn’t really have much to do. Now you can have a fairly fulfilling life with 0-2 children, bringing it below the replacement level.
alexey-salmin · 14h ago
> this is frowned upon, and you get paid out from your investments or the government pays you a pension.
Funny thing is, it's still the children who pick up the tab in both of these cases, just someone else's children.
morepedantic · 14h ago
Funny thing is, 100% of social security is paid for by US tax payers in that tax year.
tstrimple · 14h ago
Never mind help you out when you were old. Children were often put to work both inside and outside the houses at young ages. I'm sure plenty of parents with 10 children saw an ROI on them based off of their work. At some point the older children literally raise the younger children. Cram them all into one room... you get efficiencies of scale.
smitty1e · 11h ago
> when devising economic incentives
As capitalism has yielded to materialism, men and women have forgotten to prioritize the sacrement of marriage.
I'm not here to boss anyone in particular around, but one must judge the tree in general by the fruit.
chneu · 3h ago
Lmao the sacrament of marriage.
Wtf are you talking about? It's a man-made contractual obligation used to strengthen financial and political strength.
Marriage is entirely unnecessary in today's world.
smitty1e · 37m ago
The demographics tell the tale.
mym1990 · 14h ago
200 years ago the average life expectancy was 30, no one was having children to "future proof" their life. Quality of life today is much higher than it was 200 years ago as well. While the cost of having children is undoubtedly going up, there are more factors in play than just the doom and gloom of the world. Even in pronatalist regions like Scandanavia, birth rates are falling. Education and advancements in contraception play a huge part in these declines, and are on the more positive side of the equation.
I agree that economic policy needs to adapt to keep a population growing and healthy, but as of right now I am finding it hard to see any signs of this(in the US at least).
reycharles · 14h ago
> 200 years ago the average life expectancy was 30
> 200 years ago the average life expectancy was 30, no one was having children to "future proof" their life.
That's misleading because most of the reason life expectancy was so low back then was childhood deaths. If you made it to adulthood at all, you probably would live almost as long as people do today.
dragonwriter · 14h ago
> 200 years ago the average life expectancy was 30
Yeah, but a very large part of that low life expectancy at birth was the very high rate of child mortality that the poster above you references.
mordae · 14h ago
> She spends at least three hours a day commuting to her office and back. When she gets home she is exhausted but wants to spend time with her daughter. Her family doesn't get much sleep.
The single biggest predictor for birth rate is people caring about kids or helping out / number of kids. It's that simple.
3h commute cuts into this. Lack of grandparents and neighbourly relations cuts into this. Higher standards cut into this. And we are not allocating more care.
Commute should be minimal. Care should be flexible. In some EU countries, you won't get benefits if the care is provided by both parents equally (alternate every day for instance) or grandparents step in. You get peanuts when you take care of sick kids and risk your career. And so on.
When we build, we keep building huge ass office centres, huge ass shopping centres instead of 4-5 storey houses with mixed usage. The parents have to shuttle kids.
Plaza/garden/playground, kindergartens and small shops at the ground level, offices in upper floors. Next block same, but upper floors residential, good pulic transport, underground only parking. All designed to save the time spent doing logistics.
And finally, care must be stop being a financial trade-off. If your kid is sick, you have to take care of it and receive 100% of the pay. This must be factored into all prices, since we cannot afford not to take care of our kids. Period. Demand this from whomever your import from as well and absolutely do impose tariffs on anyone who doesn't guarantee this and tries to undercut you.
TLDR: The reviewer, who has twins under 2, is flabbergasted and can't figure out the book's logistics.
The part at the end where the reviewer actually talks with the author is just comedy gold (to a parent), so I will quote it below (emphasis mine):
"
I was curious enough about this that I emailed Bryan and asked him how much time he spent on childcare when his kids were toddlers. He said about two hours a day for him, one hour for his wife. Relatives and nannies picked up the rest.
I could complain that sure, childcare isn’t overwhelming when you’re only doing two hours of it a day. But honestly, this is about the same amount of childcare I do now. And I do feel overwhelmed. So advantage Bryan.
When I thought about it more, I realized a lot of my overwhelmedness came from not being able to consistently choose the two hours, and from survivor’s guilt about my wife doing her 7-8 hours. When I talked more with Bryan, he recommended hiring more nannies.
...
Instead it had a vibe: stop beating yourself up over your parenting decisions. So I put out a classified ad for babysitters and got two people I really like. Things are a little better now.
"
Just, you know, be rich and have other people parent your kid.
My sides! I can't make this up if I tried.
mostlyincorrect · 13h ago
I'm surprised no one's mentioned the climate factor, both in terms of actual climate and "living climate" (as in, the world we live in and the conditions we get to live in).
A concern I see typically come up when discussing having kids with friends is the strong belief that the world will certainly be significantly worse off for them, if not having water wars maybe even during our lifetime.
Most people agree they'd rather not have children than bring them into the world to live through the nine circles of hell.
Of course, it's also possible this never materializes, but the fact that it is in people's mind alone is enough.
No comments yet
Flatcircle · 15h ago
Car seats and public schools going to shit definitely didn’t help. And the two working parents. Tough times
Doesn't this study say that it had a very low impact?
> they led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980
alexey-salmin · 14h ago
The paper also estimates the number of children saved at 57 per year, so the safety impact is even lower
morsch · 10h ago
Let's call it 80 and you get a rate of 1:100 children saved per children not conceived. What would be a reasonable rate in your mind?
Yossarrian22 · 7h ago
Car seat design has improved you can readily fit three car seats in most vehicles these days
baseballdork · 6h ago
This is a weirdly funny thread. How many theoretical children would you trade for 1 real child? All over a car seat that perhaps prevented 4,000 additional births a year?
tpetry · 14h ago
Its a joke. A few weeks ago JD Vance listed the reasons for birthrate decline. There wasn‘t any serious like one like the costs. But car seats…
coffeebeqn · 14h ago
No one from the current childbearing generation can afford to buy a house near any major city. No… that can’t be it
happytoexplain · 9h ago
It says an enormous amount that we simply accept the premise that we must live in or near a major city. We don't have to trap all the livable jobs and housing there, but getting them elsewhere requires bootstrapping with a long lead-in, and we actively attack attempts to do that.
subscribed · 8h ago
Many highly skilled jobs automatically gravitate towards the population centres because of the pool of the workforce available.
We have a dev team in one of the big cities of New Zealand, we need people, and we interviewed everyone available (yes, this must be on site).
When you have jobs, childcare, education, entertainment, government, etc, all inside cities, people migrate towards cities.
I wish I could move further away from the big city but I'd get paid third of my salary, my SO didn't found any openings, and I'd have to buy a second car so my kid could attend their school.
I see what you're saying but not every job is available outside.
morepedantic · 14h ago
The car seat phenomenon is real, well studied, and interesting. The explanation is not only logical, but is exactly what you called a "serious" reason: cost. Parents must often buy a new car with the 3rd child, because they cannot fit 3 car seats in their current vehicle.
morepedantic · 14h ago
Historically, the jump from 2 kids to 3 kids requires purchasing a new car. The new car is more expensive to buy, operate, and maintain.
Today there are many narrow car seat options on the market, so 3 across seating is possible in full size sedans, but not compact cars. A European company makes a 3-across and 4-across car seat, but it's illegal in the US by accident.
jjav · 11h ago
> Historically, the jump from 2 kids to 3 kids requires purchasing a new car.
The cost of daycare and education is so immensely larger than the cost of a car, that I don't think cost of a car is a factor. The important consideration with having a child, or another, is how could you possibly afford the daycare and later school.
subscribed · 8h ago
Kinder eggs are illegal in the USA.
Lead in the drinking water is okay. Last resort human antibiotics in the farmed animals are OK.
Seems like school shootings are OK.
I wouldn't use "illegal in the US" as something necessarily negative.
CalRobert · 14h ago
The idea is that you used to be able to throw five kids on a bench seat but now having a third kid requires a car with more interior space (ironic since cars are much bigger now than they used to be).
You can get car seats that do three across in a normal sedan though
morepedantic · 14h ago
>You can get car seats that do three across in a normal sedan though
Only in the last few years, and they require a full size sedan.
ReptileMan · 14h ago
It is impossible to fit more than 2 car seats in a normal car. So having more than two kids complicates the logistics quite a bit.
morepork · 14h ago
Difficult, but not impossible. We fit 3 across the back seat of our Mitubishi Lancer for a few years. You do need to be selective in which car seats you get, and I wish it was easier.
morepedantic · 14h ago
It's still impossible for many vehicles. Plus, slim fit car seats are expensive. Here's the cheapest:
That is the problem. Death of the birthrates is by a thousand cuts. The more friction you put in society to having children, less of them you will have. There are thousands of small inconveniences of having children that accumulate.
In my country we have had in the last decades the following - car seats, prohibition small children to roam free, prohibition for kids under 12 to be left alone at home, the size of the city apartments has shrunk substantially - from two bedroom to one. The impossibility of stay at home parent. You can add to the list.
throwaway924 · 14h ago
Its only a problem if each child has a separate car seat. There are companies that produce seats for up to 4 children that fit in the back of the car.
Example from a Google search (don't know if they are good)
4. Those are, quite by accident, illegal in North America
cosmicgadget · 14h ago
> "Calling this a crisis, saying it's real. That's a shift I think," says demographer Anna Rotkirch, who has researched fertility intentions in Europe
What's the crisis?
irrational · 14h ago
That there will be nobody to care for the great mass of old people, nobody to work jobs to make 401ks worth anything, nobody to prop up social security, nobody to buy old people’s houses so they can use that money to pay for nursing homes So… all the old people will suddenly find they can’t retire and are forced to work till death. They will consider it a crisis. The current retirees are probably the final retirees in our lifetime.
AlecSchueler · 12h ago
But wasn't the idea that technology increased our productivity so that with few people we could do the work of many?
The amount of wealth an individual can generate and the amount of productivity one can activate on the world has ballooned unimaginably over the past 100 years yet we are still expected to produce 2.4 children to support us in the future.
Something doesn't add up and it feels clearer and clearer that the issue is wealth inequality. Regular people are being asked to breed like cattle to support the lifestyles of the ultra rich. We have enough to cover pensions but it's all being horded.
In 2024 this might have seemed acceptable but with the collapse of credibility in the Western world the clock has begun ticking.
subscribed · 8h ago
Almost all the productivity gain got reaped by the 0.1%
morepedantic · 14h ago
If the burden is too high, there's a risk that future generations will simply decline to care for the elderly who contributed to the problem (childlessness), but then expect the children to care for them in retirement.
alexey-salmin · 13h ago
That's almost a "positive" scenario in my view, I would prefer people who are left to care about themselves and their kids rather than the elderly who screwed them up.
The alternative is, more and more resources will be allocated towards the elderly and by consequence less towards kids, making the problem worse with every generation. Not clear though how to break out of this spiral by democratic means if elderly are the majority.
cosmicgadget · 6h ago
Honestly self-inflicted economic problems seem mild compared to overpopulation and overconsumption. I am sure there is a happy steady state somewhere but I don't think we have the collective will to find it.
cryptonector · 14h ago
The fertility decreases are very steep.
cosmicgadget · 14h ago
Are we headed toward negative population or something?
mdeeks · 14h ago
In some places, yes. South Korea is expected to shrink by 15M in the next 50 years, and to cut in half by 2100. Even with immediate drastic improvements in birth rate, it is expected to shrink significantly.
cosmicgadget · 6h ago
Don't populations typically oscillate sinusoidally?
cryptonector · 5h ago
What's that got to do with whether such steep declines are desirable?
cosmicgadget · 1h ago
Well that might impact the long term projections.
cryptonector · 1h ago
The frequency/period of the sinusoidal wave you're asking about can be very long. When the Roman Empire collapsed its collapse was in great part due to Rome's inability to reverse a steep, long, secular fertility decline. It took hundreds of years for Rome to go from growth to decline, then hundreds of years for the post-Roman Europe to get back to growth.
When a generation's female cohort is significantly smaller than the preceding generation's female cohort the increase in fertility needed to offset that is enormous relative to the fertility rate that led to the present generation's small female cohort. And the cultural and other reasons for the low fertility rate are difficult to change too. So the likelihood of reversal is very low, and the likelihood of continued female cohort decreases is high, therefore you have to think a severe low fertility patch will last at least two generations, and if the fertility rate right now is half the replacement rate then that bakes in a population reduction of 50% once the current non-fertile generations pass, so several generations down the line. But the risk of three or four generations of below-replacement fertility is pretty high, and that's how you get into multi-centennial periods. Nothing requires that we bounce back, either. We could go extinct just from refusal to reproduce.
cryptonector · 5h ago
Negative population, no. The minimum is zero.
Population declines, absolutely -- those are baked into the pie now, and they will be quite steep.
Afforess · 14h ago
Desire for children is above the replacement rate, though.
There is a gap between the world we live in and the world desired. One solution would be to close the gap.
lmm · 14h ago
> Desire for children is above the replacement rate, though.
Among whom? Evidently not among the women who would actually be bearing them.
AngryData · 14h ago
Why do you say evidently not? I have multiple friends who would love to have children, but can't fathom managing to fulfill the monetary costs to do so. They don't make enough money to send them all to childcare all the time, but quitting their job to take care of the kids will cut their income in half and make saving any reasonable amount of money for retirement near impossible.
lmm · 14h ago
> Why do you say evidently not? I have multiple friends who would love to have children, but can't fathom managing to fulfill the monetary costs to do so.
Then I put it to you that their desire isn't above the replacement rate. People with no money manage to have plenty of children.
morepedantic · 14h ago
Perhaps they simply have unrealistic material expectations not in line with individual productivity. In fact, if your expectations are a function of your childless consumption levels, then it will always exceed what you can achieve with the same income spread over more people.
AngryData · 14h ago
Maybe in your job losing your partner's income may merely represent lowering your consumption levels, but the vast majority of people aren't earning enough money to simply lower consumption levels when their income is halved. I don't consider people living in a 2 bedroom 1 bath house, driving 15 year old cars, and buying a few video games to be some sort of excessive living or high level of consumption.
brabel · 10h ago
The people living a simple life as you describe have more children than the higher paid inner city folk. Explanations like yours are shown again and again to not explain reality.
disgruntledphd2 · 9h ago
But if your fixed costs are much lower (housing etc) then it makes more financial sense to have kids as there's less of a hit from the loss of lots of income (plus expenses, kids are not cheap).
Like, we have two kids and a top 10% (bottom of the top though) salary, and we have no discretionary income or ability to save (very much) after paying for the costs associated with kids and housing. I can completely understand why people don't want to do that, particularly given that 90% of households in my country earn less than us.
coffeebeqn · 14h ago
They also can’t buy a house that would house 2-3 more people and their stuff
mym1990 · 14h ago
Many still have the desire, but today have the choice to walk away from that desire in order to pursue a career, or to just live life in a different way. Some also have the desire but have trouble conceiving, or don't have the means to support a child. The gap is definitely there.
lmm · 14h ago
> Many still have the desire, but today have the choice to walk away from that desire in order to pursue a career, or to just live life in a different way.
I'd say in that case they don't have the desire. They may want children all else being equal, but they don't want to put in what it would cost them to have children. Otherwise they would.
mym1990 · 7h ago
Okay…I usually have the desire to eat cake, I don’t have it for every meal though.
unstablediffusi · 13h ago
the deciding metric here is how old are they when they start wanting children. naturally, that factor is ignored, because it's politically incorrect to discuss it for a number of reasons.
a woman in her thirties has very slim chances to find a partner because men in their thirties have unlimited access to an unlimited number of women in their twenties. it's a harsh truth, but burying one's head in the sand doesn't really help.
lmm · 13h ago
> men in their thirties have unlimited access to an unlimited number of women in their twenties
On the contrary. Maybe the most desirable 20% do, but many men in their thirties have very little access to women of any age.
unstablediffusi · 12h ago
yes, there certain discrepancies between what men and women consider desirable in a partner, but we aren't really allowed to discuss this on the internet without certain folx coming out of the woods to claim that 2+2=5.
still, your claim does not invalidate my point, does it?
lmm · 12h ago
"There are no men available" and "women do not want the men who are available" are quite different situations with different solution spaces.
unstablediffusi · 11h ago
no, no, my point was neither of those things. my point was that "women past a certain age have slim chances of finding a man who would be willing to have children with them," and I don't think it's a particularly outrageous or controversial statement.
lmm · 11h ago
Then perhaps we have a real disagreement. I think for the vast majority of women over 30 there is a ready supply of men who would be willing to have children with them - just not men that those women would condescend to have children with.
unstablediffusi · 11h ago
which doesn't invalidate my point, does it? :)
I don't know where is that you live that men are so desperate and eager to commit to low-value women, but in the world I live in, men in their thirties are unmarried and/or childless by choice.
disgruntledphd2 · 9h ago
Cultures differ wildly across the world. Where I live, the median age for a male to get married is 37, and the median age for women is 33 or so, so I would suggest that you not be so dogmatic (as an aside, US people seem to marry absurdly early for my tastes).
disgruntledphd2 · 9h ago
> a woman in her thirties has very slim chances to find a partner because men in their thirties have unlimited access to an unlimited number of women in their twenties.
This is utter nonsense. I met my now wife at 31, and can assure you that I had little to no interest in 20 somethings at that point (having made those mistakes in the past).
Clearly you live in a very different world from me, or you're just trolling (more likely given the green account name).
No comments yet
littlestymaar · 14h ago
Why do you think this is “evident”? I don't know worldwide but in France at least, French women would like to have more kids than they have.
No comments yet
silisili · 14h ago
Quasi related, I thought immediately of this experiment.
It's hard not to loosely apply it to humanity and especially complaints you hear about gen Z in your head.
I don't see how I can view this any other way than the culminating results of rampant capitalism. When everything is reduced to pure profit motives there is no room left for people to be people. Time off, dating, family, stability, and more, all take a back seat to increasing profits. And as business and corporations get bigger and bigger they only gained more power and control over peoples lives and push us farther down the self-destructive path of pure profit motivations and working endless hours.
morepedantic · 14h ago
I suppose the high child mortality rates of all the other economic systems tried thus far are preferable.
The proximate cause is social collapse, not economic. Maybe the ultimate collapse is economic, but it could again be social.
AngryData · 13h ago
Are you trying to claim that without unfettered capitalism all medical progress and technological improvement would never happen? Capitalism didn't reduce child mortality, technology and knowledge did, and we have been progressing technologically for atleast 40,000 years, if not significantly more.
mordae · 13h ago
It did help make the time saving devices widely available and thus boosted our productive capacity. It e.g. allowed many women to enter the workforce since they no longer had to spend all their time washing, cleaning, cooking, shopping etc..
It no longer does that, though. Now it just seeks rent, sells luxuries to rich and manipulates masses into overconsumption.
mordae · 13h ago
Sigh. Capitalism aligned with our needs (cheap goods) up until about 1990. Colonization of former USSR pushed it to 2010 or so, but now it just keep declining and won't stop. It needs growth in productivity that just isn't possible without replacing human labour at above inflation rate.
I did so by giving us fridges, dishwashers, supermarkets and other time savers, but robotic vacuum was the last one.
Self driving trucks and autonomous shops are being rolled out extremely slowly.
And with hollowing out middle class the outlook for 90% standard of living is pretty bleak, without having anything to offer to the 10% besides being cheap factory manipulators.
At some point we really will have to sit down, say the house is complete, hand out free beers and take a breather before getting to the smaller details of furnishing and gardening. Then we can maybe discuss the stars.
cornhole · 14h ago
if it’s not the social issues, it’ll be the microplastics
morepedantic · 14h ago
First one, then the other.
Balgair · 7h ago
Aside: I hang out in 'Pro Natalism' social media every once in a while.
It's a really strange place and a bit fun as a result.
The thing is that low fertility impacts everyone, so you get a lot of strange bedfellows. The fundamentalists of nearly every religion are interacting with each other, not always calmly, but mostly. And they're boosting very pro Marxist accounts for some article or study from a very pro capitalist account. You get radical trad-fems interacting with Catholics and Mormons calmly. You have Pakistanis and Indians not shouting at each other. Even Democrats and Republicans are holding hands and clutching pearls.
Really, it's just the LGBT community's wings that aren't there. Because they mostly have no dog in the pro natalism fight.
They had a conference earlier this year in ... Austin (?). It went okayish. Mostly just neckbeardy dudes with like too many kids and a Mormon bent. But also some good talks from the history folks and some socialists.
I have exactly zero hopes that any of these people stay coherent in this goal. It's just not in the nature of social media to abet it.
But still, an interesting place while it's here.
archagon · 2m ago
From the outside, at least, pro-natalism feels a bit too cuddly with white supremacy and replacement theory dogma.
(I wish it were not so.)
thefz · 15h ago
It's OK, it had to happen at some point
achierius · 15h ago
What? No it doesn't. There's no reason we can't have a society that lets people have ~2 kids happily on average. Collapsing population numbers will be a disaster for everyone involved -- this isn't even some quirk of capitalism (though that is why the rates are collapsing in the first place) but just a consequence of the simple fact that the elderly require the young to take care of them.
fnordpiglet · 14h ago
Why? Why do we need more people for?
We have a society that lets people have all the children they want. But they don’t want more children.
I’d note fwiw replacement rate in the US is currently 2.08 children, and current fertility is around 1.6/couple.
On a comment about US policy - With immigration we have a growth in population, without it we will drop rapidly. I don’t think however people will be badgered into having kids by politicians, even with bribing. Most people I know that don’t have or have one kid, including myself, do so because they don’t want to have more kids. No amount of incentive changes that.
SXX · 14h ago
If you can financially sustant all children you want then you are exception.
Majority of people don't have this kind of option to begin with and the more children you have less financial resources you have.
fnordpiglet · 14h ago
My grandmothers family was eight kids in the Great Depression, homeless. In fact there is a strong inverse correlation between wealth and fertility.
littlestymaar · 14h ago
> Why? Why do we need more people for?
You don't necessarily need “more people”, but you'd need population to be at least close to stable.
cosmicgadget · 14h ago
> Why?
SXX · 14h ago
If you have lots of aging population and not enough of workforce to run infrastructure you have a problem.
We can pretend that AI and robots will come soon enough, but that can as well not happen.
cosmicgadget · 6h ago
Seems like scaling back infrastructure is not insurmountable, particularly since we're not looking at an abrupt change.
fnordpiglet · 2h ago
The bigger challenge will be food production. Even with fewer people, less Americans are willing to work in the fields 10 hours a day under a hot sun. With the immigration crackdown and low birth rates and aging population, who will pick the strawberries? Compound this with food production is a major export, our internal consumption will require more and more of the produced food, lowering exports and GDP. This will make food scarce and expensive, further lowering fertility.
Low fertility and no immigration is a recipe for disaster.
aaronbaugher · 1h ago
We could survive without cheap strawberries if we had to, but we won't have to. Plenty of Americans used to do farm labor and other difficult work before mass migration pushed the wages for those jobs below sustainable levels for citizens. The idea that Americans have changed in some fundamental way that makes them "unwilling" to do hard work is just another lie from corporations bent on getting as much cheap foreign labor as possible.
edhelas · 14h ago
"Collapsing" is really the word we should use there ? Shrinking okay.
Collapsing is the word we use about the biodiversity collapse, or the collapse of some environmental numbers.
There's no catastrophy about having a population shrinking, we are doing that to most of the other species on the planet and only a few people seems to really care.
We are in a humanity re-adjustement, not a collapse.
cryptonector · 14h ago
Europe is heading towards less than half the replacement rate.
Japan is already there.
South Korea is at one third the replacement rate.
This is the story almost worldwide, and soon can be expected to be worldwide. In China and India there is also sex selection abortions and male preference to make things worse.
Exponential on the way up, and on the way down.
Reversing such steep declines isn't possible in one generation without a "Marshall plan" for fertility, which means that in one generation the next cohort of fertile females will be half the size of today's if today's fertility rate is half of replacement. If the situation persists then the next cohort will be one quarter of today's.
These declines are much sharper than past growth rates.
What if these fertility declines persist for three generations? How many generations can they persist for anyways?
alexey-salmin · 14h ago
> Reversing such steep declines isn't possible in one generation without a "Marshall plan" for fertility
"Reversal" isn't possible with our without Marshall plan. What you need is young females and what you have is aging population, no amount of money or political will can change that. Even if we (I'm in Europe) manage to get out of decline, the recovery will take several generations which means a century of time.
South Korea is screwed way beyond repair by my estimates.
edhelas · 14h ago
How many generation it could have continue to grow exponentially ?
What goes up ends up to going down at one point.
We are reaching some limits, in a society that was used to think that we could push boundaries continuously endlessly for several centuries.
cryptonector · 5h ago
> How many generation it could have continue to grow exponentially ?
Declines are also exponential.
Plateuing could have been a thing. But instead we're now in a steep decline mode. It will be 150 years before populations increase again.
unstablediffusi · 14h ago
Japan gets singled out all the time (the WEF types really want it to be more vibrant for some reason, so every other day, there's an article about how "Japan will not survive" without open borders), but its TFR is like 10% below most Western countries.
SK though... yeah, something is uniquely broken there.
littlestymaar · 14h ago
The fertility rate has indeed been collapsing for the past few years. It will only cause a population shrinking in the short term though, but it's still very concerning because being surrounded by kids is a big source of motivation to have kids yourself, and the less kids in a society the harder it becomes to raise kids yourself.
The current trend implies that the human specie is collapsing at a similar as the rest of biodiversity, it's not a readjustment.
edhelas · 14h ago
Are you scared of that ?
littlestymaar · 14h ago
Yes, I am.
This is equally concerning as the collapse of the number of bugs. Some people can believe it doesn't matter, but the consequences are enormous.
SpicyLemonZest · 14h ago
I think it will be quite unpleasant for my peers and I if there's not enough working age adults around to produce goods and services for us when we're old.
edhelas · 13h ago
Because you thought that this trend could have continued for centuries?
We built an economy based on the fact that resources and population could grown indefinitely and now we are surprised that we cannot cope with limits. Looks like we'll have to learn it the hard way.
littlestymaar · 9h ago
You're mixing things up:
What's desirable is not population expansion but neither is population collapse, it's population stability.
This also has nothing to do with Capitalism being built for perpetual growth: of course it is deemed to fail at some point in a finite world, but that's irrelevant to the topic of demography. If anything, the system will see the population decline as an opportunity, as it means fewer people to share the resources with.
sambapa · 8h ago
I think that the crux of the problem is that populations are inherently unstable. There is only one point of equilibrium and that point is very hard to achieve, barring some kind of dystopian tyranny. There are just too many things that influence boom/bust dynamics (world wars, contraception, education, culture etc.)
There is only one point of stability and getting there is like placing a basketball atop of a flagpole.
littlestymaar · 8h ago
You don't need exact stability though, having a fertility rate just above or just below replacement rate in periods wouldn't be too big of a deal.
But now we are facing a crisis. For instance the next South Korean generation is set to be half of the current one. And fertility declined strongly there over the past 10 years. Many countries are now at levels SK had ten years ago (well below the replacement rate by higher) and if the trend continue they may end up in the same situation as SK in a few years.
Halving your population over one generation is a catastrophic event.
chneu · 3h ago
Our natural resources can't support endless growth. We have to cap somewhere. Most estimates say we are about 1.7-2x the population we should be at to be "sustainable".
verisimi · 14h ago
Isn't this good news for the environment?
PlunderBunny · 14h ago
Yes, but it's going to come too late for climate change, and I'd wager that the percentage of people - relative to the total population - living at 'first world' standards is going to increase nevertheless, which is also bad for the environment.
morepedantic · 14h ago
Not necessarily. There are a lot of second and third order effects to consider.
alexey-salmin · 13h ago
Not really. The ideas that survive into the future will be the ideas of societies that sustain themselves. And it doesn't seem to coincide with "enlightened" ideas that much, including the desire to protect the environment.
Though I'm way more worried about e.g. women rights than the environment.
pengaru · 14h ago
Yes
anovikov · 15h ago
"school fees" - this is very, very symptomatic. Public school is free in all countries of the world without exception. Private, paid schools cover 1-20% of kids depending on the country. But now, everyone wants their kid to be among the elite - or never exist at all.
ricksunny · 15h ago
Is their position untenable? If, lacking the resources to place their child into elite circles of society they perceive their child will instead be treated as a vehicle for exploitation, is it irrational for them to withold siring would-be blighted offspring to the world?
anovikov · 9h ago
But this is natural. In every society, vast majority are the exploited poor, and always have been. It shouldn't stop them from multiplying.
atmavatar · 7h ago
I would point out that at least in the US, the degree to which the poor are exploited has been ever-increasing for over a half century with no signs of reversing. If anything, it's accelerating.
lurk2 · 14h ago
> But now, everyone wants their kid to be among the elite - or never exist at all.
This isn’t remotely true.
franktankbank · 7h ago
I've got kids and am not elite so that might sound like I'm in agreement with you. However, I do worry my kids will struggle because of the rampant greed of the elite. Will my kid be able to even follow in my footsteps? Put another way, will the children two-three generations from now be populated almost exclusively by the elite of today and their imported labor? If we have that as an endpoint then why would I want to subject my potential kids to that grizzly middle ground?
yardstick · 14h ago
In the UAE, you pay for your kids education from day one to the end. There’s no free ride, unless you’re a local. I’m not sure how many other countries are like this.
I’d say most countries provide free education to their residents. But, not all.
lnsru · 12h ago
Got few job offers from there. All included healthcare and school fees up to three kids. I don’t think, that outsiders go to that part of the world just for schools. So at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter if school is free or paid by employer.
yardstick · 11h ago
Yes agree a lot do include education. But, not all the jobs there come with such perks.
anovikov · 9h ago
For CITIZENS, all of them do. Naturally in UAE there are few citizens. I have no idea why temporary, non immigrant foreigners should be entitled to free anything. There is no naturalization in UAE, you can't ever get citizenship regardless of years of residence or being born in the country - only way to it is direct male line from 1915 (something i think more countries should practice). So why fund someone who's outsider and who, will, and his descendants, always remain outsiders on temporary visas?
mrkeen · 14h ago
> "school fees" - this is very, very symptomatic. Public school is free in all countries of the world without exception.
And the world fertility rates are in unprecedented decline. Should we stop making schools free?
jsphweid · 14h ago
I've always wondered, what fraction of the decline could be attributed to indoor pet dogs?
Ok, this is half humorous and half serious. But I'd wager that the answer is non-zero.
This is all just anecdotal, obviously, but I think childless humans with pet indoor dogs could have less of a desire to procreate for various reasons, but perhaps mainly because the instinctual thirst to care for a living thing is quinched to some extent when you have a pet indoor dog.
Obviously not every or most or even many. But perhaps _some_.
lnsru · 13h ago
Dog as child replacement fits too well for many western couples. There is very light care aspect included. Even bad illnesses happen and one must go to vet. With a dog you don’t need to do homework for two hours after hard workday. Nor plan children birthdays or vacations. Nor read primitive children books for hours on weekend. It’s perfect substitute without much effort.
Children are long term gain, first decade is rather hard. Teaching and training every day, hour, minute. If one wants to do it right.
On other hand dog might be better that a child hooked to a smartphone from an age of 2 years.
dnel · 12h ago
I had a dog, then kids and now just got a puppy and I think there is perhaps some truth to it, dogs are certainly much much lower effort/stress/cost but provide a good amount of companionship. It wasn't enough for us, obviously, but we also have minimal family connections outside our household, for others the equation may add up that a dog/cat is enough and if it was then all the power to you.
landosaari · 9h ago
In South Korea pet strollers outsold child ones [0].
DINKWAD (Dual income, no kids, with a dog) is rising [1]. Hospitality is changing to accommodate this [2].
Not sure why you are being downvoted. It's an interesting thought.
I will add that us having children completely erased the desire to get a dog. We almost got one just before our first born. Now we can't imagine. I think it's a combination of what you're suggesting, and also because a dog requires a lot of time we just don't have now.
incomingpain · 9h ago
There's a single reason that's highly correlated better by a long shot and obviously causal. What's curious is that it's so tremendously controversial. But since this subject is so contentious we're looking at pets, carseats and other regulation, porn/sextoys and microplastics?
The "empowerment of women" has been hugely successful for society but has eroded if not destroyed the social balance of society.
There's a painful debate coming and if it doesnt happen, someone like Trump will get to choose.
franktankbank · 7h ago
> someone like Trump will get to choose.
What does this mean? What will they be choosing? I don't get it.
Now, you have both parents in the workforce - even with generous parental leave the mother loses a lot of opportunity in the prime of her career.
Then you have to pay for childcare if both are working (or lose out on one income if they aren't), food, clothing, schooling, extracurriculars. And you're competing in the workforce against all couples with less children. And then when you get old you aren't relying on your children to look after you - this is frowned upon, and you get paid out from your investments or the government pays you a pension. Basically most of modern life is set up economically against having children, and the main reason to is purely the biological drive.
I think all these factors need to be taken into account when devising economic incentives for people to have more children, and the current levels in any country are too low to have enough of an effect.
Your investments and the government pension are financed by the active work of someone’s children. If there won’t be enough of them around your retirement will not be as comfortable as you planned.
Retirement is still dependent on children. Before it was your children. Now it’s a collective mass of children.
Which messes up the incentive structure. People with many children are subsidizing those with fewer/none.
What an extraordinarily perverse view of recent history. Who do you think built and maintained the socioeconomic systems that allowed women to focus on creating and raising children? You could even more easily twist your perceptions such that men have been forced to work hard and short lives serving the whims of women who have enjoyed the luxury of sitting around making babies, singing nursery rhymes, and gossiping over afternoon tea with their friends.
Women have stopped making babies. So men have stopped wanting to make civilisation. We are indeed seeing the consequences of the collapse of this social contract.
Could you or someone enumerate them?
Because I'm having a hard time thinking of anything that wasn't supported or enabled with women.
This statement completely ignores how our current world is shaped by white supremacy and the patriarchy. Women were prohibited from taking part in anything expect raising children (which even today is seen as contributing nothing).
Women who dared venture outside the home had their work ignored or credit stolen. Eunice Foote and Rosalind Franklin are two obvious examples.
Later, textiles, telecoms and computing were powered by women labour and they were expected to stay in their lane so the men could take credit and the money.
> Women have stopped making babies.
Couples have stopped making babies.
You could make a different bet, e.g. invest into whatever infrastructure they'll need to take care of aging population. But your savings fund likely invests in luxuries for aging big spenders, so...
I am rather curious how this plays out long-term, since there is no investment instrument for "please build train / underground closer to my house".
Who will work in these companies? Who will buy their products and fuel their revenues?
> How many children my neighbor has impacts my social security payments or other retirement disbursements in no tangible way.
All the retirement savings you have, whether state-managed or private-managed, are just some coupons for your share in the economy of the future. If the economy of the future shrinks your coupons will be worthless.
The number of kids you and your neighbor have not only have an impact on your retirement, these kids are your retirement.
The investment happens when somebody sells you the shares in exchange for fiat used to pay off the workers. Who do you buy your shares from? That's where you invest.
As for the first part, holding fiat or assets convertible to fiat when fiat has been issued with interest and must be eventually repaid under threat of confiscation of assets. :shrug: It's basically a game of chicken.
Ownership of assets, like home ownership, also contributes towards the totality of a pension.
In that sense, not owning a home, having to pay rent in old age, is a form of impoverishment. If that rent isn't offset by other sources of income like financial investments.
I'd be worried about expected financial growth of any retirement fund over the long term if population is flat or declining.
Infinite productivity growth is just as detrimental to society as cancer is to the body. We need more sustainable economic models.
The home ownership is real, but you can't feed of that. You can live in your home yourself if you'd like, but if you plan to rent it out for profit you'll need young people to work and pay the rent.
Funny thing is, it's still the children who pick up the tab in both of these cases, just someone else's children.
As capitalism has yielded to materialism, men and women have forgotten to prioritize the sacrement of marriage.
I'm not here to boss anyone in particular around, but one must judge the tree in general by the fruit.
Wtf are you talking about? It's a man-made contractual obligation used to strengthen financial and political strength.
Marriage is entirely unnecessary in today's world.
I agree that economic policy needs to adapt to keep a population growing and healthy, but as of right now I am finding it hard to see any signs of this(in the US at least).
If you take out infant mortality the life expectancy wasn't all that different from what it is today. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2625386/
That's misleading because most of the reason life expectancy was so low back then was childhood deaths. If you made it to adulthood at all, you probably would live almost as long as people do today.
Yeah, but a very large part of that low life expectancy at birth was the very high rate of child mortality that the poster above you references.
The single biggest predictor for birth rate is people caring about kids or helping out / number of kids. It's that simple.
3h commute cuts into this. Lack of grandparents and neighbourly relations cuts into this. Higher standards cut into this. And we are not allocating more care.
Commute should be minimal. Care should be flexible. In some EU countries, you won't get benefits if the care is provided by both parents equally (alternate every day for instance) or grandparents step in. You get peanuts when you take care of sick kids and risk your career. And so on.
When we build, we keep building huge ass office centres, huge ass shopping centres instead of 4-5 storey houses with mixed usage. The parents have to shuttle kids.
Plaza/garden/playground, kindergartens and small shops at the ground level, offices in upper floors. Next block same, but upper floors residential, good pulic transport, underground only parking. All designed to save the time spent doing logistics.
And finally, care must be stop being a financial trade-off. If your kid is sick, you have to take care of it and receive 100% of the pay. This must be factored into all prices, since we cannot afford not to take care of our kids. Period. Demand this from whomever your import from as well and absolutely do impose tariffs on anyone who doesn't guarantee this and tries to undercut you.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-selfish-reasons...
TLDR: The reviewer, who has twins under 2, is flabbergasted and can't figure out the book's logistics.
The part at the end where the reviewer actually talks with the author is just comedy gold (to a parent), so I will quote it below (emphasis mine):
"
I was curious enough about this that I emailed Bryan and asked him how much time he spent on childcare when his kids were toddlers. He said about two hours a day for him, one hour for his wife. Relatives and nannies picked up the rest.
I could complain that sure, childcare isn’t overwhelming when you’re only doing two hours of it a day. But honestly, this is about the same amount of childcare I do now. And I do feel overwhelmed. So advantage Bryan.
When I thought about it more, I realized a lot of my overwhelmedness came from not being able to consistently choose the two hours, and from survivor’s guilt about my wife doing her 7-8 hours. When I talked more with Bryan, he recommended hiring more nannies.
...
Instead it had a vibe: stop beating yourself up over your parenting decisions. So I put out a classified ad for babysitters and got two people I really like. Things are a little better now. "
Just, you know, be rich and have other people parent your kid.
My sides! I can't make this up if I tried.
A concern I see typically come up when discussing having kids with friends is the strong belief that the world will certainly be significantly worse off for them, if not having water wars maybe even during our lifetime.
Most people agree they'd rather not have children than bring them into the world to live through the nine circles of hell.
Of course, it's also possible this never materializes, but the fact that it is in people's mind alone is enough.
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> they led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980
We have a dev team in one of the big cities of New Zealand, we need people, and we interviewed everyone available (yes, this must be on site).
When you have jobs, childcare, education, entertainment, government, etc, all inside cities, people migrate towards cities.
I wish I could move further away from the big city but I'd get paid third of my salary, my SO didn't found any openings, and I'd have to buy a second car so my kid could attend their school.
I see what you're saying but not every job is available outside.
Today there are many narrow car seat options on the market, so 3 across seating is possible in full size sedans, but not compact cars. A European company makes a 3-across and 4-across car seat, but it's illegal in the US by accident.
The cost of daycare and education is so immensely larger than the cost of a car, that I don't think cost of a car is a factor. The important consideration with having a child, or another, is how could you possibly afford the daycare and later school.
Lead in the drinking water is okay. Last resort human antibiotics in the farmed animals are OK.
Seems like school shootings are OK.
I wouldn't use "illegal in the US" as something necessarily negative.
You can get car seats that do three across in a normal sedan though
Only in the last few years, and they require a full size sedan.
https://www.amazon.com/Graco-SlimFit3-Forward-Highback-Kunni...
In my country we have had in the last decades the following - car seats, prohibition small children to roam free, prohibition for kids under 12 to be left alone at home, the size of the city apartments has shrunk substantially - from two bedroom to one. The impossibility of stay at home parent. You can add to the list.
Example from a Google search (don't know if they are good)
https://www.multimac.com/
2. Those must be professionally installed
3. Those are pricey
4. Those are, quite by accident, illegal in North America
What's the crisis?
The amount of wealth an individual can generate and the amount of productivity one can activate on the world has ballooned unimaginably over the past 100 years yet we are still expected to produce 2.4 children to support us in the future.
Something doesn't add up and it feels clearer and clearer that the issue is wealth inequality. Regular people are being asked to breed like cattle to support the lifestyles of the ultra rich. We have enough to cover pensions but it's all being horded.
In 2024 this might have seemed acceptable but with the collapse of credibility in the Western world the clock has begun ticking.
The alternative is, more and more resources will be allocated towards the elderly and by consequence less towards kids, making the problem worse with every generation. Not clear though how to break out of this spiral by democratic means if elderly are the majority.
When a generation's female cohort is significantly smaller than the preceding generation's female cohort the increase in fertility needed to offset that is enormous relative to the fertility rate that led to the present generation's small female cohort. And the cultural and other reasons for the low fertility rate are difficult to change too. So the likelihood of reversal is very low, and the likelihood of continued female cohort decreases is high, therefore you have to think a severe low fertility patch will last at least two generations, and if the fertility rate right now is half the replacement rate then that bakes in a population reduction of 50% once the current non-fertile generations pass, so several generations down the line. But the risk of three or four generations of below-replacement fertility is pretty high, and that's how you get into multi-centennial periods. Nothing requires that we bounce back, either. We could go extinct just from refusal to reproduce.
Population declines, absolutely -- those are baked into the pie now, and they will be quite steep.
There is a gap between the world we live in and the world desired. One solution would be to close the gap.
Among whom? Evidently not among the women who would actually be bearing them.
Then I put it to you that their desire isn't above the replacement rate. People with no money manage to have plenty of children.
Like, we have two kids and a top 10% (bottom of the top though) salary, and we have no discretionary income or ability to save (very much) after paying for the costs associated with kids and housing. I can completely understand why people don't want to do that, particularly given that 90% of households in my country earn less than us.
I'd say in that case they don't have the desire. They may want children all else being equal, but they don't want to put in what it would cost them to have children. Otherwise they would.
a woman in her thirties has very slim chances to find a partner because men in their thirties have unlimited access to an unlimited number of women in their twenties. it's a harsh truth, but burying one's head in the sand doesn't really help.
On the contrary. Maybe the most desirable 20% do, but many men in their thirties have very little access to women of any age.
still, your claim does not invalidate my point, does it?
I don't know where is that you live that men are so desperate and eager to commit to low-value women, but in the world I live in, men in their thirties are unmarried and/or childless by choice.
This is utter nonsense. I met my now wife at 31, and can assure you that I had little to no interest in 20 somethings at that point (having made those mistakes in the past).
Clearly you live in a very different world from me, or you're just trolling (more likely given the green account name).
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It's hard not to loosely apply it to humanity and especially complaints you hear about gen Z in your head.
https://www.the-scientist.com/universe-25-experiment-69941
The proximate cause is social collapse, not economic. Maybe the ultimate collapse is economic, but it could again be social.
It no longer does that, though. Now it just seeks rent, sells luxuries to rich and manipulates masses into overconsumption.
I did so by giving us fridges, dishwashers, supermarkets and other time savers, but robotic vacuum was the last one.
Self driving trucks and autonomous shops are being rolled out extremely slowly.
And with hollowing out middle class the outlook for 90% standard of living is pretty bleak, without having anything to offer to the 10% besides being cheap factory manipulators.
At some point we really will have to sit down, say the house is complete, hand out free beers and take a breather before getting to the smaller details of furnishing and gardening. Then we can maybe discuss the stars.
It's a really strange place and a bit fun as a result.
The thing is that low fertility impacts everyone, so you get a lot of strange bedfellows. The fundamentalists of nearly every religion are interacting with each other, not always calmly, but mostly. And they're boosting very pro Marxist accounts for some article or study from a very pro capitalist account. You get radical trad-fems interacting with Catholics and Mormons calmly. You have Pakistanis and Indians not shouting at each other. Even Democrats and Republicans are holding hands and clutching pearls.
Really, it's just the LGBT community's wings that aren't there. Because they mostly have no dog in the pro natalism fight.
They had a conference earlier this year in ... Austin (?). It went okayish. Mostly just neckbeardy dudes with like too many kids and a Mormon bent. But also some good talks from the history folks and some socialists.
I have exactly zero hopes that any of these people stay coherent in this goal. It's just not in the nature of social media to abet it.
But still, an interesting place while it's here.
(I wish it were not so.)
We have a society that lets people have all the children they want. But they don’t want more children.
I’d note fwiw replacement rate in the US is currently 2.08 children, and current fertility is around 1.6/couple.
On a comment about US policy - With immigration we have a growth in population, without it we will drop rapidly. I don’t think however people will be badgered into having kids by politicians, even with bribing. Most people I know that don’t have or have one kid, including myself, do so because they don’t want to have more kids. No amount of incentive changes that.
Majority of people don't have this kind of option to begin with and the more children you have less financial resources you have.
You don't necessarily need “more people”, but you'd need population to be at least close to stable.
We can pretend that AI and robots will come soon enough, but that can as well not happen.
Low fertility and no immigration is a recipe for disaster.
Collapsing is the word we use about the biodiversity collapse, or the collapse of some environmental numbers.
There's no catastrophy about having a population shrinking, we are doing that to most of the other species on the planet and only a few people seems to really care.
We are in a humanity re-adjustement, not a collapse.
Japan is already there.
South Korea is at one third the replacement rate.
This is the story almost worldwide, and soon can be expected to be worldwide. In China and India there is also sex selection abortions and male preference to make things worse.
Exponential on the way up, and on the way down.
Reversing such steep declines isn't possible in one generation without a "Marshall plan" for fertility, which means that in one generation the next cohort of fertile females will be half the size of today's if today's fertility rate is half of replacement. If the situation persists then the next cohort will be one quarter of today's.
These declines are much sharper than past growth rates.
What if these fertility declines persist for three generations? How many generations can they persist for anyways?
"Reversal" isn't possible with our without Marshall plan. What you need is young females and what you have is aging population, no amount of money or political will can change that. Even if we (I'm in Europe) manage to get out of decline, the recovery will take several generations which means a century of time.
South Korea is screwed way beyond repair by my estimates.
What goes up ends up to going down at one point.
We are reaching some limits, in a society that was used to think that we could push boundaries continuously endlessly for several centuries.
Declines are also exponential.
Plateuing could have been a thing. But instead we're now in a steep decline mode. It will be 150 years before populations increase again.
SK though... yeah, something is uniquely broken there.
The current trend implies that the human specie is collapsing at a similar as the rest of biodiversity, it's not a readjustment.
This is equally concerning as the collapse of the number of bugs. Some people can believe it doesn't matter, but the consequences are enormous.
We built an economy based on the fact that resources and population could grown indefinitely and now we are surprised that we cannot cope with limits. Looks like we'll have to learn it the hard way.
What's desirable is not population expansion but neither is population collapse, it's population stability.
This also has nothing to do with Capitalism being built for perpetual growth: of course it is deemed to fail at some point in a finite world, but that's irrelevant to the topic of demography. If anything, the system will see the population decline as an opportunity, as it means fewer people to share the resources with.
There is only one point of stability and getting there is like placing a basketball atop of a flagpole.
But now we are facing a crisis. For instance the next South Korean generation is set to be half of the current one. And fertility declined strongly there over the past 10 years. Many countries are now at levels SK had ten years ago (well below the replacement rate by higher) and if the trend continue they may end up in the same situation as SK in a few years.
Halving your population over one generation is a catastrophic event.
Though I'm way more worried about e.g. women rights than the environment.
This isn’t remotely true.
I’d say most countries provide free education to their residents. But, not all.
And the world fertility rates are in unprecedented decline. Should we stop making schools free?
Ok, this is half humorous and half serious. But I'd wager that the answer is non-zero.
This is all just anecdotal, obviously, but I think childless humans with pet indoor dogs could have less of a desire to procreate for various reasons, but perhaps mainly because the instinctual thirst to care for a living thing is quinched to some extent when you have a pet indoor dog.
Obviously not every or most or even many. But perhaps _some_.
Children are long term gain, first decade is rather hard. Teaching and training every day, hour, minute. If one wants to do it right.
On other hand dog might be better that a child hooked to a smartphone from an age of 2 years.
DINKWAD (Dual income, no kids, with a dog) is rising [1]. Hospitality is changing to accommodate this [2].
[0] https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/lifestyle/trends/20231226/sales...
[1] https://www.thehistoryofenglish.com/dinkwad-meaning-origin-u...
[2] https://rochsociety.com/rise-of-the-dinkwads/
I will add that us having children completely erased the desire to get a dog. We almost got one just before our first born. Now we can't imagine. I think it's a combination of what you're suggesting, and also because a dog requires a lot of time we just don't have now.
The "empowerment of women" has been hugely successful for society but has eroded if not destroyed the social balance of society.
There's a painful debate coming and if it doesnt happen, someone like Trump will get to choose.
What does this mean? What will they be choosing? I don't get it.