The two are linked. Having children is at least partly an economic choice. People have spent decades working against "teen moms" and "single parents" and "welfare queens". Everyone is very clear that you must not have children unless you can comfortably afford to do so. And not just now, that has to be enduring economic security across their childhood. Now, how many people can comfortably afford to do so?
Are the people who want others to have more children prepared to pay for it? To help make sure that enough housing and infrastructure is built for them?
The incentives to have children are being removed one by one, it's becoming impossible to find affordable housing & education unless you are born rich, the social fiber is being eroded more and more with every passing year so the 0.1% can become even more filthy rich.
Add to that the younger generations being keenly aware of the deteriorating environment due to global warming (which older generations are happy to ignore), and is there really any wonder why birth rates are down across the board?
It's not necessary to pay for other peoples housing, all that is necessary is to repeal absurd zoning laws and ridiculous bureaucracy that makes building such things 100x more expensive (if it's even possible) than they need to be.
That's land owners "paying for it" in a decrease to the price of their assets. I'm all for that, but it involves one group of people benefiting from the loss to another group of people.
Housing is only a good investment because there's a chronic shortage. Those big evil investors are just a scapegoat, they might be exacerbating the issue but they aren't the real source. The real issue is the self-imposed shortage.
> Are the people who want others to have more children prepared to pay for it?
This implies that more people make society poorer. Which is false. People don’t consume a finite set of resources, they create more. As populations rise the net general standard of living goes up, not down. For source, check out all developed nations over the last 200 years, and human history to date.
USA actually has an advantage here as population growth decline is lower than most other developed nations (eg most EU states, Japan, Korea etc)
> This implies that more people make society poorer. Which is false.
Me having a child would make me poorer. Which is true. Because I'd have to pay for the child's food and living expenses. That's what I meant. It's an individual decision.
>>Are the people who want others to have more children prepared to pay for it?
>This implies that more people make society poorer.
Not really. The implication is that children’s are a costly investment, and as I see it; there’s a big overlap of people decrying the decline of birth rate, and people supporting politician who support slashing the budget that might help people raising children e.g. school lunch programs.
It makes no difference if society reaps the rewards on the long term if individuals can’t afford to cost that investment because it was decried as an irresponsible decision.
> People don’t consume a finite set of resources, they create more
This is true only in some regards. There's a finite amount of natural resources that can be extracted from the planet, perhaps most tangible in terms of food. There's only so much more land that can be made into farmland, and it will only produce so much in terms of crop yields. We're already sort of pushing it in this regard. This food needs to be divided among the world population, somehow. Adding more workers won't miraculously double the amount of arable land.
There's only so much food that can be produced before we all need to lower our standard of living to feed everyone. Like yeah we can feed more people that way, but we'd all be eating insect gruel. I don't think that can be regarded as increasing the standard of living.
> As populations rise the net general standard of living goes up, not down. For source, check out all developed nations over the last 200 years, and human history to date.
Are we ignoring all the human history involving societies that collapsed or went through ecological and/or violent struggles?
Pre-plague Britain had terrible living conditions and over population. Living conditions for the survivors immediately rose after a huge chunk of the population was removed. Other civilizations that were overpopulated had huge amounts of population move to greener pastures, such as the Saxons.
Fish, livestock, forests, land are all finite and we're already consuming them at such rate that by the end of the century our planet will become a desert. Adding a few more billions people won't help the matter. Solar ans other clean energy won't create more food and land. What would help is a drastic novel method of resources management.
Oh.. just that problem about our space ship not having infinite resources.. looking into the past won't help for seeing the rebound of the sigmoid curve..
Having children requires an element of hope, of faith in a bright the future. If you're convinced of nothing but dark days ahead, bringing children into the world would be a cruelty.
Media messaging, especially on social media, has gotten extremely dark and catastrophic. Looking at the screen you'd think the sky was falling several times every day. If global warming isn't doing us in, the nazis are literally back for real this time, or putin is hatching schemes, or there's the new Tau Ceti VI strain of Covid, or delayed side effect from the vaccines, or vikings on capitol hill, or race riots, or police brutality, or inflation, or deflation, or financial crisis, or public debt, or forever chemicals, or mass surveillance, or xi jinping, or killer bees, or vanishing bees, or microplastics, or actual space aliens. Et c.
> Humans don't breed when their own lives are precarious and it's rational and realistic to assume the lives of their kids will be even more so.
I do not think this is a generally true notion. There are so many people living in precarious circumstances in large parts of Africa, Asia and South America. But the highest population growth is right there.
Maybe there is some truth to the notion in developed countries.
>> Humans don't breed when their own lives are precarious and it's rational and realistic to assume the lives of their kids will be even more so.
> I do not think this is a generally true notion. There are so many people living in precarious circumstances in large parts of Africa, Asia and South America. But the highest population growth is right there.
Yes, but wealthy technological society enables it, because modern birth control technology is what makes reproduction so much of a choice.
In earlier times and in less developed places, if you really wanted to be "child free" you'd have to take much more extreme actions, like adopting celibacy or being OK with infanticide.
Birth control, yes, but also the existence of credible pension plans. If your survival in your old age solely depends on the family you probably tend to make sure there are several candidates for sustaining you.
I'd say it's the other way around. For most of human history we've had to live in a precarious state, stability or "things not changing", static life have never been true. Even for a farmer never leaving his village he always had to be precarious of the element.
It's only maybe last two-three generation or so we've tricked ourselves to the escalator life with dissipation of risk through social programs.
Historically, people have been far less aware of the circumstances outside of their immediate area. Life appeared extremely stable, because on a local level, it has been. Not that people didn't die or anything, they absolutely did, but what was certain was that life would more or less go on the way it had since time immemorial.
You can't have the sort of uncertainty about the future we have today without the progress we've had until today. The society-scale anxiety essentially boils down to this question: Just what is it we're progressing toward?
Housing and infrastructure? We even have bigger problems, and even if economists claim endless growth it is clear that our population, unless we grow into space, cannot grow forever.
To me it feels we have already passed the sustainable level at maybe 4 billion world population..
Another perspective, lower birthrates in western economies have strongly correlated with prosperity... and our prosperity is also endangered if we don't stop.
Biggest issue is (same with the whole ecological disaster) that this is a world and not a countries problem, and how do you approach that.. no clue. But to begin with, lower birth rates are a good thing imo, we just need to get into a sustainable balance and make sure swings one or the other way don't get too big..
> Another perspective, lower birthrates in western economies have strongly correlated with prosperity
As soon as you switch from the pyramid to the fat belly curve (of population vs age) you gain workforce with respect to burden and thus productivity as a country, as soon as it becomes top heavy you're screwed. Maybe it's something else but the baby boom after ww2 and impulses in the 50's 60's will become the baby burden quite soon (and has already started to be).
Agreed, but what about a balance between bottom heavy and top heavy, wouldn't that be best?
(And on economic arguments, I have been hearing the top-heavy-we-are-all-screwed slogans as long the climate crisis thing for what, 40 years (I think belly curve panic even longer)... however it seems only climate crisis turns out to be true (just observational :))
The climate crisis isn't true, these panics never are. Look at the data. If there was a crisis people would be dying but deaths from weather are massively down over the last 100 years. You can't actually perceive climate change with your senses because the changes are far too small and slow, so you have to rely on news media and academics who aren't exactly reliable.
> Are the people who want others to have more children prepared to pay for it? To help make sure that enough housing and infrastructure is built for them?
Why would they want more housing? That would only devalue their rental properties.
Children can live in their parents' homes, or parents can live in their childrens' homes.
Distinction arbitrary when it comes to availability of "shelter" in the Maslow sense but non-trivial when it comes to comes to components higher in the hierarchy pyramid.
Yeah, the Blue State solution: bans on abortion, moving towards banning contraception again. While simultaneously making it legally risky for obstetricians to work there, and banning certain medical interventions, so the maternal mortality rate goes up. (Someone find the American life expectancy thread on here from a few months ago?)
There’s a really fundamental socio-economic change that nobody has touched upon here yet, as it’s such a slow one with such inertia it’s barely noticeable from the ground.
Having children used to be a profitable enterprise. You’d get married, bang them out one after another, hope that a decent number survived, raised them cheaply, and put them to work as soon as they were able.
Once, and if, they were grown, they would then be part of your family enterprise, be it subsistence farming, cobbling, scrivening, or lording, and would add value.
Now, having a child is a definite cost centre for the individual, for the family.
As healthcare, industry, and the idea of the nuclear family and the individual have developed over the last several centuries, birth rates have declined rather precipitously - if you are 40, you probably have one child, one sibling, at least two uncles or aunts per family side, and your grandparents probably have six siblings each.
You can see this process happening at various stages, in various parts of the world. It’s universal.
This is a long term trend, and it has been on the trajectory to where we are now for a long while.
It isn’t terribly problematic, to my view, as it hasn’t been previously.
Yes, it leaves an eldercare labour and pension gap, but if other trends in industrialisation and the decoupling of human effort from realised value continue, this will fill said gap.
> Once, and if, they were grown, they would then be part of your family enterprise, be it subsistence farming, cobbling, scrivening, or lording, and would add value.
> Now, having a child is a definite cost centre for the individual, for the family.
I get what you're saying, but I mean nowadays it's not like they grow up as a purely sunk cost... A fairly-average-in-all-industrious-matters child will get a job and make an income, and there's a good chance the child will produce more than the input cost. It's up to the family if they're going to share that total wealth with each other though.
In fact, compared to before, there might be even more opportunities for children to increase that "return on investment", if you really want to think that way.
But then what about the golden example the OP mentions? What was going to happen in that case? Were most children just born into indentured servitude and everything they produced was pure profit for the elders? Surely a good percentage of them wanted to have their own family and leave, or wanted some kind of compensation. The set of possible outcomes seems the same.
>This is a long term trend, and it has been on the trajectory to where we are now for a long while.
Economic conditions (real and imagined) in urban and suburban areas not unlike those seen in 1920 (automation resulted in massive economic gains capture) have caused total replacement fertility to drop in those areas to rates similar to 1920 (total TFR 2.3 at 50% rural -> likely urban TFR much lower).
This isn't so much as "long term trend" as it is "returning to the post-industrial baseline"; doomerism doesn't help, but their choice to not reproduce will improve the climate and resources available to my children so I find it rather difficult to see this as a problem.
* (sociologic) fear of climate change (will the world still be habitable in 20 years' time) or commitment to make a small positive impact on climate change by not having kids
I'm not saying this is true or rational (there are actually blog posts in the rationalist community along the lines of "no, having kids does not cause climate change") but it's definitely a sentiment I've encountered.
Before having a child, it was something I thought about and my wife and I would occasionally discuss. Now my son asks, "How can you do this to me? You've screwed up our planet and there is nothing I can do for at least ten years," (direct quote after coming home from school yesterday -- he's 9).
Our kids are worried about it, more so than our generation, that's for sure.
That's clearly ideological brainwashing and you should take it up with the head teacher. It's not only factual nonsense to believe what your son is saying, but also dangerous. You definitely don't want him to be added to the ranks of the "i killed myself to save the planet" brigade.
I don't want to teach my son that him misunderstanding something is someone else's fault. Obviously, this wasn't taught in class. He was taught lots of things and was a conclusion he came to on his own. Like nobody ever told me that a McDonald's hamburger will cost around $50 when I retire, I simply did some math based on the average inflation. Will it actually? no idea. But I know that I should probably have that much more in my retirement account.
And what were these "lots of things" that led to him concluding the world is now ruined by you, his parent? Cuz I definitely don't recall anything like that being on the curriculum when I was a kid.
No, pretty sure he concluded exactly what his teachers wanted him to conclude. Nine year olds are not famous for their critical thinking and deep research skills.
If your son is talking like that, it’s a strong signal you haven’t properly put things in perspective for him. The world has always been horrible in one way or another. Go ahead. Pick a time.
Why would I bring my son’s opinions up with the school? Because they learned about global warming? Nah, we had a sit down talk about it and how it isn’t “any one specific person’s” fault.
Because from the description, one of two things probably happened: Either the school taught a secular version of a "put the fear of God into them" lesson, and your kid came home in feeling like he literally should not have been born, or another kid talked to him with the same result. That's a really unfair message to hand a 9-year-old.
5. Ergo: the adults in my life will continue to do X which will cause Y because I can’t affect meaningful change
I don’t automatically assume they start at step 5 at school. I’ve seen his math homework. Is that a normal way of thinking though?
To automatically assume that with my son would teach him (likely, inadvertently) that what he learns at school may not be right (which isn’t true, for the most part). Rather I want to teach him that he takes ownership of the words that come out of his mouth. That his opinions are his own and he has to defend them, and further learn what is an opinion and what is a fact.
No, because it is obvious past a certain age or once you know enough about the world. At his age, I want him to learn, enjoy learning, and trust his teachers to answer questions. I want him to learn, more importantly, that he can misunderstand something and it isn't the other person's fault. Schools teach the basics of the world, so by definition, are always wrong; but, with just the basics, you can make it quite far in the world...
A lot of people in the 18-35 demographic I am talking to are keenly aware of the environmental issues, and have taken steps to change their lifestyle to match. No cars, becoming vegetarian, buying second-hand, reducing travel, reducing consumption.
Yes, I may be seeing a bubble - but that is across three different countries, and clearly reflected in car-ownership statistics (down dramatically in younger generations) and in voting preferences.
It's anecdotal, of course, but I've definitely seen a number of posts online that amount to 'my spouse and I have decided not to have children, because we don't want to inflict them with the terrible state of the planet in 30 or 40 or 50 years'.
> I dont know anyone that is seriously worried about this in such a way
Do you happen to remember the global wildfires/rivers drying up/massive heat waves in 2020? About a few billion people worldwide / 100m Americans sure do. A larger and larger portion of them are starting to understanding what the cause to that is and are acting accordingly.
Every year, we keep hearing how even the most aggressive estimates for climate change were underestimated. That's terrifying and existential to a lot of people including me.
> I dont know anyone that is seriously worried about this in such a way
In 20 years not, but it's reasonable to believe for anyone outside America and Central Europe that wide swaths of the planet - particularly the entirety of Africa and lots of Asia - will be unable to support human life.
Hell, we're already seeing issues with water supply even in Central Europe, with France restricting water consumptions because of drought [2], and Germany's water reserves are dwindling as well. India is suffering from a massive heat wave [1], and last year's devastation in Australia should still be in living memory.
Anyone who is not worried about the future of the planet is either ridiculously ignorant to reality or completely incompetent. And the worst thing is, politicians in power play down climate change, act like future technology (anything from nuclear fusion to desalination plants) will save us, or deny it entirely - and wide swaths to outright majorities of people believe that.
That feels actually anti-rational, since if the people that care about the environment stop having children that means the people that are passing on their life outlook are mostly ignorant of the environment.
It must be a US thing more though, as I haven't personally heard people say fear of environmental damage to keep them from having kids.
> That feels actually anti-rational, since if the people that care about the environment stop having children that means the people that are passing on their life outlook are mostly ignorant of the environment.
This assumes that parents successfully pass on their life outlook to their children, but if that were true then society would have never changed.
> This assumes that parents successfully pass on their life outlook to their children, but if that were true then society would have never changed.
> I don't share the life outlook of my parents.
So the climate "birth strike" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35973163) strategy would necessarily have to have two parts to be successful: 1) refuse to have kids, 2) indoctrinate many of the ones that remain to reject their parent's outlook and adopt the strikers' outlook (e.g. through control of the school curriculum). I would expect the second point to result in scenes like this, where a kid comes home from school mad at his a parents for having him in a world with climate change: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35973070.
It's all about averages. People, on average, will share the same broad traits and characteristics as their family. Also, depending on your age, give it a couple of decades. Time and experience have a way of shaping our character in ways we may never have expected, let alone ever desired.
>if the people that care about the environment stop having children that means the people that are passing on their life outlook are mostly ignorant of the environment.
It's not a perfect correlation, but I'd find it hard to believe that children don't share on average more of their outlook on life with their parents than with a random member of society.
It's a pretty bad, very risky "investment" in the environmental cause, though, because by the time your kids are old enough to vote, it'll be almost 20 years later already, the kids will be using up resources while they're growing up regardless of the ultimate outcome, and you can only pray in the end that they'll agree with you on values when they're adults. You can't just pump a new environmentalist out of the womb.
> That feels actually anti-rational, since if the people that care about the environment stop having children that means the people that are passing on their life outlook are mostly ignorant of the environment.
If your goal is to pass your life outlook to more people in the next generation, I believe you're probably likely to be successful without kids than with them. Without kids you have much more time to reach more people.
Or the ones having kids are actually more rational. Consider:
1. There is no scientific reason to believe the world is doomed. Go read some serious climatology papers and see for yourself. They're unreliable and exaggerated but even so, no doom.
2. State pensions and benefits might actually be doomed though given demographics. If the state can't take care of you in old age, you'd better hope you have kids who will.
It's not about whether your kids will cause climate change. It's about creating children just in time for them to suffer through the collapse of civilisation.
We did not, that's the famously debunked hockey-stick graph claim.
Temperature has varied drastically throughout time. There were Vikings growing barley in Greenland, something completely impossible today. The reason you believe otherwise is because climate doomers lie a lot.
For most people who say this, it’s just a rationalization.
Acknowledging that kids are infeasible for economic reasons, like GP laid out, is just too painful and embarrassing. So the ‘environment’ fig leaf saves their dignity.
It's kinda down on the list of prios but "I can not in good conscience have children grow up in this world where I see only problems and no solutions." is definitely on it, and you can call me overly pessimistic, but not sure how this has anything with dignity.
This is one the factors as to why my partner and I have decided against having children. Not because we think it'll make the situation worse, but because we believe they shouldn't have to deal with the significant fallout from resource contention, climate migration etc. that is more than likely on the horizon when they had no hand in creating the problem
This is a weird take to me. Even if climate change turns out to be significantly bad, I have a hard time imagining it would be worse than most times in human history. Only a few generations ago people lived through two world wars. We could have a third world war at some point, or the AI doomers could be right, but would that stop you from having children? This feels to me like someone who doesn’t leave their house because they are worried a car might hit them…it’s an unhealthy anxiety about one of many potential risks, that shouldn’t prevent you from living life.
Keep in mind that I've said it's one of the factors, not the only factor.
But why should my standards be just better than most times in human history? That seems a low bar to me, most times in human history were miserable for the majority of people compared to the living standards I've become accustomed to.
To be clear, I don't feel there is any moral duty to continue my particular genes and the world population will continue to increase for the foreseeable regardless. If I were to have children I personally would feel guilty if they had it significantly harder than I have and I think the likelihood is that will be the case - it's really as simple as that.
If you grew up with $50M+ and lived a luxurious life, but lost it all, would you not have children over worries they may not have the same standard of living that you did?
If you could be born in America in 1925 and live until 2015, would you? Or would you decline because the standard of living dropped right away with a Great Depression followed by a world war?
I agree with you that if I knew, with certainty, that my children’s lives would be filled with nothing but suffering, I would make the same choice. But a fear of a theoretical drop in a standard of living, and which may not even impact an American over the next 100 years all that much, does not seem to me like it should reach that threshold, and I suspect it is starting to for others because of the media playing into their anxieties. There are people living that lived through the holocaust and are still happy to have lived and, over their lifetime, have had fulfilled and happy lives. I suspect your children could likewise carve out a happy life, even if their standard of living is somewhat reduced.
I agree you have no moral duty to have kids, and if you don’t want them, don’t have them. But if you want them, but are not having them because you find that to be cruel to your unborn kids, I question whether that is really a rational choice.
> If you grew up with $50M+ and lived a luxurious life, but lost it all, would you not have children over worries they may not have the same standard of living that you did?
I'd agree there's nuance to this. For your cherry picked scenario, no, that wouldn't affect my decision. I can accept a single person having a reduction in living standards. However, when most of Western society (I'm British, not American) is struggling to attain housing at a rate similar to the generation before, when the middle classes as a whole aren't able to become as financially secure as the generation before then it is enough to give me pause.
So ignoring any climate worries I already think things will be much harder. When you add on that it's estimated that billions will be without sufficient water in a few decades it's not hard to imagine that there will be significant problems of which I have very little confidence that we will be able to handle well as a species.
Perhaps I'm overly pessimistic. But as I say, this isn't the only factor we've taken into account, it's more a tertiary concern.
You realize the house price obsession is rather uniquely British, right? It's a bit of a national stereotype to people outside the UK. In many countries it's considered normal to rent, including rich countries.
Weirdly, the dominance of renting in Switzerland doesn't stop the Swiss having children. So this is really very much a media induced anxiety disorder of some sort. It's not rational to decide whether or not to have children based on whether you can get a mortgage.
Perhaps I worded it poorly, but I meant housing as in a place to live regardless of if that's achieved via ownership or renting. Both are getting more expensive compared to median wage as we build less than the increase in population. I didn't think that was a uniquely British phenomenon, but I'd be happy to learn otherwise.
General housing pressure certainly isn't a unique phenomenon, just the obsession with ownership. But many other countries have managed immigration levels better and don't experience the same level of pressure on the housing market as a consequence. Again Switzerland is an example.
I realise the UK is starting in one of the worst positions for house price pressure, but it does seem to be a general trend in all Western countries. My point is that it seems like my potential children would need to work harder to get the same level of basic necessities. It might be getting tougher more slowly in some countries than others, but that doesn't meet the criterion I feel is necessary of mostly getting better for most people.
As you can see, Swiss single family house prices were stable since 2016. It's
a different lifestyle, there's a lot of apartment living with shared gardens for example, but it can be done.
The absolute cost isn't a perfect measure for what I'm considering though because it will need to be compared to median real income. Looking at this: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/databrowser/view/ILC_MDED01__c... it appears housing is costing a bigger share of household disposable income over time in Switzerland
If we're talking about mortality salience, then there's quite a lot of evidence that mortality salience predicts a greater desire to have children, which is the opposite to what you're suggesting.
From an evolutionary point of view, this seems plausible. Obviously not having children because 'life is hard' is almost certainly dysgenic.
> I'm not saying this is true or rational (there are actually blog posts in the rationalist community along the lines of "no, having kids does not cause climate change")
I would not use the "rationalist" community as a measure of what is rational.
I generally agree with you and while reading that line made me laugh, I think you are misunderstanding the statement.
If I read that line charitably, it wants to point out that no single set of demographic, economic, or policy changes can directly explain the decline. It appears to be an emergent outcome—a sum of its constituent factors.
Yes we could go and enumerate the hundreds of reasons people contribute to the decline, but the article wants to ascribe a more "matter-of-fact" explanation to populations of people rather than speculating those hundreds of reasons.
And though I'm defending the above statement, the article writes in a tone of surprise ("The Mystery"), which makes it difficult to take the article seriously. This emergent property shouldn't surprise anyone at all considering nearly every developed nation is experiencing it...
(policy) the middle class was forced to bail out the 0.1% for making bad investments during the crises of 2008.
It should be obvious to everybody the U.S. is an oligarchy. It actually has been for decades now, but it was laid bare in 2008. Many people are fighting the oligarchs in an interesting way - refusing to provide them the labor they need to further enrich themselves. The kids born in 2008 would be 15 in 2023. What the oligarchs are worried about is a huge drop in the labor market. That's one reason they're pushing so hard for ending abortion. All I can say is there's going to be a lot more incels.
Increased/unlimited immigration seems like their preferred solution to the labor shortage problem. So what if a country's population are refusing to work, just bring in people who are used to worse and pay them less than those pesky citizens.
Then why do these same people complain so much about being "invaded" from the Southern border? Seeing as how I see them as both xenophobic and racist I see their real fear is the precipitous drop in white women having children. They want labor, and they want it to be white. American, at a minimum.
The "same people" probably want lots of immigration to staff their factories with cheap labor, but they want the Republicans in power because they want lower taxes et al. And the way to keep the Republicans in power is through racist xenophobia.
My term "same people" was referring to the oligarchs. They complain about the invasion from the Southern border, yet they also complain about people "not wanting to work." It's pretty clear they want to keep America white. I think alarm bells are going off for them with the slipping of the white majority in America.
I was giving you the benefit of the doubt on your first comment, but are you really implying that all american oligarchs are republicans? Sure, some of them are saying the things you mentioned. But it’s ridiculous to ignore all the other ones claiming that not having open borders is a human rights violation.
Both sides play to their audience, but all of it is ultimately about cheap labor.
We're getting pretty in the weeds on this tangent here, so I will just say that it's obvious that "we" "know and observe" different things which is why "we" disagree on certain things. You're not "right", you just believe you are, just like everyone else. Including me!
"what we know and observe" is completely subjective and meaningless on its own.
We can either automate production or import workers.
Currently we're automating as fast as possible. Meanwhile people are flooding across the border. Perhaps migrants realize that once ChatGPT is robotized, automation will spread to dominate the economy: there will be less need for labor (immigrant or other).
BTW assuming "oligarchs" control the economy is not a useful concept.
don't forget education is expensive, and quite a few have received funding in predatory lending ways where the debt cannot be discharged in bankruptcy without even receiving the degree.
you need to marry, be debt free, and have a down payment (20% of 700k is 140k down) for a house to have kids. Kids need to happen before 35 for your wife; mortality increases greatly after that. You need 2 with modern medicine, or 4 children without for one to make it to 18. These are all very known quantities.
If you can't make enough to cover your expenses and enough for 2 others you can't have kids.
Couple that with the job market, education, debt, and all the other unlivable things the silent generation didn't have to deal with and that's why we are where we are. A lot of people aren't having kids because there are no incentives; you bear the cost. Its stupid, but that is the world we all have created over the past two generations. Through inaction or action.
Personally I'd like to have kids but just like everyone else, the economics just isn't there. There's also the general unlivable coercion that's everywhere nowadays. So a lot of people are choosing to be the last generation of their family line.
That's not even touching things that will never likely pay out a benefit by the time I get to the age where I can use those programs. It has no funding after 2032 or something like that.
The US has seen an insane rise of child and adolescent mortality over the last years [1] - and a large part of this is due to the top death cause: homicide or other firearm incidents [2], a scale orders of magnitude worse than among other developed nations.
Add on top of that the rising drug epidemic, the removal of access to reproductive and mental health care...
Still, the probability of dying while a child in the US is minuscule (about 35 in 100,000 from the first source cited)? Hardly enough to have an additional child to make the expected number out of the two at 19 to be 1 child.
It's still way too high - once a week there's some sort of shooting incident in the US [1], and that doesn't include all the other mass shooting incidents in general society [2], nor the shooting incidents that don't kill multiple people. Frankly, for me as an European, these numbers are insane - and the worst thing is, even after outright massacres nothing changes.
It's one thing if society learns something from incidents like we did with after the mass murder at Winnenden 2009. But in the US, it's "thoughts and prayers" and that's it - utterly dystopian.
School shootings are a rounding error in the youth homicide statistics, but they definitely make for good cable news coverage.
The elephant in the room is inner-city, largely gang-related violence. Stopping those kids from obtaining firearms by restricting legal purchases makes about as much sense as keeping criminals away from encryption by restricting E2E encryption on WhatsApp.
For some reason, Hacker News thinks the former is absolutely possible, despite knowing the latter is not. Weird.
I didn't really want to bring this up, but .. yeah. The reaction to the deaths of children being to libel their parents by claiming that the whole incident was made up is one of the most incomprehensibly disgusting things about American politics. It should not have been necessary to sue Alex Jones over that, his public audience should simply have evaporated overnight of their own accord.
"Protecting children" is only ever brought up in US politics for dumb controlling initiatives that do anything but protect children. Actually protecting children is taboo.
Yes, its not a belief, its simple risk management perspective.
You need at least two with modern medicine. You have a limited time period to have children, after which you can't have more without significant consequence, and you won't know ahead of time about the risks or need.
There are increasing mortality rates, and increasing unmanageable risks (i.e. regulation, and other aspects of government working against parents).
If you want your family line to continue and survive, you need at least 2 children, if not 4 or more. 4 is better.
There is cost, but that's what needs to be possible that no one talks about. That actuarial all death discrepancy during the pandemic is most likely attributed to lack of general availability of medical care during that time. The risks change without notice. During the pandemic, in my role supporting our IT support staff (System Engineers helping overflows) I heard from people across the country.
Some families were nearly wiped out, imagine if 3/4 of your family died and it was a large family. One man I spoke with was just crazy with grief, he had to help with funeral arrangements for eight of his family members in the span of a few weeks.
I am an engineer as well, in western Europe with kids. But I regularly see people committing code at 9pm or commenting on docs at 11pm or see their testing traces (logs) at 1am and on weekends.
I can't compete with them in any way. "Don't work hard, work smarter" doesn't apply here, because I am surrounded by smart people, who also do smart work, when baseline is same, you just need to work more.
Guess who will be liked/praised more and have less chances to be laid off when conditions get worse?
I am lucky though, its not easy to fire people here, can't imagine what's happening in US
I have worked 10-12 hours a day throughout all of my working career (from 19yo onwards). This is in central Europe, and I'm not even the hardest worker around.
I also have hobbies and a social life - but it has consequences.
Family and children are entirely 100% impossible in this lifestyle without a stay-at-home partner. And unlike previous generations, stay-at-home partners are no longer a thing.
(Edit: to make it clear, I am not making a judgement, nor wishing for a stay-at-home partner - I'm entirely in favour of everyone making their own choices in life.
I am just pointing out that younger generations are now living in a totally different environment from previous generations, where a stay-at-home wife was the default. Which is yet another component in the birth rate equation.)
Props to you man, I have no kids and still barely manage to have hobbies and social life with just normal full-time hours. I do need a lot of time to sleep and simply rest and do nothing, so that is a factor.
* (sociologic) no trust in your partner (which is partly related to social networks and porn in some ways). they can divorce anytime, because it is easier to divorce than trying to resolve issues in the relationship, which will leave you as a single care taker of the kid, which creates 2 issues: (1) do you want to raise alone, making kid feel half family (2) can you actually raise alone with current demand at workplace
* (political) do politicians want to and policies support having kids? Like helping with healthcare when needed or should you spend 10k$ for simple things per kid?
Number one is very true. My generation has so many children of divorced parents that I don't see these trust issues ever being fixed.
I'm not sure if it's attributable to porn though. I think it's rather our individualistic, bordering on narcissistic, culture that is driving this.
As the old saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child. The next best thing after the village is the family.
But in a society where the individual is celebrated and divorce is so common, the whole burden of raising the child rests either on the mother or the father. And that is just too much to deal with.
I think if you look back in human history it was natural that the tribe would take care of all the children, thereby spreading the burden a lot. But we don't have the tribe anymore. And the families are now breaking apart, too.
> * (political) do politicians want to and policies support having kids? Like helping with healthcare when needed or should you spend 10k$ for simple things per kid?
They (conservative ones) seem to want to force births (against abortion & in some extreme cases, even contraception). But the followup on supporting kids is, like you said, not there.
I feel like real estate prices outweigh a lot of other factors entirely because real estate costs in places people would prefer to live are an order of magnitude higher than they were even a generation ago after accounting for inflation, and where people live determines an immense number of other factors.
Of course, it will be hard to fix that unless we can get people to realize the problem is fundamentally a literal shortage of housing in places, and that slapfighting with developers and landlords won't conjure up more homes for people to live in.
For IT, that would be under "Information" on that chart, so the average was 36.3 hours, or 7.3 hours a day.
In addition, the number of hours worked per day has been falling historically in the US. So if a high number of hours worked was negatively associated with birth rate, birth rate should be higher now than in the past.
As far as being laid off, the unemployment rate is as low as it has been in over half a century.
These statistics [1] would suggest that sociological factors are in play, especially if you look at the graphs for young people. The number of young men not having sex is at record numbers.
As the sibling post noted, most of the positive natality in Western Europe is due to immigrant mothers. And since the US has quite a strong barrier to entry for immigration they don't benefit from this effect.
[edit] Looks like in term of raw numbers, the US has much more immigrants than Germany for example. But in terms of legal immigrants there's about twice the number in Germany vs. the US for 2021 (dunno how reliable statista is though).
there are couple of differences between EU and US which can introduce confusion:
1. EU countries sees a lot immigration from Middle East and Africa, who has more kids and there is still a cultural difference towards having kids, give some time to those people to notice the environment and you see similar trend
2. but also EU countries have stronger labor policies which impacts birth rate. Not easy to fire, even when they don't have a job, they get support from government, cheap healthcare (I pay ~250-300 EUR/month for a family, no payment for kids), free dentist until 18 years for kids.
It doesn't cancel what I have said about the impact and reasons, if same conditions exist in EU countries as well, you would see similar decline, which also means this is a political and economical issue
This may well be true. But it also may well be not true to the extend that it can explain that decline in US and the differences to similar countries. So far I’ve not seen much data to back up the alleged causality in much of this entire discussion.
sometimes discussions are just to share the opinion and disagreement, not always they contain result of research. I shared my disagreement about specific statement which says: "This decline cannot be explained by demographic, economic, or policy changes" and shared couple of economic and policy issues which might impact the birth rate.
Real reason(s) could be even different, e.g. chemicals used in foods or a plastic? we need a research. But expecting single reason is probably wrong
To make that useful to the question you may want to show that this is different than in US, which sees also a lot of immigration. I added a comment that shows the numbers are also quite normal in UK and France. That should also be accounted for.
Would there also be effect that long term relationships are hard and pairing up has been disturbed by dating apps. If you aren't living together with regular partner taking next step of getting kid rarely happens.
> If you aren't living together with regular partner taking next step of getting kid rarely happens.
Hard to live together with your partner if you're living with roommates (or worse, parents) because you can't make rent or can barely afford a 20 m² micro apartment.
There's a comical Jurassic Park "life finds a way" outcome lurking... those reproductively restricted by these ideas gradually will be replaced by those who are not so inhibited.
Over the past 40 years, was has been rate and efficacy of formal and informal sexual health education?
Pretty sure 80s kids got a lot of reasonable knowledge their parents lacked, and then went on to raise the next generation who are now much more aware of gender, sexual preference, etc concepts and increasingly so via informal means (Tiktok, etc).
No explanation! Just dont look at education policy!
Indeed. There's been decades of "TEENAGERS: DO NOT HAVE SEX AND IF YOU DO ESPECIALLY DO NOT GET PREGNANT, PREGNANCY AND LABOUR ARE DANGEROUS AND UNCOMFORTABLE" messaging, and now we're surprised that it's working?
I think your last two points make up most of the drivers. Particularly now many people are in an un-breakable relationship with their smartphones.
I know many people that simply don't want to entertain the "hassle" of a relationship. It's an inconvenience for them to think about somebody else other than their own immediate needs and wants.
* (policy) - If things don't work out, your wife will divorce you, take half of what you have and enslave you to pay her support for the next 15 years. Actually, she might do that just because she needs more passion while you are hard at work.
Whenever I hear "wedding" I wonder why the male is going for that risk. The obvious unfairness and non-equality during a divorce is the main reason why I never would get married. Its just illogical to put yourself that much at risk.
I mean, disregarding "love" and whatnot, at least in the US, there are lots of bureaucratic benefits to it.
I'm not religious or anything, so a wedding in itself doesn't mean a lot to me, but my wife and I got married in no small part so we could share health insurance, help with her immigration, and lower our tax burden. I don't regret the marriage, I trust my wife, and we've been pretty happy for the last eight years.
People forget all the reasons gay marriage had to be fought for; no matter how solid a relationship is, the external privileges of having that status recognized matter.
(Also, few of the posters in this subthread are looking at the woman's side of the game theory)
No, there are all sorts of very specific and sometimes tragic cases like "who is allowed at the bedside of their dying spouse in the hospital" where official recognition matters. The AIDS crisis produced a number of those incidents, but it's also happened to straight people as well that if you're not officially married you may find your partner's family having legal rights which you don't.
So, to sum it up, straight people marry so that one can not run away easily, and gay people marry for increased closeness? :-) In any case, this subthread was about the inequality between straight couples, so...
Well, as I am not married, this would also apply to my spouse and I. However, I dont feel like this is reason enough to marry, in fact, I never even thought about such a specific case. Death is painful, and likely will not go down as planned, so no reason to worry. See, not a gay marriage specific problem, just the way it is for unmarried couples.
Where I come from, public health insurance is a given, so no need to marry to obtain that basic "right". Marrying to fascilitate immigration is not unheard of, however, most cases I know are more about economic incentives then actual love. I can not speak about lowering tax burden, the system I am living in is apparently too different from yours.
Marriage is only worse, but having kids without marriage comes with most of the same risks and inequalities. Like what are the chances that the father gets custody?
The father only gets custody if the mother is proovably insane or basically unable to provide for herself. In all other cases, she is treated with extra priviledge.
> No obvious policy or economic factor can explain much of the decline.
I mean, if people literally can't afford to have kids what do we expect to happen to the birthrate? I want kids more than anyone I know yet realistically I'm never going to have them. I'm 33 now and like most people in their early 30s I'm no where near in a stable enough position to raise kids. I mean who the hell even owns a home < 30 these days? Then add student debt to that mix... It's really difficult unless you have wealthy parents who will help you out.
Here in the UK there's a very clear trend – if you work for a living you don't have kids because you have neither the time, space, or money to do so. However most of my family has lots of kids but that's because in UK you get a free home and living expenses paid for for choosing to have kids instead of working. Realistically this is the only way a working class person is able to "afford" a place of their own and have kids because you just can't do it on a salary of £25,000.
I don't understand this mentality. Who told you that you need to own a home to have kids? I don't understand this connection that everyone seems to be making. To me it sounds like an excuse.
You don't necessarily need to own a home, but I think we'd agree most want to be in a good place financially before raising kids. Having a foot on the property ladder and living somewhere you can raise a family over the long-term is clearly part of this for most people.
You're right that couples could just rent a place and try to get on the proper ladder while trying to raise kids, but realistically I think most would want to do things the other way around. But to your point not owning a home is one of the compromises people who really want kids will be forced to make to have them today.
It's a slightly bizarre and under-discussed aspect of British culture. There's a widespread cultural belief that you have to own a house and "get on the property ladder" before you start a family or really consider yourself a proper adult. The ladder is a reference to the assumption that house prices only ever go up so it's free money to own one, which you can then invest in another more expensive house and so on.
Here's another possible cause that I don't see mentioned: The spread of the internet removed a lot of the mysticism surrounding births and allowed any woman to look up how it's really going about. Some might simply not want to take the risk because potential complications during and after birth are manifold.
I honestly don't get it, but I'm not an economist so I may be wrong.
Pensioners cost the state a lot, and in my naive understanding population growth - so more tax payers - has funded that for the last 100 years. Declining birth rates, and reducing immigration, reduces proportional tax income and therefor smaller pot for pensions and healthcare.
This is why the UK is talking about getting retired people back into work. And is well on its way to ending pensions altogether.
The age at which pensions are paid out has been creeping upwards and is now heading towards 70. What should have happened is that pension payments were ring-fenced, but of course government finances don't work like that.
Most pensioners vote Tory, so the government is literally robbing its own base.
You can't ringfence pension payments if by ringfence you mean just store them in a savings account. Inflation would destroy the saved money completely, so the funds have to be invested. In turn those investments have to yield enough to cover both inflation and expected investment losses, whilst still yielding enough to pay out reliably over the average expected lifespan post retirement.
Unfortunately if you do the numbers it doesn't work, financially. The number of years you have to pay out to people is so large that you need a very high ROI to keep the fund stable, but ROI sometimes wasn't high enough and the funds fall behind.
This isn't a Tory or UK or even a government problem. It affects pension funds around the world and private funds too.
> You can't ringfence pension payments if by ringfence you mean just store them in a savings account. Inflation would destroy the saved money completely, so the funds have to be invested. In turn those investments have to yield enough to cover both inflation and expected investment losses, whilst still yielding enough to pay out reliably over the average expected lifespan post retirement.
Or just cut to the chase, and realize the money is only a unit of exchange, and not a store of value. This idea of a society saving/investing money to pay for retirement is just nonsense, if there won't be enough people to pay the money to for job to get done.
Ultimately, retirement is paid for by spending a fraction of the current economic output, which can't be banked.
The UK's government is, frankly, gone nuts. They complain about no one picking fruits from fields and empty supermarket shelves, they don't want immigration, they don't want population growth, and they don't want imports from the EU.
All of that doesn't add up even in the slightest to anything that makes sense.
> But something changed around the time of the Great Recession; the birth rate fell precipitously, and it did not recover when the economy improved.
I'm going to guess that this is generational shock. That generation got burned hard, and now they are weary. I suspect when another generation passes they will forget.
Also "the economy improved" doesn't mean that people could afford a house or kids. It could just as well mean that companies and the 1 percent got way richer.
That's what 2,000 people tell Paul Krugman every time he tells them 'the economy is fine' in his New York Times column.
It's quite entertaining to watch, altough troubling. He's smart, he gets a lot of direct feedback, and yet he doesn't understand it at all.
Put simply, the economy isn't "working" when people can afford less food by the month, renting gets harder by the week, used cars are double as expensive, new cars are unavailable and building a house is nothing more than a dream that we inherited from previous generations.
Krugmann just thinks Americans are stupid:
"You don’t want to say that Americans are stupid"
I agree with everything you say, but technically it's about as easy for me to build a house today as it was for my grandpa (who built his own house in the 40s). At least, it is if I get to ignore regulations.
It requires being very frugal, moving to a low cost of living area, taking a lot of time, manual labor, and getting help from friends. Also, you have to live in 3rd world conditions for quite a while.
At least, that's what my grandpa did. I know a few folks-- who are quite poor-- who have done it in the past 10 years. But maybe 0.01% of the population is willing to do anything like it. I know I'm not.
> Housing is more expensive but real wages are up, the vast majority of Americans can afford more food than ever before.
Housing is pervasively unattainable, and yet you would still claim that "real wages are up"? What the crap do "real" wages mean to you? Our parents and grandparents easily purchased homes to keep them safe in as they grew old. What "real" wealth do we have that can compare?
That this analysis tries to claim this doesn't correlate to economic conditions only demonstrates that economics has failed. When we say "the economy recovered" we don't mean anything that's meaningful to people on the ground, making decisions like whether they can have a child, because for a long time it has been the policy of basically any official macroeconomic analysis to ignore distinctions between the "real economy" and the increasingly unwieldy labyrinth of financial instruments, from stocks to commodities futures to real estate prices - which dwarf it completely - and to ignore "distributional outcomes" and favor analysis of dry gestalts that, again, can be skewed by extreme levels of quantifiable prosperity for a vanishingly small number of people and firms. This approach means that as inequality increases, a "recovery" or really even "the economy" has less and less to do with the majority of people's real fortunes and stability improving - the economic conditions that actually affect birth rates
As the long con of neoliberal policy drags on, more and more phenomena in our society can be attributed to the interplay between Goodhart's law and the utter willful ignorance of it on the part of the people and institutions that measure outcomes and get to make policy decisions
If the recent decline in annual birth rates simply reflects women pushing off having children from their 20s to their 30s, then annual birth rates will eventually rebound and the total number of children the average U.S. woman has over her lifetime will not change. But the decline in annual birth rates since 2007 is consistent with more recent cohorts of women having fewer births. Those cohorts have not completed their childbearing years yet, but the number of births they would have to have at older ages to catch up to the lifetime childbearing rates of earlier cohorts is so large that it seems unlikely they will do so. If the decline in births reflects a (semi)permanent shift in priorities, as opposed to transitory economic or policy factors, the U.S. is likely to see a sustained decline in birth rates and a general decline in fertility for the foreseeable future. This has consequences for projected U.S. economic growth and productivity, as well as the fiscal sustainability of current social insurance programs.
“””
> in the United States during 2018-2020 (average), the highest fertility rates per 1,000 women were to women ages 20-29 (80.1), followed by women ages 30-39 (75.3) [...]
Part of the issue is the infertility cliff happens in the late 30s to mid 40s, so those age categories are a little wonky in terms of capturing the phenomenon.
Having bumped up against this myself, the problem in the US isn't that women are more often waiting until they are 32 to have kids, it's that they are waiting until they are 39.
There seems to be a much bigger decline in births among younger than there is an increase in older, but if those women are delaying rather than abstaining completely, they'll run into infertility issues later if they wait late enough. There will be a certain number who intend to have more kids than they actually do.
I don't think this is all of it, as it doesn't address why women are increasingly forgoing children in prime fertility years. I also in general think it's part of a set of demographic trends that point to societal problems (stalling or declining life expectancy for one).
Note that these age-specific fertility rates measure the number of births per 1,000 women. This does not directly measure how easy it is for a woman in that age group to conceive (what OP referenced), because fertility rate is confounded by the degree to which women (1) actively try to conceive (versus avoid conception), and (2) decide to carry pregnancies to term.
If people have children in their early 20's, is conceivable that by the time of their deaths at least 3 generations of their descendants would be alive.
If they instead choose to have descendants in their late thirties, only their children would exist, and perhaps their grandchildren would be in their early infancy.
I know many people that don't even want to have children, and even among the ones that do want, most push it to their late thirties, and stop at 1.
I don't really think it's a problem. It's just how life nowadays is set up, for economic, professional, sociological, and cultural reasons.
There was a funny diagram I sawed that presented the birth rate of my country and placed the launch of Tinder to the timeline. The same year Tinder was published the birth rate started going down. Most likely there are other better explanations for this but it made me think. How has the radical disruption of dating market affected the way people form relationships and start families?
> In general, a smaller workforce and an aging population would have negative implications for economic productivity and per capita income growth. In addition, the combination of a smaller workforce and an aging population puts fiscal pressure on social insurance programs, like Social Security, that rely on tax payments from current workers to pay the benefits of current retirees.
This is from economofact.org so I understand that they translate this to metrics like “economic productivity” yet, this kind of framing irks me. Also the implication that this impacts social security may be true for the existing system, but it may only imply that this system may need to change.
Yet I feel that the implicit message is: get policy in place to get people to make more babies.
But why isn’t the falling birth rate just a good thing from a human well-being perspective? Or: why is there even implied that there is a problem?
> The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007. This decline cannot be explained by demographic, economic, or policy changes.
What a load of bull. Obviously, there is no single one explanation - the entire point of such articles is that they don't get just how bad the combination of causes actually is.
To explain: my generation (i.e. 1990 and onwards) have experienced multiple and, to make it worse, overlapping devastating crises with long term impact. We graduated right in the midst of a multi-year recession (first the banking crisis, then the euro crisis), as soon as that was over Europe had the refugee influx and America still reeled with the aftereffects of the banking crisis, then COVID came along, and directly afterwards Russia invaded Ukraine, leading to exploding costs of living - at the moment about 2/3rds of the population struggle to make rent and bills, forget about "luxury" purchases.
The worst problem is rents are sucking us dry. We want to offer our children a better perspective than we had while growing up - but we can't even do that as housing is barely affordable for us with our partners, if we don't have to live at our parents' or in shared housing (=roommates). Also, both parents have to work to make rent, but that makes childcare a necessity - but childcare itself eats up a lot of money. And children themselves cost a lot of money as well - clothing, food, diapers, insurance, all that easily adds up to hundreds of euros a month.
Americans, additionally, have to fight with political changes - if I were living in the US, I would do everything to not make my s/o pregnant, simply because women have literally died or gotten permanently infertile because they were denied abortions for non-viable pregnancies, and even if that were not the case I would not risk getting stuck with a 50.000$ bill for the birth.
Oh, and on top of that those of my generation who think about ethics have yet another problem... can it be ethical to birth a child into a world firmly heeded towards environmental destruction? With politicians in power actively denying climate change?
The US has to fix access to healthcare, and we all have to fix rents - the primary cause of people not having kids is because they literally cannot afford them.
We had the Cuban Missile Crisis, which came dangerously close to causing a nuclear war. Even after surviving that, we still lived under the threat of sudden nuclear death until about 1990. We also had massive inflation in the 1970s, combined with economic stagnation. We had inflation at 14% in 1970 (IIRC). We had the hollowing-out of American manufacturing - it started back then. We had a wave of Islamic terrorism, we had oil crises. We had conditions that were, maybe not worse, but didn't appear all that much better. (I'm not old enough to go back to the Great Depression and World War II, but things didn't look optimistic then either.)
Then 1990 came. The wall came down; the USSR dissolved. Everything was going to be wonderful from then on. The good times were finally here, and they would continue forever. When that optimism didn't pan out, people may not have been mentally prepared for living in, essentially, what people had always lived in.
> The US has to fix access to healthcare, and we all have to fix rents - the primary cause of people not having kids is because they literally cannot afford them.
That I think I can agree with, except that we also need to fix blue-collar pay, and we probably need to do something about mental health (which may involve doing something about addiction to social media).
> We also had massive inflation in the 1970s, combined with economic stagnation. We had inflation at 14% in 1970 (IIRC). We had the hollowing-out of American manufacturing - it started back then. We had a wave of Islamic terrorism, we had oil crises. We had conditions that were, maybe not worse, but didn't appear all that much better.
And yet, despite all of that, a blue collar wage was enough to own a home, a car for the breadwinner, a second car for the stay-at-home wife, healthcare, two children and their education. The economic base indicators were just way better than they are for my generation.
Also, politicians actually did something about all the crises you mentioned. The threat of nuclear war and other weapons of mass destructions got tackled by non-proliferation programs or outright bans (on chemical and biological weapons). Threats to the environment such as lead, acid rain or the ozone hole got combatted by banning lead and sulphur in fuels and CFC gases as refrigerants. The islamist terror threat got combatted by carpet-bombing Afghanistan, Iraq and a number of other hellholes, as well as upgrading airports and planes. The oil crisis got under control by introducing consumption limits and an expansion of domestic production to a point the US is a net exporter of oil.
In contrast, none of the modern polycrises got tackled. The financial world has deregulated to the point that we have yet another impending collapse, with actual giant banks like Credit Suisse going down. Migration and its causes aren't addressed, instead we build borders and threaten people with deathly conditions on their travel. Pandemic prevention has gone down the drain so hard that wearing masks and getting vaccines got politicized. Climate change is outright denied. If you don't get top degrees you have virtually no chance at getting a halfway decent paying job. Would-be parents, even young children can see all of that deliberate inaction.
> and we probably need to do something about mental health (which may involve doing something about addiction to social media)
Social media is an useful scapegoat - the mental health crisis (and I'd say also the drug abuse epidemic) is a direct result of our hyper-competitive, individualist everyone-for-themselves environment and the above-mentioned inaction of leadership to crises.
I'm not sure a blue-collar job in the 1970s got you two cars; I'm pretty sure it didn't in the 1950s. I'm not sure it got your kids through college without working, either.
Afghanistan and Iraq were in response to a later wave of Islamic terrorism. The earlier one got handled... I forget all the details, but I think there was some hunting down and killing of the responsible parties, and a (non-carpet) bombing of Libya.
Today, I think you can get a "halfway decent job" - or even a pretty good one - with a degree that is less than a "top degree".
So, overall you have at least something of a point. Leadership seemed a lot more competent then, and infighting was a lot less of an obstacle. But you're also looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses, and at the present with gloom-tinted ones.
From your perspective, do you think there's a good possibility the USA will improve the living conditions of our generation and the zoomers? I'm very skeptical and that's why I don't live there anymore, but I'm curious about those who are sticking it out. Is the hope that there'll be some kind of political change, a slow shifting to more progressive politicians?
I'm German anyway so I can't say much about the US - but given that Trump of all people still has more popular support in the polls than Biden has, and the average age of Congress members continuously rising? No chance.
For Europe? It's not as bad but still bad - we share the same issue, too many gerontocrats in power and the Boomer generation will dominate voters for the next 15-20 years given they enter pensioner age now and will probably live to age 80-85.
Had a job in SV, we moved to EU when my wife was pregnant. We would have loved to stay but as many of immigrant friends, we had difficulties figuring out how to be a happy family in USA. We couldn’t afford a house, education without becoming slaves to our career and not to feel threaten by the constantly changing immigration policy.
As an American who moved to the EU after having a child in the US, when I tell people we had to pay for our son on a payment plan, they cringe. Yes, we had insurance, but ironically, the calculated conception date was 2 days before we got insurance -- reality is that we got insurance when we decided to have a kid, so the calculated date is actually wrong. Thus, it was a pre-existing condition and insurance wouldn't cover it. True story.
May sound cruel, but I don't find that outrageous. Purpose of insurance is to pool the risk. 100 people pay 1$, one unlucky fellow meets an accident gets 98.
In case of pregnancy/delivery it is not a truly random event so society will have to pool for a planned event. For such events we need government support proxying for society not some insurance company.
You don't think it's outrageous or at least cringeworthy that an insurance company used a one-size-fits-all, deterministic, possibly opaque and proprietary math formula to estimate an inherently fuzzy date based on a chain reaction of biological processes with duration error bars far exceeding one day, and then mechanically making an all-or-nothing coverage decision because of a TWO-DAY difference between that speciously precise date and the date on which enrollment forms were filed?
That may be the way the contracts and laws are currently set up, and if we want to have a child without going bankrupt, we have to play the game. But it's simultaneously possible to recognize that the system produces some deeply ridiculous cases such as this one.
Yes, the purpose is to pool risk, but nobody expects to need insurance within days of purchasing it. An insurance company worming out of it due to 'technicalities' is kind-of shitty when the cost of having a child is >30k USD and they can negotiate it down to 10k -- but as a regular Joe, you have no negotiation powers.
As an interesting contrast China (which is also suffering fertility issues) just launched a new pro family/fertility campaign [1]. It's so weird how little coverage this issue receives in the West. Fertility will be one of the biggest factors in shaping our future, to say nothing of its more immediate impact on economic factors, retirement, and general social stability.
I think the big issue is that we live so much longer than we're fertile that it masks the impact of fertility changes by ~60 years. So this makes many people not really appreciate what's happening. To give a toy example, imagine a world with a fertility rate of 1, where everybody reproduces at 20, and dies at 80:
- Everything looks fine (if not great) until the first generation born from a high fertility generation starts to die. Somebody in year 20 saying there's a major fertility crisis would probably be considered eccentric.
- A fertility rate of 'n' results in an n/2 ratio of younger:older. Fertility rate of 1 = 50% as many people in each succeeding generation that will be ultimately responsible for economically supporting the previous generation.
- By observation 2 one could recreate the entire demographic distribution of year 0. If we assume a fertility rate of e.g. 4, then it would be a ratio of 4/2 younger people per older generation. So it would be: 100 births, 50 twenties, 25 forties, 12 sixties, and 6 deaths.
- The effects are exponential with relation to our window of fertility, and not our life expectancy. From year 60 onward in the above sim, the population would drop by 50% every 20 years. All life expectancy does is add a longer period before you hit an equilibrium.
- The minimum sustainable fertility rate is 2. This would, when equally distributed, be a society where 100% of women are having an average of 2 children each. It's unclear that anything like this is obtainable in our current economic and social models.
Definitely, but they seem to be facing the 'Iran problem.' [1] In the early 90s Iran's population was exploding, and so they started on a major 'family planning' commitment, which ultimately proved too successful. In the 80s they had a fertility rate upwards of 6. By 2000, they were below replacement. And it just kept falling.
So in 2012 they understood they'd really screwed up and tried to reverse it by starting an equally hard push back towards big families. In 2012 their fertility rate was 1.89, as of 2021 it's down to 1.69. [2] China's even worse off. In 2016 their fertility rate was 1.7. It's now down to 1.08. In general it seems much easier to reduce fertility than it is to raise it.
That the West is just ignoring this is crazy, especially because in the West fertility is strongly inversely proportional to income. So not only are we failing to even sustain our population, but generational poverty is spreading like a virus.
It's helping Germany offset an ageing population and declining economic productivity. If age distribution in your population is becoming unbalanced and you can't encourage the current residents to increase the birth rate, what other option is there?
The solution is not to rely on workers to finance your schemes. Most of our economic development is captured by the wealthy.
Do you need to sustain the elderly? Have 100% wealth tax at age 60 and use it to pay equal retirement for everybody above 60. Let elderly sustain elderly.
100% too much? Ok, let's say it's only for the money above 10 million. Or 50, or 100, whatever.
I sympathize with the idea in principle, but do you really think people who are that rich will not find ways to evade the tax? Most likely they can prevent such a tax being installed at all. Money = power.
You are right of course. What I'm opposed to is when poor people (by which I mean everybody except billionaires) claim that there are no other solutions instead of saying that there are plenty of other potential solutions but billionaires won't let us have them.
I can't see where it help us declininng economic productivity. Other options: family friendly politic, better education, investments in schools, better care in schools (full day care), consistent politic where you can plan your future,....
Today we can read in the newspaper, that 25% of our children in school can not read. Elephant in the room.
If the people don't exist, they can't produce. You can make all the policy decisions you want, but the economy will stagnate if you don't have people working in fields or factories or wiring up houses. Sure, better education might make higher-value workers that produce more economic value. Providing better support for families will help people interested in having children potentially have more children and be economically productive while doing so. If your current citizens don't want to have children, then it doesn't matter.
What are companies doing: training people or just hiring externally and expecting those new hires to hit the ground running? The same strategy is applied everywhere.
Ironically, immigrants are usually net contributors (not eligible for welfare, have to work) while children are not (until they reach the age of majority).
Big difference between immigrants as the US sees them and the way Germany sees them. The US doesn't have a social safety net to speak of for immigrants, Germany does for refugees. Nobody is complaining about the Indian IT workers or EE truck drivers when they say "immigrants."
I always thought this type of argument assumes that the immigrants will magically locate and fix societal problems that lead to the decline as they integrate, and that that would be an unreasonable expectation.
Could this be saying that future dystopian megalopolises should sustain own existences by capturing free-ranged humans roaming wastelands, promise them successes and citizenships, and then letting them die without offsprings?
I don't understand why this is a problem. We are moving through demographic transition, as the world reaches its carrying capacity for human populations. So, we are safe from overpopulation crisis, from future unemployment crises, etc.
It's a problem when it happens suddenly because you end up with a 'top heavy' age distribution. The elderly pensioners:young earners ratio explodes and society security/national insurance cannot afford healthcare/pensions etc.
This is compounded by what was (until recently) a steady increase in life expectancy.
The really frustrating aspect of this is pensioners, who have traditionally huge voter turnouts during elections, are unlikely to have their benefits cut, because it would be political suicide for a party. The elderly believe they have "paid in" to their plans and deserve them, but outside of private pensions, this is usually a significant over-simplification. Instead, what will happen is the working young will need to pay for the generous promised benefits that the elderly are receiving, whilst 'paying in' for much lower benefits for themselves.
This is only disturbing for people who think human work creates the economic value we need. While in reality most of our economic value is created by machines. We don't feel it because it's mostly captured by billionaires so it seems that we still need to work as much as we used to.
So the future with less workers is just a future with poorer billionaires and they don't like that which explains why all the media owned by them are trying to scare us about againg population scenario.
It's considered a problem because the entire system, for most developed nations, implicitly relies on a specific demographic distribution.
Pension system in most world assumed steady supply of productive populace when it was set up. (=assumes certain young / old people ratio).
A lot of asset backed valuation (real estate etc) assumes certain consumption level, demand, and steady grow. So does inflation / investment / wealth management.
Healthcare systems (especially socialized) also have certain expectation on the distribution
If we just equally reduced population in the demographic distribution (same amount of % of men/women young/old) things wouldn't be as much of a problem.
But as it is, most countries would struggle with the transition. That's why it is a "problem" people's talk about; what is the least stressful transition strategy?
Our systems need revision anyways. Nothing ever happens voluntarily. So we should be kind a glad that there is outside factor that will eventually force us to revise out systems. Because laziest approach to the problem, like letting more immigrants in didn't work out that well.
The problem is that a significant part of the current world economic system is dependent on adequate supply of human labor. The declining population phase is especially painful as this will lead to a larger proportion of older people, which cannot supply the same amount of labor yet do consume the same amount of resources.
I don't think the solution should be to prop birth rates back up, necessarily, but we do need to consider how to deal with the economic consequences of this demographic transition, and I don't think any mainstream politician is currently willing to deal with a world that doesn't experience constant population growth.
Besides, having children is extremely bad regarding climate change. I personally find the argument a bit hilarious, but hey: Never forget that virtue signaling can also reduce the amount of children!
"We" can do whatever we want but if not "everyone" is doing it then the impact is fairly limited.
You would be better off having children and just consuming less than making a grave decision that impacts your whole family tree for the sake of a Humanity collective that likely will not be making the same "sacrifice".
I don't see how a two-child family is a sacrifice, really. But regardless, it seems like people have fewer children by choice as they become wealthier, have better access to education and birth control, etc.
How many families are large because the person who had to be pregnant had no real say in the matter?
Er … for those potential parents already living at the economic margins, where having a child would be a demonstrably poor decision, then just having children and consuming less would help them or their children how?
Indeed, who is to say that the perpetuation of one’s family tree is at all desirable or necessary?
Maybe the best outcome is not to play the game at all.
I believe so, yes. If birth rates continue to decline then the pool of available workers will decline, and their work will become much more valuable. At that point, workers will be making enough money to feel comfortable enough to have children again.
Exactly. I'm boggling at all these people who think that a dip is an inevitable decline and that civilisation will evaporate in a straight line without anyone ever thinking to change anything.
On the other hand there is always the possibility that we regress to a sort of feudal age, and the lords of the land require that all inhabitants produce children while surviving off of the allotted amount of rations, otherwise they face consequences.
Edit: Not only are there natural corrections that occur, there is also a lot of room for human-made "corrections". Is it ugly? Yes. Is it unfair? Yes. Will it ensure that the local economy continues to function? Yes. The vast majority of us in such a scenario would live in poverty.
(This is where I go off the deep end) Imo, the proliferation of LLM's will truly lead to massive amounts of people being displaced from meaningful work. I foresee that in the not-so-distant future "normal people" who didn't attend elite institutions (or who are otherwise not extraordinary in some sense) will only find "flesh work" available to them - i.e. prostitutes. As long as human flesh exists there will always be work for humans. It's dark, I know, but ask yourself if it's true.
Disclaimer: I find prostitution appalling and sad, but its existence is no secret. In my experience the people who are okay with it are either socially inept people who can't manage to hold down a partner, or socially competent people who are bored with their partner(s). In the latter case I wonder, why not just get a new partner? I didn't ask them about it because the answer doesn't actually matter to me. To them I say, "Do you", just as I would say to the poor souls who know no other way. Who am I to question how someone feeds their kids? I don't even have kids.
Certainly. Continuing to grow the population ad infinitum could result in a population crash that settles down at 0 people after we have pushed the world to 5C+ warming.
It actually is considering that the root cause of our environmental problems is human activity and that billions of people are still poor.
For instance, when we're told we need to eat less meat, we'll it's not so much that meat production is a problem, it's that meat production for billions of people is a problem.
So all the constraining measures we're seeing either being suggested or enforced "for the environment/climate" are constraints to fit so many people on the planet.
Similarly, there are groups who encourage people to go vegetarian or vegan for the climate, which makes some sense, but considering how few people do so long-term we might be better served by encouraging people to treat beef, dairy, etc. as a treat (or at least not something you need 365 days a year) than forgoing these things completely.
For what it's worth, I would be delighted to live on a planet of 10 billion people who have found a way to live in a way that can persist for millenia, but we don't seem to have done so. Although, living in a well-insulated flat made with renewably-grown timber (a great carbon sink!) walking and biking distance from all of my daily needs where my meagre energy needs are met with 100% renewable energy (when I lived in San Diego I worked from home and our apartment's average load was 100 Watts so this can be done!) on a mostly-vegan diet and working 20 hours per week or less sounds pretty nice to me.
I haven't said anything about "the wrong kind of people having babies" and have been pro-immigration in another comment so I don't see how this has anything to do with what I said.
Would 15 billion people be too many? 20 billion? Are we to imagine that Earth could support an infinite number of people? Because that seems like magical thinking to me. Though a different lifestyle (vegan, low energy consumption, etc.) would probably allow the current number to get by fine.
The world can sustain the current number of people many times over in terms of food supply. Indeed based on sustainable (vegetarian/vegan) food.
Talking about how many people can be sustained by earth is talking about the wrong thing. It only leads and HAS only lead to the eugenetics part. Because it's always poor people in different countries who gets sterilised.
The real topic is that capitalism and consumerism is 100% unsustainable, right from the start. That is the real debate to be had. That this world is not about human well-being and happyness, but about GDP and growth, making a tiny number of people wealthy at the expense and misery of the majority.
Unfortunately this site - Hacker News - and everything related to it, Ycombinator, Paul Graham, is only fueling the capitalist game.
If we must all become vegeterian/vegan then to me that proves that the planet is currently overpopulated. In my view a sustainable population level is one that does not require drastic measures because ultimately we want the best quality of life we can have and not live like in a dystopian movie.
Going vegetarian/vegan is about the environment, not about the number of people. Even with half of the world population, meat-based diets are unsustainable.
Why do people insist on making this an eugenics talking point?
I still don't see how my comment specifically relating to reductions in the birth rate in the US (a rich country) perhaps becoming a trend for all humans is remotely similar to sterilizing poor people in different countries.
> and gradually find equilibrium at a more sustainable population.
You talk about "sustainable population", there's nothing not to understand about this. Sustainable implies it's now unsustainable, but that notion isn't true.
It’s become popular knowledge that the way ducks mate is almost all non-consensual. Less well known is that something like 90% of all orangutan mating involves violence by the male against the female. If we ended rape among ducks, or ended sexual violence among orangutans, that would probably be the end of their species. It’s extraordinarily sad and disturbing, but for some incredibly unfortunate animals, rape and sexual violence are load-bearing pieces of their existence.
Obviously such is not the case for literal human existence, but we aren’t that far removed from orangutans; it does seem possible to me that human society (mostly invented hundreds or thousands of years ago, mostly by men with dim views on women) could have oppression of women as a load-bearing component. Some of the radical feminist thinkers in earlier waves certainly believed this was true, it was part of their argument that society needs to be completely rebuilt.
Yes, the result is obvious. As soon as you introduce feminism birthrates are tanking. This can be observed observed across the globe. Couple this with the establishment of contraceptives and acceptance of abortion you get a recipe for annihilation.
Birth rates in 2018-2020 were about equal here, NW Europe (per capita, within the margin of error) and went up afterwards. But that was not what you wanted to hear.
Why would the birth rates from 2018-2020 be relevant other than for comparative purposes?
The question I posed was specific to birth rates after people volunteered for gene therapy.
The funniest part is that it would be incredibly easy to prove whether I am right using data, so it should be equally easy to prove me wrong.
Off the top of my head, I imagine if we take places with the highest rate of coerced compliance, we should see a noticeable drop in birth rates overall as well as premature or still births as well as overall fertility rate.
So proving me wrong should be very easy to do.
You can all thank me later for volunteering to be in the placebo group.
Still running the comparison for European countries. Will come back with the data once I finish.
The two are linked. Having children is at least partly an economic choice. People have spent decades working against "teen moms" and "single parents" and "welfare queens". Everyone is very clear that you must not have children unless you can comfortably afford to do so. And not just now, that has to be enduring economic security across their childhood. Now, how many people can comfortably afford to do so?
Are the people who want others to have more children prepared to pay for it? To help make sure that enough housing and infrastructure is built for them?