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US births decline for fourth year in a row, CDC says
- rpmisms 7y agoShame. I wonder where we fall in the saga of the collapse of the Roman Empire?
- hprotagonist 7y agoand here i was thinking that a falling birth rate spoke to a more sustainable future in the face of climate change.
- Accujack 7y agoIt's not all of humanity. Just people in industrialized nations, for the most part. The third world has babies as much as they can as often as they can. So many of our "first world" problems wouldn't happen if we'd just help out the third world with education, opportunity, and other basics. Too bad living in the industrialized world doesn't mean one can't be foolish or racist.
- lkramer 7y agoThis is not really true. Except for some parts of Africa, the birthrate across the world is declining. The worldwide average is 2.4. Likely the world's population will start decline in actual terms some time in the 2nd half of the 21st century: http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/total-fertility-rate/ http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/total-fertility-r... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FACK2knC08E
- Accujack 7y agoOther than in general terms, there's no comparison. The birth rate declining is normal in terms of industrialized countries... people educated enough to use birth control and who have availability tend to have fewer kids. The rest of the world hasn't caught up yet, and probably won't in time to avoid problems. The birth rate isn't declining because "America is in decline"... it's declining because people are choosing not to have children. The wisdom of that choice is open to discussion, of course.
- rpmisms 7y agoRichness becomes childlessness, which becomes poverty, which becomes death.
- dougmwne 7y agoRight now I'm reading: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6415185-lost-to-the-west https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6415185-lost-to-the-west There's a strong argument to be made that the Romans existed as a political entity for 2000 years and that the final end wasn't until the fall of Constantinople in 1453. The last thousand years are mainly a story of slow decay which is why they get lopped off in all the simple narratives about the fall of Rome. If there's anything to be learned from Rome, it's that an advanced civilization can survive almost anything.
- lizardking 7y agoThere's no reason to believe we fall anywhere in said saga
- rpmisms 7y agoSo far every past civilization has fallen. Why are we so different?
- mensetmanusman 7y agoRome never died, the U.S. was founded as an extension of the empire :)
- sojmq 7y agoI think we are falling in the saga of the Weimar Republic instead.
- dougmwne 7y agoHere's a comparison to the rest of the world: http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/total-fertility-rate/ http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/total-fertility-r... This is an interesting topic for a number of reasons. It's tied up in political questions like immigration, taxes, healthcare and education. And there are unresolved economic questions like, "how will capitalism survive the end of endless growth?" Sociological questions like, "why did everyone stop having babies?" And then there's the environmental perspective, "Are we already hopelessly past this planet's carrying capacity?"
- neallindsay 7y agoThe article doesn’t do a good job of highlighting that the decrease in pregnancy is mostly (maybe entirely?) among teenage girls. Maybe kids today are having less sex or maybe they’re better at using birth control. Either way, this is a good thing.
- ch4s3 7y agoI don’t have the citation at hand, but from what I’ve read it’s both, but largely they’re have sex a lot less.
- lawn 7y agoWhy is teenagers having less sex good?
- hkarthik 7y agoLess unwanted pregnancies which result in less abortions, single mothers relying on taxpayer social safety nets, or extra state money spent on kids falling through the cracks of the foster care system.
- sametmax 7y agoThe problem here seems more unwanted pregnancies than with teenagers having sex. I se how less sex is an easy solution to the problem, but it is also the wrong one. Your teenage years are when you have the more energy and hormones, you are basically built to have sex. Not to mention it's healthy for the mind and body. It would be like not allowing teens ride bikes because of possible crash with cars since stats show teens are more likely to have accidents than adults. Better find a way to limit the accidents themself: you get healthy kids, having fun, and they grow into better adults.
- hkarthik 7y agoA big part of the stigma around teen sex is rooted in thousands of years of religious taboo associated with it among the world’s major religions. This is likely because those belief systems were the original dominant form of birth control. This is likely a case where the evolution of human culture hasn’t caught up with the available medical technology.
- propter_hoc 7y agoPopulation change is going to have wide-ranging effects on society and the economy. Already, the shrinking size of generations is putting smaller colleges out of business and is expected to hit the housing market hard in the near future [1]. Immigration will have somewhat of a mitigating effect, but sentiment has been pretty anti-immigration for a while. Worse, the rest of the world is experiencing the same decline in birth rates [2], and is developing so fast that the economic argument for a resident of another country to emigrate to the West is shrinking. (Why learn another language to live in Denver, when Shanghai is faster-growing and more modern? [3]) To be sure, there are lots of confounding factors, like the universities and social freedoms available in the West, but on a 50-year span we should expect to see some dramatic shifts due to these demographic evolutions. [1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/ok-boomer-whos-going-to-buy-your-21-million-homes-11574485201 https://www.wsj.com/articles/ok-boomer-whos-going-to-buy-you... [2] https://amp.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3039064/chinas-ageing-population-prompts-plan-deal-looming-silver-shock https://amp.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3039064/chin... [3] https://a16z.com/2019/10/30/the-power-of-qr-codes/ https://a16z.com/2019/10/30/the-power-of-qr-codes/
- moonraker 7y agoIronically (given our current Zeitgeist) by the time we start to feel the effects of the these demographic trends, we'll need more automation to keep up productivity (and therefore long-term GDP growth)... especially when one considers the entitlement spending that will be needed to care for the elderly). I'd imagine that by then, there will be more individuals advocating for increased automation and (hopefully) society will become increasingly 'techno-optimist' as a result
- tykj5tyke 7y agoHaving a kid is hard and usually looks unrewarding from the outside in the US. I get that having a kid isn't for everyone but for a lot of working class people the optics look like a choice between having a belligerent room mate that takes all your money vs. being able to poonhound around on Tinder and blow my money on fun. Some people might choose the former if the outcomes weren't so starkly contrasting. The government needs to be doing more to support families or else we're going to end up in a situation like Germany where we have to import people from abroad just to prevent shrinkage.
- mensetmanusman 7y agoThere are over 100,000,000 south of the border who have indicated they would like to come to the U.S.
- pm24601 7y agoThe earth resources are stressed beyond the breaking point with the current population. A declining population is not a problem - except to handwringing economists. From a human perspective, we need to only have workers to fulfill the production needs of society. Paying for retirees is solvable by simply aggressively taxing the billionaires. In the US, having a kid or kids is an unaffordable luxury item for couples trying to survive in today's economy. I know the only way, I can afford my kids is that I got lucky with the stock market.
- moonraker 7y agoEarth's resources are strained, yes. However, taxing billionaires as you propose wouldn't necessarily pay for all the entitlement spending that the elderly require. A solution to both of these problems is increasing total factor productivity (aka doing more with less). The big rise in living standards during the post-war boom was largely a result of a huge increase in total factor productivity. This has petered out since the 1970s and a lot of the 'zero-sum' mentality/nostalgia for a 'Great America'/fighting over a fixed economic pie in the US today is because we haven't been increasing productivity (i.e. there hasn't been enough technological innovation and disruption) at a fast enough rate.
- moonraker 7y agoCheatsheet source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_factor_productivity#cite_note-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_factor_productivity#cite... For the adventurous/curious: https://www.bls.gov/dpr/faqs.htm https://www.bls.gov/dpr/faqs.htm http://www.helsinki.fi/iehc2006/papers2/Warr.pdf http://www.helsinki.fi/iehc2006/papers2/Warr.pdf [PDF] https://assets.cambridge.org/97811070/36161/frontmatter/9781107036161_frontmatter.pdf https://assets.cambridge.org/97811070/36161/frontmatter/9781... [PDF]
- cameronbrown 7y agoI don't think Earth's resources are strained. I think we're approaching capacity, especially in the oil industry, but so much of the food we produce is thrown away.
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- symplee 7y agoWhen will the narrative that "there are too many people" finally catch up to the facts? Edit: Just pointing out that doomsday predictions about population growth have been consistently wrong for the last 100 years.
- drdeadringer 7y agoWhat are the facts?
- symplee 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_growth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Projections_of_population_grow...
- lacker 7y agoThis doesn't seem sustainable, to me. Just basic evolution. As long as some subpopulation has a birth rate above replacement rate, that subpopulation will grow, until the total birth rate at least returns to replacement. I feel like human culture has still not reached a steady state after the invention of birth control. I don't know what will happen per se, but it seems like the world of the future will have to be more encouraging of parenthood, in some way, than the world of the present. I hope it is a way that is consistent with the model of a modern free Western democracy.
- polski-g 7y agoYou are correct. The country is currently projected to be majority Amish by 2200.
- xamuel 7y agoRelevant article [1] and corresponding HN discussion thread [2] Daily reminder that in an evolutionary context, the last 200 years are the blink of an eye. I'll paste a comment I made there: "If an antibiotic doesn't wipe out its target, then its target's numbers will be devastated in the short-term, but in the long-term, its target will evolve immunity to the antibiotic and ultimately recover. If you think about it, contraceptives are extremely similar to an antibiotic whose target is human beings. We're still living in the short-term when the antibiotic seems to be effective." [1] "The heritability of fertility makes world population stabilization unlikely in the foreseeable future" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513817302799#bb0180 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S109051381... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20360626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20360626
- namirez 7y ago> If you think about it, contraceptives are extremely similar to an antibiotic whose target is human beings. We don't really know that. There are environmental stressors that lead a species to adapt; there are also stressors that cause a species to go extinct. I think time scales are really important here. Bacteria evolve much more rapidly than humans. But the rate of creating new antibiotics and contraceptives are probably in the same ballpark.
- spodek 7y agoThe best book I've read on population is Countdown by Alan Weiss https://www.amazon.com/Countdown-Last-Best-Future-Earth/dp/0316097756 https://www.amazon.com/Countdown-Last-Best-Future-Earth/dp/0.... If you think we need to grow or that leveling off to 10 billion or even 7 billion helps, you'll appreciate reading the book. Among other points, he recounts several nations that have lowered birthrate without coercion to greater abundance, prosperity, and joy -- Thailand, for example. It inspired me to 3 podcast episodes on lowering birth rate: episodes 248, 250, and 251 http://joshuaspodek.com/guests/rants-raves-and-monologues-volume-9 http://joshuaspodek.com/guests/rants-raves-and-monologues-vo.... Also Limits to Growth's 30 year update https://www.amazon.com/Limits-Growth-Donella-H-Meadows/dp/193149858X https://www.amazon.com/Limits-Growth-Donella-H-Meadows/dp/19...
- mensetmanusman 7y agoI am a PhD with 5 kids under the age of 10, people think I’m crazy. My new thing is telling people I have 10 kids, then saying ‘just kidding, only 5’
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- souprock 7y agoYou're a beginner. I have 6 kids under the age of 10, and another 6 aged 10 and older. Not kidding: only 1.2 dekachildren. You have some catching up to do.
- bamboozled 7y agoDo you think some of this has to do with climate change, I mean right now, who really feels like bringing a child into this world is a good idea ? I’d personally be quite hesitant at this point.
- tempsolution 7y agoSounds like good darwinistic filter to me. In this case it will filter out people who are so afraid of the future that they want to rather have mankind extinct.
- bamboozled 7y agoHow about this instead. We collectively weren’t smart enough and lacked the skills to organise and solve complex and political issues at scale so we went the way of the Dinosaur. Sounds also like a Darwinian theory to me. Never mind people who can actually see the writing on the wall I guess, just keep breading during a totally unmitigated environmental disaster and see how that does for your offspring. I know for a fact this issue turns people off having children.
- serf 7y agoquestion : at what point in modern history would you have been comfortable doing so, if you aren't now? The world is getting progressively safer, by the numbers.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- bamboozled 7y agoI feel like through all the worst times in the world, there was At least a relatively safe guarantee the biosphere would be there to support you. We’re destroying that like never before so I think that it’s a much worse time for our future prospects personally. No other thing worries me more right now than climate change. Having a habitat to live in is important, it might be easy to forget that we’re animals too but I think as we look around at the extinction at other species via our smartphones, we don’t realise this is our future too if the current trajectory doesn’t turn around very, very fast.
- 0_gravitas 7y agoi can only really see this as a good thing, but im admittedly a bit of an antinatalist myself