6 ms·

US Birth Rate Hits New Low – A Nation of Singles

50 points by moocow01 14y ago

usaar333 14y ago
> To get a sense of how powerful the marriage effect is, not just for women but for men, too, look at the exit polls by marital status. Among non-married voters – people who are single and have never married, are living with a partner, or are divorced – Obama beat Romney 62-35. Among married voters Romney won the vote handily, 56-42. I'd be interested in seeing these numbers adjusted for age, various SES indicators, etc.
- clarkm 14y ago
  You can do all the crosstabs you want here: http://elections.reuters.com/#poll http://elections.reuters.com/#poll The marriage gap is much bigger than the gender gap, age gap, and any socioeconomic gap. I think it falls right below the race gap in terms of size, and is probably on par with the religious/non-religious gap.
- tomjen3 14y ago
  Agreed. Young people and single mothers are both very unlikely to be married and already known to hugely favor Democrats.
  - mtoddh 14y ago
    Interesting, my guess is this is the demographic the Obama campaign was courting with the Life of Julia [1] slide-show a while back- http://www.barackobama.com/life-of-julia/ http://www.barackobama.com/life-of-julia/
    - dnu 14y ago
      But if everybody lives like Julia, who the hell will do the hard work anymore?
      - throw_away 14y ago
        Are you saying that web design and starting your own small business (as did Julia in the ad) isn't hard work?
        boboblong 14y ago
        I think his comment was more along the lines of, "Who will dig the ditches?" I'm sure HN's response is, "Robots, if all goes as planned."
WalterSear 14y ago
very interesting, but the part about singles being less concerned with the future is more than slightly ridiculous. IMHE, parenthood brings on a set of priorities that override longer term, less tangible issues in favour of supporting children.
- hype7 14y ago
  Thank god someone else picked up on this. I'm willing to take the article at face value in its description of the results of the research; but the analysis is all nut job territory. The singles not caring about the future is one perfect example. If it were true, and it were only the regions with high concentrations of parents caring about the future, then you would see much stronger support for actions to prevent climate change in areas where there are higher birth rates. The thing is, you don't - it's the cities - the places that the author is bemoaning for the lack of kids (he even calls cities "pleasure centers") that are at the forefront of trying to fix the big problems. The areas with the high birth rates are the ones that seemingly don't care about the future. So yeah, take every last bit of his analysis with a grain of salt. He strikes me as a "America has been going backwards since the 1950s" type and he's trying to back the data in to fit his preconceived notions of how the world should work.
lucian303 14y ago
Less stupid people being brought into the world? I see nothing wrong with that. It's about time. EDIT: And seriously: "The US birth rate has continued to decline to a record low since the recession of 2007-2009. This is alarming." This is not alarming. The depression never ended. It'll be 2013 soon and we're still in a depression. This is supposed to be a serious educated article? Fail!
- daeken 14y ago
  s/Less/Fewer/; But anyway, saying things like "stupid people being brought into the world" is meaningless. That's not a birth issue, but an education one; you can argue that fewer people in the country makes education a simpler problem, but I don't know that that really matters in the grand scheme of things. Especially since birth rates for lower socioeconomic class families aren't dropping, to my knowledge, and those are the ones generally in the worst position for education.
  - lucian303 14y ago
    There is no decent educational system in the US. Finally, stupid or not, more people in this world is the last thing we need. 7 bil++. The earth has limits (water)! Not to mention the artificial scarcities of non-scarce goods which none of the people in power are willing to stop.
- tsotha 14y ago
  >This is not alarming. It's certainly alarming if you have pay-go pension schemes like Social Security and Medicare. The way things are going either the young will live under a crushing tax burden or people who paid into social welfare programs for fifty years won't see any benefit. That's not a recipe for a stable society.
  - dnu 14y ago
    The pay-go pension system is a huge ponzi scheme because it needs more and more people into the game with each generation. It lasted less than a century and it's on the edge of collapse now. Why should we postpone the inevitable?
eli_gottlieb 14y ago
Everyone said, "Bail out the banks and you risk turning into Japan." You bailed out the banks. Now you're turning into Japan. Mazal tov, America! You're committing national suicide!
- prostoalex 14y ago
  Assumption here being that US needs more younger people. Let's see a couple trends here though: 1) US life expectancy is on the rise, I guess one of the most expensive healthcare systems in the world is good for something. 2) Average retirement age is moving farther ahead - Reuters recently ran an article about startup founders who are 60+ y.o. http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/27/us-valley-ageism-idUSBRE8AQ0JK20121127 http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/27/us-valley-ageism-i... 3) Rise of robotics outsourced a good portion of typical physical jobs to machines - iRobot, Kiva Systems, Tesla's car-manufacturing robot arms 4) Youth unemployment is on the rise 5) Youth STEM skills, the only applicable skills that matter in current economic climate, are declining Why does the country need large amounts of young people again? A bunch of the assumptions - you need younger people to slave off to contribute taxes towards the retirement of the elderly - are a bit shaky to say the least. Most of the youth employed at various menial jobs are earning low enough income to qualify them for tax credits, so they're not a huge revenue source.
  - anigbrowl 14y ago
    A bunch of the assumptions - you need younger people to slave off to contribute taxes towards the retirement of the elderly - are a bit shaky to say the least. The assumption that they will be able to supply that revenue is indeed shaky, but the assumption that one needs them to do so is well-founded. Traditionally immigration has been the safety valve for demographic mismatches, as ably documented here: http://www.ssab.gov/documents/immig_issue_brief_final_version_000.pdf http://www.ssab.gov/documents/immig_issue_brief_final_versio...
  - sliverstorm 14y ago
    It's less about having a class of youth, as having a group of people up-and-coming to replace the old guard.
ars 14y ago
One interesting thing is that this seems a bit self-correcting. Assuming there is any genetic component to the desire for having children and religiosity (and I believe there is), that means that non-religious people, and people who are not interested in having children are breeding themself out of existence. It'll probably be many generations before the results are large, but it should cause a dramatic shift eventually. (Which will probably eventually get too large, causing yet another shift in the other direction.)
- w1ntermute 14y ago
  I wonder if this is one of the major ways (other than conversion) that the major religions of the modern world spread in the first place. After all, they all seem to emphasize having children to a great degree, something that I don't think existed in many other religions.
  - nicholassmith 14y ago
    I've read somewhere before that the religious compulsion towards having many children is to keep the meme of religion going through multiple generations. It's certainly highly prevalent through the Catholic Church, especially given that the priesthood is essentially a non-replenishing rank based off the old tradition of following in your fathers footsteps for work.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - suby 14y ago
      I view religion in terms of evolution and natural selection. A religion which favors converting others will become more widespread than a religion that doesn't emphasize this, the same goes for emphasizing having many children.
- lkrubner 14y ago
  "Assuming there is any genetic component to the desire for having children and religiosity (and I believe there is)" The genetic argument should cancel itself it out. After all, if genetic factors should eventually cause people to have more children, then how is it possible for us to have a 55 year trend toward less children (as the article says, since 1957)? If genetics can eventually correct this trend, then why hasn't it already done so? For you to make this argument solidly, you'd have to establish at least 1 of 2 dependent arguments: 1.) there is some critical number that triggers a reaction 2.) there was, in the past, some force that allowed people to defy the genetic impulse to have children, but whatever that force was, it will no longer have as much power in the future Here on Hacker News I have, several times, seen people invoke the idea that child-raising is a genetic impulse and that therefore the trend toward less children should be self-correcting. The people who advance this idea don't seem to get the irony of the suggestion. Here is a bit of personal history: my great grandmother had 16 children. My mother had 4 children. Of the 4 of us, we are mostly past the age where we would consider having children. The 4 of us have so far had a total of 3 children, and I don't think there will be any more children, so my mom has less grand-children then she had children. This surprises her. There are some powerful forces pushing the trend towards less children. My feeling is that some people are glib in their dismissals of the trend. A poorly thought out genetic argument would fall into my category of glib.
ThomPete 14y ago
Wow that might be a little premature. The US do not have anything close to the problems the European countries are facing.
- aes256 14y ago
  Indeed, the latest figures (2012, CIA World Factbook) show the United States' 13.68 births per theousand persons is still higher than most of Western Europe. The demographic-economic paradox [1] is fascinating. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic-economic_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic-economic_paradox
- henrikschroder 14y ago
  Still, we might hit negative growth worldwide in about 50 years, that's going to be very interesting.
- sterna 14y ago
  It is true that the US has had remarkebly high birth rates during the last 30 years compared to most of Europe and the rich cuntries in Asia. However, once the trend for low fertility has been established it is extremely difficult to break. Even the countries in Europe that have given strong economic incentives to have children have still not managed to keep their fatility rates at replacement level. The only exception is Ireland, which has strong anti- abortion laws. Teherefore it important of the US to confront the problem of declining fertility before it has turned into a permanent problem.
- pbateman 14y ago
  Not yet. Europe (and Japan) gives us a taste of things to come.
chriscool 14y ago
The marriage rate is lower than ever because we are in a transition from a patriarchy to a matriarchy. See my blog post about it: http://blog.couder.net/post/2012/06/30/Sex-and-Power http://blog.couder.net/post/2012/06/30/Sex-and-Power
- lifebar 14y ago
  Marriage is also lower because feminism made all women paranoid, made them want to be victims. Man can't approach woman as easily these days - will be accused of rape, harrasement, day rape if he tries. Example - suggest cup of coffe to woman in elevator - instant rapist (I hope everyone still remembers that incident) . By the way, was't there some statistics that it's men don't want to marry thesedays (for obvious reasons - women start most of divorces and takes almost everything. And men that stars divorce are famous for getting their pen1s cut off and thrown in garbage disposer.) Why it's hard to approach feminism indoctrinated wiman (victim syndrome) kateharding.net/2009/10/08/guest-blogger-starling-schrodinger%E2%80%99s-rapist-or-a-guy%E2%80%99s-guide-to-approaching-strange-women-without-being-maced/
  - hazov 14y ago
    When I lived in the US I had no problem to call girls for a beer, even one that called herself a feminist and studied feminist literature in her MSc... maybe this is just a moral panic where you live, rape is not that common in New England and people are not paranoid about it, at least this was true in the cities I lived. But I never approached strange women on the street, only people that I knew or was introduced before.
    - lifebar 14y ago
      "But I never approached strange women on the street, only people that I knew or was introduced before." Good for you to have broad circle of friends. Also rape is not common in any first word country, but feminists claim 1 in 4 women will be raped... (had nice link about that claim but can't post it now).
rorrr 14y ago
So? It's not like we're running out of people.
hayksaakian 14y ago
Birth rates are low but population continues to grow. The US is still a nation of immigrants, once we accept that with our Immigration laws we'll be fine.
rdl 14y ago
Assuming we can handle the "421" problems, a world population in the 1-2 billion range, purely through low fertility rate, would solve a lot of environmental problems. You could have first-world quality of life for everyone, with reasonable technology advances, and still have a much lower impact on the environment than we have now. Under 2b seems like the right number unless space colonization is seriously in force.
- TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
  Unless we see huge advances, I think we are doomed with space colonisation, since we put more energy in than we can take out, i.e., it produces non-self-sustaining space colonies reliant on Earth.
  - rdl 14y ago
    Yeah, but I'd bet on huge advances over the next millenium, assuming we don't seriously screw things up. I'd bet on robots doing a lot of the work. There are clearly mineral resources in space which seem worthwhile -- asteroids, and potentially fuels or consumables from some planets. Something which consisted of U-235/Pu-239 exports from Earth to space, where space then returns some minerals. I doubt we'd get appreciable human population off the earth and into the solar system, unless we intentionally went for that. It would probably be easier to do high-density earth colonies using resources brought in from off-world. The surfaces of Mars and the Moon don't seem particularly hospitable compared to the Sahara or Antarctica or the oceans.
  - antidoh 14y ago
    We may wish we're doomed to space colonization.j "The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand." - Carl Sagan, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot What he's saying is that anything viable is too far away. Forget about the Moon or Mars, we cannot protect a population against radiation, and if we could we may as well build that same habitat here on our then presumably inhabitable planet that we're already on. Don't just use the planet up and walk away from it, because there's nowhere to go.
tomwalker 14y ago
Why do we need to continue to increase or maintain the population?
- DanBC 14y ago
  To pay and care for the current population. People live longer; diseases of old age are not cured yet and are considerably expensive and labour intensive. You need lots of people earning money and paying taxes to provide for that older generation. You also need lots of people to do the physical care of that population.
  - hype7 14y ago
    You are promoting the economic equivalent of a Ponzi scheme that by its very definition is not sustainable.
    - DanBC 14y ago
      People pay small amounts of money into their pension (401k?) schemes throughout their life. The growth of those schemes requires people to continue to pay money into them. This ponzi scheme is either my poor communicating, or is a feature of many pension systems around the world. (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/a-look-at-pensions-plans-worldwide-517579.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/a-look-at-p...) I agree it's not sustainable. What do you suggest? How should people fund their old age? Prisoners are already being used to care for other old age prisoners. This moving NY Times article is fascinating. (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/health/dealing-with-dementia-among-aging-criminals.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/health/dealing-with-dement...) Fun sci-fi noodling would have criminals being sub-contracted into institutions that care for poverty stricken old people. The prison / elderly care industrial complex grows to a huge evil empire. (Throw in a bit about making and selling coffins and it's complete.)
  - prostoalex 14y ago
    This works in some kind of flat tax system, which isn't really how it works in the US. Fresh college graduates end up with significant education debt, and interest payments on student loans are deductible. For the rest the system of credits allows for zero net tax obligation as far as federal budget is concerned http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Donald-Marron/2011/0728/Why-do-half-of-Americans-pay-no-federal-income-tax http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Donald-Marron/2011/0728/Wh... US economy is dependent on high income earners, which might or might not be younger people.
loceng 14y ago
The problem is health-related - physical, mental, and emotional - along with not getting the proper support of the community that it takes to raise a healthy child, not just for the child, but for the parents.
Ygg2 14y ago
I have a question. How does one solve negative birth rate effectively? What are possible cases in which the trend was reversed?
gte910h 14y ago
I was pretty good then got all ideologue at the end with unfounded assertions.
pasbesoin 14y ago
Personally, anecdotally, I would find it exhausting to try to catalog all the ways in which child-rearing has been disincentivised in my own life. I find this all another instance of the outsized hypocrisy in the U.S. Bemoaning something, while simultaneously taking seemingly every action to reinforce it. (There are a lot of secondary effects, that I won't go into here, that seem to trigger... "outrage" in some of the very people contributing most strongly to the primary condition. Deceit, or stupidity. Seems to be some of each.)

50 points by moocow01 14y ago

> To get a sense of how powerful the marriage effect is, not just for women but for men, too, look at the exit polls by marital status. Among non-married voters – people who are single and have never married, are living with a partner, or are divorced – Obama beat Romney 62-35. Among married voters Romney won the vote handily, 56-42. I'd be interested in seeing these numbers adjusted for age, various SES indicators, etc.

clarkm 14y ago
You can do all the crosstabs you want here: http://elections.reuters.com/#poll http://elections.reuters.com/#poll The marriage gap is much bigger than the gender gap, age gap, and any socioeconomic gap. I think it falls right below the race gap in terms of size, and is probably on par with the religious/non-religious gap.
tomjen3 14y ago
Agreed. Young people and single mothers are both very unlikely to be married and already known to hugely favor Democrats.
- mtoddh 14y ago
  Interesting, my guess is this is the demographic the Obama campaign was courting with the Life of Julia [1] slide-show a while back- http://www.barackobama.com/life-of-julia/ http://www.barackobama.com/life-of-julia/
  - dnu 14y ago
    But if everybody lives like Julia, who the hell will do the hard work anymore?
    - throw_away 14y ago
      Are you saying that web design and starting your own small business (as did Julia in the ad) isn't hard work?
      - boboblong 14y ago
        I think his comment was more along the lines of, "Who will dig the ditches?" I'm sure HN's response is, "Robots, if all goes as planned."

WalterSear 14y ago

very interesting, but the part about singles being less concerned with the future is more than slightly ridiculous. IMHE, parenthood brings on a set of priorities that override longer term, less tangible issues in favour of supporting children.

hype7 14y ago
Thank god someone else picked up on this. I'm willing to take the article at face value in its description of the results of the research; but the analysis is all nut job territory. The singles not caring about the future is one perfect example. If it were true, and it were only the regions with high concentrations of parents caring about the future, then you would see much stronger support for actions to prevent climate change in areas where there are higher birth rates. The thing is, you don't - it's the cities - the places that the author is bemoaning for the lack of kids (he even calls cities "pleasure centers") that are at the forefront of trying to fix the big problems. The areas with the high birth rates are the ones that seemingly don't care about the future. So yeah, take every last bit of his analysis with a grain of salt. He strikes me as a "America has been going backwards since the 1950s" type and he's trying to back the data in to fit his preconceived notions of how the world should work.

lucian303 14y ago

Less stupid people being brought into the world? I see nothing wrong with that. It's about time. EDIT: And seriously: "The US birth rate has continued to decline to a record low since the recession of 2007-2009. This is alarming." This is not alarming. The depression never ended. It'll be 2013 soon and we're still in a depression. This is supposed to be a serious educated article? Fail!

daeken 14y ago
s/Less/Fewer/; But anyway, saying things like "stupid people being brought into the world" is meaningless. That's not a birth issue, but an education one; you can argue that fewer people in the country makes education a simpler problem, but I don't know that that really matters in the grand scheme of things. Especially since birth rates for lower socioeconomic class families aren't dropping, to my knowledge, and those are the ones generally in the worst position for education.
- lucian303 14y ago
  There is no decent educational system in the US. Finally, stupid or not, more people in this world is the last thing we need. 7 bil++. The earth has limits (water)! Not to mention the artificial scarcities of non-scarce goods which none of the people in power are willing to stop.
tsotha 14y ago
>This is not alarming. It's certainly alarming if you have pay-go pension schemes like Social Security and Medicare. The way things are going either the young will live under a crushing tax burden or people who paid into social welfare programs for fifty years won't see any benefit. That's not a recipe for a stable society.
- dnu 14y ago
  The pay-go pension system is a huge ponzi scheme because it needs more and more people into the game with each generation. It lasted less than a century and it's on the edge of collapse now. Why should we postpone the inevitable?

eli_gottlieb 14y ago

Everyone said, "Bail out the banks and you risk turning into Japan." You bailed out the banks. Now you're turning into Japan. Mazal tov, America! You're committing national suicide!

prostoalex 14y ago
Assumption here being that US needs more younger people. Let's see a couple trends here though: 1) US life expectancy is on the rise, I guess one of the most expensive healthcare systems in the world is good for something. 2) Average retirement age is moving farther ahead - Reuters recently ran an article about startup founders who are 60+ y.o. http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/27/us-valley-ageism-idUSBRE8AQ0JK20121127 http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/27/us-valley-ageism-i... 3) Rise of robotics outsourced a good portion of typical physical jobs to machines - iRobot, Kiva Systems, Tesla's car-manufacturing robot arms 4) Youth unemployment is on the rise 5) Youth STEM skills, the only applicable skills that matter in current economic climate, are declining Why does the country need large amounts of young people again? A bunch of the assumptions - you need younger people to slave off to contribute taxes towards the retirement of the elderly - are a bit shaky to say the least. Most of the youth employed at various menial jobs are earning low enough income to qualify them for tax credits, so they're not a huge revenue source.
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  A bunch of the assumptions - you need younger people to slave off to contribute taxes towards the retirement of the elderly - are a bit shaky to say the least. The assumption that they will be able to supply that revenue is indeed shaky, but the assumption that one needs them to do so is well-founded. Traditionally immigration has been the safety valve for demographic mismatches, as ably documented here: http://www.ssab.gov/documents/immig_issue_brief_final_version_000.pdf http://www.ssab.gov/documents/immig_issue_brief_final_versio...
- sliverstorm 14y ago
  It's less about having a class of youth, as having a group of people up-and-coming to replace the old guard.

ars 14y ago

One interesting thing is that this seems a bit self-correcting. Assuming there is any genetic component to the desire for having children and religiosity (and I believe there is), that means that non-religious people, and people who are not interested in having children are breeding themself out of existence. It'll probably be many generations before the results are large, but it should cause a dramatic shift eventually. (Which will probably eventually get too large, causing yet another shift in the other direction.)

w1ntermute 14y ago
I wonder if this is one of the major ways (other than conversion) that the major religions of the modern world spread in the first place. After all, they all seem to emphasize having children to a great degree, something that I don't think existed in many other religions.
- nicholassmith 14y ago
  I've read somewhere before that the religious compulsion towards having many children is to keep the meme of religion going through multiple generations. It's certainly highly prevalent through the Catholic Church, especially given that the priesthood is essentially a non-replenishing rank based off the old tradition of following in your fathers footsteps for work.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - suby 14y ago
    I view religion in terms of evolution and natural selection. A religion which favors converting others will become more widespread than a religion that doesn't emphasize this, the same goes for emphasizing having many children.
lkrubner 14y ago
"Assuming there is any genetic component to the desire for having children and religiosity (and I believe there is)" The genetic argument should cancel itself it out. After all, if genetic factors should eventually cause people to have more children, then how is it possible for us to have a 55 year trend toward less children (as the article says, since 1957)? If genetics can eventually correct this trend, then why hasn't it already done so? For you to make this argument solidly, you'd have to establish at least 1 of 2 dependent arguments: 1.) there is some critical number that triggers a reaction 2.) there was, in the past, some force that allowed people to defy the genetic impulse to have children, but whatever that force was, it will no longer have as much power in the future Here on Hacker News I have, several times, seen people invoke the idea that child-raising is a genetic impulse and that therefore the trend toward less children should be self-correcting. The people who advance this idea don't seem to get the irony of the suggestion. Here is a bit of personal history: my great grandmother had 16 children. My mother had 4 children. Of the 4 of us, we are mostly past the age where we would consider having children. The 4 of us have so far had a total of 3 children, and I don't think there will be any more children, so my mom has less grand-children then she had children. This surprises her. There are some powerful forces pushing the trend towards less children. My feeling is that some people are glib in their dismissals of the trend. A poorly thought out genetic argument would fall into my category of glib.

ThomPete 14y ago

Wow that might be a little premature. The US do not have anything close to the problems the European countries are facing.

aes256 14y ago
Indeed, the latest figures (2012, CIA World Factbook) show the United States' 13.68 births per theousand persons is still higher than most of Western Europe. The demographic-economic paradox [1] is fascinating. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic-economic_paradox http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic-economic_paradox
henrikschroder 14y ago
Still, we might hit negative growth worldwide in about 50 years, that's going to be very interesting.
sterna 14y ago
It is true that the US has had remarkebly high birth rates during the last 30 years compared to most of Europe and the rich cuntries in Asia. However, once the trend for low fertility has been established it is extremely difficult to break. Even the countries in Europe that have given strong economic incentives to have children have still not managed to keep their fatility rates at replacement level. The only exception is Ireland, which has strong anti- abortion laws. Teherefore it important of the US to confront the problem of declining fertility before it has turned into a permanent problem.
pbateman 14y ago
Not yet. Europe (and Japan) gives us a taste of things to come.

chriscool 14y ago

The marriage rate is lower than ever because we are in a transition from a patriarchy to a matriarchy. See my blog post about it: http://blog.couder.net/post/2012/06/30/Sex-and-Power http://blog.couder.net/post/2012/06/30/Sex-and-Power

lifebar 14y ago
Marriage is also lower because feminism made all women paranoid, made them want to be victims. Man can't approach woman as easily these days - will be accused of rape, harrasement, day rape if he tries. Example - suggest cup of coffe to woman in elevator - instant rapist (I hope everyone still remembers that incident) . By the way, was't there some statistics that it's men don't want to marry thesedays (for obvious reasons - women start most of divorces and takes almost everything. And men that stars divorce are famous for getting their pen1s cut off and thrown in garbage disposer.) Why it's hard to approach feminism indoctrinated wiman (victim syndrome) kateharding.net/2009/10/08/guest-blogger-starling-schrodinger%E2%80%99s-rapist-or-a-guy%E2%80%99s-guide-to-approaching-strange-women-without-being-maced/
- hazov 14y ago
  When I lived in the US I had no problem to call girls for a beer, even one that called herself a feminist and studied feminist literature in her MSc... maybe this is just a moral panic where you live, rape is not that common in New England and people are not paranoid about it, at least this was true in the cities I lived. But I never approached strange women on the street, only people that I knew or was introduced before.
  - lifebar 14y ago
    "But I never approached strange women on the street, only people that I knew or was introduced before." Good for you to have broad circle of friends. Also rape is not common in any first word country, but feminists claim 1 in 4 women will be raped... (had nice link about that claim but can't post it now).

rorrr 14y ago

So? It's not like we're running out of people.

hayksaakian 14y ago

Birth rates are low but population continues to grow. The US is still a nation of immigrants, once we accept that with our Immigration laws we'll be fine.

rdl 14y ago

Assuming we can handle the "421" problems, a world population in the 1-2 billion range, purely through low fertility rate, would solve a lot of environmental problems. You could have first-world quality of life for everyone, with reasonable technology advances, and still have a much lower impact on the environment than we have now. Under 2b seems like the right number unless space colonization is seriously in force.

TazeTSchnitzel 14y ago
Unless we see huge advances, I think we are doomed with space colonisation, since we put more energy in than we can take out, i.e., it produces non-self-sustaining space colonies reliant on Earth.
- rdl 14y ago
  Yeah, but I'd bet on huge advances over the next millenium, assuming we don't seriously screw things up. I'd bet on robots doing a lot of the work. There are clearly mineral resources in space which seem worthwhile -- asteroids, and potentially fuels or consumables from some planets. Something which consisted of U-235/Pu-239 exports from Earth to space, where space then returns some minerals. I doubt we'd get appreciable human population off the earth and into the solar system, unless we intentionally went for that. It would probably be easier to do high-density earth colonies using resources brought in from off-world. The surfaces of Mars and the Moon don't seem particularly hospitable compared to the Sahara or Antarctica or the oceans.
- antidoh 14y ago
  We may wish we're doomed to space colonization.j "The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand." - Carl Sagan, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot What he's saying is that anything viable is too far away. Forget about the Moon or Mars, we cannot protect a population against radiation, and if we could we may as well build that same habitat here on our then presumably inhabitable planet that we're already on. Don't just use the planet up and walk away from it, because there's nowhere to go.

tomwalker 14y ago

Why do we need to continue to increase or maintain the population?

DanBC 14y ago
To pay and care for the current population. People live longer; diseases of old age are not cured yet and are considerably expensive and labour intensive. You need lots of people earning money and paying taxes to provide for that older generation. You also need lots of people to do the physical care of that population.
- hype7 14y ago
  You are promoting the economic equivalent of a Ponzi scheme that by its very definition is not sustainable.
  - DanBC 14y ago
    People pay small amounts of money into their pension (401k?) schemes throughout their life. The growth of those schemes requires people to continue to pay money into them. This ponzi scheme is either my poor communicating, or is a feature of many pension systems around the world. (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/a-look-at-pensions-plans-worldwide-517579.html http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/a-look-at-p...) I agree it's not sustainable. What do you suggest? How should people fund their old age? Prisoners are already being used to care for other old age prisoners. This moving NY Times article is fascinating. (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/health/dealing-with-dementia-among-aging-criminals.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/health/dealing-with-dement...) Fun sci-fi noodling would have criminals being sub-contracted into institutions that care for poverty stricken old people. The prison / elderly care industrial complex grows to a huge evil empire. (Throw in a bit about making and selling coffins and it's complete.)
- prostoalex 14y ago
  This works in some kind of flat tax system, which isn't really how it works in the US. Fresh college graduates end up with significant education debt, and interest payments on student loans are deductible. For the rest the system of credits allows for zero net tax obligation as far as federal budget is concerned http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Donald-Marron/2011/0728/Why-do-half-of-Americans-pay-no-federal-income-tax http://www.csmonitor.com/Business/Donald-Marron/2011/0728/Wh... US economy is dependent on high income earners, which might or might not be younger people.

loceng 14y ago

The problem is health-related - physical, mental, and emotional - along with not getting the proper support of the community that it takes to raise a healthy child, not just for the child, but for the parents.

Ygg2 14y ago

I have a question. How does one solve negative birth rate effectively? What are possible cases in which the trend was reversed?

gte910h 14y ago

I was pretty good then got all ideologue at the end with unfounded assertions.

pasbesoin 14y ago

Personally, anecdotally, I would find it exhausting to try to catalog all the ways in which child-rearing has been disincentivised in my own life. I find this all another instance of the outsized hypocrisy in the U.S. Bemoaning something, while simultaneously taking seemingly every action to reinforce it. (There are a lot of secondary effects, that I won't go into here, that seem to trigger... "outrage" in some of the very people contributing most strongly to the primary condition. Deceit, or stupidity. Seems to be some of each.)