5 ms·

Finland is a good place to move to fix most of these, if you're willing to live with the tradeoffs. And yet, it seems like the slowdown is hitting us as hard a

Finland is a good place to move to fix most of these, if you're willing to live with the tradeoffs. And yet, it seems like the slowdown is hitting us as hard as anyone... so I don't think it's actually that.

l33t7332273 3y ago
I think a big part of this is a cultural shift to no longer being culturally obligated to marry young and start a family.
- ekianjo 3y ago
  Anf brainwashing that everyone should have a career while in reality most people end up simply with jobs and not careers. Believing lies has a societal cost.
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
  Honestly, I think it's simply that people have much more interesting lives these days. Babies and entertainment are substitute goods.
  - wesapien 3y ago
    Interesting? Give me some examples. This problem goes beyond the east vs west. This is about humans failing to learn from the past. Add modernity and progress|regress.
    - wiseowise 3y ago
      Sports, science, literature, movies, skydiving, games, online games, learning, I can go on forever about different modern activities.
      - cpursley 3y ago
        Most of this was around before the modern era in some form or fashion. There is nothing new under the sun.
        yakubin 3y ago
        If you weren’t born rich, like Newton or Darwin, you were unlikely to be able to afford to learn and do science. Forget about being able to travel to the other side of the world without a huge risk of dying of malaria, dysentery or any of the other myriad diseases whose risks weren’t yet mitigated. Most people also couldn’t afford to travel even to countries nearby. Games: obviously no video games, but personally I wouldn’t miss them. ;) Other games, like poker, chess, mahjongg: true, they were there. Skydiving: nope. Learning: much more limited. E.g. there was so little communication between Asia and Europe that for most Europeans you’d need to move to Asia for months or more to even find a teacher. Beside languages, education in general didn’t use to be available to as large a percentage of society as now. Illiteracy was the common case. According to [1], in 1701 in UK 54% of population was literate, in Western Europe: 31%. [1]: <https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/estimated-historical-literacy-rates https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/estimated-historical-lite...>
      - wesapien 3y ago
        One of my grand mothers was a teacher and yet she bore 9 children. She lived through WW2 in the Asia/Pacific. All her children got were engineers, couple of doctors and a successful entrepreneur. What's more interesting than that? The truth is that inequality, modernity and self-love is going push us into a demographic collapse. Being a wirehead/hobbyist is definitely less fulfilling and less noble.
        idiotsecant 3y ago
        Pumping out children is ... noble? How?
        mensetmanusman 3y ago
  - sdsd 3y ago
    I feel this can be easily dramatized in either direction Imagine sitting down for 9 hours typing, then going home and scrolling through porn and getting high and thinking that's much more interesting than conquering a village, sailing the coast of a new continent, having sex with a beautiful virgin, and teaching your sons to reach even further into greatness. Or on the other hand, the hard reality redpill that your life in the past would be manual labor on a farm as a peasant, making a lord rich. I still lean towards a romantic past - working hard with your village friends, then going to the pub with them, and coming home and making babies with your wife, in a home you own, with a tended garden and many children, sounds better than writing Ansible playbooks and jacking off to pornhub. And this is the life of a loser in the past, compared to a "winner" of the present. Maybe it's anomie, people don't have children when they don't believe in their civilization
    - Earw0rm 3y ago
      The losers in the past died of diarrhea aged three. If you made it as far as wife and kids, you were a winner. If wife made it as far as the third kid without dying of sepsis, she was an ultra winner.
      - sdsd 3y ago
        By that standard, most people conceived in the present don't even survive the womb
        defrost 3y ago
        Well, ditto the past - not only were diet and other conditions harsher, the Church was happy to prescribe, mix, prepare and administer abortifacients. eg: https://daily.jstor.org/abortion-remedies-medieval-catholic-nun/ https://daily.jstor.org/abortion-remedies-medieval-catholic-... and that's Saint Hildegard of Bingen, Abbess and founder of two monasteries handing out the Ye Olde abortion pills. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9K9PfjRjxM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9K9PfjRjxM
        3y ago
- BurningFrog 3y ago
  Evolution will weed that culture out in a few generations. The future belongs to Mormons and Muslims.
  - rs999gti 3y ago
    And real poor people, not middle class westerners complaining about housing and student loans. Poor people in Asia and Africa still have large families.
    - jen20 3y ago
      So did the Irish, until it wasn't necessary to have 9 kids for enough of them to make it through childhood to take over the family farm.
      - BurningFrog 3y ago
        Yeah, much of the big family thing is a numbers game. You get 7 kids to be sure to have 2-3 surviving ones.
- failbuffer 3y ago
  Birth rate always drop in times of riding political instability and decreasing quality of life.
Roark66 3y ago
>Finland is a good place to move to fix most of these, if you're willing to live with the tradeoffs. And yet, it seems like the slowdown is hitting us as hard as anyone... so I don't think it's actually that. I think you hit the nail on its head so to speak. Here in Poland the parenting/childcare situation is probably worse than Finland from what I hear, but much better than it used to be. The change in benefits for example eliminated child poverty, but had zero effect on population growth(which was one of its selling points). I think unless we manage to invent "artificial womb" in long term (as humanity) we are going to have huge problems. Not because there will be less of us. No, but because the huge majority will be very old. This will blow up our heathcare, economy etc. Who will care for all these old people? Robots? This is a very serious problem that will hit us in next ~30 years. Imagine if a single person at work supports 5 pensioners? Someone can say, what do you mean, these pensioners are living off investment income on the decades of their contributions. But this is not exactly right. For them to consume someone has to produce. If there is shortage of workforce there will be shortage of goods, the prices will skyrocket, the workers wages will adjust, but pensioners will be left with nothing or will be helped by the state. Also imagine what impact on national security this will have? Religious sects that promote having large families will thrive, imagine what that will do to our societies. I propose in medium term this is a far bigger problem than climate change. What is the solution then? Immigration. (the legal kind). We (the West) have to establish systems that promote migrant integration. For this we absolutely have to give up the insanity of "cultural relativism". No, cultures that cherish freedom of the individual and ones that treat women as property are not equivalent. Without the strong backbone of acceptance our culture is superior and certain things are non-negotiable (like individual liberties, freedom of religion, expression, identity) this will not work. But if we can manage to implement this without sliding into extremes people from other places will want to come, live here, work and raise their children. This will solve our (the West) population growth problem in the short to medium term. In the long term? Only robots and artifical wombs.
- DecoySalamander 3y ago
  > Religious sects that promote having large families will thrive, imagine what that will do to our societies. > What is the solution then? Immigration. I can understand holding either of those views, but not both at the same time. Why do you expect immigrants from a culture that produces a surplus of people (and pressure to immigrate) to have a lesser/better effect on your culture than the offspring of native religious "sects"?
pembrook 3y ago
Finland, like all developed countries over the last decade+ (Canada, Australia, Netherlands, UK, France, Sweden, etc) also has a big housing affordability problem. Yes, supply is an issue in all these places (due to mass internal migration to the biggest metros). But also a decade of low interest rates combined with inflationary guarantees/bonuses for first time home owners (esp. in Finland) also has a lot to do with it. When you make it so everybody can get a loan and cap the interest rate artificially low for them, all you’ve done is inefficiently create inflation. The developed world elite all attend the same conferences, so we all make the same stupid policy mistakes together.
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
  Maybe in Helsinki. Try any of the thousand other little towns around here, or even the other major cities (Jyväskylä is very underrated imo) and it's a totally different story. I don't disagree with your claim that last generation's housing policies have caused serious problems, but the scale of what I've seen so far in Finland is nothing like what it is in the United States. The fact that when you inherit property from a deceased relative, you're also hit with a 15% inheritance tax that year, to be paid in cash, helps. Suddenly holding onto that $700,000 Helsinki condo for the kiddos starts to look like it might do more harm than good. https://www.suomi.fi/guides/death-of-a-close-family-member/property-of-the-deceased-person/inheritance-tax https://www.suomi.fi/guides/death-of-a-close-family-member/p... Ultimately I hold out hope that Finland will continue down its path of very common remote work, allowing even mid-career professionals to live wherever they want in this beautiful country. We're all in this together.
  - pembrook 3y ago
    > the scale of what I've seen so far in Finland is nothing like what it is in the United States This is because US housing was already insanely cheap by comparison globally. Just as you say housing is cheap outside Helsinki...outside NYC/SF/LA, housing in the United States is even cheaper. Even today, the average US house is 40% cheaper than the average Finnish house. [1] And US incomes are on average 25% higher. AND taxes are 15% lower on average in the US. Meaning the price-to-net income ratio is almost 2X for Finnish real estate vs. US real estate. [1] As of 2023, average price per sq meter in Finland is 2800 USD. Average price per sq meter in the US is 1800 USD.
Cloudef 3y ago
Finland may feel ok right now, but Finland seems like its going downhill pretty fast. Tax payers are declining. Having kids is seeing more PITA as people want to be young forever, or people are afraid of becoming single fathers/mothers, and the country doesnt support child families enough. The numbers dont look very good. Many of the nordic wellbeing country pillar stones come from high taxes, and once that money stops, the pillar stones have to be cut one by one. Not to add, finland has problem with employment, more than the neighbour countries.
- hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
  Hm ... Is it actually going downhill, or is it merely improving slower than it otherwise could? The evidence of my senses seems to contradict the first claim.

l33t7332273 3y ago

I think a big part of this is a cultural shift to no longer being culturally obligated to marry young and start a family.

ekianjo 3y ago
Anf brainwashing that everyone should have a career while in reality most people end up simply with jobs and not careers. Believing lies has a societal cost.
hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
Honestly, I think it's simply that people have much more interesting lives these days. Babies and entertainment are substitute goods.
- wesapien 3y ago
  Interesting? Give me some examples. This problem goes beyond the east vs west. This is about humans failing to learn from the past. Add modernity and progress|regress.
  - wiseowise 3y ago
    Sports, science, literature, movies, skydiving, games, online games, learning, I can go on forever about different modern activities.
    - cpursley 3y ago
      Most of this was around before the modern era in some form or fashion. There is nothing new under the sun.
      - yakubin 3y ago
        If you weren’t born rich, like Newton or Darwin, you were unlikely to be able to afford to learn and do science. Forget about being able to travel to the other side of the world without a huge risk of dying of malaria, dysentery or any of the other myriad diseases whose risks weren’t yet mitigated. Most people also couldn’t afford to travel even to countries nearby. Games: obviously no video games, but personally I wouldn’t miss them. ;) Other games, like poker, chess, mahjongg: true, they were there. Skydiving: nope. Learning: much more limited. E.g. there was so little communication between Asia and Europe that for most Europeans you’d need to move to Asia for months or more to even find a teacher. Beside languages, education in general didn’t use to be available to as large a percentage of society as now. Illiteracy was the common case. According to [1], in 1701 in UK 54% of population was literate, in Western Europe: 31%. [1]: <https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/estimated-historical-literacy-rates https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/estimated-historical-lite...>
    - wesapien 3y ago
      One of my grand mothers was a teacher and yet she bore 9 children. She lived through WW2 in the Asia/Pacific. All her children got were engineers, couple of doctors and a successful entrepreneur. What's more interesting than that? The truth is that inequality, modernity and self-love is going push us into a demographic collapse. Being a wirehead/hobbyist is definitely less fulfilling and less noble.
      - idiotsecant 3y ago
        Pumping out children is ... noble? How?
        mensetmanusman 3y ago
- sdsd 3y ago
  I feel this can be easily dramatized in either direction Imagine sitting down for 9 hours typing, then going home and scrolling through porn and getting high and thinking that's much more interesting than conquering a village, sailing the coast of a new continent, having sex with a beautiful virgin, and teaching your sons to reach even further into greatness. Or on the other hand, the hard reality redpill that your life in the past would be manual labor on a farm as a peasant, making a lord rich. I still lean towards a romantic past - working hard with your village friends, then going to the pub with them, and coming home and making babies with your wife, in a home you own, with a tended garden and many children, sounds better than writing Ansible playbooks and jacking off to pornhub. And this is the life of a loser in the past, compared to a "winner" of the present. Maybe it's anomie, people don't have children when they don't believe in their civilization
  - Earw0rm 3y ago
    The losers in the past died of diarrhea aged three. If you made it as far as wife and kids, you were a winner. If wife made it as far as the third kid without dying of sepsis, she was an ultra winner.
    - sdsd 3y ago
      By that standard, most people conceived in the present don't even survive the womb
      - defrost 3y ago
        Well, ditto the past - not only were diet and other conditions harsher, the Church was happy to prescribe, mix, prepare and administer abortifacients. eg: https://daily.jstor.org/abortion-remedies-medieval-catholic-nun/ https://daily.jstor.org/abortion-remedies-medieval-catholic-... and that's Saint Hildegard of Bingen, Abbess and founder of two monasteries handing out the Ye Olde abortion pills. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9K9PfjRjxM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9K9PfjRjxM
        3y ago
BurningFrog 3y ago
Evolution will weed that culture out in a few generations. The future belongs to Mormons and Muslims.
- rs999gti 3y ago
  And real poor people, not middle class westerners complaining about housing and student loans. Poor people in Asia and Africa still have large families.
  - jen20 3y ago
    So did the Irish, until it wasn't necessary to have 9 kids for enough of them to make it through childhood to take over the family farm.
    - BurningFrog 3y ago
      Yeah, much of the big family thing is a numbers game. You get 7 kids to be sure to have 2-3 surviving ones.
failbuffer 3y ago
Birth rate always drop in times of riding political instability and decreasing quality of life.

Roark66 3y ago

>Finland is a good place to move to fix most of these, if you're willing to live with the tradeoffs. And yet, it seems like the slowdown is hitting us as hard as anyone... so I don't think it's actually that. I think you hit the nail on its head so to speak. Here in Poland the parenting/childcare situation is probably worse than Finland from what I hear, but much better than it used to be. The change in benefits for example eliminated child poverty, but had zero effect on population growth(which was one of its selling points). I think unless we manage to invent "artificial womb" in long term (as humanity) we are going to have huge problems. Not because there will be less of us. No, but because the huge majority will be very old. This will blow up our heathcare, economy etc. Who will care for all these old people? Robots? This is a very serious problem that will hit us in next ~30 years. Imagine if a single person at work supports 5 pensioners? Someone can say, what do you mean, these pensioners are living off investment income on the decades of their contributions. But this is not exactly right. For them to consume someone has to produce. If there is shortage of workforce there will be shortage of goods, the prices will skyrocket, the workers wages will adjust, but pensioners will be left with nothing or will be helped by the state. Also imagine what impact on national security this will have? Religious sects that promote having large families will thrive, imagine what that will do to our societies. I propose in medium term this is a far bigger problem than climate change. What is the solution then? Immigration. (the legal kind). We (the West) have to establish systems that promote migrant integration. For this we absolutely have to give up the insanity of "cultural relativism". No, cultures that cherish freedom of the individual and ones that treat women as property are not equivalent. Without the strong backbone of acceptance our culture is superior and certain things are non-negotiable (like individual liberties, freedom of religion, expression, identity) this will not work. But if we can manage to implement this without sliding into extremes people from other places will want to come, live here, work and raise their children. This will solve our (the West) population growth problem in the short to medium term. In the long term? Only robots and artifical wombs.

DecoySalamander 3y ago
> Religious sects that promote having large families will thrive, imagine what that will do to our societies. > What is the solution then? Immigration. I can understand holding either of those views, but not both at the same time. Why do you expect immigrants from a culture that produces a surplus of people (and pressure to immigrate) to have a lesser/better effect on your culture than the offspring of native religious "sects"?

pembrook 3y ago

Finland, like all developed countries over the last decade+ (Canada, Australia, Netherlands, UK, France, Sweden, etc) also has a big housing affordability problem. Yes, supply is an issue in all these places (due to mass internal migration to the biggest metros). But also a decade of low interest rates combined with inflationary guarantees/bonuses for first time home owners (esp. in Finland) also has a lot to do with it. When you make it so everybody can get a loan and cap the interest rate artificially low for them, all you’ve done is inefficiently create inflation. The developed world elite all attend the same conferences, so we all make the same stupid policy mistakes together.

hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
Maybe in Helsinki. Try any of the thousand other little towns around here, or even the other major cities (Jyväskylä is very underrated imo) and it's a totally different story. I don't disagree with your claim that last generation's housing policies have caused serious problems, but the scale of what I've seen so far in Finland is nothing like what it is in the United States. The fact that when you inherit property from a deceased relative, you're also hit with a 15% inheritance tax that year, to be paid in cash, helps. Suddenly holding onto that $700,000 Helsinki condo for the kiddos starts to look like it might do more harm than good. https://www.suomi.fi/guides/death-of-a-close-family-member/property-of-the-deceased-person/inheritance-tax https://www.suomi.fi/guides/death-of-a-close-family-member/p... Ultimately I hold out hope that Finland will continue down its path of very common remote work, allowing even mid-career professionals to live wherever they want in this beautiful country. We're all in this together.
- pembrook 3y ago
  > the scale of what I've seen so far in Finland is nothing like what it is in the United States This is because US housing was already insanely cheap by comparison globally. Just as you say housing is cheap outside Helsinki...outside NYC/SF/LA, housing in the United States is even cheaper. Even today, the average US house is 40% cheaper than the average Finnish house. [1] And US incomes are on average 25% higher. AND taxes are 15% lower on average in the US. Meaning the price-to-net income ratio is almost 2X for Finnish real estate vs. US real estate. [1] As of 2023, average price per sq meter in Finland is 2800 USD. Average price per sq meter in the US is 1800 USD.

Cloudef 3y ago

Finland may feel ok right now, but Finland seems like its going downhill pretty fast. Tax payers are declining. Having kids is seeing more PITA as people want to be young forever, or people are afraid of becoming single fathers/mothers, and the country doesnt support child families enough. The numbers dont look very good. Many of the nordic wellbeing country pillar stones come from high taxes, and once that money stops, the pillar stones have to be cut one by one. Not to add, finland has problem with employment, more than the neighbour countries.

hiAndrewQuinn 3y ago
Hm ... Is it actually going downhill, or is it merely improving slower than it otherwise could? The evidence of my senses seems to contradict the first claim.