8 ms·

World fertility rates in 'unprecedented decline', UN says

54 points by mmarian 1y ago

anovikov 1y ago
"school fees" - this is very, very symptomatic. Public school is free in all countries of the world without exception. Private, paid schools cover 1-20% of kids depending on the country. But now, everyone wants their kid to be among the elite - or never exist at all.
- ricksunny 1y ago
  Is their position untenable? If, lacking the resources to place their child into elite circles of society they perceive their child will instead be treated as a vehicle for exploitation, is it irrational for them to withold siring would-be blighted offspring to the world?
  - anovikov 1y ago
    But this is natural. In every society, vast majority are the exploited poor, and always have been. It shouldn't stop them from multiplying.
    - atmavatar 1y ago
      I would point out that at least in the US, the degree to which the poor are exploited has been ever-increasing for over a half century with no signs of reversing. If anything, it's accelerating.
- dmitrygr 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - pinkmuffinere 1y ago
    I went to high school in CA, AZ, and SD (state, not city). The CA public school was by far the best, despite being in a relatively poor town (San Jacinto), and so underfunded that we got random fridays off _to save on teacher salaries_. I don't know what you've heard about CA public schools, but all things considered I think they are quite good.
- mrkeen 1y ago
  > "school fees" - this is very, very symptomatic. Public school is free in all countries of the world without exception. And the world fertility rates are in unprecedented decline. Should we stop making schools free?
- yardstick 1y ago
  In the UAE, you pay for your kids education from day one to the end. There’s no free ride, unless you’re a local. I’m not sure how many other countries are like this. I’d say most countries provide free education to their residents. But, not all.
  - lnsru 1y ago
    Got few job offers from there. All included healthcare and school fees up to three kids. I don’t think, that outsiders go to that part of the world just for schools. So at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter if school is free or paid by employer.
    - yardstick 1y ago
      Yes agree a lot do include education. But, not all the jobs there come with such perks.
  - anovikov 1y ago
    For CITIZENS, all of them do. Naturally in UAE there are few citizens. I have no idea why temporary, non immigrant foreigners should be entitled to free anything. There is no naturalization in UAE, you can't ever get citizenship regardless of years of residence or being born in the country - only way to it is direct male line from 1915 (something i think more countries should practice). So why fund someone who's outsider and who, will, and his descendants, always remain outsiders on temporary visas?
    - yardstick 1y ago
      Yeah your original post didn’t state citizens. It’s common for residents to receive free primary education for their children in most countries. Eg UK, AU, NZ, Canada all do. Work visa or permanent resident visa.
- lurk2 1y ago
  > But now, everyone wants their kid to be among the elite - or never exist at all. This isn’t remotely true.
  - franktankbank 1y ago
    I've got kids and am not elite so that might sound like I'm in agreement with you. However, I do worry my kids will struggle because of the rampant greed of the elite. Will my kid be able to even follow in my footsteps? Put another way, will the children two-three generations from now be populated almost exclusively by the elite of today and their imported labor? If we have that as an endpoint then why would I want to subject my potential kids to that grizzly middle ground?
Flatcircle 1y ago
Car seats and public schools going to shit definitely didn’t help. And the two working parents. Tough times
- eastbound 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - haroldb1 1y ago
    [dead]
  - bongodongobob 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - Jiltilder 1y ago
      [flagged]
    - eastbound 1y ago
      [flagged]
      - cosmicgadget 1y ago
        Nope, just saw your comment and it was bad. The person who replied even started with "it's hard to say these things without sounding like an asshole..." and then proceeded to say he can't date because of feminism. You're not being suppressed.
        eastbound 1y ago
        He meant it for himself. I didn’t go as far as he did. I just said a worthy explanation for fewer kids is this movement that makes genders diverge. It’s an observation worthy of merit. Expressed differently, women want to be left alone. I think the downvotes are expressing something else - a tendency to downvote anything that discusses feminism negatively. And your comment tends to confirm it: You express negativity without argument. If so, it’s suppression. If not, then surely there’s a compassionate way to argument other than the usual “you = bad man”. The lack of discussion makes all extremes spike. And yes, I’m full of hatred now. Which the downvoted comment didn’t express.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
thefz 1y ago
It's OK, it had to happen at some point
- achierius 1y ago
  What? No it doesn't. There's no reason we can't have a society that lets people have ~2 kids happily on average. Collapsing population numbers will be a disaster for everyone involved -- this isn't even some quirk of capitalism (though that is why the rates are collapsing in the first place) but just a consequence of the simple fact that the elderly require the young to take care of them.
  - edhelas 1y ago
    "Collapsing" is really the word we should use there ? Shrinking okay. Collapsing is the word we use about the biodiversity collapse, or the collapse of some environmental numbers. There's no catastrophy about having a population shrinking, we are doing that to most of the other species on the planet and only a few people seems to really care. We are in a humanity re-adjustement, not a collapse.
    - cryptonector 1y ago
      Europe is heading towards less than half the replacement rate. Japan is already there. South Korea is at one third the replacement rate. This is the story almost worldwide, and soon can be expected to be worldwide. In China and India there is also sex selection abortions and male preference to make things worse. Exponential on the way up, and on the way down. Reversing such steep declines isn't possible in one generation without a "Marshall plan" for fertility, which means that in one generation the next cohort of fertile females will be half the size of today's if today's fertility rate is half of replacement. If the situation persists then the next cohort will be one quarter of today's. These declines are much sharper than past growth rates. What if these fertility declines persist for three generations? How many generations can they persist for anyways?
      - 1y ago
joegibbs 1y ago
200 years ago you would have ten children, a few would survive until adulthood, and you needed to have children or nobody would look after you in old age, help you out when they're grown or take over your farm when you became infirm - and besides, everyone else has children, so if you don't you're the odd one out. Now, you have both parents in the workforce - even with generous parental leave the mother loses a lot of opportunity in the prime of her career. Then you have to pay for childcare if both are working (or lose out on one income if they aren't), food, clothing, schooling, extracurriculars. And you're competing in the workforce against all couples with less children. And then when you get old you aren't relying on your children to look after you - this is frowned upon, and you get paid out from your investments or the government pays you a pension. Basically most of modern life is set up economically against having children, and the main reason to is purely the biological drive. I think all these factors need to be taken into account when devising economic incentives for people to have more children, and the current levels in any country are too low to have enough of an effect.
- koliber 1y ago
  …you get paid out from your investments or the government pays you a pension. Your investments and the government pension are financed by the active work of someone’s children. If there won’t be enough of them around your retirement will not be as comfortable as you planned. Retirement is still dependent on children. Before it was your children. Now it’s a collective mass of children.
  - bluecalm 1y ago
    >>Retirement is still dependent on children. Before it was your children. Now it’s a collective mass of children. Which messes up the incentive structure. People with many children are subsidizing those with fewer/none.
    - morepedantic 1y ago
      Perhaps there should be a social security deduction for every dependent child you had that tax year? For example, each dependent child that year could be a refund of 3.1% of income up to the social security maximum, such that at 4 children all 12.4% is returned to you?
Afforess 1y ago
Desire for children is above the replacement rate, though. There is a gap between the world we live in and the world desired. One solution would be to close the gap.
- lmm 1y ago
  > Desire for children is above the replacement rate, though. Among whom? Evidently not among the women who would actually be bearing them.
  - littlestymaar 1y ago
    Why do you think this is “evident”? I don't know worldwide but in France at least, French women would like to have more kids than they have.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
  - AngryData 1y ago
    Why do you say evidently not? I have multiple friends who would love to have children, but can't fathom managing to fulfill the monetary costs to do so. They don't make enough money to send them all to childcare all the time, but quitting their job to take care of the kids will cut their income in half and make saving any reasonable amount of money for retirement near impossible.
    - coffeebeqn 1y ago
      They also can’t buy a house that would house 2-3 more people and their stuff
    - morepedantic 1y ago
      Perhaps they simply have unrealistic material expectations not in line with individual productivity. In fact, if your expectations are a function of your childless consumption levels, then it will always exceed what you can achieve with the same income spread over more people.
Jiltilder 1y ago
[flagged]
jsphweid 1y ago
I've always wondered, what fraction of the decline could be attributed to indoor pet dogs? Ok, this is half humorous and half serious. But I'd wager that the answer is non-zero. This is all just anecdotal, obviously, but I think childless humans with pet indoor dogs could have less of a desire to procreate for various reasons, but perhaps mainly because the instinctual thirst to care for a living thing is quinched to some extent when you have a pet indoor dog. Obviously not every or most or even many. But perhaps _some_.
- mdeeks 1y ago
  Not sure why you are being downvoted. It's an interesting thought. I will add that us having children completely erased the desire to get a dog. We almost got one just before our first born. Now we can't imagine. I think it's a combination of what you're suggesting, and also because a dog requires a lot of time we just don't have now.
- lnsru 1y ago
  Dog as child replacement fits too well for many western couples. There is very light care aspect included. Even bad illnesses happen and one must go to vet. With a dog you don’t need to do homework for two hours after hard workday. Nor plan children birthdays or vacations. Nor read primitive children books for hours on weekend. It’s perfect substitute without much effort. Children are long term gain, first decade is rather hard. Teaching and training every day, hour, minute. If one wants to do it right. On other hand dog might be better that a child hooked to a smartphone from an age of 2 years.
- dnel 1y ago
  I had a dog, then kids and now just got a puppy and I think there is perhaps some truth to it, dogs are certainly much much lower effort/stress/cost but provide a good amount of companionship. It wasn't enough for us, obviously, but we also have minimal family connections outside our household, for others the equation may add up that a dog/cat is enough and if it was then all the power to you.
- landosaari 1y ago
  In South Korea pet strollers outsold child ones [0]. DINKWAD (Dual income, no kids, with a dog) is rising [1]. Hospitality is changing to accommodate this [2]. [0] https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/lifestyle/trends/20231226/sales-of-pet-strollers-surpass-baby-strollers-on-gmarket-for-first-time https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/lifestyle/trends/20231226/sales... [1] https://www.thehistoryofenglish.com/dinkwad-meaning-origin-usage https://www.thehistoryofenglish.com/dinkwad-meaning-origin-u... [2] https://rochsociety.com/rise-of-the-dinkwads/ https://rochsociety.com/rise-of-the-dinkwads/
verisimi 1y ago
Isn't this good news for the environment?
- PlunderBunny 1y ago
  Yes, but it's going to come too late for climate change, and I'd wager that the percentage of people - relative to the total population - living at 'first world' standards is going to increase nevertheless, which is also bad for the environment.
- pengaru 1y ago
  Yes
- kitler88 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - tomhow 1y ago
    We've banned this account.
    - morepedantic 1y ago
      The guy's name was kitler. Do you think that kitten hitler, or something else?
      - tomhow 1y ago
        Let's not waste any more time thinking about it. The comment is more than reason enough to ban the account.
        morepedantic 1y ago
        That may be true, and you may have banned the account, but I don't think you banned the person. New account created immediately after, responding to the same thread with the same sentiment but less extreme specific statements. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=drentost https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=drentost
temptemptemp111 1y ago
[dead]
Jiltilder 1y ago
[flagged]
cosmicgadget 1y ago
> "Calling this a crisis, saying it's real. That's a shift I think," says demographer Anna Rotkirch, who has researched fertility intentions in Europe What's the crisis?
- cryptonector 1y ago
  The fertility decreases are very steep.
  - cosmicgadget 1y ago
    Are we headed toward negative population or something?
    - mdeeks 1y ago
      In some places, yes. South Korea is expected to shrink by 15M in the next 50 years, and to cut in half by 2100. Even with immediate drastic improvements in birth rate, it is expected to shrink significantly.
      - cosmicgadget 1y ago
        Don't populations typically oscillate sinusoidally?
        cryptonector 1y ago
        What's that got to do with whether such steep declines are desirable?
        cosmicgadget 1y ago
        Well that might impact the long term projections.
        1y ago
kasterner 1y ago
[flagged]
AngryData 1y ago
I don't see how I can view this any other way than the culminating results of rampant capitalism. When everything is reduced to pure profit motives there is no room left for people to be people. Time off, dating, family, stability, and more, all take a back seat to increasing profits. And as business and corporations get bigger and bigger they only gained more power and control over peoples lives and push us farther down the self-destructive path of pure profit motivations and working endless hours.
- morepedantic 1y ago
  I suppose the high child mortality rates of all the other economic systems tried thus far are preferable. The proximate cause is social collapse, not economic. Maybe the ultimate collapse is economic, but it could again be social.
  - mordae 1y ago
    Sigh. Capitalism aligned with our needs (cheap goods) up until about 1990. Colonization of former USSR pushed it to 2010 or so, but now it just keep declining and won't stop. It needs growth in productivity that just isn't possible without replacing human labour at above inflation rate. I did so by giving us fridges, dishwashers, supermarkets and other time savers, but robotic vacuum was the last one. Self driving trucks and autonomous shops are being rolled out extremely slowly. And with hollowing out middle class the outlook for 90% standard of living is pretty bleak, without having anything to offer to the 10% besides being cheap factory manipulators. At some point we really will have to sit down, say the house is complete, hand out free beers and take a breather before getting to the smaller details of furnishing and gardening. Then we can maybe discuss the stars.
  - AngryData 1y ago
    Are you trying to claim that without unfettered capitalism all medical progress and technological improvement would never happen? Capitalism didn't reduce child mortality, technology and knowledge did, and we have been progressing technologically for atleast 40,000 years, if not significantly more.
peepeepoopoo134 1y ago
[flagged]
cornhole 1y ago
if it’s not the social issues, it’ll be the microplastics
- morepedantic 1y ago
  First one, then the other.
kitler88 1y ago
[flagged]
mordae 1y ago
> She spends at least three hours a day commuting to her office and back. When she gets home she is exhausted but wants to spend time with her daughter. Her family doesn't get much sleep. The single biggest predictor for birth rate is people caring about kids or helping out / number of kids. It's that simple. 3h commute cuts into this. Lack of grandparents and neighbourly relations cuts into this. Higher standards cut into this. And we are not allocating more care. Commute should be minimal. Care should be flexible. In some EU countries, you won't get benefits if the care is provided by both parents equally (alternate every day for instance) or grandparents step in. You get peanuts when you take care of sick kids and risk your career. And so on. When we build, we keep building huge ass office centres, huge ass shopping centres instead of 4-5 storey houses with mixed usage. The parents have to shuttle kids. Plaza/garden/playground, kindergartens and small shops at the ground level, offices in upper floors. Next block same, but upper floors residential, good pulic transport, underground only parking. All designed to save the time spent doing logistics. And finally, care must be stop being a financial trade-off. If your kid is sick, you have to take care of it and receive 100% of the pay. This must be factored into all prices, since we cannot afford not to take care of our kids. Period. Demand this from whomever your import from as well and absolutely do impose tariffs on anyone who doesn't guarantee this and tries to undercut you.
- Balgair 1y ago
  ACX had a good review of a pro-natal book here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-selfish-reasons-to-have https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-selfish-reasons... TLDR: The reviewer, who has twins under 2, is flabbergasted and can't figure out the book's logistics. The part at the end where the reviewer actually talks with the author is just comedy gold (to a parent), so I will quote it below (emphasis mine): " I was curious enough about this that I emailed Bryan and asked him how much time he spent on childcare when his kids were toddlers. He said about two hours a day for him, one hour for his wife. Relatives and nannies picked up the rest. I could complain that sure, childcare isn’t overwhelming when you’re only doing two hours of it a day. But honestly, this is about the same amount of childcare I do now. And I do feel overwhelmed. So advantage Bryan. When I thought about it more, I realized a lot of my overwhelmedness came from not being able to consistently choose the two hours, and from survivor’s guilt about my wife doing her 7-8 hours. When I talked more with Bryan, he recommended hiring more nannies. ... Instead it had a vibe: stop beating yourself up over your parenting decisions. So I put out a classified ad for babysitters and got two people I really like. Things are a little better now. " Just, you know, be rich and have other people parent your kid. My sides! I can't make this up if I tried.
silisili 1y ago
Quasi related, I thought immediately of this experiment. It's hard not to loosely apply it to humanity and especially complaints you hear about gen Z in your head. https://www.the-scientist.com/universe-25-experiment-69941 https://www.the-scientist.com/universe-25-experiment-69941
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
mostlyincorrect 1y ago
I'm surprised no one's mentioned the climate factor, both in terms of actual climate and "living climate" (as in, the world we live in and the conditions we get to live in). A concern I see typically come up when discussing having kids with friends is the strong belief that the world will certainly be significantly worse off for them, if not having water wars maybe even during our lifetime. Most people agree they'd rather not have children than bring them into the world to live through the nine circles of hell. Of course, it's also possible this never materializes, but the fact that it is in people's mind alone is enough.
- ndjeosibfb 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - chneu 1y ago
    How is caring about the environment(and therefore every living creature) a selfish, lazy materialist act? Going without children against a ton of social pressure takes a lot of fortitude. Modern consumer society is dead set on using every last scrap of natural repossible possible while telling you it's not only okay but your right because you have $$$. Bucking that trend and minimizing ones impact is selfish, lazy, and materialistic how?
    - ndjeosibfb 1y ago
      >actually not having kids is way harder than having kids its all a bunch of cope and mental gymnastics to avoid the hard work of doing the primary thing humans were programmed to do
  - Spartan-S63 1y ago
    This is myopic. 100,000 years ago, humans didn't understand the basic rules of how things worked. They would have no idea if and when the next ice age would happen. We've learned a lot as a species and as such, our biological need to reproduce is balanced by the logical realization of the impact we have on the planet and the impact the planet can have on us. We have higher-level thinking and more information to leverage second-order thinking. So no, that's not a joke.
incomingpain 1y ago
There's a single reason that's highly correlated better by a long shot and obviously causal. What's curious is that it's so tremendously controversial. But since this subject is so contentious we're looking at pets, carseats and other regulation, porn/sextoys and microplastics? The "empowerment of women" has been hugely successful for society but has eroded if not destroyed the social balance of society. There's a painful debate coming and if it doesnt happen, someone like Trump will get to choose.
- franktankbank 1y ago
  > someone like Trump will get to choose. What does this mean? What will they be choosing? I don't get it.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
Balgair 1y ago
Aside: I hang out in 'Pro Natalism' social media every once in a while. It's a really strange place and a bit fun as a result. The thing is that low fertility impacts everyone, so you get a lot of strange bedfellows. The fundamentalists of nearly every religion are interacting with each other, not always calmly, but mostly. And they're boosting very pro Marxist accounts for some article or study from a very pro capitalist account. You get radical trad-fems interacting with Catholics and Mormons calmly. You have Pakistanis and Indians not shouting at each other. Even Democrats and Republicans are holding hands and clutching pearls. Really, it's just the LGBT community's wings that aren't there. Because they mostly have no dog in the pro natalism fight. They had a conference earlier this year in ... Austin (?). It went okayish. Mostly just neckbeardy dudes with like too many kids and a Mormon bent. But also some good talks from the history folks and some socialists. I have exactly zero hopes that any of these people stay coherent in this goal. It's just not in the nature of social media to abet it. But still, an interesting place while it's here.
- archagon 1y ago
  From the outside, at least, pro-natalism feels a bit too cuddly with white supremacy and replacement theory dogma. (I wish it were not so.)
  - Balgair 1y ago
    Oh yes, there are lot of those folks in there too. But then you get hardcore socialists from Korea that are pretty worried about the issues there. And some muslim scholars sometimes. Like, I said, it's a 'fun' grab bag of people. Realistically, once the solution presents itself to how to get people to have more kids, then the whole place is going to splinter as they all go their separate ways and try to implement it and be some '-ist/-ism' again. Everyone in the pro-natalism sphere is just looking and bumbling about trying to figure out what thing or program or list of incentives is going to make people have more kids. No one has a clue what the recipe is yet, so they're comfortable talking with ideological opposites until that recipe is found and it's winner take all. Until then, cooperation. Reminds me a lot of this TNG episode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chase_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chase_(Star_Trek:_The_Next...
zzo38computer 1y ago
My opinion is: There are advantages and disadvantages of the reduced human population; I think the advantages are more significant. At this time, human population is too much and should be reduced, so anyone who does not want to have children should not have children (this is the good way to do it, voluntary, rather than being forced or "expected" to do one way or other way). Humans is not the only living things in this world. What is not enough population at this time is insects.

54 points by mmarian 1y ago

"school fees" - this is very, very symptomatic. Public school is free in all countries of the world without exception. Private, paid schools cover 1-20% of kids depending on the country. But now, everyone wants their kid to be among the elite - or never exist at all.

ricksunny 1y ago
Is their position untenable? If, lacking the resources to place their child into elite circles of society they perceive their child will instead be treated as a vehicle for exploitation, is it irrational for them to withold siring would-be blighted offspring to the world?
- anovikov 1y ago
  But this is natural. In every society, vast majority are the exploited poor, and always have been. It shouldn't stop them from multiplying.
  - atmavatar 1y ago
    I would point out that at least in the US, the degree to which the poor are exploited has been ever-increasing for over a half century with no signs of reversing. If anything, it's accelerating.
dmitrygr 1y ago
[flagged]
- pinkmuffinere 1y ago
  I went to high school in CA, AZ, and SD (state, not city). The CA public school was by far the best, despite being in a relatively poor town (San Jacinto), and so underfunded that we got random fridays off _to save on teacher salaries_. I don't know what you've heard about CA public schools, but all things considered I think they are quite good.
mrkeen 1y ago
> "school fees" - this is very, very symptomatic. Public school is free in all countries of the world without exception. And the world fertility rates are in unprecedented decline. Should we stop making schools free?
yardstick 1y ago
In the UAE, you pay for your kids education from day one to the end. There’s no free ride, unless you’re a local. I’m not sure how many other countries are like this. I’d say most countries provide free education to their residents. But, not all.
- lnsru 1y ago
  Got few job offers from there. All included healthcare and school fees up to three kids. I don’t think, that outsiders go to that part of the world just for schools. So at the end of the day it doesn’t really matter if school is free or paid by employer.
  - yardstick 1y ago
    Yes agree a lot do include education. But, not all the jobs there come with such perks.
- anovikov 1y ago
  For CITIZENS, all of them do. Naturally in UAE there are few citizens. I have no idea why temporary, non immigrant foreigners should be entitled to free anything. There is no naturalization in UAE, you can't ever get citizenship regardless of years of residence or being born in the country - only way to it is direct male line from 1915 (something i think more countries should practice). So why fund someone who's outsider and who, will, and his descendants, always remain outsiders on temporary visas?
  - yardstick 1y ago
    Yeah your original post didn’t state citizens. It’s common for residents to receive free primary education for their children in most countries. Eg UK, AU, NZ, Canada all do. Work visa or permanent resident visa.
lurk2 1y ago
> But now, everyone wants their kid to be among the elite - or never exist at all. This isn’t remotely true.
- franktankbank 1y ago
  I've got kids and am not elite so that might sound like I'm in agreement with you. However, I do worry my kids will struggle because of the rampant greed of the elite. Will my kid be able to even follow in my footsteps? Put another way, will the children two-three generations from now be populated almost exclusively by the elite of today and their imported labor? If we have that as an endpoint then why would I want to subject my potential kids to that grizzly middle ground?

Flatcircle 1y ago

Car seats and public schools going to shit definitely didn’t help. And the two working parents. Tough times

eastbound 1y ago
[flagged]
- haroldb1 1y ago
  [dead]
- bongodongobob 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - Jiltilder 1y ago
    [flagged]
  - eastbound 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - cosmicgadget 1y ago
      Nope, just saw your comment and it was bad. The person who replied even started with "it's hard to say these things without sounding like an asshole..." and then proceeded to say he can't date because of feminism. You're not being suppressed.
      - eastbound 1y ago
        He meant it for himself. I didn’t go as far as he did. I just said a worthy explanation for fewer kids is this movement that makes genders diverge. It’s an observation worthy of merit. Expressed differently, women want to be left alone. I think the downvotes are expressing something else - a tendency to downvote anything that discusses feminism negatively. And your comment tends to confirm it: You express negativity without argument. If so, it’s suppression. If not, then surely there’s a compassionate way to argument other than the usual “you = bad man”. The lack of discussion makes all extremes spike. And yes, I’m full of hatred now. Which the downvoted comment didn’t express.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

thefz 1y ago

It's OK, it had to happen at some point

achierius 1y ago
What? No it doesn't. There's no reason we can't have a society that lets people have ~2 kids happily on average. Collapsing population numbers will be a disaster for everyone involved -- this isn't even some quirk of capitalism (though that is why the rates are collapsing in the first place) but just a consequence of the simple fact that the elderly require the young to take care of them.
- edhelas 1y ago
  "Collapsing" is really the word we should use there ? Shrinking okay. Collapsing is the word we use about the biodiversity collapse, or the collapse of some environmental numbers. There's no catastrophy about having a population shrinking, we are doing that to most of the other species on the planet and only a few people seems to really care. We are in a humanity re-adjustement, not a collapse.
  - cryptonector 1y ago
    Europe is heading towards less than half the replacement rate. Japan is already there. South Korea is at one third the replacement rate. This is the story almost worldwide, and soon can be expected to be worldwide. In China and India there is also sex selection abortions and male preference to make things worse. Exponential on the way up, and on the way down. Reversing such steep declines isn't possible in one generation without a "Marshall plan" for fertility, which means that in one generation the next cohort of fertile females will be half the size of today's if today's fertility rate is half of replacement. If the situation persists then the next cohort will be one quarter of today's. These declines are much sharper than past growth rates. What if these fertility declines persist for three generations? How many generations can they persist for anyways?
    - 1y ago

joegibbs 1y ago

200 years ago you would have ten children, a few would survive until adulthood, and you needed to have children or nobody would look after you in old age, help you out when they're grown or take over your farm when you became infirm - and besides, everyone else has children, so if you don't you're the odd one out. Now, you have both parents in the workforce - even with generous parental leave the mother loses a lot of opportunity in the prime of her career. Then you have to pay for childcare if both are working (or lose out on one income if they aren't), food, clothing, schooling, extracurriculars. And you're competing in the workforce against all couples with less children. And then when you get old you aren't relying on your children to look after you - this is frowned upon, and you get paid out from your investments or the government pays you a pension. Basically most of modern life is set up economically against having children, and the main reason to is purely the biological drive. I think all these factors need to be taken into account when devising economic incentives for people to have more children, and the current levels in any country are too low to have enough of an effect.

koliber 1y ago
…you get paid out from your investments or the government pays you a pension. Your investments and the government pension are financed by the active work of someone’s children. If there won’t be enough of them around your retirement will not be as comfortable as you planned. Retirement is still dependent on children. Before it was your children. Now it’s a collective mass of children.
- bluecalm 1y ago
  >>Retirement is still dependent on children. Before it was your children. Now it’s a collective mass of children. Which messes up the incentive structure. People with many children are subsidizing those with fewer/none.
  - morepedantic 1y ago
    Perhaps there should be a social security deduction for every dependent child you had that tax year? For example, each dependent child that year could be a refund of 3.1% of income up to the social security maximum, such that at 4 children all 12.4% is returned to you?

Afforess 1y ago

Desire for children is above the replacement rate, though. There is a gap between the world we live in and the world desired. One solution would be to close the gap.

lmm 1y ago
> Desire for children is above the replacement rate, though. Among whom? Evidently not among the women who would actually be bearing them.
- littlestymaar 1y ago
  Why do you think this is “evident”? I don't know worldwide but in France at least, French women would like to have more kids than they have.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- AngryData 1y ago
  Why do you say evidently not? I have multiple friends who would love to have children, but can't fathom managing to fulfill the monetary costs to do so. They don't make enough money to send them all to childcare all the time, but quitting their job to take care of the kids will cut their income in half and make saving any reasonable amount of money for retirement near impossible.
  - coffeebeqn 1y ago
    They also can’t buy a house that would house 2-3 more people and their stuff
  - morepedantic 1y ago
    Perhaps they simply have unrealistic material expectations not in line with individual productivity. In fact, if your expectations are a function of your childless consumption levels, then it will always exceed what you can achieve with the same income spread over more people.

Jiltilder 1y ago

[flagged]

jsphweid 1y ago

I've always wondered, what fraction of the decline could be attributed to indoor pet dogs? Ok, this is half humorous and half serious. But I'd wager that the answer is non-zero. This is all just anecdotal, obviously, but I think childless humans with pet indoor dogs could have less of a desire to procreate for various reasons, but perhaps mainly because the instinctual thirst to care for a living thing is quinched to some extent when you have a pet indoor dog. Obviously not every or most or even many. But perhaps _some_.

mdeeks 1y ago
Not sure why you are being downvoted. It's an interesting thought. I will add that us having children completely erased the desire to get a dog. We almost got one just before our first born. Now we can't imagine. I think it's a combination of what you're suggesting, and also because a dog requires a lot of time we just don't have now.
lnsru 1y ago
Dog as child replacement fits too well for many western couples. There is very light care aspect included. Even bad illnesses happen and one must go to vet. With a dog you don’t need to do homework for two hours after hard workday. Nor plan children birthdays or vacations. Nor read primitive children books for hours on weekend. It’s perfect substitute without much effort. Children are long term gain, first decade is rather hard. Teaching and training every day, hour, minute. If one wants to do it right. On other hand dog might be better that a child hooked to a smartphone from an age of 2 years.
dnel 1y ago
I had a dog, then kids and now just got a puppy and I think there is perhaps some truth to it, dogs are certainly much much lower effort/stress/cost but provide a good amount of companionship. It wasn't enough for us, obviously, but we also have minimal family connections outside our household, for others the equation may add up that a dog/cat is enough and if it was then all the power to you.
landosaari 1y ago
In South Korea pet strollers outsold child ones [0]. DINKWAD (Dual income, no kids, with a dog) is rising [1]. Hospitality is changing to accommodate this [2]. [0] https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/lifestyle/trends/20231226/sales-of-pet-strollers-surpass-baby-strollers-on-gmarket-for-first-time https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/lifestyle/trends/20231226/sales... [1] https://www.thehistoryofenglish.com/dinkwad-meaning-origin-usage https://www.thehistoryofenglish.com/dinkwad-meaning-origin-u... [2] https://rochsociety.com/rise-of-the-dinkwads/ https://rochsociety.com/rise-of-the-dinkwads/

verisimi 1y ago

Isn't this good news for the environment?

PlunderBunny 1y ago
Yes, but it's going to come too late for climate change, and I'd wager that the percentage of people - relative to the total population - living at 'first world' standards is going to increase nevertheless, which is also bad for the environment.
pengaru 1y ago
Yes
kitler88 1y ago
[flagged]
- tomhow 1y ago
  We've banned this account.
  - morepedantic 1y ago
    The guy's name was kitler. Do you think that kitten hitler, or something else?
    - tomhow 1y ago
      Let's not waste any more time thinking about it. The comment is more than reason enough to ban the account.
      - morepedantic 1y ago
        That may be true, and you may have banned the account, but I don't think you banned the person. New account created immediately after, responding to the same thread with the same sentiment but less extreme specific statements. https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=drentost https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=drentost

temptemptemp111 1y ago

[dead]

Jiltilder 1y ago

[flagged]

cosmicgadget 1y ago

> "Calling this a crisis, saying it's real. That's a shift I think," says demographer Anna Rotkirch, who has researched fertility intentions in Europe What's the crisis?

cryptonector 1y ago
The fertility decreases are very steep.
- cosmicgadget 1y ago
  Are we headed toward negative population or something?
  - mdeeks 1y ago
    In some places, yes. South Korea is expected to shrink by 15M in the next 50 years, and to cut in half by 2100. Even with immediate drastic improvements in birth rate, it is expected to shrink significantly.
    - cosmicgadget 1y ago
      Don't populations typically oscillate sinusoidally?
      - cryptonector 1y ago
        What's that got to do with whether such steep declines are desirable?
        cosmicgadget 1y ago
        Well that might impact the long term projections.
        1y ago

kasterner 1y ago

[flagged]

AngryData 1y ago

I don't see how I can view this any other way than the culminating results of rampant capitalism. When everything is reduced to pure profit motives there is no room left for people to be people. Time off, dating, family, stability, and more, all take a back seat to increasing profits. And as business and corporations get bigger and bigger they only gained more power and control over peoples lives and push us farther down the self-destructive path of pure profit motivations and working endless hours.

morepedantic 1y ago
I suppose the high child mortality rates of all the other economic systems tried thus far are preferable. The proximate cause is social collapse, not economic. Maybe the ultimate collapse is economic, but it could again be social.
- mordae 1y ago
  Sigh. Capitalism aligned with our needs (cheap goods) up until about 1990. Colonization of former USSR pushed it to 2010 or so, but now it just keep declining and won't stop. It needs growth in productivity that just isn't possible without replacing human labour at above inflation rate. I did so by giving us fridges, dishwashers, supermarkets and other time savers, but robotic vacuum was the last one. Self driving trucks and autonomous shops are being rolled out extremely slowly. And with hollowing out middle class the outlook for 90% standard of living is pretty bleak, without having anything to offer to the 10% besides being cheap factory manipulators. At some point we really will have to sit down, say the house is complete, hand out free beers and take a breather before getting to the smaller details of furnishing and gardening. Then we can maybe discuss the stars.
- AngryData 1y ago
  Are you trying to claim that without unfettered capitalism all medical progress and technological improvement would never happen? Capitalism didn't reduce child mortality, technology and knowledge did, and we have been progressing technologically for atleast 40,000 years, if not significantly more.

peepeepoopoo134 1y ago

[flagged]

cornhole 1y ago

if it’s not the social issues, it’ll be the microplastics

morepedantic 1y ago
First one, then the other.

kitler88 1y ago

[flagged]

mordae 1y ago

> She spends at least three hours a day commuting to her office and back. When she gets home she is exhausted but wants to spend time with her daughter. Her family doesn't get much sleep. The single biggest predictor for birth rate is people caring about kids or helping out / number of kids. It's that simple. 3h commute cuts into this. Lack of grandparents and neighbourly relations cuts into this. Higher standards cut into this. And we are not allocating more care. Commute should be minimal. Care should be flexible. In some EU countries, you won't get benefits if the care is provided by both parents equally (alternate every day for instance) or grandparents step in. You get peanuts when you take care of sick kids and risk your career. And so on. When we build, we keep building huge ass office centres, huge ass shopping centres instead of 4-5 storey houses with mixed usage. The parents have to shuttle kids. Plaza/garden/playground, kindergartens and small shops at the ground level, offices in upper floors. Next block same, but upper floors residential, good pulic transport, underground only parking. All designed to save the time spent doing logistics. And finally, care must be stop being a financial trade-off. If your kid is sick, you have to take care of it and receive 100% of the pay. This must be factored into all prices, since we cannot afford not to take care of our kids. Period. Demand this from whomever your import from as well and absolutely do impose tariffs on anyone who doesn't guarantee this and tries to undercut you.

Balgair 1y ago
ACX had a good review of a pro-natal book here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-selfish-reasons-to-have https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-selfish-reasons... TLDR: The reviewer, who has twins under 2, is flabbergasted and can't figure out the book's logistics. The part at the end where the reviewer actually talks with the author is just comedy gold (to a parent), so I will quote it below (emphasis mine): " I was curious enough about this that I emailed Bryan and asked him how much time he spent on childcare when his kids were toddlers. He said about two hours a day for him, one hour for his wife. Relatives and nannies picked up the rest. I could complain that sure, childcare isn’t overwhelming when you’re only doing two hours of it a day. But honestly, this is about the same amount of childcare I do now. And I do feel overwhelmed. So advantage Bryan. When I thought about it more, I realized a lot of my overwhelmedness came from not being able to consistently choose the two hours, and from survivor’s guilt about my wife doing her 7-8 hours. When I talked more with Bryan, he recommended hiring more nannies. ... Instead it had a vibe: stop beating yourself up over your parenting decisions. So I put out a classified ad for babysitters and got two people I really like. Things are a little better now. " Just, you know, be rich and have other people parent your kid. My sides! I can't make this up if I tried.

silisili 1y ago

Quasi related, I thought immediately of this experiment. It's hard not to loosely apply it to humanity and especially complaints you hear about gen Z in your head. https://www.the-scientist.com/universe-25-experiment-69941 https://www.the-scientist.com/universe-25-experiment-69941

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

mostlyincorrect 1y ago

I'm surprised no one's mentioned the climate factor, both in terms of actual climate and "living climate" (as in, the world we live in and the conditions we get to live in). A concern I see typically come up when discussing having kids with friends is the strong belief that the world will certainly be significantly worse off for them, if not having water wars maybe even during our lifetime. Most people agree they'd rather not have children than bring them into the world to live through the nine circles of hell. Of course, it's also possible this never materializes, but the fact that it is in people's mind alone is enough.

ndjeosibfb 1y ago
[flagged]
- chneu 1y ago
  How is caring about the environment(and therefore every living creature) a selfish, lazy materialist act? Going without children against a ton of social pressure takes a lot of fortitude. Modern consumer society is dead set on using every last scrap of natural repossible possible while telling you it's not only okay but your right because you have $$$. Bucking that trend and minimizing ones impact is selfish, lazy, and materialistic how?
  - ndjeosibfb 1y ago
    >actually not having kids is way harder than having kids its all a bunch of cope and mental gymnastics to avoid the hard work of doing the primary thing humans were programmed to do
- Spartan-S63 1y ago
  This is myopic. 100,000 years ago, humans didn't understand the basic rules of how things worked. They would have no idea if and when the next ice age would happen. We've learned a lot as a species and as such, our biological need to reproduce is balanced by the logical realization of the impact we have on the planet and the impact the planet can have on us. We have higher-level thinking and more information to leverage second-order thinking. So no, that's not a joke.

incomingpain 1y ago

There's a single reason that's highly correlated better by a long shot and obviously causal. What's curious is that it's so tremendously controversial. But since this subject is so contentious we're looking at pets, carseats and other regulation, porn/sextoys and microplastics? The "empowerment of women" has been hugely successful for society but has eroded if not destroyed the social balance of society. There's a painful debate coming and if it doesnt happen, someone like Trump will get to choose.

franktankbank 1y ago
> someone like Trump will get to choose. What does this mean? What will they be choosing? I don't get it.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

Balgair 1y ago

Aside: I hang out in 'Pro Natalism' social media every once in a while. It's a really strange place and a bit fun as a result. The thing is that low fertility impacts everyone, so you get a lot of strange bedfellows. The fundamentalists of nearly every religion are interacting with each other, not always calmly, but mostly. And they're boosting very pro Marxist accounts for some article or study from a very pro capitalist account. You get radical trad-fems interacting with Catholics and Mormons calmly. You have Pakistanis and Indians not shouting at each other. Even Democrats and Republicans are holding hands and clutching pearls. Really, it's just the LGBT community's wings that aren't there. Because they mostly have no dog in the pro natalism fight. They had a conference earlier this year in ... Austin (?). It went okayish. Mostly just neckbeardy dudes with like too many kids and a Mormon bent. But also some good talks from the history folks and some socialists. I have exactly zero hopes that any of these people stay coherent in this goal. It's just not in the nature of social media to abet it. But still, an interesting place while it's here.

archagon 1y ago
From the outside, at least, pro-natalism feels a bit too cuddly with white supremacy and replacement theory dogma. (I wish it were not so.)
- Balgair 1y ago
  Oh yes, there are lot of those folks in there too. But then you get hardcore socialists from Korea that are pretty worried about the issues there. And some muslim scholars sometimes. Like, I said, it's a 'fun' grab bag of people. Realistically, once the solution presents itself to how to get people to have more kids, then the whole place is going to splinter as they all go their separate ways and try to implement it and be some '-ist/-ism' again. Everyone in the pro-natalism sphere is just looking and bumbling about trying to figure out what thing or program or list of incentives is going to make people have more kids. No one has a clue what the recipe is yet, so they're comfortable talking with ideological opposites until that recipe is found and it's winner take all. Until then, cooperation. Reminds me a lot of this TNG episode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chase_(Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chase_(Star_Trek:_The_Next...

zzo38computer 1y ago

My opinion is: There are advantages and disadvantages of the reduced human population; I think the advantages are more significant. At this time, human population is too much and should be reduced, so anyone who does not want to have children should not have children (this is the good way to do it, voluntary, rather than being forced or "expected" to do one way or other way). Humans is not the only living things in this world. What is not enough population at this time is insects.