It is disturbing that people take for granted that this is an economic problem. This thread is full of people lamenting the fact that we could support X times as many people as we do now if we all just sacrifice Y.
When I look around the world today, I think the biggest resource that is lacking is economic opportunity. Huge swathes of people are desperate, angry, and depressed, I think because there is no opportunity for them. The best case scenario for huge numbers of people is stagnation.
A shrinking, aging population would fix this problem. The demand for labor will go up, the supply will go down. Bad for the investor class looking for profits, good for reducing economic inequality. People will be able to profit from labor again.
The techno utopian solution of allocating everyone a 20 m^2 apartment, a vr headset, and 1500 calories of soylent per day is going to be a disaster unless you also allocate everyone some future drugs to keep them sedated.
I do believe it is an economic problem, in that people are not secure in their job, housing, and life enough to bring new people into it.
Think Maslow's wotsit of needs. And I think back on where I grew up, what my parents did; they got married early 20's, and were financially secure enough in blue-collar jobs to afford a house twice the size of the one I managed to finally buy at age 32. With that house and the luxury of being able to make ends meet on a single income, they were able to raise three kids.
Meanwhile nowadays a lot of people have to work their ass off just to keep afloat. You can't have a healthy relationship if you don't have the time or energy for it, you can't raise kids in a shitty shared apartment, you shouldn't have kids if you can't take care of them because you have to work.
This is the main reason I never want kids. I'm just not sure I'll ever be secure enough while young enough to really care for them. Student loans being the main killer; if I could get rid of them and buy a house, things might be different.
But, more than that, I'm also not sure if I'll ever be secure enough to make sure they're secure in the future that seems inevitably coming, with regards to global warming, etc. I just feel it isn't responsible currently.
Having kids took us from “will retire comfortably, probably early, without seriously having to sacrifice for it” to “uh, might retire only a little late, somewhat comfortably, with great effort and luck?” We’re also at much greater risk, financially. On both counts healthcare costs/risks are a big part of why (lost wages and direct costs for childcare are are #1 on the cost side, though). Friggin’ American healthcare system.
I also had/have reservations for the same reason before having children. If I didn’t pair up with another high earner, I would not have tried to have children, as I believe the labor market is too volatile.
I also would have wanted to spare them the effects of climate change/societal turbulence, but partner wanted kids so I said sure, but I wonder if that was the right call sometimes.
In India, student loans have mainly been in demand from people seeking an MS degree in the US. But things are changing, and education is getting more expensive across the board, and I do worry about my kids. My immediate reaction right now is to save enough fuck-you money for my kids so that they don't have to get into the education rat race at all. I don't know how that will work, if at all, but that's the best I can do. If they choose to spend the money I saved on expensive degrees, I hope collectively as a family, we know what we are getting into.
> The demand for labor will go up, the supply will go down. Bad for the investor class looking for profits, good for reducing economic inequality. People will be able to profit from labor again.
I'm not so sure about that.
Loads of wealth is consolidated at the top, both in terms of economic class and age. People who got their jobs and attained management positions after barely graduating high school are demanding bachelor's or master's degrees for jobs that will barely pay rent. Landowners bought up when it was cheap and refuse to lower prices or sell for below what they think it's worth, even going as far as evicting people during a pandemic, knowing full well those units might not be filled in months or years, if ever. Some young people will get to a point where they can buy stuff up and work their way up the ladder, but there will be plenty more people who have it all given to them by those who established themselves when it was easier. I don't expect the next generation to be any more compassionate.
There are already endless reports of there being insufficient workers for agricultural jobs, nursing, teachers, etc. Wages haven't risen to meet the demand. They've remained stagnant or dropped in the long term. Meanwhile, those at the top are richer than ever.
Wealth at the top is often created by rent seeking. Just extracting money without actually making anything. I'm pretty confident that if the number of workers dropped and demand for labor increased, they'd just squeeze harder. Shut out the ones who didn't make it and terrify the ones who've managed to hold a job about the possibilities of what'll happen should they quit.
People are already getting paid more being unemployed. Employers are trying to get people to work for them again while offering them less than unemployment pays. They're not even trying to compete because they know people are going to come desperately crawling back.
I think we need to ask ourselves why some of those things are the case.
Why are the same jobs requiring higher levels of education now than they did in the past? If you've worked these jobs you know they don't require anything past a highschool education.
Why is housing seen as something that must constantly increase in value? It doesn't, we've been through housing bubbles but people still cling to this belief and continue to pump air into the bubbles with speculation based on it. If you've owned a home you know that it is a constant sink for money just to maintain its existing state let alone what it costs to upgrade it to modern standards as it ages.
What is driving people away from the sectors you mentioned? Is it only lack of pay? Why are we not funding these sectors when they are so essential to the functioning of our society? Where is the existing funding going, specifically whose pockets does it wind up in?
Why don't employers offer higher wages? Are they really being greedy or are their profits going to something else like rent or other business costs?
I don't think this is entirely to be laid at the feet of the richest members of society. Yes they protect their own interests but all of us are responsible for ensuring that our communities continue to function and improve. We've neglected that responsibility, we've all collectively failed. We all have to work together to fix this, blaming one group or the other will solve nothing.
"Why are we not funding these sectors when they are so essential to the functioning of our society? Where is the existing funding going, specifically whose pockets does it wind up in?"
Because there is no capitalist imperative to keep people alive. If investors and landowners can't make any money producing food, then no food will be produced beyond that which is needed to feed the investors and landowners.
> There are already endless reports of there being insufficient workers for agricultural jobs, nursing, teachers, etc. Wages haven't risen to meet the demand. They've remained stagnant or dropped in the long term. Meanwhile, those at the top are richer than ever.
Who do you think is responsible for those reports? It's employers who have enough labor for now, but foresee a more competitive labor market in the future & don't want to have to raise wages.
> People are already getting paid more being unemployed. Employers are trying to get people to work for them again while offering them less than unemployment pays. They're not even trying to compete because they know people are going to come desperately crawling back.
People don't eternally just walk around in blind terror of being unemployed, irrespective of the labor market. If the labor market gets tight, economics and history indicate that wages will adjust.
It's not actually that unusual for a country to have a shrinking population. Italy, Croatia, Lithuania, and a few other central and Eastern European countries currently have declining populations, as does Japan, some due to ageing and a drop in fertility and some due to that plus emigration. Economically and socially they've not entered into the death spiral some people seem to think will happen and are actually doing alright. Countries with declining populations due to war, economic collapse etc. are a different matter but in those cases the decline in population is a symptom not a cause. The transition to a shrinking world population will happen gradually over a period of decades and at different times in different areas of the works giving us plenty of time to for economic and social structures to adapt to deal with it. If it were to happen over night we would be in trouble but it won't.
It's a question of degree. I think the article is kinda hand-wringy, but not incorrect in the attention they're giving to orders of magnitude. You've got to remember that if a country like Spain halves in population, that's a colossal shift from A to B, to the extent that each decade will feel like a fairly major leap on its own. I don't think it'll be a death spiral, but it'll definitely absorb resources that otherwise could be directed to advancements, rather than preventing retrenchments. And that's assuming the rate of change doesn't cause nonlinear effects of its own.
Also, if Spain halves, it may well be that other countries shrink even further. You've also got to wonder about the distribution of old folk: some countries will end up with far more extreme distributions than others, but what I suspect we'll find is that, just as there's a quality of life level above which the reproduction rate decreases, there'll be a population level below which the quality of life decreases, so it'll self-correct.
We haven't even seen this scenario play out yet. I'm from the region and I don't think it will turn into some Fallout-type scenario, but I think it will definitely impact the well-being of all citizens in these countries, some 20-30 years from now. It's hard to say yet if/how these countries will recover.
I live in Croatia. Its population has been shrinking since 1991. Almost 30 years of unchecked population decline and it's still not an apocalyptic hellhole.
In spite of entrenched corruption and other issues, standards of living and wages have gone up, even as the government does everything it can to destroy nascent industry and chase that tourism nickle.
The more old people die, the more domestic opportunity there is for the younger generation, and the lower the tax burden on young workers.
Honestly, I'm not sure population decline is something Croatia can afford to "recover from".
Those aren't related. I'm from Romania, which has:
1. A higher population population than Croatia.
2. Higher emigration than Croatia.
3. A lower fertility rate than Croatia.
And yes, the economy is going up despite people becoming old, dying, or just leaving the country. But the reason for that is temporary, it's because Croatia, just like Romania, is still a developing country, you're converting low productivity workers to higher productivity ones.
But how long do you think this can last? What happens when active people are 1/3rd of the population or less and there are no more easy gains to be had?
I just said that things won't look like in Fallout, so why are you even mentioning "apocalyptic hellhole"?
A country doesn't lose 20% or more of its population without major changes happening. It's extremely optimistic to hope that there won't be at least some major negative changes.
> What happens when active people are 1/3rd of the population or less and there are no more easy gains to be had?
Old people retire, opening up jobs for younger workers. Old people die, freeing up housing stock and capital and tax money. And these will happen long before Croatia or Romania achiever maximum productivity. There's plenty of fat left to be trimmed.
As long as the sustained rate of youth emigration is below the mortality rate -- or marginally higher while the country continues to develop -- conditions should improve for working age people (ignoring the chaos of politics).
But perhaps I'm misunderstanding your implication or just not thinking this through. Could you elaborate on some of the negatives?
I’m also from Croatia...we actually had population growth in early nineties and we are losing more people to emigration rather than natural decline.
It’s myopic to think that population decline doesn’t harm us. It puts rural areas in vicious cycle of losing population -> smaller economic base -> losing population due to no economic opportunities.
Also cohort of women able to give birth declines even faster thus preventing any future recovery.
I live in a small town that is almost 1700 years old. Something is very wrong if we are unable to maintain or grow our population while living in unprecedented luxury and wealth compared to historical norms.
We're unable to grow our population largely because of that unprecedented wealth. Children are no longer seen as an insurance policy, and young people are better educated, choosier about their partners, and more likely to utilize birth control.
I agree that it is sad that rural areas continue to die out -- I live in an island, so I feel this keenly -- but objectively, is that such a bad thing?
Communities don't have an innate right to exist in perpetuity, and it would be an unsustainable resource nightmare if we tried to keep them all alive.
After all, it's because of rural flight that we have huge tracts of natural parks like Velebit. That's a resource that enriches the commons, even if it came at the cost of some individual welfare. It's also vastly better for the planet.
But I feel I'm missing something. What are some more of the downsides?
We have a good enough understanding of capitalism to know that the average person will not benefit from a shrinking labour pool. You have no clue just how devastating a shrinking population would be to an economy where the real average wage hasn't increased in 40 year.
The black death didn't discriminate and wiped out people of all social statuses equally. It upset power balances rapidly.
Barring absolute chaos, people can generally plan for years and decades from now. Declining population is something we all know is coming. Those with wealth will, for the most part, hold onto it. Those born into wealth will, for the most part, hold onto it. Japan is always mentioned as the prime example of declining population in these threads, and while the population is declining and demand for labor is increasing, wages are not rising but poverty is. Maybe it'll change 10 or 20 years from now, but the trend is downwards for the average person.
That's true but I think which bit of the population remains matters.
The demographic impact of a plague is pretty much the exact opposite of economic flight. In a plague the fittest and healthiest survive and are unencumbered by the elderly and unfit, but in a demographic flight the fittest and healthiest leave. Similarly in a birth rate collapse the demographics shift towards the elderly and away from the young and fit.
So change the economic system? The balls to the wall neoliberal, winner takes all, no safety net model that the Anglo American world has been moving towards for the past thirty years is not the only one. The Anglo American post war consensus model which was more redistributory correlated with higher growth rates (not saying it caused them, kinda hard to tell) while the Northern European corporatist, Scandinavian mixed model and Japanese corporatist models have all been successful in both creating economic growth and distributing that wealth more evenly amongst the population. It has always entertained me that the one thing that the average Marxist and neo liberal share is a belief that there is only one type of capitalism.
But neither the Northern European nor Japanese models can cope with negative real growth in consumption. Nor negative real growth in savings.
There is a fundamental issue in capitalism that there must always be growth. Without growth, the entire concept of investment breaks down and the business cycle cannot continue. You could totally replace it with something that isn't capitalism, but that's not a small endeavor and won't happen without massive conflict.
Our current reality is that if the population shrinks significantly, there is a good likelihood that will happen.
> There are already endless reports of there being insufficient workers for agricultural jobs, nursing, teachers, etc. Wages haven't risen to meet the demand. They've remained stagnant or dropped in the long term. Meanwhile, those at the top are richer than ever.
Insufficient/shrinking supply of a good, but prices going down instead of up? What economics are in play here?
Inelastic demand and cartel behavior. People require jobs to survive; survival is an inelastic good; businesses know this; they work together to suppress wages to as close to subsistence level as possible.
> The techno utopian solution of allocating everyone a 20 m^2 apartment, a vr headset, and 1500 calories of soylent per day is going to be a disaster unless you also allocate everyone some future drugs to keep them sedated.
I don't know if you live in California, but I think that there's sort of a reality distortion field that comes with living in a big and expensive city.
Here in Georgia the rents are cheap and people seem to be moderately satisfied. A little money goes a long way. You can own acres of land dirt cheap and do with it whatever you want.
I grew up in Georgia (metro suburbs and later GT in Atlanta) and moved to the Bay Area two years ago. Georgia offers a very nice quality of life at a great price, but in my opinion the Bay Area has it beat in absolute terms on just about everything except friendliness: food, weather, nature, jobs, art, culture, proximity to other interesting places (further drive but more interesting when you get there), universities, international diversity. I’m not trying to disparage Georgia — in fact I’m currently attempting to relocate there as a remote worker for my current company to be closer to family since we just had our first child. But I really can’t think of a whole lot about my time living in Georgia that I prefer over living in the Bay Area except that my family happens to be there and all of the great memories I have of growing up with them.
The Bay Area part of that comment is a redherring - yes it's a popular destination here on HN but there are much more financially accessible areas in California that bring 90-99% of the same climate, cultural benefits, and metropolitan amenities as SF like the San Diego, Los Angeles, and Orange counties. I think the most unique things SF has for the general population is mass transit and walkability, which is a real crapshoot in the rest of the state.
In San Diego, for example, you can buy a 2+ acre property with a decent house that's 20-40 minutes away from the beach and downtown with all the operas, sportsball, and meetups/events you could want, excellent weather year round, and still be a part of the 5th largest economy in the world, only a few hours drive from Los Angeles or short flight to SF. It's not as cheap as Georgia but it's not San Francisco: the aforementioned exurban property can be had for half a million which would also get you a decent townhouse somewhere in the suburbs of Los Angeles or Orange county. There are a lot more plumbers, teachers, accountants, out here with property than there are engineers in SF - and they receive 80%+ of the benefits of California with only 20% of the hassle.
>food, weather, nature, jobs, art, culture, proximity to other interesting places (further drive but more interesting when you get there), universities, international diversity
With a little either self-starting or help from the local authorities, there's no reason another town/city/state couldn't have these unless there is such destitution it's in some kind of death spiral.
Every place has it's own niche, their own culture, and not to put the blame on you but too many people go "I'll move to a place that is already nice" and escape trying to build up where they come from or another small place.
And don't get me wrong, it would take more than an individual or a small group to turn a place around and you may be genuinely moving away from an unfixable, bad situation, but too many people I graduated with from high school/college think everyone needs to pile on the Golden Coast to make it and live an enjoyable life.
But maybe I'm curmudgeonly and a little antisocial even at 23.
I didn’t move away from a bad situation at all. I liked living in Georgia. It’s just that I like living in the Bay Area better.
Also, one of the major reasons I like Redwood City is the almost constant sunshine and moderate temperatures. That has a really positive effect on my mood, especially during the winter. There’s no way to get that in the southeast short of altering the climate.
Who wants to live in Georgia though? I mean this unironically, there's not much to do in terms of entertainment and opportunities for a young 20 yo vs LA or NY
I know Americans on the internet usually view their country with rose-shaded glasses but this comment has to take the price. I don't know the number, don't think anyone does, but off the people I know, 100% would never want to move to any state in the US. Probably the real number of people wanting to immigrate to the US is closer to 0% than 100%.
It doesn't really make sense to try to pinpoint an exact number, but I think you are right in answering to another subtly different question: the real people that would move, given just the opportunity, and nothing more. E.g. my grandmother would not move, most non-white people would face racial difficulties there that might not be present in their home country and would not consider moving, a lawyer might not be able to maintain a bar status there, etc.
But if you read your parent post caritatively, and the context to which it is responding, they are discussing just location - so the implicit question is more of "would a random world citizen complain about moving to Georgia, in the conditions that a US citizen would move (belonging to society, job prospects, no issues with recognition of citizenship, education, job experience, no language issues, etc. etc.)". He is just answering to the dismissal of the Georgia standard of living.
So yeah, answering to that second question, and speaking as a western european, I do think that most (more than 50%) of my acquaintances would take the chance (I think this because most barriers would be being far from friends and family and language issues, but following the spirit of the initial complaint, we are talking about an american who already lives probably far away from friends and family, in LA or NY). Obviously this is also just opinion and I did not run a poll, but I thought the rose-shaded glasses thing was a red herring.
The people you know are almost certainly not representative of the world at large. Maybe 80% is a bit high, but the number is certainly over 50%. The median global person earns less than $3000/year.
> The people you know are almost certainly not representative of the world at large
Yeah, most certainly.
> The median global person earns less than $3000/year
What does that have to do with anything? In plenty of places you can easily survive and have a good time with $3000/year, so not sure where or how this is relevant.
And how you get the "certainly over 50%" number from? You happen to be American too?
Perhaps, but that's not really relevant since the vast majority of people do not live in well functioning democracies.
Your post sounds like an assumption like "the people who live in war are a small minority so their position is an exception compared to humanity in general" when actually it's the opposite, the people who live in the well functioning first world democracies are a small minority so their position is an exception compared to humanity in general.
Yes, the leaders of USSR could do that and did just that, but I don't understand what this has got to do with any challenges to the original assertion that large quantities of people worldwide would be "very grateful to relocate to Georgia" - they would be. At the moment despite all the immigration restrictions that USA has implemented, the Green Card queue indicates a mass willingness to become residents of USA.
It's not about boasting, it's about whether USA can rely on people wanting to immigrate to ensure that places like Georgia stay sufficiently populated even if population naturally declines - and IMHO they can.
15% of the world wants to move to another country. Of those, 20% want to move to the United States, the most desired location. The second most desired destination is Canada with 6%. More stats here: https://news.gallup.com/poll/245255/750-million-worldwide-mi...
One wonders who is wearing the reality-distorting glasses on HN. ;)
Isn't Atlanta a major metropolitan city? I would assume that many of the same opportunities present in LA or NY wold be available there. I live in Portland, OR and there are tons of 20 year olds here and we are a very very tiny city.
The Atlanta metropolitan area is home to more than 6 million people and is the ninth-largest metropolitan area in the nation. Portland is located in the 25th.
Sure, but 25th largest city in the US is not "very very tiny". I grew up in a township of 4k people. That would be what I consider very very tiny. I was nearby a city of 30k people. I considered it a decently large city.
You're right, but the point is that Atlanta is overall larger than Portland in terms of being a major metropolitan area. The original post was talking about ATL's largeness and number of opportunities for youth.
I can drive around the entirety of downtown Portland in about 5-10 minutes (depending on traffic). It would take at least an hour to drive around downtown Atlanta.
As someone that lives there let me tell you there is no "downtown" Atlanta. There is a neighborhood called Downtown, but it's one of three (four, or maybe even five, depending on who you ask) major, dense business and retail districts in the city limits, and even more in the suburbs. And yeah, would take you about an hour to hit all of them. Probably more with traffic.
It's a very polycentric city. Kind of throws people off when they first come here.
and LOL at the guy saying "no one wants to live in Georgia." This is what happens when you don't ever leave the Bay.
The 5 and 405 around downtown Portland can be driven in under 10 minutes under ideal circumstances.
Also, your google map link for Portland is bizarre. I honestly have no idea what that route is supposed to represent. It definitely isn’t any route someone would take who was trying to circle downtown Portland.
Both of those routes are trying to contain the tall buildings inside and the single family homes outside. If you expand the route I drew around Atlanta very much in any direction you start to include single family homes.
285 around Atalanta encloses forests and suburbs, a lot more than just downtown.
Anecdote I was told, shows how quickly cities can grow into metroplexes.
Back when Interstate 285 was built, it was a 2 lane road out in the middle of nowhere for the truckers going from Florida north to be able to bypass Atlanta traffic.
Kids could play hopscotch for multiple minutes to hours before moving off to the let the singular car go by.
285 was the orbit of pluto, separating sleepy suburbs from the great flyover nothingness that people ascribe to the empty swathes of, say, Nevada (?).
Nowadays, 285 is more like going from outer core of earth to inner core. Moving from 285s westernmost terminus further west, the analogy of Pluto's orbit is more like Carrollton GA.
Atlanta the city is small. Atlanta as natives know it is large.
Dallas-Forth Worth TX is a twin sister in terms of growth rate but also bigger on an absolute scale.
There's a burgeoning film industry (well, at least there was before COVID hit pause on it), thriving nightlife, beaches... a pretty big tech sector in Alpharetta (northern suburb of ATL)... lots of opportunities for Black creators (and creators of all colors obviously) and individuals as there's a lot of existing infrastructure for people who want to get started in music, film, arts, entrepreneurship, et. It's only a red state because of voter suppression, which is a topic for another day, but that's the truth.
The fact that people on this forum don't really know what the world looks like outside of the Bay Area and Boston is concerning. God forbid someone ever describe Illinois the way you just described Georgia. Hordes of angry Chicagoans with deep dish from Giordano's are gonna flood this thread.
Giordano's is crap. Lou Malnati's is where it's at.
Seriously, though: First chance we got, the wife and I fled Chicago. Great hospitality, fun culture and reasonable diversity (for the Midwest), but the weather is awful but for two decent weeks per year (aka "spring" and "fall"), the lake is disgusting, two centuries of unchecked industrialization have made the place a gigantic Superfund site, and the lack of unspoiled nature is disconcerting.
People's needs differ. We left a lot of very good friends behind who adore the place and have no need for mountains, streams, oceans, beaches, wilderness, etc.
I see this idea here in several places. Effectively "more money = more kids"
There is ZERO evidence that's the case. In fact all evidence points to the opposite. The more money people have the less likely they are to have children.
I'm not suggesting that we should therefore lower people's incomes. Only suggesting that the idea that his has anything do with lacking economic opportunity has zero basis in fact.
The richer a country gets, the less kids they have, period.
To put in another way, let's wonder if we lived in a post scarcity society and everyone had all they needed and more. Would the birth rate explode? Would it go up a bunch? Would it hit the replacement level? I suppose it's all speculation but my reading of the data it is would not hit the replacement level.
Basically, for whatever reason, people that are well educated and well off want children less than those that don't for whatever reason.
The “more money == more kids” hypothesis comes from the observation that women are typically having fewer kids than they reportedly want to have, implying that something is holding them back from having the number of kids they want.
In places like America, the cost of childcare is commonly pointed to. However this phenomenon is common enough across multiple countries with different labor arrangements that I genuinely doubt its just the cost.
Adam Smith mentions explicitly in 1776 how "women of stature tire after having 2 or 3 children, if any at all. Poor women have up to 20" (couldn't find the literal quote).
> Huge swathes of people are desperate, angry, and depressed, I think because there is no opportunity for them.
As a slight digression, mental health is particularly dire because culturally we have not learned how to advance it yet. Mental health is not given the same reverence as physical health.
It's common sense more or less that you need to drink water, eat healthy food, get good sleep, get exercise. Some people don't do it, but it's well known that you should.
What do you do for mental health? Take some time off occasionally? There is simply not an equivalent body of knowledge as what is needed for physical healthiness.
If the industrial revolution made food abundant and jobs sedentary such that obesity is a problem, the information revolution made similar problems for mental health- but we don't spread awareness because being depressed or anxious isn't as visible as being obese.
IMO, as someone who has struggled with mental health problems throughout my life, the needs of good mental health are pretty easy to understand but extremely difficult to achieve.
Good mental health comes from feeling loved and needed and having a purpose in life. Love can come from one person or a community but it's absolutely essential. Having a purpose and feeling needed are as important as having the time and energy to feel like you're living up to these obligations.
I feel like the idea of communities has all but been broken down. Similarly with purpose. Simply working to achieve more comfort doesn't seem to be a fulfilling purpose. Most people work just to get by without any sense of what they're doing is important. People are generally made to feel replaceable and powerless.
I have no idea how to solve these problems as I feel like they are fundamental problems of our society. How can you feel necessary when you compare yourself to billions of others instead of 100s? How do you feel connected to other people when you don't even know your neighbors?
I can tell you what I try to do for myself. First, I make sure I'm being healthy. I get enough sleep, exercise regularly, and cook a large portion of my meals. I try to prioritize my relationships with other people over work. Within my work, I left software to start a company that made me feel more connected with the people benefiting from my work. I still struggle with mental health a lot but when I look at where my life was 10 years ago to now, I feel a much deeper sense of fulfillment.
IMO, purpose in life as motivation to live is a double edged sword. It motivates someone for sure, but when he/she lost the very purpose, depression comes, even suicidal thoughts.
Which is why I like the concept of Dukkha in Buddhist, that knowing how meaningless I am can make me enjoy life more and not caring too much unimportant things, such as comparing myself with billionaires.
For me, purpose comes from my impact on other people. Is it positive? Does my existence lower the suffering of others?
I don't think purpose should be comparative.
I'm not very familiar with Buddhism so I appreciate you sharing. For philosophy, I tend to look more at Stoicism. What I take away from Stoicism as it relates to purpose, is that how you live your life is more important than the things you accomplish. Living a virtuous life can be a purpose onto itself.
To add to that, even if we can technically support a lot more people with the sustainable resources we have, which I personally doubt, getting close to our max capacity means we will have zero wiggle room when things go wrong. With climate change accelerating and guaranteed to cause drastic changes to our environment, a lot of things will go wrong at the same time.
The analogy I like is your income/spending ratio. Yes, you can technically spend 100% of your income, or even >100% with debt. But if you choose to live like that, then when you get laid off, or get sick/disabled, or divorced, or forced to start caring for a relative, or have your house burn down, then all of a sudden what's already a major emergency is exacerbated by financial issues.
Decreasing our population now is like increasing our savings rate. We know difficult times are coming. Fewer people will only help us navigate the transition more humanely and equitably. Not only is this true from a macro/global scale, but also a micro/family scale where it's obvious that having more kids than you can afford or have time to raise is its own kind of cruelty.
Anyway, if you're choosing to have kids, one is enough. The real winners adopt.
Meh. The continuation of the species is more important than some silly desire to mix my own DNA into a new human. A kind of corollary to the Gay Uncle theory.
I also consider the memes > genes in terms of leaving a legacy. Shaping a kid's mindset doesn't require them to share half of your genes.
I can appreciate the idea that one's work can (potentially) function as a superior alternative to children, with respect to legacy. In general, I'm all for elevating the rational part of Human mind. On the other hand, I think it's dangerous to describe the reproductive priorities of the "primitive" mind as a "silly desire". To put it more concretely, imagine a husband who has just learned that the children he's dedicated years of financial, emotional, and educational support are not his own. Imagine the gamut of emotions that cross his mind: anger/hatred toward his wife's deception; the humiliation that comes from being deceived; the conflict that comes from both loving the children, yet despising them for what they represent. How do you think that man would respond if you told him that his feelings were the consequence of a "silly desire". It's all well and good to have a world with gay uncles that support their nephews and nieces; but somebody's gotta make those nephews and nieces.
> A shrinking, aging population would fix this problem. The demand for labor will go up, the supply will go down. Bad for the investor class looking for profits, good for reducing economic inequality. People will be able to profit from labor again.
An economy exists to fulfill human needs of various kinds-- making stuff, providing services, etc. Old people intensively consume (medical services, etc) and don't produce anymore. Getting too high of a ratio of old people therefore has some impacts beyond equilibrium labor prices.
>Why do peasants in Africa have more children than Lawyers in New York
Because below a certain agricultural productivity level having more kids is actually beneficial for your economic success. Once you get over a certain productivity level it makes sense to have fewer kids and invest in them moving up the economic ladder.
>Builders in Arkensas have more kids than tech workers in San Francisco?
Because the cost of every warm body in a household in SF is completely asinine so people have fewer kids than they would like to.
I was assuming you knew that your comparison of a builder in Arkansas or a programmer in SF was intended to be a comparison of two people not at the top of the income ladder but reasonably financially secure.
Poor people everywhere have more kids than richer people in the same places because various welfare programs make the net cost of each kid less. There's also a massive cost cliff once you get below the threshold at which parents have enough income to justify saving for their kids college.
That doesn't mean family sizes aren't smaller in high cost areas. This is a well known trend.
I posted anecdotes to contextualise the trend. I don't really think there's much point in getting hung up on them because my point is: poor people have more kids, on average, and this trend holds pretty much everywhere. The real question is: what is it about being rich that causes you to have less kids?
>what is it about being rich that causes you to have less kids?
Are we talking locally rich or globally rich?
People in industrialized (rich) nations don't have tons of kids because that's not how you get ahead in that kind of economy. Subsistence farmers have tons of kids because that's how they get ahead economically.
Within richer nations richer people have fewer kids because the way social safety nets and social expectations of how one should raise one's kids make kids more expensive the higher up you go.
I understand that the real reason is Women’s education. The more education a woman has the more life options she has. Uneducated women have lots of kids, educated women tend to have fewer.
"it's in the very poorest places that you're going to have a tripling in population ... it's amazingly as children survive, parents feel like they'll have enough kids to support them in their old age. And so they choose to have less children."
I actually don't agree with that diagnosis. I think the very poorest people genuinely can't access contraception. Once you get above a fairly low level and the pill becomes affordable, something else becomes the bigger factor.
I just don't buy that very poor people ration out sex under a precise calculation of how many kids they want. Doesn't fit my observations of how humans behave. Most people fuck because they're horny, or because their husband is horny and they need his support to survive, or frankly because they're so poor they have to sell themselves. HIV is a bigger risk than not having children in old age, most Africans know that, but that doesn't stop it either.
Poor people beget more poor people. That's the economic data point right there.
The reason peasants in Africa have more children is manifold: from religion and lack of knowledge preventing contraception to outright necessity, because in these regions child labour is a thing.
A for developed countries: again, multiple reasons with religion still being right up there.
You can't just draw a parallel between a poor agricultural worker and a New York Lawyer, because obviously there are a thousand confounding factors, anything from education to where is the nearestvdoctor, so general stavility of the country.
> A shrinking, aging population would fix this problem. The demand for labor will go up, the supply will go down.
An ageing population likely consumes less. The demand for goods will go down and the demand for labor will likely remain constant for a shrinking workforce. Asset prices will crash if future demand does not keep up with current valuations. This is not just bad for the investor class, this is bad for anyone who relies on the modern banking and financial systems.
Fewer children increases unequality. Less children means, that inheritance does not spread across several people. To the contrary, it consolidates within an ever shrinking size of the population. And because as of today it's capital ownership and not work that makes you rich (with few exceptions), higher demand for work might not be enough to offset this development.
> A shrinking, aging population would fix this problem. The demand for labor will go up, the supply will go down. Bad for the investor class looking for profits, good for reducing economic inequality. People will be able to profit from labor again.
There is historical evidence of this, like consequences of the Black Death:
"Another notable consequence of the Black Death was the raising of the real wage of England (due to the shortage of labour as a result of the reduction in population), a trait shared across Western Europe, which in general led to a real wage in 1450 that was unmatched in most countries until the 19th or 20th century. The higher wages for workers combined with sinking prices on grain products led to a problematic economic situation for the gentry."
I'm not yet convinced the uneven distribution of economic opportunity is due to a fundamental shortage of opportunity. It reminds me of the food shortages in African states embroiled in conflict- there is enough food, but it is not distributed. A significant question of our time is how we might bring economic opportunity to distressed regions. The idea of remote work from rural areas is a simple conceptual example; increasing access to markets for isolated farmers is another.
> A shrinking, aging population would fix this problem. The demand for labor will go up, the supply will go down. Bad for the investor class looking for profits, good for reducing economic inequality. People will be able to profit from labor again.
Growing populations can also reduce wealth inequality and lessen the importance of inherited wealth. These are complicated issues, to be sure.
There is a lot of empty space on earth even before we start terraforming deserts or building floating cities, or colonizing other planets. So the malthusian fearmongering that we are all going to die due to lack of resources is simply false. Having X times more people doesn't lead to us sacrificing anything but to producing 2^X more art and sciense. Even for such a simple example as youtube videos, if population is reduced by half, majority of people who make living by producing videos will lose half of heir income, and will stop producing videos. Developing new cpus will become much harder because research cost would stay the same, and demand would be cut in half. Moreover drastic reduction of population in the parts of world that produce most of our science would put under question even the ability to maintain the technologies we have now.
Plenty of space, yes, but in zones where you don't have to worry about natural disaster seasons, or ridiculous supply chain issues (I'm thinking southwest US for water)? NE is no cakewalk in the winter but we generally don't have to worry about a hurricane decimating a whole city.
As far as production, remember the automation issue as well as the fact that, well, more content is great perhaps in smaller communities, but think of the absolute firehose the Internet is and how many creatives would want to be able to sustain off of a consistent fanbase at at least an average salary. If more (or everyone) becomes a Youtuber, does that itself reduce who is watching the vids, reduces payouts because of the sheer amount of content, and lead to a scarcity? AND MORE IMPORTANTLY: Is too much of the same type of thing being created (e.g., people used to one Nicki Minaj probably think it's great to have Saweetie and Meg Thee Stallion, but what if they get their own copycats/spinoff artists? Too much of the same thing at once?) I'm assuming economically both our scenarios would adjust to views in an increase/decrease in population.
Also throwing more people at the science situation doesn't necessarily help if we aren't training quality people in the field and resort to degree factories. Think about the sheer number of papers being published nowadays. I assume it is hard for them to keep up and who knows how much more bad science (or disinformation in general) would occur then.
Follow up to the scarcity mentality for creatives: I realized not everyone makes it, and there are varying shades of grey to that. But does that lead to more job stress on non-creative "day jobs" if people have to give up on the creative jobs? Everyone with their fifteen minutes of fame...if it is literally everyone. We already see that a bit with Youtube artists. At any given time there are a handful of big name rappers (or musicians in general) for instance, but how many lesser-knowns would love to continue doing this but can't financially?
> A shrinking, aging population would fix this problem. The demand for labor will go up, the supply will go down. Bad for the investor class looking for profits, good for reducing economic inequality. People will be able to profit from labor again.
Except in terms of pure economics, labor won’t necessarily become more valuable, because with less population there will be less consumption and less demand for goods. So even though the dwindling supply of labor will have an upward effect on labor’s value, the dwindling demand for goods will have a counteracting downward effect. And this will only be exacerbated by increased automation.
Economic inequality and lack of economic opportunity is going to be a problem regardless of the population growth rate, and the solution will require something more substantial than simply have less/more children.
The point about it being an aging population is that the proportion of consumers to producers will change. The demand for goods might shrink as an absolute value, but the demand for labour should increase more, as a higher proportion of the population just can't work. In addition, part of the demand which increases will be for forms of labour that we currently don't have an automation plan for.
To balance out the automation question, it's just as likely that technical advances will improve the ability of older people to do economically useful work that they want to do. There's a lot of mental horsepower, life experience, and will there, if you can work around physical and metabolic limitations.
> When I look around the world today, I think the biggest resource that is lacking is economic opportunity. Huge swathes of people are desperate, angry, and depressed, I think because there is no opportunity for them. The best case scenario for huge numbers of people is stagnation.
> A shrinking, aging population would fix this problem. The demand for labor will go up, the supply will go down. Bad for the investor class looking for profits, good for reducing economic inequality. People will be able to profit from labor again.
To a large extent, that lack of economic opportunity is a political choice that was made by the selection of particular parameters for the economic system. Trying to engineer a shrinking population to force different parameters to be chosen is an indirect way of addressing the true problem.
> A shrinking, aging population would fix this problem. The demand for labor will go up, the supply will go down.
What leads you to believe demand for labor will rise with a shrinking population? Furthermore, why wouldn't most companies simply continue automating? While Japan certainly isn't comparable to most western nations, it's certainly a good example of the potential downsides of a shrinking, aging population. A growing one isn't possible forever, either; it will eventually level out. We've just been innovating so quickly our population hasn't had time to reach a new equilibrium.
I live in a small studio apartment in a city, don’t do drugs, and don’t have a VR headset. I’m very happy even when working from home, the two things that bother me the most are fear of losing my job and fear of losing my girlfriend.
Maybe some people aren’t happy without having a yard? There are plenty of plants around here though and there’s an entire block that’s left as just trees and grass for people to walk around in. Maybe without that I’d feel the same way.
A shrinking, aging population would in no way make this better. It would make it worse.
Aging societies spend more on healthcare, have a smaller working base, and typically don’t have the kind of growth that makes it easy to borrow money to invest in new things. The typical result is slow economic growth, high taxes, and low levels of services for workers.
Why would demand for labor go up in a society with a shrinking population? Both the labor market and the consumer market draw from the general population - so I would think that a shrinking population would cause both to decrease. The net per capita effect would be for things to stay the same.
I'm largely with you. I'm a bit annoyed with the BBC on this article. It seems like just last week overpopulation was a big problem. Now we are "ill-prepared for the global crash" and there will be a "jaw-dropping impact". Oy. No wonder people feel anxious.
> A shrinking, aging population would fix this problem. The demand for labor will go up, the supply will go down.
In the short term, absolutely. But after a generation, the old working population has retired and the smaller new working population cannot support them.
Did you read the story all the way through? If we're going to live in a world dominated by AI/Automation it presents a compelling alternative to the current path.
Pretty sad how this lie has propagated and caused so much misery and frankly mental disorders. Theres no better time to be born than today, period. All the rest are ravings of a madman.
This is the point I was about to make, but you've put it better than me.
As the traditional factory job disappears more and more, the aging population will provide a huge source of new caring/support jobs. We'll have to find a way to pay them a living wage, but then we had that problem with factory jobs in the early industrial revolution too.
The problem is care-jobs are incredibly low productivity.
The reason a worker today is paid more than 100 years ago is, essentially, just that they can produce/transact with more people at once.
A nurse "should" be paid what they were 100 years ago, as the number of transactions hasn't changed. The only reason they aren't is due to competition from productive sectors.
But those productive sectors need to exist! In a world where many people are doing such low-productivity jobs, everyone will be much poorer.
How can you compare productivity across functions, nevermore industries? Does a nurse produce less than a director of marketing? By what possible metric? Profit comes to mind, but I am hoping no one is inhuman enough to judge the medical care sector by its profits...
Profit is a measure of productivity, other things being equal.
A director of marketing creates a campaign which affects millions of transactions... so it's a function which can dramatically increase economic production.
It's pretty easy to compare productivity across industries. Leave what "should" be aside, when you're planning for the success of nations you cannot rely on Moral Bonuses.
The rate of economic activity (ie., people transacting with one another such that each has more than before) is measurable: it's called growth.
And you cannot grow by replacing highly productive industries with deeply unproductive ones. To pay for things we need the ratio of workers:transactions to increase.
Human history was severely impoverished because this was always a low number. We are wealthy today only because it is a higher one.
> To pay for things we need the ratio of workers:transactions to increase.
Human health is also a component of that inequation. How are you factoring that in with profit?
Also, all of that growth is meaningless unless it somehow makes people healthier and happier. So I would say that having a huge and successful healthcare industry is one of the goals of the rest of the economy (as are food production, entertainment, knowledge production and others).
So, if we have enough wealth but not enough healthcare, food, fun or knowledge, than we can trade some of that wealth for more important things, like healthcare workers, or garbage collection, or agricultural work, or mathematics research, etc. Or child care, though I suppose you view stay-at-home parents as deeply unproductive by this measure.
That only works because the data doesn't take into account any kind of shared wealth. Large swathes of people lived in tribal communities which had different concepts of ownership and property, but were not 'poor' by any common definition from their times. GDP data completely ignored these types of societies, which formed the majority in some areas of the world before colonization. Even then, most of the escapes from poverty have happened in state-run, dictatorial China and in the newly de-colonized India, so it is very hard to imagine how some can claim Capitalism is the important factor here.
Also, capitalism without explicit social goals imposed by a state is disastrous. Just look at the USA, with one of the worse and most expensive Healthcare systems out of the developed world, despite having by far the largest GDP (the only fully capitalist-run Healthcare system in the world!).
All of this is not to mention that capitalism is rapidly destroying our planet, with global warming, deforestation,river polution, oil spills, air pollution and other woes being fought for tooth-and-nail by most large companies.
Child mortality rates and mortality rates in childbirth have been c. 20% for most of human history, up until c. 1940.
Almost all human beings for almost all recent history have been agricultural works (over 90% in 1800) which is a severe and precarious state.
If you wish to go before settlements into nomadic hunters and gatherers note that this cannot produce "mathematical research, healthcare, etc." -- ie., the desirable things stated.
At this point you're just pining to be a dog. You may prefer a shorter, more brutal, more violent life... but I think, rather, you just need a fantasy of a utopian "before time" to justify you enmity towards the status quo.
> how some can claim Capitalism is the important factor here.
Err... when do you think they started their massive reductions in poverty?
When they stopped blaming various other people an liberalized their markets (in china "The Capitalists" and in India "The British Empire"). Within a few years of introducing captialist reforms these societies dramatically reduced poverty.
according to that logic, lawyers, CEOs, line managers and HR should be paid what they were 100 years ago, as they do not directly produce. They're not, it's effectively through competition with other jobs that their pay is determined.
Intuitively, "pay according to productivity" makes sense, but productivity gains have far outpaced the pay of workers while the money went elsewhere. Let's face the reality that productivity prescribes the total sum that goes around but not how each individual's contribution is credited in a society.
> according to that logic, lawyers, CEOs, line managers and HR should be paid what they were 100 years ago
Is that not true? Carnegie and Rockefeller were even relatively richer than the CEOs are today, and I'm sure their lawyers were compensated for as well as today's richest lawyers as well.
yes, for almost all of human history wealth inequality has been (far) worse than it is today.
The only period of relatively more equality was post-WW2. Inequality then, as ever, has only been reduced by mass death -- either in the form of wars, or plagues, famines etc.
The mechanism of wealth acquisition, ie., investment /(preferential attachment), necessarily iterates towards increasing levels of inequality.
Your productivity is your effect on net increases in economic transactions. A CEO has a massive effect. Jeff Bezos can literally, right now, change the GDP of entire countries just by making a decision.
One minute of his time can raise or lower a country's economic activity.
> while the money went elsewhere
Did it? Productivity increases is still the reason people have rising wages.
That we don't see the 1:1 wage:productivity increases we used to (post-WW2), doesnt mean that productivity isnt still the key metric to be increasing.
As to why that is probably the form automation takes today has a lot to do with it, ie., that innovations in factories used to increase the productivity of working class people; now such increases accumulate to highly skilled workers.
Ironically, I think this makes my point: our economy has become politically unstable because of the relative increase of low-productivity labour. This would get much worse with people transitioning to care work.
We're going to be a multi-planetary species. All we need is people willing to take risks instead of peons trying to live a cosy, uneventful and "sustainable" life in their government-allocated single-room apartments. And having children really isn't a huge risk even for the most incompetent.
Birth rates in an era with birth control and women’s ability to have careers is not comparable to birth rates without birth control and when women could not work.
A reducing labor population really won't help the working class.
First of all, you'll be able to kiss your retirement bye bye.
Second of all, you would likely see decline of the economy in real terms. This will cause huge dysfunctions in capitalism, as there will not be an efficient way to invest.
If your retirement was predicated on a forever swelling population lifting your boat, then you actually didn't save enough to retire. Secure retirements shouldn't rely on paygo systems and infinite growth.
You can have a billion dollars worth of shares in amazon, hell you can have a billion dollars in cash. It isn't going to wipe your ass in a nursing home. Someone young will. If the people who do the work are downtrodden enough why would they bother participating in your scheme?
This is the one thing people seem to forget; people who work in places like nursing homes rarely do so because they have a dream of wiping old people's asses for a living. Instead, they do it because they need the money.
In a society where there are plenty of other well-paying jobs to be had, working at a nursing home won't be the popular choice. I expect the future to be interesting.
Some people have vocation for taking care of the old and the sick. Yes, they do it for the money, but they could have chosen something else, and yet they chose nursing because to them it is rewarding. Job satisfaction and doing good things for others are very important indicators for happiness.
Definitely. The people who want to work in nursing homes are probably outnumbered by the people that have to, however, and once the others leave, others will too, simply because the job will become unbearable. Combine that with increased numbers of retirees and fewer potential employees, and things could turn ugly real fast.
Personally, I'm preparing for a future where a nursing home isn't an option. Just in case.
It's common to equate old age with nursing homes and misery in the West.
Other cultures show that this needn't be the case at all and is - for the most part; there's still about 30% genetics involved - dependent on how you chose to spend your days. Less Netflix, Facebook, and convenience food, more exercise and healthy, non-processed food can get you much further than a billion dollars and medical personnel...
If an 80 year old no longer contributes to society, and all they have is pieces of paper indicating they used to contribute in the past, they are relying on people who do contribute (by fixing toilets, growing food whatever) to accept those pieces of paper. They will only do so if they feel they are getting enough of those pieces of paper, and if they will believe those pieces of paper will work in the future.
The health of that 80 year old is only relavent in terms of the amount of resources needed to move from the working class to the non-working class. The healther the aged, the fewer the resources. The higher the working:retired ratio, the fewer the resources.
What is to stop the adults under say 50 who have barely any capital at all (401ks, houses, shares, whatever) from saying "screw this, I'm off to $other_country where I don't live hand to mouth and have no future of retirement"
A country can not survive when 90% of its population are 80 years old, no matter how healthy or rich those people are, it means for every 10 hours an under-80 works, 9 hours is to produce goods and services for other people.
Goods and services do move across borders, though. A single country’s economy doesn’t exist in a sealed bottle. Those pieces of paper can be traded for foreign goods and services.
Now if the whole world was 90% elderly you might have a point.
The issue is that large numbers of people, organizations, and governments have assumed a forever swelling population in their retirement plans. So, yes, like any time in history there will be individuals who haven't saved enough to retire. The issue is that a demographic contraction throws the large majority of retirees into crippling poverty, absent government intervention that allocates capital investment and workers' consumption toward retirees' consumption.
Obviously a forever swelling population is not model we can or should try to sustain, but reaching some kind of replacement-level equilibrium is sustainable and is much healthier for workers' and retirees' economic health.
Majority of working people live paycheck to paycheck, earning enough to pay for rent, food, and maybe a few beers on a friday night.
Any extra money from pay rises goes into spiraling rent costs cause by extra money from pay rises, which goes to those who own the rentable assets.
There is more than enough housing to go round. There is more than enough food to go round. There's more than enough beer to go round. Yet there are people working 100 hours a week sweeping floors that can barely pay for it.
There have to be better ways to distribute what's being generated (which is almost entirely from those ages 20-65) among the population without disenfranchising increasing numbers of those that actually do the work
Without a population at least being more or less constant, there is essentially no way at all that the average person can retire.
Why? Because if we all start saving enough to retire without relying on growth, then that has a deletrious impact on the economy that makes retirement even more difficult.
This is because no matter how much paper you have, you still need people to grow food, build houses and run services once you retire. If there are more retirees than working people, you're in deep trouble. The average person simply won't be able to retire, ever.
This article is quite exasperated, but doesn't say much. I'm far from an expert in this area, but here's what I've read elsewhere:
We're quickly moving from the population explosion problem to the population implosion problem. No one planned it or made it happen. But, it looks like we're not actually going to overflow the planet with people standing shoulder to shoulder. Instead, the problem we're facing moving forward is a combination of longer lifespans and less children shifting the elderly support structure from a pyramid to a column.
A big driver of this is people moving up in job prospects around the world. Clearly in rich nations like the US, Japan and UK couples are working more and putting off having kids. But, also in the poorer nations people are moving to the cities because that's where the jobs are. Once there, the combination of high rent and great reductions in child mortality means it doesn't make sense any more to have lots of kids hoping that a few survive long enough to work at a young age. Instead of having babies rapidly, women around the world are going to work to bring in that second income needed to pay the bills in the city.
It's great news, really. It's just really scary really great news because we don't know how to set up a society where there aren't enough young people to support the elderly.
Here are two scary storylines that get discussed pretty regularly here on HN:
a) AI and machine learning will raise productivity so much that they will steal millions of jobs from people.
b) Global population will eventually go into decline, which will crash the economy by killing growth.
But, these two stories look far less scary when considered together. In fact they seem directly complementary, although the timing is not likely to work out perfectly, so it won't necessarily be smooth sailing along the way.
C) We will develop anti-aging treatments due to increased funding of SENS and similar projects. Combine that with a universal basic income and robots and you get a much better picture of the future.
Edit: we are also not taking into account artificial gestation methods that may be developed in the next 100 years. In 2120 it may seem as barbaric as child labor and other 19th century atrocities to actually have a woman carry through a pregnancy, not to say that religious fundamentalists will want to continue the practice.
If we are able to keep people alive for much, much longer but don't find a way to make their brains young and elastic again, we're going to be in for a very, very special kind of dystopia.
If AI takes jobs, it doesn't cause wealth to be redistributed, it causes wealth to flow upwards to the person who owns the AI.
That might then be redistributed, but it might also not. Whether it is or isn't is largely up to the people who have the most power. In that system, which group has the most power?
In democratic societies the majority decides how resources are distributed. If they can understand where their interests actually lie it shouldn’t be a problem.
If you put a referendum to the people tomorrow, saying "should we tax billionaires more than other people, and spend it on you," you'd get an overwhelming yes. The fact we don't have policies like that show the majority aren't deciding that distribution.
But you're also assuming society stays democratic. Why would it, if enough power is aggregated at the top? Who's going to stop them if they decide to form a cabal?
Sure, because the populace had more power than they thought, and they organised. It didn't matter how rich the aristocracy were, they couldn't buy enough loyalty to defend themselves. Down the line you probably will be able to buy a robot army, and robots aren't squishy.
AI is just one piece of increased productivity. Even without AGI there are paths that could lead to 3x productivity faster than the population would go down by 66%.
There are other issues with an older age distribution which cannot be fixed by productivity though. There could be an oversupply of 5 bedroom homes for example.
Or consider the alternative scenario where population keeps declining but technological advancement doesn't materialize. Which for AI and machine learning could happen soon with another 'AI winter' after people realize only narrow set of opportunities to deploy it.
The stability of society depends on technological progress and more children born in each new generation. Once this global Ponzi scheme reverses there is an incentive to manufacture lies about massive technological progress ahead of us. See buzzwords such as autonomous cars, industry 4.0 or quantum computing.
Well we can. Someone owns the robots (or owns shares in the corporation that owns the robots). Just change the tax code to make Social Security tax apply to all income, including capital gains, with no upper limit.
The reason why capital income is not subject to social isurance taxes is because it is fundamentally an insurance scheme. People who earn mostly wages need social insurance in retirement (when they would not be physically able to work), so they (have to) pay it, while people who earn mostly capital income do not need it (as capital income does not depend on personal health / fitness to work).
Therefore extending social insurance taxes to capital income without extending pension payments to capital earners would be unfair. Local politicians tried something similar - remove caps on social insurance, while keeping pensions capped / strongly sublinear, and it was struck down by constitutional court.
Perhaps reasonable solution would be to split pensions to tax-based UBI, and smaller contribution based 'linear' pensions.
Firstly that has nothing to do with redistribution.
Secondly total cost of living in a major city has gone up, not down, due to rent and realestate. Sure, i can but more polypropyl, bread and stainless steel, but what good is that if i have nowhere to live.
You jest, but the economic effects of all of this are severe. A total regression in the real-estate market (because stagnant demographics means the existing housing stock will roughly suffice or even exceed demand) will have severe effects.
Basically the end to growing demand, and thus essentially an end to growth-orientated capitalism.
My long term prediction is that once the boomers start dying off in droves, we'll face a real estate crisis as their houses flood the market...and many less desirable neighborhoods throughout suburbia will turn into mini ghost towns.
I come from northern Italy and during my relatively brief lifetime (length(life.qubex)>40) I’ve seen this happen to formerly exclusive “Beverly Hills”-type affluent residential areas (and un/gated communities). Enormous, cavernous hangar-sized homes that used to be worth millions of euros now struggling to sell for a couple hundred thousand.
Swedish authorities did a study about this for that very reason. The conclusion was that it's unlikely that people will want to move halfway across the World only go get a job changing old peoples' diapers.
Counterpoint: major world problems like climate change are a direct result of having too many people, and more specifically having too many people living unsustainable lifestyles. Worse, a large percentage of the world's population is now moving out of sustainable living into unsustainable living as a result of globalization (as people gain more wealth, they tend to want things like more meat and driving a car).
The net result is that a decreasing population is a good thing for the planet, but a bad thing for economics.
> Counterpoint: major world problems like climate change are a direct result of having too many people
Not exactly. The bottom 85% (in income terms) of the global population contribute very little to unsustainability. There are too many people in OECD countries, perhaps.
That is also partly because bottom 50% don't have decent lifestyles. Try commuting for 1.5 hrs in packed local trains in Mumbai and you will definitely wish for a slightly higher carbon footprint in exchange for a better quality of life. Off course, USA standards is unsustainable for the world, but at the least Japanese standards of living are like human rights.
> Not all countries will have an overshoot day. By way of the country overshoot equation above, a country will only have an overshoot day if their Ecological Footprint per person is greater than global biocapacity per person (1.63 gha).
There’s a lot of countries not listed, i.e they do not overshoot.
It groups by country rather than income level but, reading between the lines, it seems to me almost certain that the bottom 85% (in income) of people emit more than half of the global total.
BTW it is important to consider that a large fraction of the emissions from countries like China and India are in the service of consumption in wealthy western countries. But, I googled, and even in a famously export-heavy country like China, exports only account for 17% of the GDP.
The rapid and massive increase in the number of global middle class is why virtual everything will be important for the planet. If virtual services and experiences become almost as useful and enjoyable as the real world, people will burn less fuel and cause less negative externalities.
(They could be better as well! Even those who enjoy traveling, for example, don’t care for the hassles of airport queuing, getting stuck in sardine-like plane seats, finding laundry places, etc.)
Obviously, real-world experiences necessary for genuine, long-term human connections should remain.
Note: Although the birth rate is falling, the number of global middle class is expected to rise a great deal in the next few decades, largely due to rapid economic development.
This is very interesting, and unexpected at the surface level. Especially with all the doom and gloom we've always been fed about the world population getting out of control, consuming all the resources, polluting the planet into oblivion, etc.
I was expecting to read about medical/health reasons why men and women are literally becoming less fertile, but it's not that. It sounds like it's a side effect of countries/societies advancing technologically and socially. It makes sense, but I just never visualized it like that in my head. Wow, what a great problem to have!
But as you say, it is a problem, just in other ways we might not have considered before. It will be interesting to see how we figure out how to restructure society as the demographics shift. But this seems like it could be a very good thing for the environment, climate change, resource management, etc. Overall, seems like positive new to me!
I fully expect the Indian and Chinese population coming into wealth will go through a period of fairly outrageous conspicuous consumption. I have a hope that it will be fast-forwarded compared to the past 70 years of American history. Hopefully after a decade-long warmup and another decade of settling in, the novelty will wear off and there will be a move away from focusing on "More Stuff!" and toward focusing on "Less Clutter, More Experiences!"
> Hopefully after a decade-long warmup and another decade of settling in, the novelty will wear off and there will be a move away from focusing on "More Stuff!" and toward focusing on "Less Clutter, More Experiences!"
The western world hasn't even moved past that stage, so I highly doubt developing countries will move through it quickly.
Good thing that high-speed rail and other land transport infrastructure is being built in order to connect the entirety of Eurasia and eventually Africa, with sufficient throughput to feed multiple US economies.
These projections do not account for increase in life expectancy. India is projected to peak at 1.7 b, if you consider Indian subcontinent as an entity, it puts the population of South Asia at 2.25 b. Not a good sight when coupled with unreliable climate, water scarcity, unlivable summer temperatures and no direct opportunities which means corruption may lead to feudalism of the yore.
are you serious ? UN planned this since the 70' there's policies and support for developing countries at the global scale for implementing birth control
It seems to me that birth control itself was developed for the needs of rich countries. And, the UN pushed it into poor countries because they obviously needed it too. That did help reduce unwanted pregnancies. But, until the reduction in child mortality and the mass move of couples to cities, families were still motivated to intentionally have lots of babies.
The "population implosion" problem is only so because of the economic obligations that will be passed on. I'm actually surprised that the US/UK elite, with their grand history in funding Eugenics research, didn't fund studies that'd portend this uncertain fate - then again may be it's just not published.
this is fantastic news. Yes, we don’t know how to properly adapt yet, but this planet resources are limited and we aren’t good at sharing them.
What worries me is that long term this can be reversed just like current trend is reversing away from population growth. Current trend seems to be driven by job prospects, education and costs of raising kids. But what if in a future we all had basic income? No need to worry about food, shelter or education for your children. Won’t this lead to population growing again?
Why would it? Do you imagine people enjoy raising four kids or more? Children used to be old-age insurance. You needed so many to be certain some of them would survive, thrive, and take care of you in old age. If your needs are met, either through a good pension or UBI, you can have as many kids as you prefer. And by all indications, for most people that's actually around the natural replacement level, or fewer.
> for most people that's actually around the natural replacement level, or fewer.
Not sure where that number comes from. 2.5 is probably closer to the natural trend. Physical constraints (food, disease, etc) limited human expansion previously. The economic constraints that cause a min-max of not having kids will never be A. universal, B. persistent. A couple generations of baby recession won't impact the fate of humanity one bit. Not sure why there's so much faux concern over a fixable (and likely temporary) situation. You give a tax break of 50% on capital gains per child and the kids will be popping from the higher economic rungs.
> You give a tax break of 50% on capital gains per child and the kids will be popping from the higher economic rungs
Of course, with a perversely positive incentive like that. But it tells us nothing of the natural impulse in a neutral environment.
In a lot of the western world there is plenty of support for having kids. Ample child care leave, solid monetary support, free or affordable child care and schooling. And in the countries which have most of this, the birth rate is low but not catastrophically so. (see Germany, the Nordics..)
Whereas in the US and Japan, for example, there are certainly structural factors that now weigh against having kids. But it does not tell us much about the "default state"
One aspect this article does not address at all is the massive sex ratio imbalance in India and China (for different reasons) at around 1,100 men for every 1000 women.
This means there are 100 million girls less today in these countries alone, finding a suitable partner becomes harder and there are lesser number of couples will be there in the first place who can have kids
The 2.1 replacement is perhaps not adequate at all. The models are outdated and largely considers IFMR and few other factors, it does not factor really in issues such as the gender imbalance, hikikomori, much later age pregnancies ( higher chances of miscarriages etc?) and slightly more controversially also same sex relationships / marriages .
I do not mean to imply same sex relationships are bad or anything like that, What I mean to say is that everyone needs to have more kids as it is harder for same sex couples to have biological children ( while adoption is great and purest expression of parenthood it does not increase the population)
Miscarriages are not births. If the birth rate remains at 2.1 you can have as many miscarriages as you want, and the population will still increase.
The same with Hikkikomori, and gay people. As long as there is 2.1 children born for every woman, then the population will increase.
The only factor which you mention that is correct is that in a society that murders female babies, then yes, you will need more than a 2.1 birthrate. And as the article mentions, India is expected to grow over the next 80 years. So they clearly have a fertility rate that exceeds whatever number they need.
I think you are confusing the fertility rate, with how many children a family with children would have. The denominator is different, and that's a completely different issue, but perhaps one that is worth thinking about.
>If the birth rate remains at 2.1 you can have as many miscarriages as you want, and the population will still increase.
2.1 children per woman is the REPLACEMENT rate, meaning this is what it would take for the population size to remain roughly the same. One kid to replace her, one kid to replace a random dude (not necessarily the father!), and .1 kids to make up for the kids that die before they reach adulthood.
This does not mean that every woman needs to have children. it means that the total number of children divided by the total amount of women needs to be 2.1 for the population to remain stable
You are failing to account for the gender imbalance. Consider an extreme gender ratio where for the 2.1 born for an average woman, there are 2 males and 0.1 females. This means that every generation will have 10X less women.
the effect of will be only felt few generation later , lesser giving birth to lesser girls when all other things are equal means 2.1 will not work .
For example If you start with a population of 100 (50 couples )and every next gen there are 9 boys to 1 girl and fertility ratio is 2 then your third gen will have only 20 kids as there will be only 20 women in the second gen . The fourth gen will have only 4 kids and there may not a 5 gen.
Either balance has to be fixed or replacement ratio of women has to be 1 not all kids , to sustain a 1:10 ratio of gender means 10 kids per female so there will be 1 girl kid
Yes , you are right that any one having a family will need to have a large one.
Just like China one child policy effect will be visible in another 20 years suddenly and drastically, it will be similar for gender. population will not change gently , it will be a cliff .
>>This means there are 100 million girls less today in these countries alone
Actual numbers are way off the real numbers.
In my kids school you can see a very noticeably difference in the count of boys and girls in any standard and section. It's noticeable to a point, if you walk in to a classroom you can see at least visually boys outnumber girls by a good enough difference.
I also refuse to believe this due to infanticide or foeticide. The dirty little secret is at least in most urban centers, even tier 2 cities, these practices are dead today. You can't blame these practices for the difference anymore. How then is the difference arising?
Again on a pure anecdotal evidence basis, I see people who have boys tend to have more boys. That is male kids are born more to families with more male kids. Also having the first kid as a boy couples tend to go in for more kids. On the other hand these days if some one had a daughter as the first child they don't even bother to have another child. This way boys are born way ore than. This is a huge problem. Reason being this is not wrong by any means. This not illegal or unethical. Yet it creates a larger social problem.
These problems will never go away in India as long as there are big fat wedding expenses(Pretty much entirely paid by the girls side) and dowry. And girls not allowed to take care of their parents, both in presence help and financial help.
The other part is of course due to Thyroid illness become prevalent in India. Many couples aren't able to have kids.
I expect the gender ratio imbalance to not only continue but get way worse in India. Like really to a point, where an upper middle class man wouldn't be able to find a bride after decades of searching.
Your proposed (not illegal, not unethical) explanation does not work out mathematically.
Even in the extreme scenario where all families stopped would stop having kids after the birth of a daughter, the expected number of male children would equal the expected number of female children. And even if say 52 percent of babies born are boys, you won't ever get a male excess of the discussed magnitude (1100 men for every 1000 women) this way.
Mine was just an anecdotal evidence. Also that 52% boy babies count itself is too low. The real scenario for my comparison is 3 boys for every 1 girl born. It's also way more complicated than your simulation. Say the first kid was a boy and the second kid was a girl, people don't stop. They think their risk(Having a boy to provide in old age) is hedged and are likely to try for one more kid.
If you have families where 3 boys are born in a series, and a family on the other hand stops at the first daughter. Or a family that has 2 boys + 1 girl - Compared to a family having just one girl. Do this for a billion people, and you will the see things start going real bad soon.
Also note, just a small imbalance is not enough to cover for marriages. In India getting married is a long series of AND conditions you have to pass through. Religion, Caste, Language, Skin Color, Dowry affordability, Age, Social Standing etc etc. You are likely to end up a section of society that just doesn't get any girls.
India is a society where a daughter means a huge wedding expense, plus dowry. All this a drain to your retirement savings, plus now not having a provider in old age(which you would have one if you had a boy instead of a girl). That's how screwed up the society is. It's really one of the worst places on earth for a woman to be born in.
You are dealing with a society that's ridiculously good at not having daughters. A practice perfected for decades.
> You are dealing with a society that's ridiculously good at not having daughters. A practice perfected for decades.
I agree. I just doubt the "not illegal, not unethical" explanations.
> If you have families where 3 boys are born in a series, and a family on the other hand stops at the first daughter. Or a family that has 2 boys + 1 girl - Compared to a family having just one girl. Do this for a billion people, and you will the see things start going real bad soon.
No, this is precisely the kind of "family planning" that mathematically won't be able to affect the expected gender ratio at all. The ratios are skewed in India, but that's definitely caused by something else. Is it the conception of male children being more likely? No, probably not, we have very good evidence that about 51% of children are conceived male. So it's caused by something else. Selective abortions would be my best guess, but that's not "not illegal, not unethical".
>>I just doubt the "not illegal, not unethical" explanations.
They are not killing or aborting anything. They are opting to not have kids. Another section can opt to not even have a single kid, or not even marry. None of this illegal, or unethical. It's not exactly a crime for opting to not have kids, or refusing to marry.
>>Is it the conception of male children being more likely?
Yes. Because it's being carefully done so. On the very larger view of things, birth of a boy vs girl appears random(Or by your admission slightly skewed towards boys) if left to nature alone(that is precisely equal percentages). But on individual couple level, very clearly some couples only have boys, and some only have girls. Some have 1 boy and 1 girl. Some have 2 boys and a girl, and some 2 girls and a boy. This is for 1 - 3 kids per couple(The avg Indian family). The ones that are only likely to have girls, or more than one girl, are now opting to not have anymore after the very first one. The couples who now have 2 - 3 boys will struggle to find brides.
Your argument about randomness doesn't hold at the individual level. And the balance that needs to arise at a larger level doesn't work if the rules of impartiality are not adhered equally by each participating couple.
>>we have very good evidence that about 51% of children are conceived male.
That is if you leave nature to take its own course, of course.
you don’t understand babies are killed (rares
Nowadays) and selective abortions (million a year ) if it is not boy.
while the national average is 1100 , there are already states where it is 1250 or more , they already import brides from other states because finding a match is harder . sex detection although illegal still happens , and abortions follow
The numbers are real for both countries and are well verified over last few decades the problem is also well reported .
Sadly it found to be actually correlated with higher income and material income , states with higher per capita income have more sex selective abortions
> you don’t understand babies are killed (rares Nowadays) and selective abortions (million a year ) if it is not boy.
I do understand. I know that the skew exists. I'm saying precisely that the propoposed "not illegal, not unethical" explanations do not explain the skew; in fact, it's mathematically impossible for the style of family planning strategies (e.g. stop having children if the first one is a girl) to cause this kind of skew.
Illegal certainly, but hard to enforce as knowing the sex is not difficult at all(although illegal), ultrasounds are cheap devices do not even need a lot of expertise to handle .
How will you even control abortions ? It is not like the U.S. where abortions are a political issue and ppl make it intentionally difficult ,
everyone is in favour of terminating unwanted pregnancies, it is just that is unwanted because of the sex many times and that’s hard to enforce as a law.
>>Sadly it found to be actually correlated with higher income and material income , states with higher per capita income have more sex selective abortions
The more your income is perceived to be, the more dowry you have to pay. Plus you feel the need for a male heir to inherit all that money. That explains it.
The Hacker News comment section tends to be factual, rational, and logical.
So - this may be out of place, but here goes.
When making decisions about whether or not to have children, we operate in a state of partial information. (This is of course true of all decisions.)
I would like to contribute a bit of information.
I'm 66, and have three children and four grandchildren. My adult children are the most wonderful people I know, and it is comforting to be aware that we will be part of each others' lives forever. I spent a lot of time in assisted living facilities with my mother as her health failed, and I saw a lot of old people in those facilities with no one to visit them. It is comforting to know that I will not spend my final years in loneliness and isolation.
Our grandchildren are an unalloyed joy. We have two 3-year-old identical twin grand-daughters, and they are working their way through the nuances and finer points of grammar. It is indescribably adorable to see their efforts at expressing their detailed and elaborate thoughts. My grandsons are seriously into aviation, and I've become the go-to aerodynamics consultant. Our four-year-old asked me with great seriousness, "Grand-dad, why is the horizontal stabilizer always shorter than the wings?" Another time, the family was at the beach. He, his dad, and I were looking out at the ocean. He asked, "What are waves?" Darn good questions!
No rose-colored glasses fantasy here: I've found that your children can break your heart and devastate you just as well as bring you unfathomable joy. My daughter (a black-belt IP lawyer now), when she was about four, wandered off in a crowded video game arcade, and we searched through the crowds for her for about ten minutes, with growing panic and horror. We found her and all was fine. Fact is, if you love someone as much as you end up loving your children and grandchildren, their decisions and choices will have profound effects on you. My therapist observes that you are only as happy as your least happy child.
So, the decision about whether to start trying to have a family is a BIG-ASS decision, with life-long consequences. I highly recommend it.
There was this post not too long ago by lordleft which I thought was really beautiful and resonated with me.
The decision to have kids is a lot like the decision to continue living. There is no logical basis for it. Or rather, any latticework of logic you erect to justify this choice is based on a foundation that has nothing to do with reason. It is an emotional and spiritual desire to live and love, and give more life and more love to the world.
That's why I when see people engage in complex rational calculations about the utility a child may or may not bring into their life, I feel like they are missing the point. Of course people ought to be thoughtful about the decision to have children. And there are very good reasons to abstain. But in a sense they are not grasping that having children is a profound act of hope.
Oh! That beautifully captures my own thinking about this, and I've expanded on that over the years.
For instance, that desire and that decision aren't a guarantee that you will end up having biological children, nor that having them will bring you happiness. Barring medical or financial conditions, there are so many other reasons why one ends up not having them, a lot of them being circumstantial and outside of an individual's control e.g. who gets to cross your path, who becomes your partner, a cultural context, events affecting your family and so on.
That deep emotional and spiritual desire to live and love as a foundational directive, also pushes you to reflect, shape and reshape your personal story and your identity as you move through life. It sparks existential questions to which insights only come through time and the compounding of experience. This is a most deeply individual aspect of living.
In a way, that same desire isn't binary. It's not one or the either. It includes doubt and leaning back and forth between stances depending on one's circumstances and experience. Like a bell curve, some will feel deeply bereft if they remain childless, many will consider that a scenario with a worthwhile alternative for parenthood is just as valid an option to them, and some have a deep sated desire to remain child free.
Reflecting and reconsidering doesn't stop when one has become a parent either. Many will vocally state that parenthood - or remaining without children - was the best thing they did in life, but there are also those that deeply regret their choice. As culture, past and present, tends to emphasis the importance of having children and espouses the merits of parenthood, this is only discussed in a most apprehensive manner, which leads to misguided generalisations and dismissive tropes. This renders an important part of our human condition moot: that personal responsibility is inevitably bounded by constraints which are necessarily outside the control of an individual.
There are many ways to self-actualize that emotional and spiritual desire to live and love, and having and raising biological children is one of many possible pathways. And so, the framework of values and beliefs you've developed which underpins and drives your own personal narrative, doesn't necessarily apply to the lives of anyone else.
But you do not increase the net love of the world. That’s wrong. It’s an emotional decision to be selfish and self-serving and do something that you want to do regardless of whether that child wants to exist. Nothing more. To create life is to create death and so at best neutral but not knowing the quality of that life or that death poses a serious risk that a decision to have children increases the net suffering of the world not love.
Just because you can not be absolutely certain doesn't mean it's a coin toss with both options being equally reasonable. If someone wants to stop existing, they have the power to make that happen, while the converse is not true, thus choosing to assume someone wants to exist is safer. The overwhelming majority of people want to exist and the few who don't tend to be in situations where it easily could have been foreseen that life would be problematic; if you've lived a mostly happy life for a few decades, odds are pretty good that your offspring will do the same, thus statistically choosing to bring someone into the world is far more likely to be what they want.
But going further, the idea that death negates the benefits of life is absurd. If you read a book and are sad when it ends, that means it was a good book, and you are better off for having experienced it. The ending does not annihilate the story, it completes it. And if the story should have some bad writing in it, that may be undesireable, but all the good writing is still there to be enjoyed. No matter how bad life seems to get, the good moments still happened and they can never be taken away from you. Sure we'd all like to avoid unnecessary suffering and postpone death for as long as possible, but only because we would rather fill that time with the joys of life - if you had to choose between experiencing extreme pain periodically or spending the rest of your life in an inescapable coma, you'd certainly choose the former. Non-existance is not a pleasant alternative to life, it is a fate at least as bad as death, if there is any distinction at all.
Ten thousand generations of my ancestors were intelligent, give or take. If they had learned easy+effective contraception at any point, I wouldn't be here at all. This is infinitely more important point than all my ancestor's work, art, grand projects, ambitions, theories and whatnot. Leaving aside pondering about that bug of our genome, the immediate local decision is not to let my genome die with me and to give it yet another generation.
Maybe it's futile because the bug will be fatal in the end. Maybe. I don't know and I don't want to take risks.
I'm unlikely to contribute to AGI in any significant degree after all, which I would consider one of the alternative workaround to the bug.
This isn't an uncommon point of view, and that's unfortunate. It's incredibly sad to hear people fearful of loneliness in old age, and even sadder to see people decide the solution is to oblige their children to spend time with them rather than seek meaningful cross-generational friendships with people who want to spend time with you.
This is a genuine problem, and one that maybe tech could actually partially solve by bring adults of different ages together in ways that build friendships rather than accepting the only way to not be lonely is to rely on your family.
If this is all you've taken from the above than we've read 2 very different comments. The point about lonely old people is only 1 (and i would say not the most significant) point in the argument.
I have a wife and 2 (small) children. There is nobody in the world I love more than my family - it used to be only my wife previously and now grew from 1 person to 3. This has such a profound effect on my happiness now (in my 30s) that even if I die suddenly at age 55 (long before becoming a lonely old man) it would still have been worth it.
Yes you should also have friends & if they are of various ages that's even better. You dont need tech to do that either, although it is probably difficult if you live somewhere far from other people (and some developments like fenced off suburbs with no city centers make that harder still). But that is independent of the argument if you should or should not also have kids.
I think you should definitely have friends, with or without kids. But from I see around me, I get the impression that having friends is difficult. Even more so when people have to juggle kids and a career. There's a certain isolation that seems to set in.
I'm sure a lot of people don't have the kids with the purpose of not being alone in old age. But I also get that there's some kind of "soft expectation", for lack of a better term, that your "family" will kind of stick around, especially when you're alone because raising said family more or less led to a falling out with old friends. There's also the factor that when people get old, their own friends may have gotten old and died.
Where I live I don't see many "intergenerational friendships". Granted, I'm not a very social person so I don't really seek the society of others, but from what I see around me people tend to hang out with people of roughly the same age. There also seem to be a lot of loose friendships, in that people would get together more or less often, have a good time &c, but those are not relationships one would be able to depend on in case of a problem.
I think your point about fenced-off suburbs is quite important though. I figure that once people get older, it's much easier for them to try to hang out with other people if they all live more or less close-by. Such as joining some kind of club. Even if it won't become some very close friendship, at least they're less likely to feel as lonely as people in the suburbs.
In Japan (and probably several other cultures), it's common to list your birth order in your dating profile. This is because if you're the first born you're expected to take care of the parents and many people choose to explicitly NOT date such people, especially women, since they'll likely be tasked with taking care of the 1st born son's parents.
> because raising said family more or less led to a falling out with old friends ... Where I live I don't see many "intergenerational friendships".
I think that both of these are massively consequence of our own culture, not something that must be.
It is combination of long hours at work, the super high expectations on child raising that for many people excludes socialization with kids present and animosity of childless toward kids present near "adult places". And vice versa.
It is also a result of socialization being seen as slacking and not doing useful things. It is also result of sort stigmatising the behavior that leads to keeping long term friendships (at least I had to figure out this is issue for me).
I don't know which culture is this "our culture" you refer to but at least for me (in Germany) I've actually had more friends since having kids (parents of kids +/- similarly aged to mine) even tho I've also lost touch with some childless friends as well.
On the balance I'm sure I'm more social now (corona notwithstanding) than I was 5 years ago.
American here, and I'm pretty sure the poster you're replying to is also a product of American society. Once I moved to Europe, the shift in social norms was shocking. Now it's difficult for me to go back to the US because everybody there defines themselves by their work and social spaces are so openly hostile to children.
I don't know your kids but with mine it's a year or 2 of sleepless nights per child & then having to deal with temper tantrums & occasional other annoyances. Even in the roughest years I'm not sure the cons exceed the pros.
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.”
CS Lewis
I’ve been thinking about this and I feel like society characterises some acts as selfless (I.e. having children, marrying your ‘soulmate’)....when really it’s all about people wanting something for themselves....
Characterizing something that involves massive sacrifices and giving up a lot of freedom as "people wanting something for themselves" is pretty ridiculous edgy-teenager thinking.
But they don't exist at the moment you make them, so before they exist you have no reason to sacrifice anything for _them_ because there is no _them_.
If you give up a job to move somewhere to move to a city to meet your future partner, you didn't sacrifice your job for them, at least not in the sense that any nobility can be derived from that act. You gave something up, yes, but not for _a person_ because you don't even know them yet. You can make sacrifices for a person that you have personal love for, but you cannot have personal love for someone who doesn't exist yet.
Once the children exist you can make sacrifices for them of course. But at the moment of choosing to have kids, you are not making sacrifices in the same sense (unless you are having kids for the good of society etc.). So deciding to have kids, even if you have to give something up, is not some selfless or noble act, as parent said.
> So deciding to have kids, even if you have to give something up, is not some selfless or noble act
Sure, but assuming that you know the decision will lead to such sacrifices, it can hardly be called a selfish one either. Especially since the gratification of "wanting something for themselves" (which you claim it's all about) also doesn't actually manifest until later, actually after the sacrifices do.
> So deciding to have kids, even if you have to give something up, is not some selfless or noble act, as parent said
Is anyone actually seriously suggesting that the decision itself is an act of sacrifice? Surely it's kind of super obvious that the sacrifices are in raising the children, not in deciding to have them?
I mean before you become a wealthy society part of the reason you have children is because they can help support the family. They work the farm, or the family shop, or whatever.
Both of my parents grew up poor, both in America and elsewhere, and they were were working farms or shop jobs long before they were of legal age. It's just part of life.
The idea of just give give give to your children until they become 18 (or beyond) is a luxury/privilege.
They also grew up when "free range" parenting was still a thing. Kids just go out into town and entertain themselves, be home by supper sort of thing. So your time as parent was not spent hovering and taking them to after school programs and planning out their life to prepare them for college admissions.
why are the two things mutually exclusive? :
- 1. getting some you want for yourself (i.e. the security of marriage or having children)
And
- 2. Giving up personal freedoms and sacrifices
Many famous people, for instance in sports or the sciences, have literally climbed mountains with great personal sacrifice all while pursuing personal happiness/life goals... in my mind, real heroes are those that don’t want to do something but do it anyway because they believe it’s the right thing to do...I’m not sure this applies to most fiancés or parents-to-be in the west. To think otherwise is childish teenage thinking...because that’s how were indoctrinated as kids in the west. I mean just watch Disney movies...
Of course people marry, have children, etc. because they think they'll be in a better position in life than if they didn't. But that's not being selfish, at least in the way that I define it, that is, that they prioritize their narrow interests to the detriment of everyone else's.
As a parent the quality of your relationship with your children is something you can very much influence (though you should probably start when they are still kids).
I have to add on the loneliness piece. I worked/work in long-term and medical/surgical settings. The number of people who have health problems that are exacerbated by their lack of social connection is staggering.
There is also a second nuance where those who follow similar health patterns of the former had immediate family that were “functionally absent” for a large portion of their life (primarily mental health or result of psychosocial trauma).
There is also survivorship bias here too, in that I treat patients because they are sick and I don’t get to see the “lonely” individuals who function well in the community.
My decade of experience as a registered nurse made me fear in spending my twilight years only to be “beloved by my nieces and nephews”.
> whether to start trying to have a family is a BIG-ASS decision, with life-long consequences
It especially has life-long consequences for the children! I wouldn't want to put children in this world. I don't think the future world is a nice place to grow up in, even the current world isn't. IMO it's selfish to make kids just to feel fulfilled and not be lonely.
> I wouldn't want to put children in this world. I don't think the future world is a nice place to grow up in, even the current world isn't.
I have posted the following a few years ago:
> My ancestors thought it was okay to have kids during times in which many scholars where certain the apocalypse was due in the next 25 years, during periods in which the plague killed more than half of the population, during the 30 years war and in a time when there was a realistic chance of nuclear annihilation in the next 10 years.
I am glad they did.
Today, as a father, I would add: as a potential parent, you are in no position to decide that your future children, grandchildren or great^x-grandchildren won't be glad to be alive. You don't know them, and most importantly you do not know and you cannot know about their world. In my opinion, this argument is nothing more but a convenient excuse to avoid the stress of bringing up kids. It is a valid reason to not want any kids because of the stress, but please don't rationalize yourself into peace of conscience by assuming that you can look into the future.
"> My ancestors thought it was okay to have kids during times in which many scholars where certain the apocalypse was due in the next 25 years, during periods in which the plague killed more than half of the population, during the 30 years war and in a time when there was a realistic chance of nuclear annihilation in the next 10 years. I am glad they did."
In my opinion, your ancestors had children largely because they had intercourse without accessing to birth control, not because they made a conscious decision to have children despite the circumstances.
You realize there's probably never been a better time to be alive except for maybe 50 years ago, right? (depending on which part of the world you're in)
Yes life continues to be harsh, brutal and tragic. It always has been and in some ways always will be. But if your kids are doomed to live in merely the 2nd best civilization humanity has ever produced, I don't think they have much to complain about relatively speaking.
The argument you put forth would have us end the species if everyone agreed to it. And I don't agree we should end human existence and squander all our potential in a fit of depressive nihilism anymore then you should sell all your stocks the moment the market goes down for a day.
It's more selfish IMO to make yourself the arbiter of your unborn childrens' future, denying them the chance at a good life just because you want to make it easier on yourself. Not saying you should have kids if you're not ready, but don't use the state of the world as an excuse. All your ancestors are laughing at how spoiled you are.
Potential children don't exist. They cannot be harmed by not existing. They can, however, be harmed by being brought into existence. This is true even if life is "worth living" or "generally good" or "mostly pleasurable". Depression and nihilism has nothing to do with it, and my ancestors also don't exist anymore, so why would I care about their opinions?
They exist as potential, the same way the rock at the top of hill has a certain amount of potential energy. You choose whether to push the rock down the hill or not, and declaring that the rock will absolutely be harmed to an unacceptable degree, when it's foggy and you can't see even 10 feet down the hill, is irrational. Especially given that billions of other rocks have been pushed down much steeper hills with extremely rough slopes in the past and still managed.
When we're talking about humans instead of rocks, being harmed is part of life. At the end of the day we're all harmed by something that ends up killing us. That doesn't make life worthless, and attempting to prevent harm at all costs is the definition of maladaptive behavior. If that's your argument then you're basically the ultimate helicopter parent. You're so worried that your child might get harmed you won't even let them be born.
Reward requires risk, and greater rewards require greater risks. That's true for every lifeform down to bacteria and viruses. Granted not all risk leads to reward, but the risk of parenting tends to reward those involved above a certain baseline of effort and capability.
As for your ancestors, you're descended from a line of beings stretching back millions of years that, whatever their flaws, managed to reproduce. If there is a point to life that we know about it's that life exists to propagate in harmony with nature (often brutally enforced by various aspects of nature). The point of society is that we all help each other in that endeavor and make it more meaningful. To fulfill our potential as a species. Even those who choose not to have children help in some way through jobs and taxes. This is part of the reason helping others makes us feel good.
There are many valid reasons to not have kids, but I don't understand how you can trust someone who says "I don't want to succeed at the basic function of life because the 2nd best civilization ever produced just isn't comfortable enough for me", and means it. Someone with that level of weakness is not going to be reliable in bad times, regardless of their intentions. Maybe you don't care if I trust you or not, but if you don't care if anyone trusts you... well then I hope your life is as comfortable as you clearly require, because you'll be getting by on charity if it's not.
>I don't want to succeed at the basic function of life
Treating having children as a success and a reward in of itself is part of the problem. If someone doesn't want to have children because they feel like they'll have a bad life, that's their decision to make. Not yours to try and apply some strange value judgment where completely unborn children somehow have a say in the equation.
You're making the argument rather absurdly personal with your claims that they're a helicopter parent for not wanting to have children and claiming that they're weak/unreliable/untrustworthy. Stop it.
I plainly said there were valid reasons for not having children. If you feel unable to give them material or emotional resources, that's fine. If you currently live in a Syrian refugee camp or a ghetto that's fine. If you just aren't emotionally ready/haven't found the right person and would resent the kids then that's fine. If you want to devote your life 100% to your career, or become a monk, among many other examples I could give, that's fine.
If for example you read about, say Global Warming and say that's the deciding reason you don't want to have kids, and it isn't just a self-serving lie/excuse and you actually understand the issue, then you are an extremely weak person and you should work on that. If everyone acknowledged global warming, or saw insert negative news story and decided not to have kids on that basis the species would end in a generation. That sounds like a pretty weak species to me, literally scared to death.
As for untrustworthy, in my experience weak people are inherently untrustworthy. Even if their motives are good they are unable to endure or contribute under stress. Someone who folds on the issue of having kids because of what they see on the news is someone who's likely to fold on other things under extremely mild pressure, and I don't want to have to depend on such people in a crisis; and everyone's life will have crises unless you're extremely lucky. This is hardly just my opinion.
As for the helicopter parent line, the poster argued that while hypothetical kids can't be harmed if they aren't born, having them does potentially cause them harm. Thus they are arguing that "harm" to the hypothetical kids is the deciding factor, and said "harm" should be avoided by shielding said kids from the world. That is the exact thought process of many helicopter parents, only taken to an extreme level of over-protection and perhaps with less overt narcissism.
And yes this gets a little personal, it's a philosophical argument and I'm calling out perceived weaknesses in another person's life philosophy, just as you are calling out weaknesses you perceive in me. I don't see a problem with any of that.
> It's more selfish IMO to make yourself the arbiter of your unborn childrens' future
This is a pretty bizarre statement. If you had a pet dog, would you consider it immoral to not provide that dog with a mate, so they could flood the world with puppies?
If your only argument to not providing a mate was "the state of the world", I would say yes. There are other arguments that carry far more weight in that regard.
It's extremely weak/arrogant to take a look at "the state of the world" (typically via news/blogs/etc) and then declare you absolutely know the future, and it sucks so hard that there's no way your children will have a decent life under any circumstances, regardless of your personal situation.
There are many valid reasons not to have kids, "the state of the world" isn't one of them unless you're living in the middle of one of those negative news stories, and then it's less "the state of the world" and more "the state of my immediate surroundings", which is far more reasonable.
But usually it doesn't affect others. Maybe selfish is the wrong word. I mean you got positive feelings while some others might have negative feelings because of you.
You're right, it's not a very good argument. It's just like someone saying that not having children is selfish. Both aren't very good arguments.
It would be better to use some other kind of metric, like overall happiness vs suffering, perhaps like antinatalism attempts to do. For example, someone who enjoys working all the time, might see that as a boon for their children, and so decide that overall, it's better to have kids. While someone who doesn't like work might decide to empathize with their unborn children and decide it would be a blessing not to have them. Very subjective, but more well grounded arguments for each persons' decision.
Amen. Why is it that morons and the evil seem to be the most fertile? I have no science to back this up. This is just something I have observed from personal experience.
Because they don’t think things through (morons) or don’t care (evil). Have you seen the movie Idiocracy? It covers this pretty well: https://youtu.be/icmRCixQrx8
The irony in all this is that fertility tends to drop amongst people considered successful and (mostly) progressive, meaning that conservative unsuccessful people will out-breed them. One would think that the logical thing to do if you're rich and successful would be to have many kids, and see if it's due to genetic factors.
> The irony in all this is that fertility tends to drop amongst people considered successful and (mostly) progressive, meaning that conservative unsuccessful people will out-breed them.
If this argument really holds, why has the world become so much more progressive over the last two centuries?
There’s not much as (or more) engaging, provocative, and gratifying as my children asking those questions. Knowing they’re experiencing wonder. Knowing they look at the world and have questions like I did and still do. Why these things matter, what any of it means, that doesn’t need to matter really. I just love knowing that they have the same curiosity and wonder that has given me so much happiness for decades.
It’s incredible how relevant and hard to answer some of the early questions are. What are waves? How do objects maintain flight? It’s not just that, but the nature of the questions. They know what waves and wings are, but they want to know things about them. That’s kind of the pinnacle of human intelligence right there. The ability to care to, and then to ask, such interesting and important questions. There would be no progress without wondering about things that matter, or things with significant answers anyway.
I’d have a lot less grey hair if it weren’t for my kids but things like this are what made my life matter. I love this about kids, and I enjoyed your comment.
I've seen this weird thing with some people who state they are logical and then suddenly when it is about relationships they become illogical as hell. I'm not saying I'm logical in this regard, but I find it easy to notice in others.
I simply look for a clearly wrong assumption they have (look up the 10 cognitive distortions [1]). See which one they have, propose a way to test the assumption and potential pitfalls (most of the time fear) and then tell them to test it.
The answer won't be a "no". In my experience the answer will be something like "but that's just clearly nonsense." I've noticed that they do this without any data, it's purely based on thoughts based from their teenage years and they simply don't realize it.
It's hard to be rational on all topics. As we haven't learned to be rational/logical on all topics and I do think that, to some extent, our knowledge doesn't easily spill over into other topics (Antonio's Damasio hypothesis that has a neurological basis is a pretty interesting example of that [2]).
I have two daughters, in their teens, and both have said that they are not interested in having children. I'm glad that they are giving both thought and pause here, but I'm also secretly hoping that they change their minds when the time is right for them.
I'd be happy with and without grandchildren, but it would be incredible to be able to give all of the love that I can when I am retired, when I have less going on in my life and the time to do so.
FWIW, teenagers are unlikely to have a solid grasp of what their actual future choices will be. I know multiple people from high school or college who originally expressed a desire to never has kids, but are now delighted to have them.
On the other hand: there must be people who decided they wanted children in high school, but later regret it.
I find it unfair that the society often consider people being "too young; may change mind later" when they say they do not want children; but we don't apply the same standards to young people who want children.
May I suggest you consider fostering a child? Or spending more time as an educator of some sort (through teaching, mentoring, etc.)? There are definitely ways for you to give love to a younger generation that does not involve your daughters decision to have children or not.
Thank you for sharing this. I hope my children bring their grandparents as much joy as you do.
Speaking of this - "tends to be factual, rational, and logical." - do you worry much about what the world will look like when your grandchildren are middle aged? I spent probably too much time concerned with rising authoritarianism, climate breakdown, shortages of food and water resulting from same, and their resulting wars, and it brings a tinge of panic to my thoughts on their future. I certainly stress out about this far, far more than before I was a parent.
I don't really know how best to address it, aside from trying to live in a way resilient to those things, and am curious how you think about this things given the obvious joy in your post (and again, thank you for sharing this; it brought joy to my own day).
I think about this question often as I now have a 2yo and 4yo. It used to stress me out, but now I realize that no matter how bad it gets, it will almost certainly be better than anything any human had to deal with in pre-modern civilization. Even with all the possible negative things coming, the tools we have acquired as a species would be incomprehensible to anyone say pre-5000 years ago. We are alive such a short blip of geological time and tend to get lost in the brief frames. The ability to bring a life into this world, even if it's harder than we have it right now, is still giving someone an opportunity to learn and experience things beyond wonder. Our technology is sufficiently advanced to be magic to anyone who died like pre-1990. Yes we have challenges ahead, yes a bunch of people will die and be displaced and people will be scared and think it's the end, but even if the population shrinks to 1 billion people the human spirit will endure and figure it out. Personally, I'd much rather experience life than none at all--even if it wasn't at the top of existence.
I like this perspective! In the end my wife and I ultimately said "well either civilisation persists OK-ish and we'll regret not having kids, or this is it and in the grand scheme of things what does it matter if they go down swinging?" So far, I am glad we had them.
What follows isn't as much of a direct reply just some thoughts motivated by your post.
My wife and I met when we were in our 30s, neither of us having ever been in a serious relationship, and both of us having given up ever being married, not to mention having kids.
We're both fairly clear-eyed and long-term environmentalist types, and we know how big an impact every person brought into the western world has. We decided to have a single birth child, and then adopt a second.
We had our son, who turns 18 in a couple of months, though various circumstances caused us to not adopt.
Our wonderful son is on the autistic spectrum; he's nearly six feet, two inches tall, with a beautiful, kind spirit, but his emotional and intellectual development is several years behind.
We never made the mistake of piling up expectations on or toward him. We're fine with the strong possibility that he will likely never materially achieve in ways similar to his parents.
He is loved and he loves us. My wife and I have, on average, another 30 years in this life. If our son is living with us for the next 30 years, that's fine. It would be our honor.
He continues to grow and mature; there's at least a good chance that he could end up moving out and going his own way in some number of years.
I didn’t want children but my now-wife was persistent. We even separated for a year because I didn’t want children. The only way I was able to have my so far two children was by pretending it wasn’t a choice of mine — and now of course I have zero regrets. The idea that we can “choose” to have kids is somewhat ridiculous I think. (I realize this is counterintuitive.) But there is no calculus at all that can incorporate any meaningful “data” into that decision. If you don’t believe me consider that I didn’t want kids but just went through having them and my joy at this happening to me could not have been understood by any upfront rational thinking. There is no free will in this domain.
>The Hacker News comment section tends to be factual, rational, and logical.
To a fault, perhaps. Humour is frowned upon, while overly pedantic comments are upvoted. Far too many comments uphold the stereotypes about engineers. I wouldn't expect a standard conversation about children to be possible here, both for good and bad.
I'm generally on your end of the spectrum with regards to children and I always hoped to have some.
But, I've met plenty of people who absolutely detests their parents and visa versa, their parents detest them and they are mean and rotten to each other. So YMMV as far as the entire topic goes.
Thanks for your great comment. Not sure why people are only focusing on the final years of loneliness part. It was only one part and to me it was clear that you love spending time with all of your family and look forward to every second you have with them.
This is a bit like hearing a successful startup founder speak about the joys of success. It’s absolutely correct, but it’s also just one data point.
Keep in mind, most of the lonely old people you see have children. And I’m not sure it’s a good, caring thing to tell childless people that they will be lonely in old age, because it need not be true.
A different view from one engaged in parenting 3 boys (11, 9, 6):
Having kids is very little fun. It is work. But helping new people to be the best people they can be is fulfilling, joyful work.
We're having one of our roughly weekly sleepovers tonight where we all spread out cots on the family room floor. (Everyone falls asleep before me, and so sometimes I make my way online). I like this time because we have a long talk about the world as they get sleepy and settled. Now I hear all these people I deeply love breathe and shift and sleep and feel contentment. Tomorrow there will be problems to solve. As they grow older, the problems become less frequent... and more complicated.
I sure hope they continue to be a big part of my life in their adulthood, but that's not exactly why one does it.
I'm half way through "The Course of Love" by Alain de Botton and I think it's an amazing read for anyone with children, or thinking about having them (coming from someone yet to have them!)
I have another data point. A dear friend died last month, after about two weeks in hospice. She had no children, but she did live in a large cohousing community. We did our best to manage visitors, but sometimes there were 5-10 people waiting to spend time with her. Which stressed the staff, and annoyed other residents.
Quite right, but living in any community involves making compromises along with the benefits. I think the bottom line is community is an achievement that takes effort and compromise to attain.
I think the correlation between what you put in and what you get out is much higher.
I had to give up a number of hobbies and intelectual pursuits in order to be there for my kids. Building a caring, trust-based long term relationship is hard work - sharing the same blood and providing a roof and a meal is not enough, which sadly is many people’s definition of parenting.
I know I am giving up things. I know there is no sure-fire bet that I will get “returns”, but I love my kids and knowing you can love someone so much is a gift by itself, IMHO.
It sucks knowing that you’re the reason your parents gave up hobbies, dreams, money, travel etc that they could otherwise have had. I know, like you, parents usually think it’s worth it but it’s not nice to think that my mom would probably have been a more fun, interesting person if I didn’t exist. The admittance that your life has to change and you have to give things up so that another human can do maybe things instead... it feels like such a pointless cycle.
I'm not sure why there's this insistence that 'giving up' time spent on hobbies makes you less interesting or less fun. You can have some hobbies, learn new things, etc; while being a parent. Sure you don't have as much time to do it, but having kids can also make you learn things and get perspective you wouldn't otherwise.
Also, worth remembering the alternative to such a "pointless cycle" is a pointless short existence and then human life would be over. Sure, you can argue that's a good thing for earth, but even life on earth is pointless in the grand scheme of things if you're going to use that line of reasoning.
My mum made that choice of her own free will & to this day often repeats how having 4 kids was the best decision she ever made & if she could go back she would have had even more. My conscience is clear.
Also I don't think I have become a less fun, interesting person since having kids. I may have become wiser (and more tired).
So given that birthrate is falling, society must be changing to prevent evolution drives? If we have no will I wonder what determines society - it can't be evolution, we're acting contrary to our base nature.
You don’t exist as an independent being. You are part of a long line of humans. Lots of studies showing how trauma of our ancestors is encoded in our DNA and carried forward.
Social patterns change but the underlying human drives stay constant more or less.
Maybe you know that specifically your mum was a fun and interesting person before having kids, but I think its important to keep in mind that some people are just boring.
Not to say having kids is ever super easy but there are definitely people that live a pretty kid friendly lifestyle without them.
It's important to keep this in mind because we do tend to place weight on others deciding to do something. It's why companies like to slap their logo on everything. If my friends were jumping off a bridge I absolutely would consider following them. I like to think one would stop to briefly inform me of whatever horror they're running from but absent that yeah I'd be pretty tempted to follow suit.
So we see all of these people having kids and think "the sacrifice must be worth it" but so many of those people would have been working standards 9-5's and pairing up to go live in the same suburb for the rest of their life where they'll wear clothes in the house and barely even walk each other on leashes anyway. They didn't have to give up their hobbies and dreams. If you do, you're facing a different equation than they did.
Funnily enough, I’m the boring 9-5 suburb guy, it’s my parents who aren’t. I think my parents are more interesting and skilled than I might ever be. So I look at myself and I’m like, really, was I worth it? What else could they have done with that time? Of course they say I’m the best thing that ever happened but the reality is they moved elsewhere to work on new things before I reached 18... so I guess I wasn’t THAT exciting! :)
There are definitely people who WANT kids, like another commenter in this chain describes. I don’t get the impression MOST people are like that though. Anyone who suspects they might have regrets or will be giving things up... I don’t know if they should go through with it.
>Anyone who suspects they might have regrets or will be giving things up... I don’t know if they should go through with it.
That's where we're at. We're open to changing our minds depending on our situation, which is about as good as we could hope for (not rich but relatively secure and very happy). Since things are good and we feel fulfilled, it's hard to justify significant compromises. We're really clear that if either of us changes our mind, we'll talk about it, and we check in with each other from time to time just to make sure, but we already have more interests than we have time to properly nurture.
You shouldn't feel any guilt about existing, though.
Am I a less interesting person for having children? Maybe?
Please note that effort that goes into raising children isn't just dumped somewhere that may return dividends someday. You develop a lot of skills and improve others a ton by being a parent.
I had a lot of text written, but it's unfair to yourself for blaming yourself for a decision you've had no part in.
My children (2 and 4) don't "prevent" me from hobbies any more than one hobby "prevents" me from pursuing other hobbies. I choose to spend time with them because it's rewarding to me to see them learn and grow. Don't get me wrong, they are excellent at making me feel like crap at times, but on the whole I enjoy and value my time with them, especially as they grow older.
Hum... If they decided to travel through the entire world and know every place, they would also have to give up other possible hobbies, dreams, and money.
If they decided to be world-class professionals in some are they would also have to give up other hobbies, dreams, and travel.
If they decided to know the inside-out of some hobby, they would also have to give up other hobbies, dreams, money, and travel.
Life is made of choices. They made one, what excluded a lot of others. It's a big choice, but it's not like the alternatives are completely free of constraints. Children also do not completely restrict those things, it's just one of the many restrictions that make their affordability limited, but not zero.
Well, in most countries, you get external funding from childless people which are paying higher taxes... If people were to pay entirely for the education and health of their offsprings, they would be way less babies in the developed world. And I don't even mention externalities. A human being in a developed country has a big impact on the environment, if people had to pay for it, having a child would out of reach of most.
Which is partly true. Those children will also grow up and pay taxes and contribute to companies which in turn fund the retirement accounts of the elderly community.
Only on Hacker News would someone post a response this patronising and argumentative. I think the point he made was fine, and I'm way glad to have heard his story. It was lovely.
I disagree and I think the comment is valid. I know many cases in which children and parents are not close emotionally or physically (live away). As they say, your mileage may vary.
It might be logically valid, but it's pretty emotionally tone-deaf to blithely dismiss a long heartfelt personal account by saying "Survivor bias. Caveat emptor." Read the room, as they say.
I don't even think it's logically valid. I think if you raise your children well, the chance that they'll be there for you in old age is very high. If you don't have kids, the chance you will have friends that loyal is low. Blood is thicker than water, people should be realistic.
How do you measure that statistically? All you have are personal experiences. Saying, "not statistics, isn't valid" is obtuse, it leaves you unable to understand anything that is difficult to measure at scale.
> Blood is thicker than water, people should be realistic.
Somewhat off-tangent here, but this is a frequent misunderstanding of this particular quote. The actual quote is: “the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb” and it means the exact opposite of what we now use it for. The intended meaning is that relationships entered into as adults are much stronger and deeper than those we are forced into through accident of birth simply because they are intentional. While I hope my children will be there for me in old age, I know that I will be there for my wife and closest friends even though we are not bound by any particular genetic imperative.
> Somewhat off-tangent here, but this is a frequent misunderstanding of this particular quote. The actual quote is: “the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb” and it means the exact opposite of what we now use it for.
I hadn't heard of that expression before, so I looked a little at the corresponding Wikipedia page [0] and the sources that talks about this quote [1 and 2]. I also looked at Quora question about the quote [3].
From what I understand, there is no way one with any certainty can say that: "the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb” => "blood is thicker than water".
There doesn't seem to be a direct "the blood of the covenant . . ." quote either.
My own thought: I think it is possible that the meaning of both quotes can be true at the same time:
a) If you make a blood covenant with someone => Strong bond, and maybe stronger than with family members.
b) If something serious happens in your life, family bonds tend to be stronger than that of a friend, at least if you don't have some type of covenant (in a broad sense) with that friend.
That appears to be a matter of discussion - the oldest current recordings don't have the conventant comparison and it seems to be a couple of scholars claiming that bit.
This fits my family to some degree. My dad was a little upset that his mom left so much to some friends over him. But, he lived 2000 miles away and while he made a point of calling to talk to her every day she still probably had a stronger relationship with the people that she hung out with than him at the end of it.
I think the reason the meaning shifted is that the original meaning is not particularly accurate. Although that said, I'm looking into it and it doesn't seem settled that that is the etymylogical root. That root also specifically refers to blood shed in battle. My guess is it was war propaganda.
I think the reason is the shorter version is easier to remember, and people love to attribute genuine wisdom to these kinds of statements. Because the shorter version is easier to remember it is near at hand and got used more.
Not really, it's a valid correlation that children raised well generally have better relationships with their parents.
Sometimes children are raised well and turn out to be little shits, but given that we're not drafting a scientific study in the comment section conversational generalities should be forgiven, unless you want every conversation to be so paralyzed by pedantry that no real content is discussed.
>I think if you raise your children well, the chance that they'll be there for you in old age is very high.
Our old friend Dunning-Kruger rather spoils this strategy. I know many people who have been abandoned by their children, but none who could proffer even the vaguest hint of why they might be to blame. Very few people intentionally set out to alienate their children, but plenty of people do it anyway.
Well we can define "having enough self awareness to acknowledge one's flaws and failings" as a precursor for "raising children well". Or more succinctly: "Narcissists don't raise children well".
Note that the entire perception of children has changed over the previous century, and the modern notion of emotionally as well as physically providing for children as a universal constant is a VERY new concept. We still haven't figured out how to do it en masse, although a decent chunk of the population seems to figure it out on their own.
OK, but it's also hacker news. If we just want positive anecdotes and feel-good inspirational stories that don't get debated, and which don't fully address the point or get to the heart of the matter, we could go to a Tony Robbins seminar, and I say this as a both a dad and as someone who doesn't want to go to a Tony Robbins seminar.
True, but as someone who has seen many a HN discussion that lacks any sort of empathy or comprehension of social norms or conventions, I cannot help but to advocate for emotional literacy and for the understanding of emotional appeal. Perhaps some of the tech companies and platforms we are seeing face so many problems right now could benefit from emotional literacy. Too much head and not enough heart, one could say.
Also agreed. I don't think anyone would argue that there aren't socially-challenged posters on the internet.
On the other hand, it's almost impossible to actually discuss certain socially-mandated topics objectively without someone playing the "emotionally stunted" card against anyone who takes the negative off the socially mandated position. And the poster in this case didn't call anyone names, and is also responding in a thread about worldwide birthrates. Far from being out of place and not reading the room, I think the second poster trying to effectively stigmatise his reply is the one in the wrong/ that can't read the room. If this is not the place for such a reply, it's hard to imagine where would be.
The root post is very emotional and personal to the point of not really germane to this discussion as a whole. But it was sweet and heartfelt, and the proper response is to simply let it be, and respond to other branches in this very long discussion thread. If one disagrees with the thesis, they can simply ignore it and engage with a different subthread that advances it using a non-emotional approach.
Being prudent about which battles to fight and which debates to pick up and what statements merit argument is part of understanding social norms.
How would you suggest they broach the point that not every family turns out well?
That some end up with kids watching from the car while their mom fights dad's drunken mistress in the Safeway parking lot while dad himself watches on, smoking a cigarette and having a beer?
It's also obvious that some people have had great experiences with kids, yet someone posts it anyways, because this is a discussion forum where we share ideas, question and provide couterpoints. When someone posts a sentimental story as a singular data point on why kids are great, and follows it with a recommendation on having kids, they should expect feedback of all sorts, no?
I find adversarial pedantry much more common than opening up about deep emotional experience, in general, and the latter is way more informative. I don't care that you can say, "not true 100% of the time, QED." Yes, ok, well done. I couldn't possibly have realised that on my own. So glad you have now stifled any emotional depth that the conversation was taking on.
>It might be logically valid, but it's pretty emotionally tone-deaf to blithely dismiss a long heartfelt personal account by saying "Survivor bias. Caveat emptor." Read the room, as they say.
I think the (inadvertent) tone-deafness can work both ways. The gp (gregfjohnson) in telling his personal account was also inadvertently tone-deaf to some potential readers.
If I can compress his comment into 2 parts:
- part 1: "I would like to contribute a bit of information. [...heartfelt story of the joys children and grandchildren...]" <-- can't criticize the part about personal joys
- part 2: "I highly recommend it." <-- this advice inadvertently rubs some readers the wrong way
Although some replies (from nostromo, drukenemo, etc) didn't agree with gregfjohnson, it was triggered by the "recommendation". A reader can dismiss part 2 (recommendation) without dismissing part 1 (personal joys) at all. There are 2 separate concepts there.
Likewise, someone else could write the opposite story, "I don't have the hassle of kids and can go vacations whenever I want. I highly recommend it." -- and a reader with happy children will dismiss the "recommendation" without invalidating the freedom of vacations.
tldr: just because you're relaying a wonderful personal story doesn't mean your "advice" will be accepted at face value because some readers don't see the positive personal anecdote as (logical) evidence for the advice.
I was in here earlier and the vast majority of comments were something along the lines of "I did the social maths and children have been determined unworthy, QED" so the GP I think was just responding with their anecdote to provide another perspective.
It's not surprising that someone immediately jumped on it to argue the maths so to speak, but it is slightly disappointing even if predictable. IMHO it should be ok for someone to recommend something to you that you don't like without it being seen as an invitation to a fight.
You misunderstand the goal. Both the OP and the responder are engaging in a conversation where they are presenting different sides of understanding so that everyone involved has more total information.
They are not arguing over who is right or wrong, they are cooperating so that everyone is more informed.
The person I knew who had the most people visit in his old age was as far as I know childless. Through a chance encounter he welcomed me to San Fransisco when I moved there. Everytime I'd visit he'd seem to have a new guest over, but most of them he had known for many years.
But it seems to me like if you do not have children all the effort you would have spent raising them must be spent in cultivating social relationships throughout your life instead, otherwise you do not reap the benefits of child free life and will be alone and lonely in old age.
So either way, there’s going to be work if you do not want to be alone.
The worst is when you put in the work and end up alone anyway. No one calls, no one cares, a life wasted on something that was ultimately meaningless. You could have done other things that brought you intrinsic joy.
How many of y'all are visiting elederly and helping them now?
If you never help the elderly now, how can you expect anything else than lonliness when you are in their place?
One of the most tragic results of the "modern" American life is that we throw away are elderly as obsolete while any other sane societies treates them as the holders of wisdom.
To be fair an excessive amount of power given to the elderly in the Spartan legal system also contributed to their slow decline in power as those who benefited from the status quo continuously stifled any attempts at adaptation or reform.
Only a tiny minority of elders have any wisdom worth purveying in my experience. Most are as mediocre at 70 as they were at 25, and can't tell you anything except how to be as mediocre as they are. An even larger fraction actually are obsolete and haven't kept up to date with the latest cultural changes or technology.
I'll take advice from the 70+ year old who's still working and staying abreast of their field/maintaining good relationships with friends and family, or the 70+ year old who did something great once upon a time (and I'll limit the advice I take to said great thing and related subjects). The retiree who worked a mid-level factory job, begrudgingly learned how to check their email and largely lives alone/with their spouse in a rancher with Christian TV playing 24/7 who rants about whatever Sean Hannity said (a direct description of some of my relatives) probably less juice in the squeeze there from a wisdom perspective.
Most of everything is trash, there are no exceptions -- if we think there is an exception somewhere, it often comes from emotional bias.
Old or young, most people live a dull live of no practical value. People may be angry to hear that, but the fact they don't try to randomly make friends outside of their usual circles only shows a degree of hypocrisy.
That can be true. There is a difference, in my heart, between an "Elder" and an "old person".
I would advise you, if I may, to expand your experience.
By holding onto that narrow view (can we dare call it ageism?), you could be missing out on some truly amazing individuals whom might have something very important to convey to you and your generation.
While I don't have the data to support it, I would imagine the chance of success raising a child versus the chance of a success with a startup are in favor of the former.
This claim falsely assumes childless people will have successfully developed enough intimate and reliable relationships by the time they are on their deathbed.Research shows establishing “fictive kin” at any age is challenging and nearly impossible when the elderly show signs of dementia or Alzheimer's.
I read somewhere, (I think it was USA Today, no less) that almost half adult children in the US have no meaningful contact with their parents. Many of them have parents who do not even know where their children live.
This is a great take, but also one that will change rapidly as the US is reaching Europe- and japan levels of aging. After precipitous falls in birth rates, it is becoming increasingly difficult to expect that children will be taking care of elderly parents, especially for a long and protracted "third age". This is a default expectation in the current generations but i think younger people have different expectations for themselves and their children's lives.
This presents an opportunity where technology can make (and is making) a difference. It is also the reason why we want Longevity biotech to make our healthspan equal to our lifespans. We are already seeing the need of this during the COVID shutdowns
A lot of those people alone in care homes have children. They just don't care. You can never know what the future holds so make reasonable plans but above all just enjoy your life and make yourself useful while you can. You have a therapist so you're not really selling the whole child lifestyle to me.
Only tangentially related but, speaking of taking care of people in their old age, my mother is taking care of my step father and she's clearly not happy about it.
She's only got one life to live and she's stuck staying at home with him until he dies or at least that's seems to be how she feels.
Maybe to be put it another way she can't get herself to check him into an old folks home and effectively leave him so she can enjoy the last few years of her own life while she's still able to. She's healthy enough she could travel and do things that she want's but feels she has to stay put until he passes. That could be tomorrow or 5 years from now. 8 years ago they said he had 3 years to live.
That doesn't mean she doesn't love him but she does feel somewhat trapped.
I suppose my sister and I could help her and volunteer to watch over him for a week or two at a time though neither of us have jobs that would let us do that.
But also, she married this man after we were both adults so while we like him as a person we feel no obligation like we might if he was our father or even the step father that raised us. Instead to us he's basically our mom's boyfriend.
It does make me think what I would do if I was him. Would I be self aware enough to check myself into an old folks home to let my wife or kids not have to take care of me? I believe I'd personally feel horrible by restricting the life of my loved ones. I'm sure I'd also feel horrible if they all abandoned me. I don't know which is worse. My currently healthy self wants to believe I'd value their freedom over my needs but my, future "old and needs constant care" self will probably feel different.
I hope Humanity grows many orders of magnitude larger and expands across the galaxy. The universe will be a more interesting place. Some people here are saying this is good for the environment. Having 20% fewer people won't do that. Clean energy and other technology will.
You can easily fit 100B humans on earth, with more of the earth dedicated to nature preserves. (Maybe a trillion people https://youtu.be/8lJJ_QqIVnc)
Macau has over 21,000 people per square km. There are 510M sq km of landmass on earth. This means on 1% of the landmass you could fit 100B people.
You can fit quadrillions in ONeil cylinders just in our own solar system.
We shouldn't shrink into extinction, we should ride to the stars and populate the galaxy with consciousness.
> Macau has over 21,000 people per square km. There are 510M sq km of landmass on earth. This means on 1% of the landmass you could fit 100B people.
Yes, because the earth's carrying capacity is about square footage and not the resources necessary to keep those people alive, healthy, and happy for 80+ years. How many square km of farmland do you think is necessary to feed Macau?
A human being can fit into approximately 2x2 feet cylinder. I propose packing the entire accessible Universe with a human being per such cylinder stacked alongside each other with no padding/margin between cylinders.
We will thus avoid shrinking into extinction and maximally populate all available 3-dimensional space.
Have you even explored Earth? You will never run out of places to explore in your lifetime. Your post reads like someone who doesn't go outside and thinks they've exhausted the Earth because they've been to a couple of theme parks in North America.
Have you ever been to a densely populated area? You seem to think it will be more interesting. I speak to fewer people in cities than I do in the countryside. Nobody in a city cares about you. And if they do it's probably wishing you weren't there.
We can't even live as we are now without constantly being at war. What makes you think a higher population will make that better? You suggest colonising other planets. Do you understand exponential growth? Going to another planet is not a solution even if it was possible.
So I think there's an unstated assumption about the driving force behind human population. Asides from a couple of pretty extreme environmentalists, most humans want a world well suited to the life of humans. This means that fundamentally, humans don't care what happens to other life forms. And why not, if everything is doomed to entropy, why would we favour the outcomes of non sentients over us? The issue is, however, humans do not live in an isolated bubble. We are part of the environment, and the environment is a part of us. We need to realise we are symbiotic with the environment, even if specific aren't all that important.
As for high population density cities, as others have said, it's the support infrastructure which is killing us. Otherwise, urbanisation alone would have already brought us many gains in terms of pollution.
So how does this mesh with still growing? Short answer: policy. Technology alone will not save us. We need a lot of social and cultural changes to also increase the material efficiency of each human. If we want to continue to expand, we need every last drop of ideation, experimentation and ambition. We need an environment for people to thrive, without having a class of people who too busy patting each other on the back, and another too busy surviving to contribute to the greater cause.
Edit: I should probably also have mentioned that Technology is getting harder, and we can less and less wait for the magic bullet. We need to act now (on efficiency), so that we have space to invest in the future.
I hope that humanity doesn't grow until we actually have that room beyond Earth available to us. Martin Rees believes with a vegan diet, no travel and spending most of the time in VR, Earth could sustain 20 billion people.
We're already using resources in an unsustainable manner. Human greed will keep it that way.
Now, once we have those O'Neill cylinders out there, sign me up! Just building a single one in space is going to require an incredible amount of resources, however.
> "The Millennial Project: Colonizing the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps" by Marshall T. Savage is a book (published in 1992 and reprinted in 1994 with an introduction by Arthur C. Clarke) in the field of exploratory engineering that gives a series of concrete stages the author believes will lead to interstellar colonization. Many specific scientific and engineering details are presented, as are numerous issues involved in space colonization.
Don't worry about humanity's numbers. The "rapid-breeding" subcultures (e.g. archtraditionalist sects, pro-natalist populations) will replace those who are less willing to breed, in the long run. The problem is, of course, whether the replacement memeplex that will occur would focus on the colonisation of Solar System by Earthlife.
Its concerning that this article closes with the idea that "migration will become a necessity for all nations and not an option."
There are multiple factors that limit population density, most important of which is access to space and clean water. The fact that a professor from London, with a population density of over 10,000 people per square kilometer [1] is advocating for continued growth is odd.
Yeah, I don’t see the problem here. Seems like the planet did just fine with less humans on it for quite a while. Even human history shines particularly well after broad population declines.
My index is failing me here but I recall a paper that had looked into falling birth rates as standards of living increased and found that birth rate correlated strongly with the "cost" of children. The supposition (it really wasn't a theory or even a solid hypothesis) was that as parents became more educated and society's measure of success became more material, the parental effort to provide the "best" for their kids went up.
It worked kind of like this, you have kids, you want them to have as good or better life than you have. If you've defined "better" here as wealth and social status, then you want them to have more opportunities.
Getting them those opportunities (which you may have missed out on) costs money (wealth). Examples, good schools, good nutrition, good after school programs, Etc.
Also, the developing society is putting more social status points on "successful" people (at least outwardly so by their display of wealth) which incentivizes couples to both continue their careers and "success trajectories." That path costs still more because now you have to add day care and possibly a nanny or two to the mix.
Here in the U.S. there is actually an interesting empirical example that supports this, its called foster care fraud. When the state offers to pay money to someone as a foster parent, a small number of people will exploit this by becoming foster parents for many many children to accrue the state benefit for "caring" for them. As an example, it suggests to me that if the state provided support to people with larger families that offset their costs significantly, the result would be larger families.
I would not argue that this "proves" the supposition that child care costs drive down the size of families, but to me it argues that it is likely a large factor in the decision.
> My index is failing me here but I recall a paper that had looked into falling birth rates as standards of living increased and found that birth rate correlated strongly with the "cost" of children. The supposition (it really wasn't a theory or even a solid hypothesis) was that as parents became more educated and society's measure of success became more material, the parental effort to provide the "best" for their kids went up.
I think it is pretty clear that humans (like animals generally) are more likely to adopt K strategy (smaller numbers of offspring with higher investment in each) rather than r strategy (larger numbers of offspring with smaller investment in each) in a stable, secure environment, and that this is structurally favored by the environment.
I wouldn't put much weight on the suggestion that either the number or investment piece drives the other, though.
I don't disagree (someone does though :-)) The argument is that given an expected pool of available wealth K to a couple, and a predicted cost p per offspring. Is O = K / p variable? or constant?
More simply, if you change one and not the other, does the value of O go up and down? The article was trying to look at that question by evaluating K and p and comparing O for different values.
> if the state provided support to people with larger families that offset their costs significantly
It's been tried, many times, without success.[1]
You could argue that those countries didn't try hard enough, but that's a fallacy the name of which escapes me for the moment.
[1] Demographers talk about a "low fertility trap": because young women grow up in a one-child environment, that is normal to them. They see their peers having one child, and they do too.
There are other factors besides re-norming: assortative mating is given a lot of weight; there are the effects of TV, social media, video games, shopping, and other distractions (measured as these things have diffused through countries and regions of countries). Check out a recent demography textbook.
(Fringe authors talk about the estrogen-like effects of obesity on sperm, and the 30% - 50% decline in micronutrients in food since the 1980s. They might be right, but they're fringe at present.)
Cool, as it turns out there are a couple of fairly recent demography texts at the library (2007, 2010) so I'll pick those up this weekend. Thanks for the pointer!
I think people are putting too much emphasis on the financial costs, you figure it out as you go.
I have a 1.5 year old and it's hard to explain the simple joys I get from just running around the house with him goofing off. It's nice to forget about the real world for a while and build a pillow fort. He's also brought much joy to other family members (grandparents, cousins), and my extended family is closer as a result.
People who think about social policy on the scale of nations need to worry about costs.
This isn't something that you "figure out as you go", it's something that causes wars and societal breakdown. We're already in a democratic world where the key voting fault lines are young-vs-old.
My wife’s theory is that there will be a lot of babies born in about 6 months (9 months after the quarantine started), but only for first time parents. Being quarantined with a child is the absolute best birth control.
I initially thought this too, but then someone pointed out that people choose to have kids when they feel their life is stable (and safe).
Sure there will be a load of unplanned pregnancies, but a lot of people actively planning their family might choose to wait to see if they have a job/a place to live/are still alive after the pandemic is over.
Apparently there was a similar drop in birth-rate after the 2008 financial crash - people just held back waiting to see what happened before committing to having kids.
In this regard, human psychology is weird. Ask any first time parent of a ~6 month old if they're going to have a second one and the answer will most likely be a resounding "no!".
Then when that baby is ~2 years old, suddenly the pain of delivery, the sleepless nights and the baseless crying seem to be forgotten, and the cycle starts again.
I thought so too, but birth control is so common, day after pill, etc that I don't think it will matter much, unlike the old days. I'd love to be wrong though.
It seems like a lot of unmarried couples live together these days. Anecdotally, I know more unmarried couples that live together than I do unmarried couples that live separately, at least if we're talking about the kind of relationship that is anywhere close to "making babies".
pffft. no way. didn't slow us down at all and I got a 10 and 12 year old.
Wife isn't having any more for medical and conscious decision reasons. We just feel that 2 for 2 is plenty a replacement rate for our middle class efforts.
Thank goodness! I hope this is true. Please let it be true, that the population will decrease in the example countries and elsewhere.
Seems to be about the only thing, that can protect us from further overpopulating the planet with more humans. Even better, if it is caused by more education and more similar or equal opportunity for women.
We should start celebrating women, who choose not to get children or at least not more than 1 child as climate saviors too.
I fail to see the problem. Lower population means an age of abundance: high supply, low demand, safe environment, automation, freedom, leisure, invention. Think dark ages, plague, Renaissance. Pensions can either deflate with price level, or governments can inflate with basic income. It’s only bad for an elite class of people that benefits from increasing consumption, but doesn’t pay the social cost of it. And if you pay more than 0.1% of your net worth in taxes, that’s not you. The elites have become brazen in their assumption of our stupidity.
I think the point here is that the people who don't want kids are still a useful part of our gene pool, and we should look critically at what factors in to the decision not to have any kids - I don't think it's genetic at all.
It's impossible for me not to think of Idiocracy while writing this - which was extremely exaggerated, but still...
Astute observation, but given the fact that we also seem to be seeing an increase in fatherless/split families (indicating poor choice in parenting partners and decisions) it's not likely to simply see-saw back in necessarily healthy ways.
That's not how natural selection works. Most of us want sex because of that gene. But we do know about contraception, which natural selection knows nothing about.
Contraception is part of the environment in which natural selection occurs, in that sense it "knows" about it. Concretely, if there is a set of genes that makes it more likely to have children in spite of contraception, that can be selected for.
If reading is advantageous to select for, you'll find that natural selection will prefer whichever genes facilitate reading ability
There are a lot of subtle hereditary hints. This isn't to say a person can't consciously counteract those hints, but that in the long run those hints will have an impact on behavior which feeds back into selection
It's possible to inherit traits which will hint one to choose not to use contraception
This is the whole nature vs nurture debate. Ultimately it's both
Not necessarily one gene, per se. More like a set of characteristics and pre-dispositions that make kids seem fun and desirable will be selected for, while the opposite will be selected out.
So, massive article on how terrible a declining population is, but only four (supposedly, maybe) negative effects listed?
- Who pays tax in a massively aged world?
- Who pays for healthcare for the elderly?
- Who looks after the elderly?
- Will people still be able to retire from work?
I welcome a declining population. Because the climate will benefit and the poor will be less so, and the threat of war would diminish. I would hope this, at least, because I'd like to believe that fewer lives would place more value on the lives of others.
Why do you think the climate will benefit? Smaller but richer populations have polluted more than large but poor populations in the past. Due to global trade and wealth accumulation, a declining population could easily just lead to more concentrated wealth and more luxury goods consumption (think private jet flights, yacht construction...) which leads to pollution not decreasing.
Similar with war - tons of wars are fought for wealth and resources, which seems unrelated to population, and even with a small population, drone attacks, assassinations and proxy wars are still entirely possible.
You're probably right. My thinking is that with time and with a reduced population the world might become more enlightened. Also if there is an agricultural surplus that it might be put to use feeding the poor. I'm an optimist, and hope the world might one day become an egalitarian matriarchy that learns a thing or two from the past.
Kind of a silly thought experiment, but ever wondered why you were born at this point in history, and not some other point? If population is now nearing its peak, you're more likely to be among the people alive now.
I read a science fiction book based around this once. It makes a lot of sense at first, the issue is that we are not a random sample. People could have used this argument at any time in human history.
There's a short-term problem of society becoming "top-heavy", where there might not be enough young to pay for the continued care of the old. But in the long run this seems like a win. I wonder what impact it might have on climate projections.
Pretty much every western civilization on Earth is fully capable of providing a minimum standard of living to its entire population today, let alone just a larger chunk of the pie elder group in half a century.
Its an active and intentional decision not to do so. Unless society collapses and the knowledge of how modern mass production works to produce so much plenty evaporates it will continue to take a tiny percentage of the whole population to provide the resources needed to survive to the rest.
We should be expecting a technological singularity before 2100, not some dystopia where all wealth evaporates and the only people with money left are under 30s who get to work 80 hours a week farming rice for grandma.
what does it mean to "pay for" the continued care of the old.
Unless we have such a population implosion that we can no longer produce food or run our factories, then we don't need to "pay for" anything. We can simply decide to distribute the resources necessary for the care of the old.
The real cost of everything is the labor required to produce it, not the dollar value it receives in a market place. I don't think anyone is talking about a complete collapse in the labor pool.
Yes, but e.g. Japan faces a big problem where the labor pool will be a small part of the population, with a big noticeable slice involved in elder care. If current plans to automate large amounts of this work (and I worry that automating it could be horribly dystopian) do not succeed it will be a large problem. (Not to mention other types of resources that those not in the labor force consume besides direct care).
Pensions, social security, etc. The point is that the "active economy" will shrink beneath what was expected for those systems to function for the number of elderly they will end up having.
A big part of that problem is that most nations have a pension system where the active work force pays for the pension of the elder instead of each person paying their own pension by saving/investing troughout their lives.
Government and private retirement strategies both rely on cash transfers from younger workers. In a government system, the younger workers pay taxes which are transferred to retirees. In a private retirement system, younger workers are the purchasing counterparties as retirees sell off their investments.
Retirement financing in general relies on future economic growth for future cashflow. That said, you don't necessarily need a growing population to make it work. If the population declines 15%, but the average worker's productivity goes up 20% during that time, you still come out ahead.
>Government and private retirement strategies both rely on cash transfers from younger workers. In a government system, the younger workers pay taxes which are transferred to retirees. In a private retirement system, younger workers are the purchasing counterparties as retirees sell off their investments.
The core unit of the economy is not cash, it's value. Saving roughly corresponds to avoiding consumption and preserving value; in a very basic economy, this would take the form of e.g. preserving grain in a granary rather than eating it all. People or government savings systems that save for retirement are then able to consume the value they saved when they retire; they don't require any value transfer from the working population.
In a society that wishes to support people who are not producing value, the people who are producing value will need to overproduce.
Whether you measure the overage in units of lifetime granaries, or running annual surpluses, is primarily an accounting choice.
As a practical matter, it's impossible for one farmer to save up enough food to span their entire retirement. Storage is an expense, and food goes bad eventually. The concept of a retirement is only possible in a society that transacts value regularly.
Yeah but we have money that can be stored and anyone that is old and have reserves of money will be treated and get food etc.
Society doesn’t reward you based on the value you produce but based on how much fictional currency you have. This could be entirely granted to you for example in a a lottery and you never produced anything of value.
Money spoils (aka inflation) just as much as food does. To maintain the value of your money you have to actively utilize it in the economy by investing it. This is not a flaw. It is necessary to keep the economy running. Otherwise we would see Scrooge McDuck in real life.
You can't store medical workers in a silo for later. That's the big problem. Older people don't need to eat more but they do need more attention from nurses and doctors.
You'd still need someone to sell that 20% more product (or service) your worker is producing and with 15% less people your entire market has just shrunk.
That money is worthless if it is not backed by a young labor force that can produce what the pensioners need. There are not many things that you can buy during your 30s and keep using in your 80s.
Think of a reverse Corona virus that only kills the young.
Retirees have lots of money but the shops and factories are closed.
The system was obviously designed for a "reasonable" amount of retirement from 5 to 10 years. Nowadays everyone is exceeding that despite a raised retirement age.
Saving and investing is ineffective if everyone’s investment returns (assuming there’s any returns to be had with productivity slowing and economies stagflating, note the monetary policy in Japan and Europe) are chasing the same limited pool of healthcare and caregiver labor.
The only solutions are technology or rationing care.
The key is who saves/invests the most and they will have access. This is how it works with everything in capitalism and this is the only efficient way we know of distributing resources.
The boomers will be dead long before the system shocks itself. Probably the tail end of Gen Xers or Millenials that will get royally screwed, if I had to guess.
I don't really think so. It's the parents who decided to have fewer children and be against immigration (mostly the US and UK). If they are really getting screwed then they can always open their countries up for immigrants.
I'd like to see an accounting of the real resources (not money) that elderly require vs children and young to middle aged adults. I'm suspicious because it sounds much like the undue burden tripe you hear about disabled people.
At least in the US, expenses in later life seem not too bad, until the last 3-5 years--at which point healthcare cost absolutely blows everything out of the water. Like, more healthcare cost in one week at 85 than an entire year at 50. Especially once a person is unable to safely walk to the bathroom or prepare a simple meal without falling. Meds, ambulance transport, non-emergency wheelchair transport, rental of various equipment, home health aides, physical therapy, speech therapy, rehab or nursing care, palliative care. The costs are just stupefying.
Edit: I've replied mostly along the lines of the financial costs, but the human service component is by far the largest part of it, that's the main resource consumed.
I was thinking more along retired or semi-retired. But yes end of life is a thing. Even then people 'sounding the alarm' about the ratio of workers to retirees 'plummeting' are way overstating things. Over the next thirty years the percentage of people over 65 is going to double and then level off.
The source of the panic is the 'exponential growth forever' dingbats being confronted by a reality they don't like.
The planet is of finite size, so unlimited growth was clearly never an option. The question is, what is the best population size, and how do we get to that level?
When pension systems run dry or hyperinflation occurs to prop it up (a mathematical certainty), the result is massive depression and an unprecedented decline in progress. When times are tight, nobody is going to care if their power is green or not because they're focused on survival.
Nobody wants to admit it but the only chance to “win” against climate change is to either drastically reduce the population or invent some magic technology that solves the problem for us.
Advancements in existing technology just aren’t going to be enough at the timeline we’re looking at. Political change is another non-starter because it just won’t happen on a global scale. Then there’s the fact that for the vast majority of people alive today, the Earth’s condition in 50 or 100 years is rightly not even on their radar.
I've read plenty researches: main factor is healthcare. It's a natural a better healthcare - leads to lower child and women death rate. That's why people are having less child and they become more valuable.
100 years ago there's NO statistic for child under 13yo death rate. Mostly because it was TOO high around 50-60% children are dying before they get ready for marriage.
My grand-grand-ma told me she had 8 brothers and sisters and only 2 survive: she and her brother. In that time it was reasonable to bake kids in enormous numbers in hope some of them are won't die. Then healthcare changed everything.
> 100 years ago there's NO statistic for child under 13yo death rate
100 years ago was 1920. Many countries absolutely had infant mortality statistics by 1920.
See R.A. Meckel's "American public health reform and the prevention of infant mortality, 1850-1929" which (as the name implies) goes back was more than 100 years.
See also I. Loudon's "Death in childbirth: an international study of maternal care and maternal mortality, 1800-1950"
This article is not about the correlation of individual happiness and having children, but about a demographic change and issues it might bring in the future. In hundred years we may have a population where 80+ year olds are twice as many as 20 year olds. What will be the health of such a population? Who will take care of the elderly? What will be the economic prospects or innovation on which the today's society relies? Some very legitimate questions, and here I read about advantages/disadvantages of having children from a personal perspective. Just annoying that many people are unable to think about anything beyond their current immediate environment.
Millennials can’t afford to move out of Mom & Dad’s basement, get married, and have kids. Our society is profoundly sick, both figuratively and now literally.
That’s not the only reason. Overweight women have a harder time conceiving. More alarmingly, men’s sperm counts have been dropping for decades, and not by small amounts. I think it’s a greater threat to humanity than global warming, yet most people aren’t even aware of it.
For every one couple who wants to get pregnant but can’t due to weight or sperm count, I would wager there are dozens and dozens who cannot afford to take on a baby.
We have the same effects in Europe (even more pronounced than in the US) and Millenials here can absolutely afford to move out and generally do, so that seems to not be relevant.
Its working completely as intended. The stratification of class is a measure to maximize profit. The disconnect of markets from actual human wellbeing feeds into a perpetual profit loop that makes capitalists numbers bigger without actually being based on anything real.
If anything it is a mercy that todays kids will go childless because any children they would have will just be even more thoroughly screwed by economic mandates placed upon them by long dead barons of industry.
Why would a decline of sum(humans) even be a problem? We have destroyed large swathes of our habitats, poisoned the air, land and water not only where we live but also where we get our resources, exploit and kill each other because of a skydaddy or for financial gain, and delude ourselves into thinking we're a gift to this earth or even the universe.
How we can even think that putting more consumers on this planet is good for the environment is beyond me. The best way to stop polluting is to consume less. The max minimum of consumption is an absence of consumption.
We don't need more people, we need less of them. And if education and prosperity is making us recognize that, then I demand more education and more prosperity worldwide.
I feel like bemoaning sub-replacement rate fertility doesn't take into account the exponential growth of automation in post-industrialized economies and how little labor actually needs to be done to maintain the same productivity, let alone how less labor increases productivity in an organization (no numbers there - just an observation from my own work).
Extrapolated to society I'm not really afraid of an aging population of pensioners like Japan several years ago, because 10 years from now we'll be moving further from human controlled economic activity. But who knows if that is going to be a good thing.
I guess what I'm saying is we're going to hit Star Trek or the Matrix
I worry because society has not given us the benefits of increased productivity. We've already massively increased productivity with computerization, but during that same period instead of more leisure time, society has actually demanded MORE working hours (by putting more women to work)
It's kind of hard to make a sweeping statement like that.
We're seeing costs and benefits of increased productivity/efficiency. My diet consists of fruits and vegetables that my parents could only buy a few times a year when I was a kid. My grandmother made dresses from potato and flour sacks during the war, and my great grandmother sold jams from homegrown fruits because sugar was rationed. I'm typing this comment on a machine manufactured and assembled halfway around the world, designed 30 miles from where I'm sitting, and last week took a medical test that was developed, tested, manufactured and shipped across the country in weeks.
To say that we don't benefit from increased productivity is not true - those anecdotes are all examples of how rapid industrialization across the globe and improved communications, design, manufacturing, operations, and strategy have quantifiably improved my life as a human.
I also wouldn't say that the boon in productivity demanded more labor. Particularly because the entry of women into the workforce was driven by the Great Inflation (which didn't improve productivity) and the tail end of second wave feminism which had succeeded in changing our society's attitude towards women in the workforce. The decomposition of that barrier in our society begot such productivity in our economy, it didn't respond to the demand for more.
But I agree, we're not getting all the benefits of such productivity. At least not all of us. But that's why UBI is probably the future, because eventually all our jobs are going to be automated.
The question is, are those people actually doing useful work which contributes to an increase of happiness or living standards for people?
I'd argue that many don't, and that many work on stuff that doesn't really matter. This includes many programmers, by the way. I've certainly done more than a fair share of meaningless "bullshit" programming work.
I really feel like we don't have any effective model for how to integrate parenthood in our lives anymore, and so having kids has become almost an affectation or a hobby, rather than something that everyone bases their life around as a matter of course.
Does the article actually say population density "causes" lower birth rates? The title says it is a "factor," which is not necessarily a causal relationship.
>However, this will be a truly global issue, with 183 out of 195 countries having a fertility rate below the replacement level.
...
>As a result, the researchers expect the number of people on the planet to peak at 9.7 billion around 2064, before falling down to 8.8 billion by the end of the century.
...
>The population of sub-Saharan Africa is expected to treble in size to more than three billion people by 2100.
We're still looking at a 2billion increase in population while simultaneously 9/10 billion people from least to less developed countries will be consuming more resources as they develop. Mostly through coal and oil.
Social systems are zero sum game between individuals paying in and receiving benefits from them.
Meantime the salaries are stale, salary deductions only increase, and corporations (ehem formally "charities") funnel out billions annually through tax havens and heavens.
In countries where social systems are not that mature and trustworthy (e.g. post-Communist countries) even the most qualified like doctors and engineers pick contracting as a form of the employment to skip contributing to the social systems or to contribute only the minimum required by law.
"Purge of the needy and old", something like in the Bergamo area in Italy this March and April... and marginalization of the homeless and incarcerated like in the US.
Serious thought/question: I think everyone can agree that reproduction is how you advance your gene pool to the next stage of the human species. Does this mean people who don't want kids are effectively weeding themselves out? And is this somehow a function of survival of the fittest (or natural selection) in action?
Yes, in theory all the people who refuse to reproduce will be gone and are replaced by the children of those who want to reproduce. Over the long term this problem will fix itself. However, I personally believe that the population will level out instead of keep shrinking forever until reproductive pressures fix the problem by force.
> Yes, in theory all the people who refuse to reproduce will be gone and are replaced by the children of those who want to reproduce.
Those, who do want to reproduce, will also be replaced by the next generations. Natural selection doesn't select individuals, it selects genes. And your genes are well-represented in the rest of the population.
Maybe a controversial opinion, but: the specific way in which Western capitalist societies (which were then pushed on to the rest of the developed world, directly or indirectly) went about the liberation of women is a major cause of population implosion.
It used to be possible to raise a family on a single income. However, once corporate interests (and the blind market itself) realized that having women in the workforce would both increase potential consumers and increase the workforce (thus depressing wages), the model of everyone should be a worker first and a father/mother/family member second won out over alternatives. Add to that an entertainment-and-consumption-focused value system, and you have the present day: young people either can't afford to start families or are culturally discouraged to; to be a mid-twenties married couple with kids is almost embarrassing or shameful in many social groups.
We need a new model of work, in which parents (both men and women) aren't punished for simultaneously pursuing individual career goals and wanting to build a family unit.
As the article states, women are choosing to have fewer children. There are multiple ways to read this, and you can take the materialist theory of them just being caught up in their careers, but I tend to fall into a more cynical interpretation: humans are social creatures, and we are acutely tuned in to threats around us. I think humans are becoming increasingly aware, consciously or unconsciously, that we are killing ourselves through destroying the planet and that there is no way we can sustain further population growth. Whether “focusing on your career” is the chicken or the egg in this situation is up for interpretation.
This absolutely must be reasoned about together with climate change projections. I don't see there's any chance in hell we can stop at a 2 degree world. That means though that large parts of the world will likely become inhospitable to human life as we know it. So, I'd expect either huge population transfers, wars, or both. The population decline will likely not be uniform then, as people will flock to the still hospitable parts of the planet. Provided 'native' populations don't go full lock-the-borders mode.
That Dr Murray is a spin doctor too. The argument is that its good for the environment. And he says yes but the social problems.
Well it doesn’t change the fact that it is one of the best ways to preserve natural environment, and somehow I think dealing with ageing society, especially with assistance of technology is an easier problem than global environmental disasters such as climate change etc.
He also says it would take a few centuries for humans to disappear. I would like to see the calculations he’s done as they seem wrong.
The good: a lower total population is good for climate change. Additionally, humans can focus on living in the most habitable, productive areas, improving per capita efficiency.
The neutral: day-to-day things are unlikely to be affected much. Fewer farmers, but fewer mouths to feed. This applies to most consumables.
The mildly negative: for knowledge intangibles, a lower total population means a lower number of scientists, entrepreneurs, etc. Perhaps substantially less. Apex projects that take a substantial proportion of the world's capital and labor (e.g. colonies on Mars) become a lot harder, with many becoming impossible. This is somewhat counteracted by most countries becoming richer and more educated.
The disastrous: older societies where each person working has to support multiple other people are sclerotic societies. A society where younger workers have to pay taxes 2x higher than they do today, to support a bunch of old people who already own all the housing and capital stocks? That's a society that I'd move away from in a hurry, regardless of if I'm old or young. I'm going to have to encourage any kids I have to study Yoruba.
This is one of those huge issues on par with climate change, but people mostly don't care or think about it. I'm not sure what governments can do about it. At some point I want to study Israeli demographics and fertility more, as it's the only country I know of that has maintained a high TFR (>2.1) even in its secular populations.
> "A society where younger workers having to pay taxes 2x higher or more than they do today..."
Most likely social welfare programs for the elderly will simply be allowed to collapse. Nothing will motivate the young to vote like having their paychecks eaten away.
I feel bad for young people graduating now; if they're not able to save the _entire_ cost of their own retirement over the course of their career, they are just plain screwed.
Retired voters, and voters approaching retirement, will fight denture and nail against that. The likely result is some claw back of benefits for them, but young workers would still carry a much heavier tax burden than the retired class did, preempting their own retirement savings. That causes them to defer or forego marriage and children as well, causing a continuing downward spiral.
Without an attestupa or genuine efforts to improve fertility rates, we're in for very grim times in most countries. There's a kind of virtuous cycle here, though, as a government that does figure out how to mold its age demographics in an effective manner will be a much more attractive destination for young emigrants.
Scleroticism doesn't imply horror stories. What I'd expect for it to do is drive out-migration and a lowered quality of life. And, looking at hard numbers, more Japanese people are emigrating and more young Japanese are committing suicide, in a country that already has high suicide rates. I'd be curious about the relation between aged societies and those numbers across the OECD.
The subjective stories I read don't suggest a particularly bright experience for most younger Japanese, though I'd be the first to point out that those are often more interested in painting a narrative for gullible Westerners than offering any real analysis.
I agree that Japan is a useful canary, and policymakers should watch its experience closely to evaluate how serious the problem is and potential solutions.
Just a few points I didn't see elsewhere and would like to point at for further thought.
It seems to me that some parents have kids to help them deal with their existential angst and fulfill a need for meaning they couldn't find elsewhere, let's say providing and caring for people who are already alive and in dire need of help, lets say orphans in developing countries, homeless ppl etc. Or something entirely different. Having children have a very strong narrative for meaning associated with it, which might cause some who are lost in their life have children which will be equally lost.
I happen to hear things like "spread my genes" as example, probably not accounting for the 99.9% similarity with the next random guy and we all share the same ancestors. Even the homeless dude would help us spread our (common) dna if we could help him get his act together.
There are lots of good reasons for having children already mentioned and I agree with many of them, however, difficulty making friends and feelings of meaninglessness should probably be resolved before having children.
Focusing on having something meaningful to give is a lot better. My takeaway from the article is that people deal with more complexities today and might not reach a point where they feel enough "on top of things". Having children if already stressed out might not leave much left to give.
My wife and I have been trying for nearly 3 years now. We're both healthy - we exercise, eat right, and we're in our early 30s. We were saving up for IVF all of last year so we'd be able to do it this year.
Unfortunately, I'm a photographer and COVID has destroyed the chances of that happening. Minnesota's wedding season is really short and runs from early June to late September. That means we may not have enough until the end of next summer. When you've been trying for as long as we have every month you wait is absolute torture. My wife cries regularly, and while I've held together better I've had a few absolute breakdowns.
Nothing has made me feel like more of a failure of a husband than this has. Our infertility is unexplained, so it could be my fault. Worse is the fact that I have a degree in computer science and I could have had a job that paid better in the best of times, and right now could be done remotely. It's agonizing that all of this stress and suffering could be over if we just had some more money.
The problem is for most people there's no definitive answer, and IVF success rates aren't absolutely amazing. It'll cost north of $30,000 for just one try after the actual procedure, testing, and medicine. That has less than a 50/50 chance of working. How many times should you try before giving up? I've already put two years worth of savings/retirement in to it. I honestly think insurance should be mandated to cover at least one round of IVF. Isn't making babies our entire biological reason for being?
I would love to see this re-spun as a net-positive article, discussing how we can 'grow the economy' by providing goods and services worldwide instead of asymmetrically to only a small cohort of the population.
'Do it better with less people' is what sustainable is all about.
Birth rate decline in many economies correlates strongly to rises in standards of living: kids are a hedge against economic bad times in poor, rural economies.
Interesting for a variety of reasons but my immediate takeaway is that the world is in a long term deflationary economic trend and any attempts to push against that, however successful in the short run, will fail.
Cash will be king and assets will be sold for pennies on the dollar, so to speak - provided you can remain solvent in the whipsaws and gyrations of the desperate attempts to stave off deflation at any cost.
It must be, because TFR for resident populations is below replacement. Every wave of immigration has seen this fall: first-generation kids are intermediate, and second-generation have the same TFR as the population as a whole.
We have shit on this planet so much, we do not deserve children. None of us choose to be born. Yet we have to deal with mistakes and evils of generations past. Even the joy of discovery, of exploring a world anew, of making our own rules has been stolen. We live in the dead shells of our foolish ancestors, dragging their legacy into a future chosen for us by the wealthy 1%
For the planet? Yes. For people who have priorities other than child rearing? Yes. For economies based on endlessly borrowing from the future, overleveraging, and fractional reserve lending, most definitely not. The economy will have to adapt, as the decline curve is locked in the longer the fertility rate is below replacement rate.
This is, overall, splendid news. Commendable this was funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Agreed, but no one seems to know how we decouple the economy from growth without hurting or angering a lot of people. Maybe we just tear off that bandaid quickly.
The number of people who would be adversely 'negatively' affected if we said "alright, we're taking control of this situation and not just going to blindly let you maximize your profits at the expense of the rest of the planet" is pretty small. A few millionaires and billionaires. The majority of us will adapt just fine.
The resources are there but they are misallocated and the few own most of them. When push come to shove it will become more and more obvious this is one of the problems. Until the we fight on stupid things
This just means that the strategy of keeping most of the wealth with a tiny minority and expecting the middle class to bear the cost of supporting the old people in wholly separate existences and households paid for by the young isn't tenable.
Some degree of distribution of wealth and multi generational households would render it tenable again.
I dunno, looking at the fertility rates of rich countries vs. the performance of equities, it seems like increased productivity from computerization and automation is perfectly capable of offsetting much of the economic decline from a lower birthrate.
It should be who can produce the most efficient and consume the most efficient. We should go back to building solidly and everlasting. The investment may be initially more expensive but the return will compound quickly and the benefits will make a difference. We’re wasting so many resources to stir this stupid economy and it always crashes.
Not when you realize that the economy is largely a huge ponzi scheme which requires a constant stream of new participants to prop up asset prices and generate economic activity.
The care issue is real, not so much because we need people to look after them, which potentially could be automated, but rather the new generations are the ones paying into the system and funding their pensions.
Unfortunately that would require political action that would never be accepted by society until they're hurting enough that it's too late. No politician is going to win an election by promising to make your life worse now for the future generations.
Not all ponzi schemes are dysfunctional, some are sustainable in the long term.
For instance if you have an asset that appreciates over time and represents true value (say because it generates more income over time) then you can't realize that appreciation if there is no-one to buy that asset from you. That is the marginal effect of having less people.
This doesn't seem that "jaw dropping." Hans Rosling was saying this for at least a decade prior to this, that global population would peak around 10B and decline thereafter. That said, I think that viable longevity therapy will significantly alter this trend.
What's terrifying is that just as we face all of this pressure from falling fertility rates, we have the technology to implement massive state-sponsored breeding programs to "fix" the problem...
I find articles like this send a mass hysteria that its happening across the world, when in fact its actually dependent on the country. You can see middle east countries to africa are not falling, but yes the overall worldwide rate is falling.
Inverted population pyramid causes many problems. All the ponzi-like schemes for pensions will collapse. There will be a massive influx of sub-saharan African immigrants in the Western world as they are the only ones still making babies. Latin America holds up, mostly. But there's already internal mass migrations in the millions.
China has been investing a lot on on designer babies, artificial womb, and cloning technologies.
It's going to be... interesting to see how it all develops.
Maybe it's poor access to contraceptives but I personally know people(family) in a third-world country where a single person has 4+ kids... I'm like why, can you even afford it. These people are also still living on a dirt patch in the forest/woods. What's crazy too is in the 15+ years I left, it's still almost the same... I guess that's what happens when you're far away from major cities.
I remember we learned in elementary school, about three hundred years ago when I was a kid, a correlation (or inverse of) between economic prosperity and demographic picture. It was so obvious it even had named phases for it (that we had to learn, which I forgot).. but from vague memory it was along the lines of expansion (when country is poor), stagnation (when well-fed) and immigration (when rich).
There's a new economic model starting to get popular in Europe called the Donut[0][1] according to which after a country reaches a level of maturity, it should stop focusing on growth and switch to stability so as to avoid overshooting.
We should discuss the most important reason people have children. A way to make their genetic material immortal. At least half of it. There is no other way to continue living after ceasing to exist.
The joy of children, the company, the pain of loneliness being childless etc are emotions that is like malicious code that hacks the human psyche in order to replicate some other lines of code on to the next generation.
As life span increases, which it will in the next few decades, so will the length of fertility.
So any extrapolation out 80 years is nothing more than sensationalism.
I truly don't understand this nonsense.
We can clearly see in the past 80 years, the really slow moving pre internet past, the global fertility rate has changed how it works significantly, but suddenly in this hyper-society we are wasting time looking at 2100?
The article talks about this slightly, but very long term humanity will need a stable fertility rate and I have no idea how it will happen.
If the fertility rate keeps being below the replacement rate, at some point humanity will disappear. While short/medium term negative population growth might be a good thing, at some point we will need to do something.
i think the main question is if people want kids but aren’t having them for economic reasons or if they simply don’t want them.
the latter seems fine to me but we still need to solve the problem of paying for the social security ponzi scheme and will have to deal with increased labor costs (which could be a good thing)
There is a ludicrous amount of wealth in almost every industrialized nation. Every single one has way in excess of the ability to guarantee minimum income to all citizens without exception let alone just a social security equivalent for the elderly. Its just a question of if they will be interested at all in keeping said people alive in the future.
Immigration from the same countries that are rapidly improving their own standard of living, and at the same time experiencing their own demographic crashes?
they can also be solved by cutting back benefits. and higher wages isn't neccesarily a "bad thing" that needs to be solved unless you're a major corporation, which is why they are desperate for immigration.
"Prof Ibrahim Abubakar, University College London (UCL), said: "If these predictions are even half accurate, migration will become a necessity for all nations and not an option."
So if the US current attitude towards immigrants persists, this is a future in which it does not compete well?
It seems everything has already been said: Most of our problems are driven by population pressure. Leveling off is a good thing, despite potential expense of reconfiguring society and economies (but we have to do that anyway to address climate change!)
Kids are great. But you only have about 13 years with them until they decide want to hang out with their friends instead of you. Enjoy the journey. It is hard work though! Especially combined with the pressure and commitments of working.
WTF?! The data says nothing like what the headline says!
Yes, the projection goes down sharply... but the best estimator of tomorrow is yesterday, and the last few years of data are saying nothing like what the projection is showing!
> Prof Murray adds: "It will create enormous social change. It makes me worried because I have an eight-year-old daughter and I wonder what the world will be like."
Case in point: This implies the professor has only one child.
The article is a little alarmist. Automation is on the rise which means you don't so many people to take care of things. So there will be enough resources to handle healthcare and the elderly.
It is one of the factors for sure, but also contraception, education, women emancipation (eg they are unwillig to make 10 kids unlike 100 years ago even in the western world)
This is a very good thing. Earth is overpopulated. Ideally we shouldn't have more than 2 billion on the planet for long-term environment sustainability.
obviously, the quarantine might change those results :D
but on a serious note -- the global population has been falling. And it might be seen as a "negative" thing, but if you change your perspective: the global rate was at once higher only because women DIDN'T have access to education, opportunities, employment, or the rest.
A positive, vis-a-vis a negative, is a negative, right?
> migration will become a necessity for all nations and not an option
Looks like the projections contradict this in at least two ways:
1. The population of the United States is projected to grow slightly, so it's not "all nations"
2. The population of two of the most currently populous countries, China and India will drop so precipitously that I'm not sure where they expect the "migration" to come from.
This is old news, bit glad it's getting mentioned I guess. Confused that the BBC seem to be running it as if it's new.
And it's astounding that they somehow put an overall negative spin on it. The problems of an ageing population seem miniscule compared to the problems of resource scarcity and climate change.
This may be unpopular, but I already feel the earth is well beyond it’s ideal human population capacity. We are straining resources because of our bad policies and practices and politics.
I don't want people to suffer unnecessarily. But the more people we add to the planet, the more we exacerbate problems with food, water, Co2 emissions, etc.
In the end, something will curtail human population growth. I really hope it's voluntary and painless.
Exactly, let it be our educated decision not starvation, senseless wars and poverty. And the more the human population rose it took into other populations, it led to numerous extinctions, etc
I hope the trend stays like this. It’s not like there are 1000 people left, there are still billions extra
Following this logic (and ignoring the increase of suffering as a raw product of addition) it's totally possible there'd be less suffering if we stayed in loosely connected hunter-gatherer societies.
Following this logic further, we might be best off if we reduced the population to a single person whose ideal, perfectly happy life is that of a hermit.
Philosophers have given this a lot of thought: the "repugnant conclusion" is what to Google for.
The problem is a lot bigger than coal power. One example, agriculture is the leading cause of deforestation and many of our current agricultural practices have questionable long term sustainability. In addition our agricultural processes are introducing new diseases into the human population, including our current pandemic.
The problem of sustainably providing nutritious food people want to eat is just one of a dozen that we are not solving at acceptable levels.
It's obviously very difficult to predict, but there's also some expert speculation that affluence will spread widely enough to slow the birth rate down to be close to the death rate and we'll reach some sort of equilibrium.
I think another factor is traditionalist religious minorities – ultra-Orthodox Jews, the Amish, Latin Mass Catholics, etc – many of these minorities still have big families, and are sustaining those big families generation after generation. (Even though some people who grow up in those kinds of communities defect to mainstream society, something like 80% choose to stay.)
Those religious minorities are quite small right now, but if they manage to sustain their current growth into the coming decades, they may end up being a much more substantial component of the population.
Yes and no. if you look at the date though the places with the most "abundance" or wealth is where the fertility rate is collapsing. It is largely down to that wealth that people are having less children.
"Good" and "Bad" are down to perspective and is very subjective. Especially when talking about this issue.
There is a strong correlation also with educational levels and birth rates. the more educated the person, means both they are more successful monetarily, and they are less likely to have children, or have only a single child which is less than replacement (every child has 2 parents)
So is large numbers of uneducated people having children that statically will also be uneducated as well a "good" thing for humanity? I dont know have you watched the movie Idiocracy?
Natrually then most people will say "well we just need to educate that generation, get those nations / people educated" , this however does not solve the problem of birth rates because as you educate more and more people, as you bring more and more people to success they will also stop having children. If you reach the utopia where everyone in society has equal levels of education, then it is very likely you will see population crash.
Now technology could solve for that, extended life / extended fertility span for women for example would certainly inverse the population issue.
Over 50% of the worlds resources are consumed by the USA. A lot of it goes to waste e.g. restaurant food, "ugly" fruits etc
The problem isn't the quantity of those resources, the problem is in distribution. The world is abundant enough to comfortably support twice as many humans, if human inefficiencies, waste, greed and selfishness are factored out.
This is the popular view, reinforced by lots of different bits of media and pop culture. It's also wrong.
Enough food is already produced right now to feed every person on Earth [1]. Most estimates furthermore put the Earth's carrying capacity at around 2 billion more people than we already have [2].
The problems that people think of when they think of "overpopulation" are the result of insufficient distribution systems, corruption, unconstrained capitalism, faulty human psychology, and poor education. They are problems caused by human beings screwing over their fellow human beings. Some of these problems get easier to solve when you have more people, not fewer, and in any case, nobody's yet figured out how to make things much better in a shrinking economy.
It's almost like we've all been convinced to join some weird, global suicide cult. Except instead of killing ourselves we're throwing our genetic information away.
Almost everyone I know who is really well-off/rich is having several kids. Heck, Elon Musk, who is basically spending his life trying to solve these environmental problems as his multiple businesses, has six!
Why are their social norms and thoughts on this so different from the rest of us?
It's not rocket science, it's because they don't have to raise the kids - I'd be surprised if elon saw his kids for more than a third as much as the middle class sees theirs. Hell he wasn't even at the birth of his latest.
Yes. Pretty much everyone I talk to would happily go to their small town, or village close to their homes and families but they don't. They say they can't.
I think a lot of people are incorrectly identifying this as a good thing.
Really, this is an unprecedented phenomenon in recorded human history.
The entire social structure of basically every country on the planet is completely unprepared for the challenges that a rapidly aging popuation will bring. The effects won't be felt for decades after the change begins, and once it starts in earnest, it will prove very difficult to reverse in any short timescale.
It will become a sort of feedback loop - fewer people have children, so the capacity for children in the next generation is reduced. Because the retiree/worker ratio has now increased, the young people there are, are unable to afford having children, and so on.
Even with massive increases in productivity, you would see economies contracting. Ending up in a deflationary trap with increasing (and unsustainable) debt.
I see these kind of statements so often:
"AI will solve this problem" - really? The World Bank development report 2019 (https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/wdr2019) basically comes to the conclusion that "while automation displaces workers, technological innovation creates more new industries and jobs on balance". This has been the case for centuries now.
Automation causing mass unemployment always seems right around the corner, yet never comes. I'm confident that we're now in the "trough of disillusionment" when it comes to progress on AI. Things like self driving cars for example are much more complex than we had considered.
"This is good for the environment" - It might not be though; the economic issues caused by aging populations could lead countries to take exploitative short-term decisions; converting rainforests to farmland, using cheaper means of generating electricity (that also prove to be more damaging to the environment) for example.
It is generally more expensive to be green (in the environmental sense).
The competition for immigration (which seems like an inevetable outcome in this scenario) could also destabilise certain countries, with potentially dire outcomes.
I think the keys to this are:
- Why are people having fewer children? If it's a genuine choice, then of course this is acceptable. But I think often the number of children people want to have is actually higher than the number they feel they are able to support due to economic (and other) reasons: https://www.economist.com/briefing/2016/08/27/the-empty-crib
- If the retiree/worker ratio is going to increase, and life expectancy is going to increase, then how can we manage this in a way that puts minimal pressure on health and social care systems?
- Are there any other ways we can prepare economically/socially for a society with an inverse population pyramid (I personally think this is a very, very difficult problem to solve, but would love to be proved wrong)
- How do we manage depopulation of specific communities? This is a problem that Spain is currently experiencing (e.g. it is more economical to forcibly move people away from communities that are dying out and no longer economically viable)
Like any complex phenomena declining fertility has multiple causes. The importance of each cause depends on the local conditions.
1. Easy access to contraceptives (they are easily available throughout the developed world)
2. Positive view of abortion (the christian world used to see abortion as a crime, now with increased secularisation more is placed on the mother's preference than on the fetus).
3. Pressure on resources (when having children becomes a choice, it doesn't happen 'naturally', people are less likely to bring a child into the world if they cannot raise it properly).
4. Education and career orientation of women (Educated women make less children, they finish school around 24, start their career and if they don't secure a partner by 30-32 their fertility windows has closed - even if biologically they could bear children, they struggle finding a partner to raise children with).
5. The marriage institution has collapsed (Marriage is the bedrock of children rearing - high divorce rates, divorce courts, normalisation and acceptance of divorce has made people less likely to marry and thus having the environment in which to raise children).
6. Culture - it's not cool to have children. Now it's cool to travel the world and find yourself and experiment with as many partners as you can. This culture is not conducive to child rearing. Movies, books, music do not portrait happy families. Today, cool is to be 'different'.
7. Religion - christianity with its marriage and chastity laws is dying out. Is is being replaced by the secular world where monogamy and child rearing are not perceived as something desirable.
8. Lack of social support - as people travel to find jobs they do not live with their parents. Raising children without the support of grandparents is much more difficult.
9. Low wage growth due to women joining the work force. One man could maintain a family with children and his wife, 50-60 years ago. That is no longer possible unless you are in the top 0.1%.
10. Skewed dating market. Women are desirable by men until they reach 30-32. After that few men who want a family would try to know and marry a women because she is less likely to bear children and this is not a priority for her. Women are under much pressure to sort out their careers, know themselves and start of family by early thirties. The education and career 'system' is not optimised for mothers.
11. Global warming and reaching peak resources. We have reached the peak point in multiple natural resources and are destroying natural habitats at an alarming rate. This makes people less likely to see a hopeful future into which children have a place.
To summarise, we live in era of tremendous technological and cultural change where we reached the limits of our planet's resources in the way we currently use them and this has led to population shrinkage in the developed world.
another chicken little article. worthless speculation about the future. who knows what will happen if the population declines. one thing is for certain though. it will be a positive for the environment. at some point the ponzi scheme, infinite growth society must have it’s day of reckoning
In human population, we should be aiming for quality, not quantity. Quality also means diversity.
If higher quantity unavoidably brings a higher proportion of human suffering, then we have no other choice but to promote quality over quantity. I fear for the future of our species. Our evolutionary instinct to multiply combined with the tech we've created is now bringing this planet to the brink.
Everyone wants to exist. But I would rather exist in a positive way, than exist at all.
People may believe that they fear for the "future of our species," but at a meta level, is it not merely an expression of the same innate human desire that caused us to build up civilization and medicine to the point that we're facing the aforementioned issues?
Without getting into a long spiel, human intelligence appears to actually be extremely limited, compared to a theoretical perfect intelligence, and any explicit actions we may take to enforce "quality over quantity" could end up doing more "harm" than "good" as soon as 1 "move" beyond the furthest move that we're capable of calculating.
IMO, there is no "saving" humankind. We're all doomed in some way. Life is just a way of postponing death.
> People may believe that they fear for the "future of our species," but at a meta level, is it not merely an expression of the same innate human desire that caused us to build up civilization and medicine to the point that we're facing the aforementioned issues?
Yes, in a way. But with mindfulness, one can choose different thoughts to attach to that innate survival feeling of wanting to exist and multiply. Instead of, 'We need to always multiply / population control is evil', make it, 'We need to create a better world for our species and those around us'.
> IMO, there is no "saving" humankind. We're all doomed in some way. Life is just a way of postponing death.
Also agreed. I've read the big AI books like Nick Bostrom's and Max Tegmark's. Given their monumental knowledge, the sentiments around population control are not so much about saving so much as managing. More importantly, it's about saving the possibility of AI and superior forms of evolution to arise in the future, which are far more significant than current Homo sapiens.
One way to put this into practice is to choose to adopt a child as your own, instead of producing yet another one. I may do this in my life.
If you believe you're the sort of person who can potentially "save" the world, wouldn't you want to clone your inherited software to counterbalance the cloning of those who cannot or will not?
No really - trends are real, this is science, and we use them to actually estimate the future, in much the same way we try to do so with climate and other things.
"It will be positive for the environment"
Possibly not true. Low-birth Westerners are already the #1 emitters of Co2 by a margin, so it's not so linear.
" population declines. one thing is for certain though. it will be a positive for the environment. at some point the ponzi scheme, "
Most GDP growth does not come from resource utilisation.
So there are definitly some upsides to less people, but it's also a tremendous risk. Never before in history has this happened naturally, and it's happening fast. This is a 'really big, kind of scary' issue that we have to contend with, and as your points illustrate, there are definitely many facets let alone the social one's.
Calling it a tremendous risk doesn't seem warranted given that it will not produce a significant drop in the earth's total population this century (see my comment above). A top-heavier age spread may strain political and economic systems: these are the social effects you mention. But from an ecological standpoint, not much will change for some time.
There is tremendous risk in covering the planet with ourselves and our waste, though; imho the more relevant risk, especially since we're pretty much locked into the pattern now.
If you look at it from much longer term perspective, it's scary because it's happening extremely fast (1 generation) within nations that have reached a certain level of material prosperity and stability.
It's also 'scary' because it's never happened before.
'100 years' when we will really see the effects more globally, is not a 'long time', it's a 'quite a short time'.
We only ever knew 'one natural direction' and though it's exploded since the industrial revolution, it was at least, in normal times, 'up' to the extent the system could support it.
So yes, it's not 'scary' right now, and as you point out, Mother Earth could use a break from all of us. But thinking about the next 'few hundred' years, it's spooky.
The transition from 2B to 7.8B was also kind of fast: 90 years. The exponential growth we've seen recently is unique in human existence. Before the last several centuries human population growth was much slower. In fact, it seems unlikely that population growth will become that slow again without some sort of disaster scenario.
So this is slightly misleading as well, because it's a geometric curve upwards.
The 'inflection point' you're really looking for is the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.
But at least in that capacity - we know what happened: we harnessed energy and could provide for the material wellbeing of huge numbers of people, which can have it's downsides, but it's not all bad. Better 'more' than risking plunging towards nothing.
The 'downward plunge' is happening for somewhat unknown reasons, and it's fast, and we don't know when it's going to stop.
If you put on the afterburners on an airplane, and it goes up faster than expected, that makes sense. But if the airplanes starts falling out of the sky for no reason ... scary.
People who don't want to have a bunch of kids, don't. Does it have to be more complicated than that? Unless everyone makes this decision (which seems unlikely to me although that could just be because I have ten nieces and nephews) it's basically a self-correcting "problem". People who don't reproduce are replaced in the next generation by the offspring of people who do reproduce.
I would agree but for the fact that if we look at habitability prospects from that same longer-term perspective, we see an ocean of scarier things happening just as fast.
Humans have endured and are generally resilient to population fluctuations. We and our industrial societies are not resilient to e.g., significant departure from the Holocene equilibrium[0].
"It doesnt follow they would emit less CO2 if they happened to have children."
Except that it does. Literally from the article, they state "women entering the workforce, education jobs etc" - which increases income, and this is 100% correlated to increased consumption of all forms. It's consistent everywhere.
FYI this is the de-facto neoliberal plan (not being conspiratorial here). It's more directly apparent in China's ambitions i.e. Belt and Road: "The stated objectives are "to construct a unified large market and make full use of both international and domestic markets" [1], but it's not like it's their 'new' idea.
The objective of the wealthier nations is to get the remaining 4 Billion people driving cars, eating Cheetos, wearing H&M (fast fashion, ie 'disposable') and living in IKEA (i.e. trendy, but generally low-quality furniture, that can be replaced every several years).
> who knows what will happen if the population declines.
Hopefully, a declining population will lead to an oversupply of housing. Existing homeowners will do their damnedest to prop up prices by any means possible, but it can't last forever. Housing prices will crash sooner or later. It will probably happen in each country long before a its population has halved.
Cost of housing is currently a huge factor in declining fertility in many countries. Who has time to raise kids when they have to work two jobs just to pay rent? But once it becomes more affordable to raise a family, fertility trends are likely to reverse until it a new balance is reached.
This is just one of the many factors that might come into play over the next 80 years that popular predictions about 2100 tend to glance over.
In many areas the shortage of housing isn't really one of space, lack of housing, or population, but rather that everyone wants a house in the same urban areas, mostly due to the availability of jobs.
If you want a house in Ireland for example, then the country-side is dirt cheap, but if you want one in Dublin or Cork then be prepared to pay through the nose. The situation seems similar in most countries.
I'm not sure what a solution for this will be, but I'm not sure if population decline will be a major contributor.
Urban areas usually have a younger population than rural areas do, so I think it's safe to assume that a dramatic change in the number of young people will affect housing prices in cities more than in rural areas. For example, that block of crappy houses near the university would be worth a lot less without a steady stream of students to rent them out to.
I think it's a bit more complex than that, houses decay over time and need replacing and upkeep. If we want sufficient housing in 50 years we need to maintain the upkeep as well, which will probably only be done according to "supply and demand", so there may still be a shortage just because many houses won't be maintained sufficiently.
In quite a few cities you already see quite a lot of housing just left derelict even though there's a housing shortage.
Also, I wouldn't be surprised if a larger part of the then-old people will want to keep living in the city, as that's where they've been living their entire lives (which differs a bit from today's old population).
I don't know ... it's really hard to predict these things. It could very well be the case that you're right, but personally I wouldn't really bet on population decline significantly reducing the pressure on the housing situation. It seems more of an economical/policy issue to me than a population issue.
> Hopefully, a declining population will lead to an oversupply of housing.
It won't without policy controls, otherwise, housing units will be redeveloped into other uses (including smaller numbers of larger units designed and managed in a way to foster single-family occupancy per unit.)
> Cost of housing is currently a huge factor in declining fertility.
It certainly would improve our chances and reduce the rate at which conditions diverge from the baseline we've experienced for the last ~10,000 years, but it's important to recognize that we would not see meaningful total population reduction until at least 2100 even if the birth rate continued to drop dramatically and disasters claimed several billion lives[0]. There is too much inertia.
Children have become more of a burden than a benefit in many ways. We once had much use for our children. When people were more independent and everyone pretty much had a small business, children were seen as the life blood of that business. Now, we are pretty much expected to fill a role at some large corporation -- which Japan is the greatest example of. Also, the family centered culture has changed to a work centered culture. It used to be a mark of shame not to have a large family -- you were seen as a "dead end."
I don't think these changes are natural, given how little control people have over their lives. This stuff is being pushed from the top.
I started to read this waiting for the punchline to a Dad joke. Kids can still mow lawns for sure.
>This stuff is being pushed from the top.
Is this some kind of Sparta thing? Like you all go up to the top of the mountain and someone pushes Dad off? Because if you actually mean there's a "top" that is dictating human sexuality I am deeply, deeply interested in seeing a schematic diagram for how that system works.
>It used to be a mark of shame not to have a large family
When and where was this? As someone who grew up Catholic it feels like that cut both ways.
To be vaguely serious for longer than I want, my wife and I just had a long, unfun conversation about how hard it is to deal with her mom's dementia and I don't know that we could do anywhere near as well with dealing with it if we didn't have a kid of our own. It's a shitty Ponzi schema, but the alternative is being Shakers.
Old calculus: "I need to have lots of children so they support me in my old age. No matter the cost."
New calculus: "Between retirement accounts and welfare, society will support me in my old age. Children are really, really expensive."
It's economics, plain and simple. Of course there's a "top" and the "top" does dictate the structure. If you doubt that, ask: what percent of your income do you pay in taxes, and what percent of his income does your CEO pay in taxes (assuming you work at a typical bigcorp)?
I'm not saying that "yolo all the way to carrying capacity -- and beyond!" would be a better policy, but it clearly used to be the policy and isn't anymore. Personally, I think we dodged a big bullet and took a little one. The "little" bullet is still going to hurt quite a bit, though.
This, but also people used to see having a family as being the meaning of their lives. In the modern world, the alternative meaning of life invention is the Career™. This alone, that people have been influenced to believe a career is a replacement for having a family, is highly suspect of "top-down" influence. We don't even have the perspective of how ridiculous career driven culture is.
This also causes people to move farther away from their families for both school and then work, often meaning that the grandparent support system is not available when you want to have kids.
That, in my opinion, is taken for granted more than anything else.
It also causes people to wait longer and longer to have children. My twins, my first children, came when I was 38 years old. My wife was 35. Most of our friends and family were also well into their 30s before having their first kid. This is not a winning strategy...
I think there's definitely something to this, and I'd agree that career driven culture is very toxic.
But I'd also hesitate to call it "top-down" influence. That would drastically downplay the autonomy we have in first-world countries. Nobody is forced to prioritize their career over everything else. In most countries, I'd say it's the complete opposite - tax incentives and benefits are usually structured to encourage child-rearing.
It's too easy for everyone to blame "the man" or "society" for a mindset that is entirely self-inflicted - with the exception of the US system tying healthcare to employment. That is definitely a top-down influence.
> It's too easy for everyone to blame "the man" or "society" for a mindset that is entirely self-inflicted - with the exception of the US system tying healthcare to employment. That is definitely a top-down influence.
The truth is that most "toxic culture" issues are systemic, so dumping blame on individuals for following systemic incentives doesn't make any sense.
Nobody is forced to prioritize their career, but a lot of people don't exactly have a choice to pursue leisure either. Lot's of people working paycheck to paycheck with no savings. How can you start a family in this country under those conditions?
> The truth is that most "toxic culture" issues are systemic, so dumping blame on individuals for following systemic incentives doesn't make any sense.
Aside from tying healthcare to employment in the USA, what systemic issues are there?
> Nobody is forced to prioritize their career, but a lot of people don't exactly have a choice to pursue leisure either. Lot's of people working paycheck to paycheck with no savings. How can you start a family in this country under those conditions?
Yet birthrates decrease with income - lower income households have higher birthrates [0]. This suggests that a lower fertility rate is indeed a choice, rather than economic necessity.
top down to me equal some secret cabal of people that push an agenda
systemic to me means the way the system is but how the system got that way would be the random inputs of thousands or even millions of individual and uncoordinated actions.
People living paycheck to paycheck seems like it's always been a thing even when they had larger families. In fact the largest families in the modern world come from the people with the least amount of money (not judging, just stating what I've read). So having a paycheck looks like it has the opposite effect of encouraging family. No I'm not arguing that we should therefore get less pay. Just arguing against that idea that if everyone had a paycheck large enough to support a bigger family that they'd start having bigger families.
I would agree that not all systemic problems are top down, but many are, and there are "secret cabals" dedicated to creating and propagating such systems. It doesn't make sense to me to define systemic problems as strictly random, since humans attempt to create top-down, complex systems constantly (especially post-WW2 in more modern society).
> People living paycheck to paycheck seems like it's always been a thing even when they had larger families.
Different eras, different issues. In agrarian times a large family was an investment in future labor, and as a retirement/continuity strategy. In modern society, adding children is a significant expense, and with the easy availability of birth control, it's far more of a choice. In both cases, people were following the rational incentives that society has created for them.
We can argue about whether the current economic circumstances are random or top-down, but in either case, if you change the incentives for having kids (universal healthcare, affordable childcare, food/housing security, etc.) then you will get more kids.
Society can only support you in old age if there are enough younger people around. Unfortunately, even though kids are needed for society to function and keep going, not much of the cost of raising kids is socialized, at least in the states. Day care for one kid where I live is $1700/month and rising, you have to be rich to afford it.
It's important to note that in Germany, at least, day care is provided by the state at no cost, starting from the age of 3mo or so. You also get 300 euros a month per child. German society has made a concerted effort to encourage that people have children in Germany. It's an idea worth copying, IMHO.
"Society can only support you in old age if there are enough younger people around."
I do not agree with that. In my opinion, technology advancements (say, driverless cars) will make reduce the amount of young people needed to support for older people.
I have yet to see any technology that will change a bedpan in the next 30 years. Much less provide the most important component to an older person’s mental (and hence in some ways physical) health - which is the company of other humans, family and friends, and typically grand children and other decendants.
I don't think loneliness will be massive issue. Considering the population of young adults and adults already suffering from it. Nothing will be different for us. And the communications are likely to improve so this is one thing that technology can solve.
In that case, if these technologies become so successful to eliminate the need for young people, they will basically become our successor species and all this is moot anyways.
Obviously that won’t happen overnight, but it could definitely happen gradually.
If declining birth rate is a matter of what people can afford, we should look for some sort of correlation between wealth and birth rate.
To the best of my knowledge, the correlation is somewhat negative--that is, rich people have lower average birth rates than poor people.
How can it be economics "plain and simple" if even people who can easily afford to raise large families choose not to? Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan could afford more kids than the Duggars. But they have two.
For the same reason that the CEO of the fortune-500 I work at ran around with a broken phone screen for the better part of a year: things cost time and energy, not just money. Children even moreso. Being cash-rich doesn't make you rich in time and energy.
> New calculus: "Between retirement accounts and welfare, society will support me in my old age. Children are really, really expensive."
My calculus is not at all that society will support me. In fact, it’s the opposite. I anticipate no support from society, but I also don’t want to burden my family or society so I hope to be able to go out on my own terms once I am no longer self sufficient.
Some people have extraordinary wealth and they have the ability to set economic incentives, policies, and cultural influences for certain types of behavior to emerge. There's a hierarchy to our societies, there are people with great power and people with little to no power. I guess the greatest magic trick of the modern world is to make people believe such things do not exist.
IMO a greater magic trick is convincing folks like you that these rich people are actually powerful enough to control fundamental behaviors like sex and reproduction.
It's a profoundly dis-empowering and anti-democratic message, which is of course why a lot of those rich people are happy for you to believe it.
The reality is this: in every instance we know of, making education and birth control available to women (not forcing, just giving them the option) has resulted in declining birth rates and increasing standards of living.
It's really quite inconvenient to be pregnant, to parent a newborn, and to be responsible for a child for 2+ decades. It's very rewarding, but it's also really hard. You don't need a global conspiracy to explain why many women limit or opt against it if given the chance.
Parenting is hard and expensive, especially these days in the developed world where people have children late and most people don’t live near extended family. My parents moving near me totally changed my wife and my outlook on having a third (from “no way, too sleepy” to “hey remember when the little one was just a baby?”)
Money is just one form of wealth. Having a network of trusted, productive people, such as healthy grandparents who can assist with raising children is another.
I can see in my extended family and friends the monetary and general success of those with supportive families (especially those families with multiple brothers) that worked together versus those families that were split apart and did not have someone to rely on. They are in completely different socioeconomic classes now.
Are you saying there are no mechanisms that allow wealthy people to influence human behavior on a large scale? Please read "Propaganda" by Edward Bernays.
France has tried. They even give subsidies. But the fertility rate is only 1.85.
The groups that are still growing are those that oppress women. Islamic countries [1] and ultra-orthodox Jews, especially. Evangelical Christians used to be higher but have now dropped down to the below-replacement US rate.
Teen pregnancies are way down in the US. So are abortions; that's not it.
Nobody really understands why. There's lots of speculation. The decline of religion? Better birth control? Video games? Declining testosterone levels? Fewer people in agriculture?
What good are books if we can't direct people at them? That book makes my case. The fact that Bernays was a major advisor for the media complex of America makes the book an even more significant piece of evidence for my position.
Ok...the main point is that there is a shadow government that shapes our culture and people's perceptions through mass media and by corrupting influential people for the purpose of endorsing certain ideas/products. In that work, Bernays details these types of "shadow governments."
It's funny how people dismiss things so readily by labeling them "conspiracy theory." I just can't imagine looking at a world with such great wealth inequality and coming to the conclusion that this is an equal playing field where everyone exerts the same influence on the evolution of humanity.
Social progress influences choice, which in turn influences economies, which influence people.
There is no cabal of They. The "shadow government" thesis is straight-up conspiracy batshit.
Unless you mean the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress of the People's Republic of China who certainly authorized the two-child law just a few years back, but they're not really a shadow government. They're a regular one, just not very transparent.
Ultimately both Chinese communism (via Hegel) and Western feminism (via Wollstonecraft) trace their origins back to the French Revolution, so maybe you are being controlled by Robespierre.
>Because if you actually mean there's a "top" that is dictating human sexuality I am deeply, deeply interested in seeing a schematic diagram for how that system works.
First, a top dictating human sexuality is hilarious to read out of context. Also somewhat accurate.
Anyway, I don't think they mean there is a concrete system designed to keep people from reproducing. It's more of a feedback loop where the richest people in the world get concerned about things like global warming, overpopulation, and whatever else risks their way of life and so they use their social capital to dictate ideas and ideals that protect them. They can do this with things like think tanks or social media influencers or whatever. It's not some highly organized psyop but it's effective because they have so much economic influence.
I think you're trying to very generously interpret a conspiracy theory that doesn't stand up to a moment's scrutiny. Access to contraception, and a rise in women's education and employment, are not a message imposed on society by the wealthy, inadvertently or otherwise, nor have they occurred on the timeline of concerns such as climate change and resource exhaustion. They are social consequences of the Enlightenment.
Consider how attitudes towards contraception have changed over time. There was a time, not that long ago, where the separation of procreation from the procreative act was considered harmful to both society and the individual.
There is a cultural elite, who’s effect has been so profound, they have led you to believe that such a cultural norm as we enjoy today was inevitable and have convinced the world that taking a perfectly healthy reproductive system and making it dysfunctional is “healthcare”.
That was people disliking the change and being loud. And they failed to pose their will on those who found contraception useful for their own lives.
And they failed also because non stigmatized contraception lowers teenage pregnancies and make aids spread less. Meaning it actually solves societal problems.
Inability to control pregnancy means less heath, particularly for women and small children.
There is no cultural elite brainwashing me into believe otherwise. I can arrive at this position all on my lonesome, simply by rejecting the appalling prejudices of the Catholic church (and many other religions), misogynists in general, and bigoted authoritarians (but I repeat myself); both on the basis of the crushing harm they have inflicted over the centuries, and the colossal waste of talent due to the systematic oppression of women.
As for this:
> the separation of procreation from the procreative act was considered harmful to both society and the individual
That depends who you read. If your selectively chosen history of the last 6,000 years consists entirely of texts written by and/or documenting the fun police, I can see how you might arrive at this conclusion. On the other hand, there have always been voices otherwise. Until the Enlightenment they tended to be pilloried and/or executed, but that doesn't exactly highlight the hypocrisy in charge as something to be desired, rather something to be abandoned.
edit: poking around, this seems to be some reference to an American college commencement speech. I'm not an American, so I didn't get the cultural allusion, sorry.
Point of fact, I don't swim in your water at all. Any assumptions you may choose to make about the cultural perspective, skin colour, second language, religious tradition(s), countr(ies) of birth/residence/affiliation/upbringing, nationality of parents and/or in-laws, immigration status, education, newspaper subscriptions, food and musical preferences, or political leanings influencing my worldview are likely flat wrong.
Contraception is not dysfunction, and this is neither a parochial, nor (what-americans-call-"liberal") liberal assertion.
> if you actually mean there's a "top" that is dictating human sexuality I am deeply, deeply interested in seeing a schematic diagram for how that system works.
Access to birth control and abortion, social services and welfare, trends in divorce and family court ... All of these things are top-down forces that create a tapestry heavily influencing human sexuality and the choices men and women make. One only has to look at how different things were 50 or so (or less) years ago before these things were as widespread.
Premodern society where women were effectively property, where religion dictated their role, where marriage and a woman staying at home were the social norm. You're trying to pretend like social policy is a new thing when the Catholic Church has been controlling the rights of individuals for a very long time. To such an extent that Kings were generally subservient to the Pope. And then those Kings and Queens did actions like the Inquisition where they forced individuals to either convert to Catholicism, be exiled, or be murdered.
History goes through many stages of social belief intertwined with social control. In ancient Rome there was a plant that caused abortions and was so popular it went extinct [1]. However also in ancient Rome, Augustus patronized writers like Virgil to help instil "traditional family values" in the Roman population.
“Premodern?” The US fertility rate fell from 3.65 in 1960 to below replacement in 1972. In that time, the labor force participation rate of married women went from 32% to 42%. Then it’s been pretty stable since then between 1.8-2.1, even as the labor force participation rate for married women went from 42% to 67%. We are talking about much more recent social trends at issue.
Perhaps the "premodern societies" that are emphasized in educational settings had those qualities. Maybe that says more about our educational values than about premodern societies. Many ancient people didn't emphasize property in the first place. Many others were more matriarchal than patriarchal. Sure, Catholicism was fairly irredeemable...
I did my time in the Catholic church. There were some weird moments, but I got a lot luckier than a lot of other kids (and women, indigenous, etc.) Now I get to say my truth. Actually, anyone who reads history can say it too.
While I don't really believe in a 'conspiracy' - I can easily see "targeted 'top down' forces" in the reverse direction...Limiting women's access birth control, abortion, etc. Hell - just getting your tubes tied can be 10x harder then getting a vasectomy.
If societal forces can be so effective in limiting women's choices/options, is hard to believe they could have had a hand in expanding them as well?
I have a 2 year old. It was an accident as both I and my wife didn’t want children or weren’t ready. I’ve got to say that it has become the best part of my life and yes it is not easy when you’re looking in from the outside but becoming a parent changes you, you become more resilient, objevtives in life change, etc So, no, children are not a burden unless you make it to be.
It’s wonderful that it’s worked out for you, but I can show you to Facebook support groups of thousands of parents that abhor and regret having children. Children by their very nature are a burden because they can’t care for themselves.
Are we arguing with the very data from this article? Clearly children are not that in demand if the fertility rate is experiencing a “jaw dropping global crash”.
children have been a cornerstone of human life from the start, but you think the outliers on facebook are the norm?
everything the commenter described are not things one would “demand” before having children, but would only experience after having them. honestly, referring to having children as something that would be “in demand” is disgusting to me
Yes, children "in demand" sounds like they are some kind of marketable product, it does sound a bit misguided.
But I don't blame people who don't want to have children, when we are pressured to produce and be as productive as possible, to be the best versions of ourselves, to be always strive to have more and be ever more end always self improve, the place of parenting in one's life has diminished quite a bit. I am glad I did become a parent and in a way I am out of that rat race as my perspective, my goals, my wants, everything has changed and I think for the better.
America has had tons of immigrants working 24/7 to run a restaurant, a laundry shop, or a drugstore, while putting their kids through school. Most of them weren't forced to come to America or choose such a job: they did it because even maintaining a 24-hour convenience store is less grueling work than planting rice, and they're rejecting their children's "help" because they want their children to study and have even better, more comfortable jobs.
Pre-modern agricultural societies had huge families because there was so much work that you could always use an extra pair of hands. (Also, many of them died off anyway so you had to factor that in.) You are looking at the past with a seriously rose-tinted lens.
Child mortality was huge, fixing that definitely provided a reason to put a break to the child bearing machine. There are still poor parts of the world where that is still the norm but it’s dwindling fast
It also just costs more to do basic things. Buying a house, finding an apartment, college, finding a job (more competitive), there’s trends of more loneliness and lack of community, you have to learn graphql now, it doesn’t end, and so by the time you find yourself stable in all these things you’re much older, and well, worn out.
Starting a family used to be the first thing you did, but now it’s more of the capstone that one could easily not burden themselves with after all of life’s bullshit.
We are psychologically and financially exhausting a generation.
Also not sure why you are downvoted. As a 33 year old working professional who jumped through life's bullshit tip finally start a family, this resonates.
Because the truth is painful. People don't want to believe things are bad. People will fight tooth and nail to hold onto their perception that we are living in some sort of utopia and that everything is sunshine and rainbows.
I don't blame people that want to look the other way...it's not a pleasant sight.
It's sure ain't easy but if you take a look at the history of mankind it sure is paradise. War and famine have has been the standard, things we complain about are totally different now.
It isn't just the choices. Young people are having less sex. Japan has noticed this. Declining sales of contraceptives but declines in both STDs and pregnancies, especially amongst the young. Incidents of the "oops we are pregnant" scenario have declined all over the western world. Western culture has for decades complained that young people have too liberal a view of sex. Remember those abstinence pushes in the 80s and 90s? Remember purity rings? They worked.
I attribute this to anti-social tendencies rising due to technology addiction. People are getting worse at social interaction. When you spend so much time in front of a screen, it has to have some effect on your ability to socialize.
I think you've found a confounding variable. The root cause here is that people are entertained by something that pushes their buttons. What you've said makes it sound like people want to socialise but are hampered. I would argue that people are not that hampered but rather choose not to socialise in a way which leads to dating (or community engagement)
The main retort to this is, what about all those people who have a gnawing pain of loneliness. Well, with fewer people that pressed to find a partner, local community engagement is down. This forces dating online which results in people screening, judging and not taking chances, leading to a low success rate. This is not a consequence of a lack of social skills. When people engage in person, there are multiple interactions that occur which are not judgemental (in dating terms), leading to more opportunities for people to see the interesting bits in others.
Yeah... I'm not so sure about that. My bet would be on easy access to porn, entertainment, and social media resulting in less in person social interaction.
Pushed from the top? What on earth? Guy, there's no conspiracy required to explain urbanization. It is a simple matter of better agriculture tech. We just don't need much labor on farms anymore.
It's absolutely pushed from the top. Nobody outside of extreme religious communities sees increasing the population as a noble goal.
At least in the US, children are effectively a tax on the working class. How many people do you know that had to keep working to put their kids through college? Why do workplaces have tax-incentivized college savings accounts? Why does it cost employees to add children to employer-sponsored health insurance?
The system is very much set up to disincentive having kids. If you do have them, the trade is that you will always be financially drained. Somewhere between 60-80% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Very few will ever acquire equity in anything.
The American Dream is now working until you're 70, supporting 2 kids through college, building equity in your house, then reverse-mortgaging your property to hopefully cover your final years.
You could argue that it's an organic evolution of our profit-driven system, but that system only exists because it's what the owner-class is pushing.
Either we should accept that having children is a hobby for the rich and find other meaningful ways to live our lives, or we should have radical changes in society to increase family sizes.
This article is about global birth rates falling, which is true. But your comment is about conditions specific to the US. Yet birth rates are falling in countries which don't have the warped incentives you point out in the states, and where having children is supported (see Europe, much of Asia, etc.). So although you accurately point out that there are downsides, if not disincentives, to having kids in the US, that cannot be the driving cause of falling birth rates in the rest of the world. And therefore there's no indication of any kind of "top-down" force there either.
I politely disagree, the childcare support and social services you have in Europe are not an incentive in anyway, for the large majority of countries here, they are a mitigation at best.
The majority of young europeans in fertile age, continue to struggle with housing costs (high rents high down payments) and salaries not in line with COL until far too late in their careers, if not indefinitely. Those two are the major drivers for 'post-poning' having children in IMHO.
"Europe" is a big and diverse place. But it's my fault for generalizing. Let me rather mention the Scandinavian countries, for example, where support is pretty ample. Certainly, having kids is still expensive and time consuming, but that's how it's been since the beginning of time. The difference is, now people can afford not to have them.
As for the rest of Europe, sure, housing is expensive and all that, but people have more discretionary income now than ever, after housing and daily necessities (at least as far as I can recall from economics classes). But I do think young people's expectations have shifted as well, which makes it feel like we've got less headroom for a bunch of kids. And we certainly don't have the safe, well-paying jobs our boomer parents often lucked into.
Here's a top down global conspiracy theory: micro plastics carried by the air and water are ingested and cause hormone disruption leading to less sex and therefore less children.
Birthrate declines as a society becomes more prosperous and women gain control over their reproductive rights.
In fact, the correlation is the opposite of what you said; wealthier people have fewer kids than poor people in almost every country. Your suggestion that people decide not to have kids because they can't afford them is not supported by the data; those who can most afford the kids have the fewest.
I wish they'd show all the brackets above 200k in income. I would guess that after maybe 500k in income, it probably trends back up.
> Most billionaires have three or more children, the GoCompare analysis found. Among them, 5% had no children, 9% had one child, 23% had two children, 25% had three children, 17% had four children and 21% had five or more. Amazon CEO and founder Jeff Bezos has four children, and Bernard Arnault, the chairman and CEO of the luxury goods empire LVMH, has five. [1]
So if you're a billionaire, you're having lots of kids, but if you're making 200k/yr you're having fewer kids. It makes sense to me.
Children inherently cost money. Someone has to pay it. You're trying to pretend like the system is designed to screw parents by burdening them with this cost source that is a child when simply put, children cost money.
> How many people do you know that had to keep working to put their kids through college?
College costs money. The incentives with government backed student debt has inflated that cost dramatically. This wasn't some scheme to tax parents. It was a moral hazard of a bad policy intended to make college accessible but in turn caused massive tuition inflation.
> Why does it cost employees to add children to employer-sponsored health insurance?
Again, because insuring more people costs more money. Whether you're adding a child or a spouse, more insurance coverage ought to equate to higher premiums. That the economics of how insurance works. Again if there are higher costs, someone has to pay them.
> The system is very much set up to disincentive having kids.
The system does disincentive having kids but that doesn't at all imply the system was intentionally designed to do so. (A) kids cost money and that is by definition a disincentive and (B) some policies like college loans were not setup to cause this disincentive. They instead just had adverse effects due to the moral hazard of incentivizing colleges to raise tuition since the government will back the loan and the student doesn't understand how to make an informed decision on cost tradeoffs at their age. But this isn't the system being designed to prevent people from having children.
I used to believe your line of reasoning, but I don't anymore.
> It was a moral hazard of a bad policy intended to make college accessible but in turn caused massive tuition inflation.
Do you really think that's unsolvable? That "bad policy" is corruption. That tuition inflation could be capped.
> Again if there are higher costs, someone has to pay them.
You would think we would all want to educate, insure, and support the next generation. Maybe some costs should be shared?
> They instead just had adverse effects due to the moral hazard of incentivizing colleges to raise tuition since the government will back the loan and the student doesn't understand how to make an informed decision on cost tradeoffs at their age. But this isn't the system being designed to prevent people from having children.
I know you're saying this unironically, but please consider that a system which allows an 18 year old to sign up to accrue tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of debt over 4+ years with no guarantee that they will be able to pay it back... well, maybe that's just not a system we should have built. You know who would love to build that system? Probably the recipients of the 18 year old's borrowed funds.
I have friends that are engineers in various fields, college educated, career people, and they're still struggling to save much of anything after childcare expenses and paying down their college debts.
It's no problem though, they just have to keep working and it's all fine. Unless they can't work for some reason, then they've got a big problem.
"career people, and they're still struggling to save much of anything after childcare expenses"
That just isn't going to work. It can't. By law in most places, the ratio of childcare workers to children is limited. The work simply doesn't scale. Suppose the ratio is 1:4, and there is a 100% markup on the wages to pay for stuff like the building. Sending 4 kids will thus cost the pay of two workers. Dividing down, just 2 kids will cost as much as the typical parent might earn.
There’s no shortage of media and news out there talking about the joys of being child free in your 40s, how much more fulfilling a good career and vacations are than being burdened with children who’ll impede promotions and take up your free time, how having kids is the worst possible thing for the environment and so on.
Anecdotally: I've had multiple discussions with employed, unburdened men and women (particularly women) in their mid 20s who have decided not to have children for one reason: Climate change.
The planet is collapsing. Our children are likely to die of hunger, disease, or warfare as things become more destabilized over the next 50 years.
We don't believe their lives will be better than ours, and we don't want to further deplete humanity's scant resources.
From this perspective, having children is selfish.
Climate change will either destroy the planet, or some team of scientists and engineers will avert disaster by inventing carbon capture or whatever. It is highly likely those scientists will have been born and raised in a well educated middle class family somewhere in the developed world.
I too have heard this from people. But when I do, I can't tell if it is the root cause or a rationalization. There is still intense social pressure to have children, although I certainly remember it dropping over the last 25 years. Having children is still the assumption for a heterosexual couple, and you are often expected to provide a rationale for why not, and you feel you will be perceived negatively if the rationale is seen as selfish, and people who do choose to have children still sometimes take your choices as a criticism about their life choices. So you come up with some banal reason to deflect the conversation you have had too many times already. Or a reason to justify the decision to yourself, because social pressures are telling you it is a selfish decision and that selfish decisions about your own life are somehow bad.
That’s a bizarre and mean-spirited line of thinking. There’s nothing inherently selfish about not having kids. Every life decision involves trade-offs between time, money, effort, and various kinds of joys and sorrows. People have lots of different circumstances that lead them to evaluate these trade-offs differently. Children are a huge, irreversible decision. It’s natural for people to be cautious. Besides, one could easily argue that having kids is selfish - you’re deliberately consuming more resources and tax dollars so you can create clones of yourself and expand your family line. That’s not a nice or realistic way to look at having children though.
I am sorry you find my wife and I's decision selfish, sad, and misguided. You needn't think about it, really, as our decision doesn't concern you in the slightest.
It may help you to travel. Some time in other continents made us realize -- we have plenty of people already. The planet will do just fine without one or three more from us.
I personally don't and don't judge you either. As I said earlier, I and my wife didn't want children until one came along; that eventually has changed us.
But we will stop at one and I agree that there are plenty of people already.
You could also have another perspective: The people who bring children into this world, without the future child's consent are being selfish because _they_ want that child. You can never know if that person will grow up to have a miserable life.
I know many would consider it a ridiculous argument but I find your label of selfishness similar.
Perhaps there's some truth to what you say if we consider couples who choose not to have kids at all. However, I think the cases that choose to have just one or two children are more common than those who choose not to have kids at all. I think financial situation better explains why people would stop at one kid rather than 3.
I would’t say that is the main reason but that is one of them, sure. Also the society has become a lot more isolated. I sometimes look at a modern societies like Japan or South Korea and am wondering whether the western world will follow suit.
It's two statements. 1) childlessness is a selfish choice. 2) this is sad and misguided. That second statement, without evidence or argument, is arrogant and patronizing. Non-inclusive even.
What would natural even look like in this context?
It was only in the recent history that it was the expectation that your child would live and go on to have greater than replacement number of children. That is evident by the fact that for most of our species history the total population was fairly static.
Pulling nitrogen out of the air and sprinkling it on domestic crops was real "unnatural" but it got us past ~3B
> Children have become more of a burden than a benefit in many ways.
Especially if you are female. Children turn your very nice life into a completely different one and take up an enormous amount of resource.
I would even go a step further that in certain cultures simply getting married turns your life from a very nice thing into something destined for drudgery. Japan is a primary example as the woman is expected to take care of both sets of parents in their old age.
Do you love some man enough to take that on? Or are you better off having sex occasionally and skipping the marriage thing?
> I don't think these changes are natural, given how little control people have over their lives. This stuff is being pushed from the top.
No need. People aren't stupid and can see the consequences of their actions.
Lack of elder care support is probably becoming more crucial than lack of child care support. Children start with their needs at infinity and get more independent on a strict time schedule--elderly get more dependent on an indefinite schedule and their needs go to infinity right before they pass.
Though there's some truthiness here, it's a very cynical take.
Most people aren't thinking about the ROI of their kids, that ironically is a pretty modern twist.
Birth Control is way, overwhelmingly the #1 issue, so far ahead of anything else. Condoms and 'the pill' are a very new phenom. Imagine before them, when every sexual act had a pretty high change of pregnancy. And then it's easy to understand how sex<->marriage<->family are so deeply intertwined in pretty much everywhere. 'Sexually active' basically guarantees children, children need stability, so it's 'nuclear family' or bust for the most part, before the pill. An enormous amount of social conditioning is baked into this.
'Working for corporations' is better than 'working in a factory, mine, or on land you don't own' ie serfdom, which would have been the default for most of our ancestors in one way or another.
Undoubtedly, the 'thing we cannot say in public' is that double-working families has had a double effect on the family 1) less time and 2) more acerbically - the cost of living goes up, particularly for property, forcing everyone else into the same 'two workers or risk being be poor' trap.
Playing with the reproductive system (I mean social system, not so much physicality), is really, really dangerous, as I don't think our individual intentions are all that positive - but the silver lining is that the world does have quite a bit of people, and that in many places, we do need to have less kids.
Remember we're living a lot longer now as well.
So at least for the moment, if India and Nigeria can get a grip on fertility ... it has upsides.
The real challenge, and scary things is what this will mean longer term. Once Japan drops to a certain point, will they level out? Or expire?
The primary issues were first increased probability of survival to adulthood (shift focus to raising fewer kids better) and then higher opportunity cost (especially for women who gained opportunities).
If your assumption that people are having less children because of a shift of the sense of responsibility in the modern era--then the counter-narrative could then be built that the birthrate could potentially rebound in a future where automation has replaced workers and people's sense of purpose is no longer a product of career motivations.
Capitalists want to increase their wealth. They have a well defined role in society. Our government is supposed to be a counterbalance to them...but the two have become intertwined, hence the problem.
In my view, the will of the people is not being reflected in the government due to corruption.
You're refusing to try because you might lose. This is taking a loss by default. It's like a sports team refusing to go onto the field. It counts as a loss.
I have never felt this world was a place to bring children. And I am not alone. I rarely mention my feelings because it runs contrary to most people's stated views. Yet, any time I bring it up I get a minority sharing strong agreement. I'm 55, and I've asked my entire life the question "how can people bring children into this?" My childhood was no more unusual than the typical American Midwest dysfunction, too.
> Children have become more of a burden than a benefit in many ways.
If you view the purpose of your life through a purely hedonist lens, sure. If you view the purpose of your life as being a member of an unbroken chain going back to the very first living cell, with an incredible legacy to uphold and protect, the burden is really just a masked joy.
Overpopulation and the resulting over consumption and pollution are our biggest threats. This is a good thing, certainly until we can figure out a way to live on another planet easily.
Please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN. You've been doing it a lot, it's not what this site is for, it destroys what it is for, and we eventually ban such accounts.
You have to follow the site guidelines whether others do or not. Any other approach would guarantee a downward spiral.
Please don't miss that the issue here is the pattern of comments by your account, not just what it posted in this thread.
It's true that we don't moderate everything. That's because we don't see everything. Flagging the worst comments is helpful, as is emailing hn@ycombinator.com in egregious cases.
Just having people in your country doesn't equate to economic productivity. Western nations will want highly educated young people doing hard mechanical labor that often takes two decades of training to get proficient at.
And yes, we will reap the most educated and skilled from less developed nations throughout this century. Which.. just condemns said countries to perpetual destitution. If the best and brightest you invested in leave to go to other countries you both have no incentive to invest in them in the first place or you wasted your economic surplus that is needed to progress your society towards becoming industrialized in itself.
The uneducated poor of the world are not useful to industrialized society. Its why every industrializing nation always adopts universal education to at least make capable laborers out of the poor. Its unlikely to change without world powers deciding to be way more altruistic about their economic exploitation of the poorest regions of the planet.
Unless you are talking about interplanetary immigration.
OTOH, the real solution is “this projection of current trends into the future is likely to be just as wrong as when people were projecting the rapid rate of global population growth in the 1960s to continue without bound, or even further accelerate”.
These problems are not wide-spread in most underdeveloped countries, even Muslim-majority ones.
I don't want to "whataboutism" here, but to offer a comparison: the US clearly has a problem with police violence, but we don't judge the entire country's population by it.
I am actually "going over there" as I'm currently living in Indonesia, which has more Muslims than any other country. The problem with your previous comment is that you seem to think that everyone in these countries is the same; the very definition of bigotry is judging people by their attributes (such as country of origin) rather than on individual merit.
The people I meet and hang out with is a biased selection for sure, but the vast majority of them would be an asset for most countries because they're smart, well-educated, and generally "good" people.
Other people ... yeah, maybe not so much. But again: judge the individual.
My point is that many Americans, self included, never heard of FGM until immigrants brought it into to our country.
> you seem to think that everyone in these countries is the same
Your words, not mine. Everyone is an individual. I think many of these individuals should fix their own countries before fleeing to mine. They are not the meek and downtrodden. Every one at the university has blown through at least $125K on immigration attorneys for the student visa alone.
> smart, well-educated, and generally "good" people
There is more to being good than calculus and not murdering people. Given the immense purchasing power they would have in their own countries, why aren't they raising up their own instead of fleeing? So many brahmins blowing through half a mil on a 3rd-rate US compsci degree, while people back home don't even have clean water.
Never mind that the United States specifically also has a tradition of male genital mutilation, so ... you know.
Why should I have the personal responsibility to "fix" my county? Just because I happened to be born there? Seems like a weird take; I don't think location of birth imparts any sort of personal responsibility towards the location.
I was able to leave my own country because I didn't like it, why shouldn't other people have this opportunity? Just because someone else does something bad in their country? Meh. Most people I know aren't "fleeing"; they just want to live somewhere else for a while. Most come back as their family etc. is here and they're usually better off with the experience.
Rich people all over the world spend money on rich person's things. That's a very small minority though, and most people are just regular middle-class people (or worse) with middle-class income and jobs.
My Indonesian girlfriend will have a significantly harder time moving to Europe than I have moving to Indonesia for no other reason than her location of birth, even though she has a university degree and arguably a better job than I do.
Most immigrants from developing countries migrate for economic reasons, not to escape genital mutiliation, acid attacks or honor killings which aren't very common in most developing countries. The developing world and immigrants aren't as scary as you seem to imagine them to be.
No, but since you mention it, it's interesting to note that one of the litmus tests for what constitutes a species is the ability to reproduce.
A state is a three-way bargain between the living, the state, and the unborn. The state imposes all sorts of inconveniences on us---why do we put up with it?
The constitution lists several reasons---common defense, general welfare, and to "secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity"
Imagine, privileging one's own children over someone else's! How aggressively family-ist.
In other words, one of the primary purposes of a state is to act as a vehicle for inheritance.
That's why immigration is not a solution---the point of a state isn't "people," it's our children, specifically. Without that, no one has skin in the game.
Sad the amount of technological progress we may be missing out on by this, I rarely see it discussed but I think fertility is important in order for society to be able to maintain a steady course of improvement in science and technology.
The number of individuals with the potential of Albert Einstein (to pick a stereotype) in a given country is not correlated to the total number of people. Standard of living, a stable childhood environment, quality of schooling, modern medicine, economic opportunity, sanitation, are more important to nurture future innovators. A kid working the fields in Angola will probably never reach his full potential, but little Johnny from suburban America probably will.
When I look around the world today, I think the biggest resource that is lacking is economic opportunity. Huge swathes of people are desperate, angry, and depressed, I think because there is no opportunity for them. The best case scenario for huge numbers of people is stagnation.
A shrinking, aging population would fix this problem. The demand for labor will go up, the supply will go down. Bad for the investor class looking for profits, good for reducing economic inequality. People will be able to profit from labor again.
The techno utopian solution of allocating everyone a 20 m^2 apartment, a vr headset, and 1500 calories of soylent per day is going to be a disaster unless you also allocate everyone some future drugs to keep them sedated.