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The global population pyramid

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Re: The global population pyramid

#111

Post by bluntfang »

mr_overalls wrote: post #86
koonsolo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to give my not so popular answer for this. Western society is moving away from traditional families. When I ask my son what he wants to become when he's older, he says he wants to be a police officer. When I ask my 2 girls, they both want to become a mom. My social engineered response to this was "maybe you should become a school teacher, that way you can work with kids and be home when your kids are home".…

> On one hand it's great that women have all these new rights. . . Do you mind if I ask how old you are? The rights of women to freely choose careers, and to make their own reproductive decisions, are at least several decades old. > Western society is trying to make boys out of girls, and girls out of boys. . . Can you provide examples of this? Not to preempt your arguments, but this is an oft-repeated conservative p…

codifying freedom is not the same as having it. ask black people about it.

Re: The global population pyramid

#112

Post by lumost »

koonsolo wrote: post #27
bhouston wrote: post #25

My concern is that population will shrink after 2100 globally but it will already be shrinking in the rich countries long before that. And all indicators right now is that shrinkage will speed up. There is something wrong with rich modern secular society here or anywhere (it happens to all societies right now whether they are European, Japanese, Chinese, etc) in that it currently leads to sub replacement reproduction…

I'm going to give my not so popular answer for this. Western society is moving away from traditional families. When I ask my son what he wants to become when he's older, he says he wants to be a police officer. When I ask my 2 girls, they both want to become a mom. My social engineered response to this was "maybe you should become a school teacher, that way you can work with kids and be home when your kids are home".…

Cost disease is one possible explanation for this process. As everything gets more expensive the risk of not keeping up grows, this manifests in somewhat exotic ways such as the tent cities of Hawaii having full parking lots for people to drive to work.

Having children directly increases the risk of falling out of a financially stable position, as well as the negative effects of falling out such as raising a child in a tent City. Considering that most of our young population is either fighting against stagnant wages or student loan debt, it's not surprising that child birth rates have also fallen.

Re: The global population pyramid

#113

Post by SeanAppleby »

bluntfang wrote: post #110
koonsolo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to give my not so popular answer for this. Western society is moving away from traditional families. When I ask my son what he wants to become when he's older, he says he wants to be a police officer. When I ask my 2 girls, they both want to become a mom. My social engineered response to this was "maybe you should become a school teacher, that way you can work with kids and be home when your kids are home".…

If it comes to it, we will have no problem adopting a Brave New World style procreation strategy. Creating humans out of other human's blood/cells/dna/etc is either already here or imminent. http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jul/babies-from-bone-marrow

I don't think the problem is that people don't want to go through the mechanics of having kids, it's that they have other priorities that trump wanting to commit the massive amount of time and resources necessary to raise kids.

That's a much more complex problem. I'd be highly skeptical that we could scale an alternative development environment that even approximated the benefits of having a loving family that wanted to commit to your upbringing being their main focus in life.

Re: The global population pyramid

#114

Post by ThePhysicist »

harimau777 wrote: post #36

It seems to me that the segment of the population that is most affected by societal/political policies are the young to middle age adults who are raising kids, establishing their careers, building wealth, etc. My understanding is that in the past, due to shorter life expectancies, this was also the generation that was generally in the majority; so each generation got a fair shot at making sure society served their ne…

This surely is a problem in many western societies and in Germany politicians are currently eager to give such “gifts” to the older generation e.g. in the form of more retirement money. However it’s clear that the whole retirement system will collapse in 20-30 years if we don’t find some radical new approach of financing it, as currently it’s not capital based but financed by the active workforce (actually there is a small capital based supplementary system but it will not suffice to compensate for the changing demographics). When the ratio between old and young people will flip in 20-30 years there won’t be enough active workers to pay for the retired people. Right now the government desperately tries to fix this, recently they e.g. discussed ways to force freelancers and entrepreneurs - which currently don’t pay into the public retirement system - to pay into it as well (which is only a temporary fix at best). Another strategy is fostering massive immigration from both Europe and elsewhere (e.g. we recently took in almost one million people from Syria), which caused a significant uptick of the popularity of right-wing parties though and is also no guarantee for a stable system as many of the immigrants are hard to integrate into the labor market. Difficult times ahead it seems.

Re: The global population pyramid

#116

Post by LMYahooTFY »

patentatt wrote: post #81
theandrewbailey wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don’t think we need to devalue women (again) to support “traditional” families (again). I don't understand how supporting families means devaluing women. What exactly do you mean by "devalue"? If motherhood is the stated goal of a woman, and she achieves it, how/why is she "devalued"? If it brings her meaning and fulfillment, isn't that something to be celebrated and respected? I'm also bothered by your swipe aga…

I agree with the thrust of your comment, I think I just didn’t frame it properly. The comment I was responding to seemed (to me) to suggest that we go back to the 1950s when a woman didn’t have a right as a matter of law or de facto to have a career and aspirations of her own. I read the comment as suggesting that women’s empowerment was a proximate cause to the degradation of the family. I think electing to be a par…

How does the GP comment suggest that?

It's not clear to me. It seemed to suggest that there are complementary roles that cannot be completely subsumed by either individually.

Re: The global population pyramid

#117

Post by patentatt »

LMYahooTFY wrote: post #116
patentatt wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the thrust of your comment, I think I just didn’t frame it properly. The comment I was responding to seemed (to me) to suggest that we go back to the 1950s when a woman didn’t have a right as a matter of law or de facto to have a career and aspirations of her own. I read the comment as suggesting that women’s empowerment was a proximate cause to the degradation of the family. I think electing to be a par…

How does the GP comment suggest that? It's not clear to me. It seemed to suggest that there are complementary roles that cannot be completely subsumed by either individually.

The undertone is that women are better at being parents than men. I don’t agree with that.

Re: The global population pyramid

#118

Post by shagmin »

microtherion wrote: post #54
koonsolo wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to give my not so popular answer for this. Western society is moving away from traditional families. When I ask my son what he wants to become when he's older, he says he wants to be a police officer. When I ask my 2 girls, they both want to become a mom. My social engineered response to this was "maybe you should become a school teacher, that way you can work with kids and be home when your kids are home".…

> A family is made up of a man and a women, who support each other in their strengths and interests, and raise children together. So why not focus on the "together" part instead of trying to force partners into segregated roles? As you note yourself, stay at home mothers are in a precarious position (and, curiously, enthusiasm among males for traditional motherhood is NOT correlated with enthusiasm for lifelong alimo…

I agree, and I'd take it a step further. I just listened to an interview with Indra Nooyi (former CEO of PepsiCo). She attributed her success as CEO and ability to still be a mother due to extended family being involved with taking care of her kids.

In western society there is a lot of value in independence in general. But a lot could be gained/saved from grandparents being able to help take care of children, and be able to get by on their retirement pension/savings much easier. Perhaps this is one aspect of non western societies that could/should be adopted more in the west.

Re: The global population pyramid

#119

Post by cerealbad »

Religious and wealthy people will continue above replacement forever. Probably why these two strategies persist. Who is the poorest person you know? Are they religious and do they have many children? Who is the wealthiest and how many children do they have? Flattening this curve has been the world project of the Anglo-American establishment post WW2, with dubious results - unless replacing themselves and their own populations was the goal. The demographic winter largely of their own making, a case of idealism meeting unintended consequences which may go down as the biggest blunder in world history.

Re: The global population pyramid

#120

Post by ncmncm »

koonsolo wrote: post #27
bhouston wrote: post #25

My concern is that population will shrink after 2100 globally but it will already be shrinking in the rich countries long before that. And all indicators right now is that shrinkage will speed up. There is something wrong with rich modern secular society here or anywhere (it happens to all societies right now whether they are European, Japanese, Chinese, etc) in that it currently leads to sub replacement reproduction…

I'm going to give my not so popular answer for this. Western society is moving away from traditional families. When I ask my son what he wants to become when he's older, he says he wants to be a police officer. When I ask my 2 girls, they both want to become a mom. My social engineered response to this was "maybe you should become a school teacher, that way you can work with kids and be home when your kids are home".…

This definition of a "family" is a problem.

It is how Americans define the term, and administer resources, but it has never in previous history been an meaningful description. It is a problem because it is a very fragile construct. The definition we evolved with is what is lately called the "extended family", stripped of significance in the modern US.

Its fragility is a consequence of the small number of roles and participants. One health problem is an instant crisis.

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