6 ms·

So this dovetails with what I think is the most fascinating topic in evolution: the demographic transition in humans. If you're not familiar, demographic transi

So this dovetails with what I think is the most fascinating topic in evolution: the demographic transition in humans. If you're not familiar, demographic transition is the term used to describe what has happened to the demography of nations as they become developed. Which is that, rather than producing more children with their material abundance, people in rich nations have less children. This is not, at all, what biology would predict. More resources should lead to more offspring. My personal hunch as to what causes the demographic transition is that we have an evolved system for determining whether we are doing well or doing poorly and that system calibrates itself by examining the people around us. But, because our current economic and social system sorts people by income and status (talented people migrated into the cities from farms, even more talented people moved into more expensive neighborhoods, etc.), and because advertising constantly shows us higher levels of consumption to aspire to, even people who are, in an absolute sense, raking in obscene amounts of money are surrounded by a peer group that are roughly at their level. So it never really feels like you're rich; even though you live in a $3 million dollar home, you live on a street with $8 million dollar homes; even though your kid goes to a $30k/year private school, you can't afford to spend $200k vacationing in France during the summer like some of their peers, etc. Interestingly, this parallels my own experience. As a senior developer, I'm now making roughly 3x what I made before becoming a programmer. Back then I would have imagined that all of my wants would be satisfied by 3xing my income. Yet somehow I still yearn to make more.

lotsofpulp 8y ago
> and because advertising constantly shows us higher levels of consumption to aspire to, even people who are, in an absolute sense, raking in obscene amounts of money are surrounded by a peer group that are roughly at their level. Animals evolved using competition as a mechanism to select the best mates. Advertising is not the cause, it's the nature of all animals to project power. There might be some people here and there who are satisfied or whatnot, but even without advertising, people would be competing.
- shredprez 8y ago
  This is a fair nit, but still: it's self-evident that modern advertising high-jacks natural competition and amplifies it in order to drive an unnatural level of spending (else companies could just skip advertising and see no change in revenue). tl;dr Not a root cause, but a powerful multiplier.
gregorymichael 8y ago
As it says on the wall at Jimmy Johns, "The gap between 'more' and 'enough' never closes."
- spectrum1234 8y ago
  hahahaa
freeflight 8y ago
> This is not, at all, what biology would predict. Why isn't it? Afaik in biology, healthy populations tend to be stable populations. Populations that shrink or grow too fast are often a sign for something going very wrong, usually having to do with sustainability. That's why I think people in rich nations having fewer children is a feature and not a bug. It's the result of increasing living standards because when you have very low child-mortality rates you don't need to "try" several times to get one into adult age, just like the availability of contraception allows for more reliable family planning. The same applies to having a social security net: Without that, you have to depend on your offspring to take care of you when you get too old to work/sick. In a situation like that, more off-spring is always better, as long as you get them through childhood into productive adulthood. Each child is a future potential care-taker and each one of them could end up being a big earner. In that context, a whole lot of people treat getting children like playing the lottery.
- toasterlovin 8y ago
  Biological organisms are machines for turning energy into additional copies of the genes that created the organism. People in the developed world have access to an obscene amount of energy. Yet fertility rates are below replacement level in basically every developed country (if you don't count first generation immigrants). And when you zoom in, you notice that poor people have more children than all but the top several percent of earners (so fertility goes down as access to resources goes up). If you saw something similar in any other species, it would be the biggest unsolved riddle in biology. Something truly strange. And yet here we are basically not paying attention to it at all.
antisthenes 8y ago
> people in rich nations have less children. This is not, at all, what biology would predict. More resources should lead to more offspring. This is not correct. Rich people in rich nations have more kids than middle-income people in rich nations. What matters is your comparative purchasing power. Fertility actually increases with income, even for women with education; this is mostly due to rich being able to afford the costs of child care, and feeling secure enough to invest into all of their children as much as they feel they need to. (whereas a middle-class, educated woman would only feel secure investing into 1 child)
- reallydude 8y ago
  > This is not correct. What isn't correct based on what? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility
- toasterlovin 8y ago
  All you really need to know is that developed nations are home to the highest levels of human affluence that have ever existed, at all levels of society. And yet they have the lowest fertility rates ever measured. So low that they are not sufficient to maintain population size. But if you go even further, you'll see that fertility actually declines with income in developed nations. It's not until you get to the top several percent of income that fertility starts rising again.
  - antisthenes 8y ago
    > It's not until you get to the top several percent of income that fertility starts rising again. Yes, that's what I meant. You could argue about the significance of the top percentage rise in fertility, but if anything, it shows that fertility is constrained by lack of resources in a significant way as well as education specifically.
    - toasterlovin 8y ago
      If fertility is constrained by lack of resources, the why do poor people in the developed world have more kids than middle class people?
lkrubner 8y ago
It's also worth examining if our typical ways of measuring inflation (in the USA, the Consumer Price Index, or CPI) is an accurate guide to the real costs of raising children. The CPI currently takes into account a very diverse range of goods, including canoes and guns and lamps and kitchen wares and music and coffee grinders. The CPI tries to avoid the assumption that some purchases are more important than others, but if you are raising children, you know some things are much more important than others. You can cut back on coffee grinders, but you can not cut back much housing -- you need a certain minimum for each child. My great grandmother gave birth to 16 children (this is my mom's mom's mom) who lived to adulthood. She (with my great grandfather) had no trouble housing them, feeding them, clothing them and ensuring they got educations to at least 8th grade, most to 12th grade. Does the CPI accurately reflect the changing costs of each of the things that were then easy to afford? How much would it cost to raise 16 children now? In theory, we are much more wealthy now than my great-grandparents were in the period 1880 to 1910, and yet they were able to afford something that nowadays would take a great deal to afford. Why is that? Another thing that the CPI does not capture is how some new expenses have arisen that have become essential. In particular, automobiles. In much of the USA, having an automobile is non-optional. We should think about those changes in lifestyle that make comparisons difficult across time. My great-grandparents raised 16 children in a dense town where transportation was dominated by walking. If you were trying to recreate that lifestyle in a USA suburb, some odd questions come up. Can you fit 16 children in one car? Do you get multiple cars? Who drives them? These questions point out how difficult it is to make direct comparisons. Nor is it correct to simply say "No one needs to live in the suburbs in the USA, they can, if they wish, continue to live in a dense urban center". But the USA economy is a cohesive whole, and the existence of the suburbs effects the price of things in the urban core, as well as the focus of transportation infrastructure. Over the last 100 years, most USA urban centers have built significant transportation infrastructure to help workers in distant suburbs come into jobs in the urban core, and then go home at night. The money spent on those infrastructure projects could have been spent on some other priority, but instead were spent as they were because of the existence of the suburbs. So it is very difficult to make direct comparisons, because some lifestyle changes make direct comparisons blurry. But in that blurriness, we can argue that in important ways our standard of living has not increased as much as the CPI seems to suggest. In particular, for those people who have a strong craving to have a large family, one can reasonably argue that their standard of living has actually decreased over time.

lotsofpulp 8y ago

> and because advertising constantly shows us higher levels of consumption to aspire to, even people who are, in an absolute sense, raking in obscene amounts of money are surrounded by a peer group that are roughly at their level. Animals evolved using competition as a mechanism to select the best mates. Advertising is not the cause, it's the nature of all animals to project power. There might be some people here and there who are satisfied or whatnot, but even without advertising, people would be competing.

shredprez 8y ago
This is a fair nit, but still: it's self-evident that modern advertising high-jacks natural competition and amplifies it in order to drive an unnatural level of spending (else companies could just skip advertising and see no change in revenue). tl;dr Not a root cause, but a powerful multiplier.

gregorymichael 8y ago

As it says on the wall at Jimmy Johns, "The gap between 'more' and 'enough' never closes."

spectrum1234 8y ago
hahahaa

freeflight 8y ago

> This is not, at all, what biology would predict. Why isn't it? Afaik in biology, healthy populations tend to be stable populations. Populations that shrink or grow too fast are often a sign for something going very wrong, usually having to do with sustainability. That's why I think people in rich nations having fewer children is a feature and not a bug. It's the result of increasing living standards because when you have very low child-mortality rates you don't need to "try" several times to get one into adult age, just like the availability of contraception allows for more reliable family planning. The same applies to having a social security net: Without that, you have to depend on your offspring to take care of you when you get too old to work/sick. In a situation like that, more off-spring is always better, as long as you get them through childhood into productive adulthood. Each child is a future potential care-taker and each one of them could end up being a big earner. In that context, a whole lot of people treat getting children like playing the lottery.

toasterlovin 8y ago
Biological organisms are machines for turning energy into additional copies of the genes that created the organism. People in the developed world have access to an obscene amount of energy. Yet fertility rates are below replacement level in basically every developed country (if you don't count first generation immigrants). And when you zoom in, you notice that poor people have more children than all but the top several percent of earners (so fertility goes down as access to resources goes up). If you saw something similar in any other species, it would be the biggest unsolved riddle in biology. Something truly strange. And yet here we are basically not paying attention to it at all.

antisthenes 8y ago

> people in rich nations have less children. This is not, at all, what biology would predict. More resources should lead to more offspring. This is not correct. Rich people in rich nations have more kids than middle-income people in rich nations. What matters is your comparative purchasing power. Fertility actually increases with income, even for women with education; this is mostly due to rich being able to afford the costs of child care, and feeling secure enough to invest into all of their children as much as they feel they need to. (whereas a middle-class, educated woman would only feel secure investing into 1 child)

reallydude 8y ago
> This is not correct. What isn't correct based on what? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility
toasterlovin 8y ago
All you really need to know is that developed nations are home to the highest levels of human affluence that have ever existed, at all levels of society. And yet they have the lowest fertility rates ever measured. So low that they are not sufficient to maintain population size. But if you go even further, you'll see that fertility actually declines with income in developed nations. It's not until you get to the top several percent of income that fertility starts rising again.
- antisthenes 8y ago
  > It's not until you get to the top several percent of income that fertility starts rising again. Yes, that's what I meant. You could argue about the significance of the top percentage rise in fertility, but if anything, it shows that fertility is constrained by lack of resources in a significant way as well as education specifically.
  - toasterlovin 8y ago
    If fertility is constrained by lack of resources, the why do poor people in the developed world have more kids than middle class people?

lkrubner 8y ago

It's also worth examining if our typical ways of measuring inflation (in the USA, the Consumer Price Index, or CPI) is an accurate guide to the real costs of raising children. The CPI currently takes into account a very diverse range of goods, including canoes and guns and lamps and kitchen wares and music and coffee grinders. The CPI tries to avoid the assumption that some purchases are more important than others, but if you are raising children, you know some things are much more important than others. You can cut back on coffee grinders, but you can not cut back much housing -- you need a certain minimum for each child. My great grandmother gave birth to 16 children (this is my mom's mom's mom) who lived to adulthood. She (with my great grandfather) had no trouble housing them, feeding them, clothing them and ensuring they got educations to at least 8th grade, most to 12th grade. Does the CPI accurately reflect the changing costs of each of the things that were then easy to afford? How much would it cost to raise 16 children now? In theory, we are much more wealthy now than my great-grandparents were in the period 1880 to 1910, and yet they were able to afford something that nowadays would take a great deal to afford. Why is that? Another thing that the CPI does not capture is how some new expenses have arisen that have become essential. In particular, automobiles. In much of the USA, having an automobile is non-optional. We should think about those changes in lifestyle that make comparisons difficult across time. My great-grandparents raised 16 children in a dense town where transportation was dominated by walking. If you were trying to recreate that lifestyle in a USA suburb, some odd questions come up. Can you fit 16 children in one car? Do you get multiple cars? Who drives them? These questions point out how difficult it is to make direct comparisons. Nor is it correct to simply say "No one needs to live in the suburbs in the USA, they can, if they wish, continue to live in a dense urban center". But the USA economy is a cohesive whole, and the existence of the suburbs effects the price of things in the urban core, as well as the focus of transportation infrastructure. Over the last 100 years, most USA urban centers have built significant transportation infrastructure to help workers in distant suburbs come into jobs in the urban core, and then go home at night. The money spent on those infrastructure projects could have been spent on some other priority, but instead were spent as they were because of the existence of the suburbs. So it is very difficult to make direct comparisons, because some lifestyle changes make direct comparisons blurry. But in that blurriness, we can argue that in important ways our standard of living has not increased as much as the CPI seems to suggest. In particular, for those people who have a strong craving to have a large family, one can reasonably argue that their standard of living has actually decreased over time.