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Why is immigration the only proposed solution and raising birth rate is not considered? Part of it are pragmatic obstacles, such as lack of stable middle class

Why is immigration the only proposed solution and raising birth rate is not considered? Part of it are pragmatic obstacles, such as lack of stable middle class jobs in areas with affordable cost of living. But most of it is bad values among people who can afford to raise 2-3 kids with good living standards already. Current assumptions are that a. 40 is the new 20, meaning that adults continue to party like college kids rather than deriving life meaning from more mature pursuits, b. career success is the only measure of a person's success, c. A child would rather not be born than live a life where not everything is provided on a silver plate. Humanity is not going to die out, but future will belong to cultures that are passed on to another generation. How would folks not willing to budge on these ideals feel if they time traveled to year 2100 and the world was dominated by theocracies that managed to keep their birth rates up?

timbit42 4y ago
My country is essentially paying all the expenses of parents who have children and we're still not having enough children to keep our population stable. When people were living on farms, more children were an asset. Most people live in cities now, so children are a liability. What do you suggest would encourage people to have more children?
- glass3 4y ago
  Build cities where children are safe to roam.
- cat_plus_plus 4y ago
  If living in cities is so horrible for human reproductive health that city dwellers are dying out, we should rethink living in cities. Imagine the reaction if pollutant in drinking water did that.
bee_rider 4y ago
We could think about ways to make it easier to have kids. But it will likely be costly and difficult — having kid means you sign up for at 18 years of drastically altered lifestyle at least! So if we are to try and incentivize people to have kids, we’ll have to convince that there’ll be some stability in the incentives there. It seems much easier to have a kid if one parent is able to stay at home. But that’ll require restructuring the economy for lower labor participation rates. And I guess we’re not going to accept a massive gender imbalance in who stays home nowadays. So as a first step I guess we’ll have to massively rethink men’s role in society, so that we can get up from the paltry 16% of stay at home parents being fathers to more like 50%. All possible but it requires sustained effort. Accepting more immigrants is quite a bit more flexible. And they even show up as adults mostly, so we don’t have to raise them! It is sort of mooching off the rest of the world, but if people want to join, I say let ‘em.
- cat_plus_plus 4y ago
  More like at most 2 years of drastically altered lifestyle, after that you just send them to a daycare and go to work and then at home they are able to walk, talk and eat by themselves and you can get a babysitter and go on a date. For these 2 years we have to be grown up about existence of reproductive dimorphism, most obviously breastfeeding but also fathers and their children learning parenting relationship as an acquired skill rather than instinct. Rather than demanding that there is no statistical difference between life paths of men and women, how about respecting both equally? Why is being a cog in corporate machine inherently more worthy of respect or life meaning than taking care of your own family? If this is considered equally desirable, more fathers will also be interested. Plus there is now remote work and robots/AI are taking our jobs, so why is this even a big deal?

timbit42 4y ago

My country is essentially paying all the expenses of parents who have children and we're still not having enough children to keep our population stable. When people were living on farms, more children were an asset. Most people live in cities now, so children are a liability. What do you suggest would encourage people to have more children?

glass3 4y ago
Build cities where children are safe to roam.
cat_plus_plus 4y ago
If living in cities is so horrible for human reproductive health that city dwellers are dying out, we should rethink living in cities. Imagine the reaction if pollutant in drinking water did that.

bee_rider 4y ago

We could think about ways to make it easier to have kids. But it will likely be costly and difficult — having kid means you sign up for at 18 years of drastically altered lifestyle at least! So if we are to try and incentivize people to have kids, we’ll have to convince that there’ll be some stability in the incentives there. It seems much easier to have a kid if one parent is able to stay at home. But that’ll require restructuring the economy for lower labor participation rates. And I guess we’re not going to accept a massive gender imbalance in who stays home nowadays. So as a first step I guess we’ll have to massively rethink men’s role in society, so that we can get up from the paltry 16% of stay at home parents being fathers to more like 50%. All possible but it requires sustained effort. Accepting more immigrants is quite a bit more flexible. And they even show up as adults mostly, so we don’t have to raise them! It is sort of mooching off the rest of the world, but if people want to join, I say let ‘em.

cat_plus_plus 4y ago
More like at most 2 years of drastically altered lifestyle, after that you just send them to a daycare and go to work and then at home they are able to walk, talk and eat by themselves and you can get a babysitter and go on a date. For these 2 years we have to be grown up about existence of reproductive dimorphism, most obviously breastfeeding but also fathers and their children learning parenting relationship as an acquired skill rather than instinct. Rather than demanding that there is no statistical difference between life paths of men and women, how about respecting both equally? Why is being a cog in corporate machine inherently more worthy of respect or life meaning than taking care of your own family? If this is considered equally desirable, more fathers will also be interested. Plus there is now remote work and robots/AI are taking our jobs, so why is this even a big deal?