9 ms·

In Britain, childlessness seems likely to return to 1920s levels

43 points by jdkee 5y ago

stickyricky 5y ago
Its not culture. Its birth control. You'll have one sooner or later if you're not on it[1]. Once you do, the next few are easier to justify. Just my opinion. 1. My life.
- silexia 5y ago
  I agree, I actually posted a comment debating the merits of a possible rollback on birth control and I ended up getting flamed for it. I understand the concerns about telling people what to do with their bodies, but there also should be concerns about the survival of the human race
  - Barrin92 5y ago
    I once put a birth rate of 1.5 or so in one of these population simulators and IIRC even with that well below replacement fertility we still had more humans in 2200 than in 1900 or something like that, so I'm gonna be honest I don't think the survival of the species is on the table any time soon. As long as there's tens of millions of humans we're probably good in that department I think you can make an argument that 10 billion humans are more likely to wipe us all out than 10 million
    - silexia 5y ago
      People have been predicting a population disaster calamity since the 1960s. Having more people on our planet has actually made the human species much more efficient because of the combined brain power of all of us working together to solve problems. The people trying to shut down population growth have led to horrifying policies like China's one child policy that deeply hurt many parents.
      - rsynnott 5y ago
        So now you’re suggesting horrifying policies in the other direction? I live in a country where most birth control was banned til the 80s. It wasn’t pretty, and you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who wants to go back to that.
      - sitharus 5y ago
        Forced population control - either preventing or requiring people to reproduce - is a terrible idea. The low birth rate has a huge number of external factors, not least of which is given the current housing and job market many people simply cannot afford to have a child, and much less give their child the attention required to raise a healthy, functioning human.
      - somnic 5y ago
        So instead of an authoritarian policy that you can't have more than one child, forcing a lot of people to not have kids they do want, you want an authoritarian policy that you can't go on birth control, forcing a lot of people to have kids they don't want. Come on.
    - solveit 5y ago
      > I think you can make an argument that 10 billion humans are more likely to wipe us all out than 10 million I think that argument is weak. Geopolitical instability is probably the main threat to us[1], and I think that would be much worse affected by a shrinking population in a world where every policy decision since WWII has been predicated on continued growth. [1] Unless you think the main threat is unfriendly AI with short timelines, in which case population in 50 years matters much less than whether we can get our shit together in the next decade or so.
      - Barrin92 5y ago
        I think the biggest cause for geopolitical instability is some sort of ecological disaster or global nuclear war and I think that's if anything more likely on a planet with large, young populations rather than smaller, older ones due to intensified resource or territorial competition. People have coined the term 'geriatric peace theory' for the effect that aging populations tend to be remarkably stable politically. Today if you think of who can wipe a few billion of the planet India and Pakistan come to mind, less so Germany or Japan.
        Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y ago
        Italy has more than 50% (could be wrong, but high number) of population considered old, but politically it hasn't been stable. While writing I'm guessing you mean "externally", but the two things might be related
    - kongolongo 5y ago
      There's a lot of problems societally that happen when you go below replacement rate that are probably not being accounted for in that simulation. For example, the age proportionality can become massively fucked with populations that have a massive majority in retirement-aged people and people under working ages leading to extremely low working-age people. That type of collapse can also accelerate unpredictably since we don't have exact ideas on whether or not there is a "catastrophic threshold" that replacement rates can go under.
  - vkou 5y ago
    There's no shortage of humans on this planet, currently, or by any forecast. Let's revisit this non-problem once we figure out how the humans in those forecasts are going to sustainably live, first.
  - metagame 5y ago
    The human race isn't in danger, though. The population's actually going up year after year. There are some countries that aren't having enough kids to stay at their peak population without allowing immigration, which may be the actual cause of your concern, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing; encourage immigration, and the problem's solved.
    - hackerfromthefu 5y ago
      Have you seen that movie Idiocracy? Our modern society is hollowing out the gene pool in the vast median of our cultural middle classes
      - cperciva 5y ago
        I hate to break it to you, but Idiocracy wasn't a documentary.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        randomhodler84 5y ago
        Yeah, it was satire, and all good satire has a kernel of truth.
        hackerfromthefu 5y ago
        Correct, it is a warning
      - TrispusAttucks 5y ago
        I wonder if a bimodal genealogy could be a long term outcome? Essentially splitting the human races into two separate species. - Homo Sapiens Alpha - Homo Sapiens Beta Seems farfetched but many species have diverged due to sexual selection so not totally ruled out.
  - rhacker 5y ago
    I feel like if we try to increase the number, it will actually backfire.
  - rsynnott 5y ago
    > but there also should be concerns about the survival of the human race We’ve… some ways to go before we have to worry about extinction from not reproducing enough. This should probably not be in humanity’s top thousand or so worries.
    - TacticalCoder 5y ago
      I'm probably misreading the posts but... The worry is that too many humans may mean consuming too many resources which depletes/damages the earth too quickly. A case could be made that if we were to somehow go back down to about, say, about 1 billion humans (it's a nice round number) we could both keep our knowledge, transmit it, make new discoveries, yet not pollute too much. I'm not a big fan of the idea that "civilization" should be about packing as many humans as possible in as little space as possible ("because energy efficiency") with as little liberties as possible.
      - pyuser583 5y ago
        Have you looked at the environmental impact of low birth societies? China, Japan, and the former USSR should be environmental paradises. Their combination of technical sophistication and low birth rate should result in something from Avatar. Instead they are irradiated hellscapes (very broad and unfair generalization, but still).
      - rsynnott 5y ago
        The person I was responding to appeared to be worried we might run out of people. I was pointing out that this isn’t an immediate concern :)
        pyuser583 5y ago
        Tell that to a hiring manager ;)
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- accnumnplus1 5y ago
  Birth control is a choice influenced by the culture.
websap 5y ago
Governments around the world need to make it easy to have kids. Not sure about Britan, but here in the USA it's prohibitively expensive to have a child let alone 2. Couples of have to make tough decisions like quitting their job as they can't afford child care. Public schools are on average bad and gentrification keeps pricing people out. College costs are out of control.
- crate_barre 5y ago
  People can barely get the house to put the kid in. That’s the first milestone and if you can’t do that, you pretty much back off from all other shit. Oh, and dating in the west is a complete game. The East usually go by family connections, but in the West it’s a game and the game got super harder with social media and unrealistic expectations. So that’s a barrier too. I dunno, nothing feels normal anymore. Personal anecdote - I want to do all these things, but holy shit did it get harder and weirder.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    I did my dating before social media really took off, but my intuitive sense is that, for people who want to eventually settle down with a partner, the game will settle out on pretty close to “an ass for every saddle” just like it always has and that people complained it was hard N*10 years ago for every value of N. It’s hard because it takes a lot of your mental energy and feels very high-stakes. In the worst of the pandemic, I’ll adopt that it probably got legitimately harder, but that’s easing quickly now.
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    > People can barely get the house to put the kid in. That’s the first milestone and if you can’t do that, you pretty much back off from all other shit. If you think buying a house is a prerequisite to having children, you don't know much about any past or current society.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
bloqs 5y ago
British millennials have a particularly bad combo of low wages and world beating house prices to contend with. Older people will vote conservative, and block as many new housing projects as possible to ensure they keep "theirs".
- kypro 5y ago
  It’s very naive to think this problem has been caused by the conservatives alone. Why do you think we need to build hundreds of thousands of houses a year to keep up with demand given we have below replacement birth rates? You would think house prices would be crashing even if the supply of houses was kept steady. This is both a supply and demand issue, although low interest rates and various help to buy schemes have also contributed. As a home owner I’m far more frightened that people will get fed up of the costs of mass migration than labour attempting (and almost certainly failing) to keep up with our growing housing demand.
  - bloqs 5y ago
    I don't think that it's caused by Conservatives alone... but I'm not sure I understand the point you are making with the sentence following? Millennials want to buy houses, regardless of parental status. Low interest rates and help to buy schemes (some of which have ended, some of which aren't that helpful) you'd think would help... except that house prices have increased so severely (15% since before pandemic), and you have a generation particularly concerned by debt already due to student loans etc, not earning any more money than they were before, now suddenly faced with taking on a 95% mortage. Why on gods green earth would anyone want to add kids to that mess? If the baby boomer generation passed any lessons down, it's that stability in childhood is an absolute must. These are not conditions even remotely representing stability.
    - kypro 5y ago
      > Low interest rates and help to buy schemes (some of which have ended, some of which aren't that helpful) you'd think would help... All these do is allow people to borrow more which increases the demand for housing, pushing prices up further. As a home owner you want the government to past more help to buy schemes because these schemes will always inadvertently raise the price of your home because of supply & demand dynamics. > except that house prices have increased so severely (15% since before pandemic), and you have a generation particularly concerned by debt already due to student loans etc, not earning any more money than they were before, now suddenly faced with taking on a 95% mortage The reason house prices are up is because the government have been helping people to buy while pumping money into the economy to ensure people and businesses don’t have to bare the economic consequences of the recession. This is while we had another 300,000 migrants arrive who also need to be homed. If you want house prices to fall you basically need to do the exact opposite. If governments didn’t intervene people wouldn’t be able to afford to pay more for housing and might instead be forced to sell their home like you would expect to see in a recession. And as I touched on before, if governments didn’t import people to prop up GDP growth, housing demand would crash. Btw, I’m not making a political judgement about whether this is good or bad. Recessions suck, but historically they have been good equalisers because those with nothing to lose, lose nothing, while those with homes and businesses lose greatly. Also to your point on affordability, everyone with kids under the age of forty in my family live in social housing and those who own their own homes and have good jobs are the ones who are childless. I don’t think this is a coincident — these groups clearly have different priorities. This anecdote is also supported by evidence that educational achievement is negatively correlated with birth rates.
armchairhacker 5y ago
I don't get the argument against having less children. It would be different if the human race was really dying out. But it seems like most of our problems are caused by overpopulation. If the future generations only have 3.5 billion people, 1 billion, 10 million, I don't see how we'd be worse off. Fields like production, retail, maintenance, etc. would have less workers, but also proportionally less demand. Fields like research and academia would also have less people, probably leading to less discoveries, but how much? and how much would it matter? We lose resistance to extinction if there's a deadly disease that kills almost 100% of the population, but we gain resistance from transmissible diseases. And I know there are tons of people who still really want to have kids. And smart / talented / skeptical people who want to have kids.
- Swizec 5y ago
  > I don't get the argument against having less children. The [current] economic model presupposes infinite growth. You can't have infinite growth with a declining population.
  - arvinsim 5y ago
    True. Even if we do find a solution to replace the current economic model, the transition would be messy with a high chance of violence.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    You can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet, either.
    - gruez 5y ago
      colonize other planets then?
      - sokoloff 5y ago
        I hope we do eventually and specifically outside this solar system, which has a clock that’s shorter than the heat death master clock.
legitster 5y ago
> A new paper on America by Melissa Schettini Kearney and two other economists comes to similar conclusions. They think fertility is declining not because of economic pressures, but because people’s assumptions about life and families have changed. In particular, children are thought to require much more effort and attention than was the case in the past. This mirrors my observations as well. Even in my cohort, most of my peers can afford to have children, but many are choosing not to. Or having fewer. I think something underdiscussed is our generation's obsession with "uncompromise" - you see it in our media, what we demand from celebrities, our policy choices. Something in the way we live our lives publicly makes it easier for people to choose to do nothing rather than risk falling behind their peers. And people have it in their mind that having a kid needs to be an enormous amount of work.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

43 points by jdkee 5y ago

Its not culture. Its birth control. You'll have one sooner or later if you're not on it[1]. Once you do, the next few are easier to justify. Just my opinion. 1. My life.

silexia 5y ago
I agree, I actually posted a comment debating the merits of a possible rollback on birth control and I ended up getting flamed for it. I understand the concerns about telling people what to do with their bodies, but there also should be concerns about the survival of the human race
- Barrin92 5y ago
  I once put a birth rate of 1.5 or so in one of these population simulators and IIRC even with that well below replacement fertility we still had more humans in 2200 than in 1900 or something like that, so I'm gonna be honest I don't think the survival of the species is on the table any time soon. As long as there's tens of millions of humans we're probably good in that department I think you can make an argument that 10 billion humans are more likely to wipe us all out than 10 million
  - silexia 5y ago
    People have been predicting a population disaster calamity since the 1960s. Having more people on our planet has actually made the human species much more efficient because of the combined brain power of all of us working together to solve problems. The people trying to shut down population growth have led to horrifying policies like China's one child policy that deeply hurt many parents.
    - rsynnott 5y ago
      So now you’re suggesting horrifying policies in the other direction? I live in a country where most birth control was banned til the 80s. It wasn’t pretty, and you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who wants to go back to that.
    - sitharus 5y ago
      Forced population control - either preventing or requiring people to reproduce - is a terrible idea. The low birth rate has a huge number of external factors, not least of which is given the current housing and job market many people simply cannot afford to have a child, and much less give their child the attention required to raise a healthy, functioning human.
    - somnic 5y ago
      So instead of an authoritarian policy that you can't have more than one child, forcing a lot of people to not have kids they do want, you want an authoritarian policy that you can't go on birth control, forcing a lot of people to have kids they don't want. Come on.
  - solveit 5y ago
    > I think you can make an argument that 10 billion humans are more likely to wipe us all out than 10 million I think that argument is weak. Geopolitical instability is probably the main threat to us[1], and I think that would be much worse affected by a shrinking population in a world where every policy decision since WWII has been predicated on continued growth. [1] Unless you think the main threat is unfriendly AI with short timelines, in which case population in 50 years matters much less than whether we can get our shit together in the next decade or so.
    - Barrin92 5y ago
      I think the biggest cause for geopolitical instability is some sort of ecological disaster or global nuclear war and I think that's if anything more likely on a planet with large, young populations rather than smaller, older ones due to intensified resource or territorial competition. People have coined the term 'geriatric peace theory' for the effect that aging populations tend to be remarkably stable politically. Today if you think of who can wipe a few billion of the planet India and Pakistan come to mind, less so Germany or Japan.
      - Fire-Dragon-DoL 5y ago
        Italy has more than 50% (could be wrong, but high number) of population considered old, but politically it hasn't been stable. While writing I'm guessing you mean "externally", but the two things might be related
  - kongolongo 5y ago
    There's a lot of problems societally that happen when you go below replacement rate that are probably not being accounted for in that simulation. For example, the age proportionality can become massively fucked with populations that have a massive majority in retirement-aged people and people under working ages leading to extremely low working-age people. That type of collapse can also accelerate unpredictably since we don't have exact ideas on whether or not there is a "catastrophic threshold" that replacement rates can go under.
- vkou 5y ago
  There's no shortage of humans on this planet, currently, or by any forecast. Let's revisit this non-problem once we figure out how the humans in those forecasts are going to sustainably live, first.
- metagame 5y ago
  The human race isn't in danger, though. The population's actually going up year after year. There are some countries that aren't having enough kids to stay at their peak population without allowing immigration, which may be the actual cause of your concern, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing; encourage immigration, and the problem's solved.
  - hackerfromthefu 5y ago
    Have you seen that movie Idiocracy? Our modern society is hollowing out the gene pool in the vast median of our cultural middle classes
    - cperciva 5y ago
      I hate to break it to you, but Idiocracy wasn't a documentary.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - randomhodler84 5y ago
        Yeah, it was satire, and all good satire has a kernel of truth.
      - hackerfromthefu 5y ago
        Correct, it is a warning
    - TrispusAttucks 5y ago
      I wonder if a bimodal genealogy could be a long term outcome? Essentially splitting the human races into two separate species. - Homo Sapiens Alpha - Homo Sapiens Beta Seems farfetched but many species have diverged due to sexual selection so not totally ruled out.
- rhacker 5y ago
  I feel like if we try to increase the number, it will actually backfire.
- rsynnott 5y ago
  > but there also should be concerns about the survival of the human race We’ve… some ways to go before we have to worry about extinction from not reproducing enough. This should probably not be in humanity’s top thousand or so worries.
  - TacticalCoder 5y ago
    I'm probably misreading the posts but... The worry is that too many humans may mean consuming too many resources which depletes/damages the earth too quickly. A case could be made that if we were to somehow go back down to about, say, about 1 billion humans (it's a nice round number) we could both keep our knowledge, transmit it, make new discoveries, yet not pollute too much. I'm not a big fan of the idea that "civilization" should be about packing as many humans as possible in as little space as possible ("because energy efficiency") with as little liberties as possible.
    - pyuser583 5y ago
      Have you looked at the environmental impact of low birth societies? China, Japan, and the former USSR should be environmental paradises. Their combination of technical sophistication and low birth rate should result in something from Avatar. Instead they are irradiated hellscapes (very broad and unfair generalization, but still).
    - rsynnott 5y ago
      The person I was responding to appeared to be worried we might run out of people. I was pointing out that this isn’t an immediate concern :)
      - pyuser583 5y ago
        Tell that to a hiring manager ;)
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
accnumnplus1 5y ago
Birth control is a choice influenced by the culture.

websap 5y ago

Governments around the world need to make it easy to have kids. Not sure about Britan, but here in the USA it's prohibitively expensive to have a child let alone 2. Couples of have to make tough decisions like quitting their job as they can't afford child care. Public schools are on average bad and gentrification keeps pricing people out. College costs are out of control.

crate_barre 5y ago
People can barely get the house to put the kid in. That’s the first milestone and if you can’t do that, you pretty much back off from all other shit. Oh, and dating in the west is a complete game. The East usually go by family connections, but in the West it’s a game and the game got super harder with social media and unrealistic expectations. So that’s a barrier too. I dunno, nothing feels normal anymore. Personal anecdote - I want to do all these things, but holy shit did it get harder and weirder.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  I did my dating before social media really took off, but my intuitive sense is that, for people who want to eventually settle down with a partner, the game will settle out on pretty close to “an ass for every saddle” just like it always has and that people complained it was hard N*10 years ago for every value of N. It’s hard because it takes a lot of your mental energy and feels very high-stakes. In the worst of the pandemic, I’ll adopt that it probably got legitimately harder, but that’s easing quickly now.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  > People can barely get the house to put the kid in. That’s the first milestone and if you can’t do that, you pretty much back off from all other shit. If you think buying a house is a prerequisite to having children, you don't know much about any past or current society.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]

bloqs 5y ago

British millennials have a particularly bad combo of low wages and world beating house prices to contend with. Older people will vote conservative, and block as many new housing projects as possible to ensure they keep "theirs".

kypro 5y ago
It’s very naive to think this problem has been caused by the conservatives alone. Why do you think we need to build hundreds of thousands of houses a year to keep up with demand given we have below replacement birth rates? You would think house prices would be crashing even if the supply of houses was kept steady. This is both a supply and demand issue, although low interest rates and various help to buy schemes have also contributed. As a home owner I’m far more frightened that people will get fed up of the costs of mass migration than labour attempting (and almost certainly failing) to keep up with our growing housing demand.
- bloqs 5y ago
  I don't think that it's caused by Conservatives alone... but I'm not sure I understand the point you are making with the sentence following? Millennials want to buy houses, regardless of parental status. Low interest rates and help to buy schemes (some of which have ended, some of which aren't that helpful) you'd think would help... except that house prices have increased so severely (15% since before pandemic), and you have a generation particularly concerned by debt already due to student loans etc, not earning any more money than they were before, now suddenly faced with taking on a 95% mortage. Why on gods green earth would anyone want to add kids to that mess? If the baby boomer generation passed any lessons down, it's that stability in childhood is an absolute must. These are not conditions even remotely representing stability.
  - kypro 5y ago
    > Low interest rates and help to buy schemes (some of which have ended, some of which aren't that helpful) you'd think would help... All these do is allow people to borrow more which increases the demand for housing, pushing prices up further. As a home owner you want the government to past more help to buy schemes because these schemes will always inadvertently raise the price of your home because of supply & demand dynamics. > except that house prices have increased so severely (15% since before pandemic), and you have a generation particularly concerned by debt already due to student loans etc, not earning any more money than they were before, now suddenly faced with taking on a 95% mortage The reason house prices are up is because the government have been helping people to buy while pumping money into the economy to ensure people and businesses don’t have to bare the economic consequences of the recession. This is while we had another 300,000 migrants arrive who also need to be homed. If you want house prices to fall you basically need to do the exact opposite. If governments didn’t intervene people wouldn’t be able to afford to pay more for housing and might instead be forced to sell their home like you would expect to see in a recession. And as I touched on before, if governments didn’t import people to prop up GDP growth, housing demand would crash. Btw, I’m not making a political judgement about whether this is good or bad. Recessions suck, but historically they have been good equalisers because those with nothing to lose, lose nothing, while those with homes and businesses lose greatly. Also to your point on affordability, everyone with kids under the age of forty in my family live in social housing and those who own their own homes and have good jobs are the ones who are childless. I don’t think this is a coincident — these groups clearly have different priorities. This anecdote is also supported by evidence that educational achievement is negatively correlated with birth rates.

armchairhacker 5y ago

I don't get the argument against having less children. It would be different if the human race was really dying out. But it seems like most of our problems are caused by overpopulation. If the future generations only have 3.5 billion people, 1 billion, 10 million, I don't see how we'd be worse off. Fields like production, retail, maintenance, etc. would have less workers, but also proportionally less demand. Fields like research and academia would also have less people, probably leading to less discoveries, but how much? and how much would it matter? We lose resistance to extinction if there's a deadly disease that kills almost 100% of the population, but we gain resistance from transmissible diseases. And I know there are tons of people who still really want to have kids. And smart / talented / skeptical people who want to have kids.

Swizec 5y ago
> I don't get the argument against having less children. The [current] economic model presupposes infinite growth. You can't have infinite growth with a declining population.
- arvinsim 5y ago
  True. Even if we do find a solution to replace the current economic model, the transition would be messy with a high chance of violence.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  You can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet, either.
  - gruez 5y ago
    colonize other planets then?
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      I hope we do eventually and specifically outside this solar system, which has a clock that’s shorter than the heat death master clock.

legitster 5y ago

> A new paper on America by Melissa Schettini Kearney and two other economists comes to similar conclusions. They think fertility is declining not because of economic pressures, but because people’s assumptions about life and families have changed. In particular, children are thought to require much more effort and attention than was the case in the past. This mirrors my observations as well. Even in my cohort, most of my peers can afford to have children, but many are choosing not to. Or having fewer. I think something underdiscussed is our generation's obsession with "uncompromise" - you see it in our media, what we demand from celebrities, our policy choices. Something in the way we live our lives publicly makes it easier for people to choose to do nothing rather than risk falling behind their peers. And people have it in their mind that having a kid needs to be an enormous amount of work.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]