The global fertility rate is falling • Hacker News Board

Re: The global fertility rate is falling

#821

Post by bing_dai » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 6:00 PM UTC

jaspax wrote: post #817

fullstop wrote: post #688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have two daughters, in their teens, and both have said that they are not interested in having children. I'm glad that they are giving both thought and pause here, but I'm also secretly hoping that they change their minds when the time is right for them. I'd be happy with and without grandchildren, but it would be incredible to be able to give all of the love that I can when I am retired, when I have less going on i…

FWIW, teenagers are unlikely to have a solid grasp of what their actual future choices will be. I know multiple people from high school or college who originally expressed a desire to never has kids, but are now delighted to have them.

On the other hand: there must be people who decided they wanted children in high school, but later regret it.

I find it unfair that the society often consider people being "too young; may change mind later" when they say they do not want children; but we don't apply the same standards to young people who want children.

Re: The global fertility rate is falling

#822

Post by LargesseBargess » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 6:06 PM UTC

LargesseBargess wrote: post #820

chr1 wrote: post #808

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a lot of empty space on earth even before we start terraforming deserts or building floating cities, or colonizing other planets. So the malthusian fearmongering that we are all going to die due to lack of resources is simply false. Having X times more people doesn't lead to us sacrificing anything but to producing 2^X more art and sciense. Even for such a simple example as youtube videos, if population is r…

Plenty of space, yes, but in zones where you don't have to worry about natural disaster seasons, or ridiculous supply chain issues (I'm thinking southwest US for water)? NE is no cakewalk in the winter but we generally don't have to worry about a hurricane decimating a whole city. As far as production, remember the automation issue as well as the fact that, well, more content is great perhaps in smaller communities,…

Follow up to the scarcity mentality for creatives: I realized not everyone makes it, and there are varying shades of grey to that. But does that lead to more job stress on non-creative "day jobs" if people have to give up on the creative jobs? Everyone with their fifteen minutes of fame...if it is literally everyone. We already see that a bit with Youtube artists. At any given time there are a handful of big name rappers (or musicians in general) for instance, but how many lesser-knowns would love to continue doing this but can't financially?

Re: The global fertility rate is falling

#823

Post by ardy42 » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 6:07 PM UTC

creato wrote: post #345

It is disturbing that people take for granted that this is an economic problem. This thread is full of people lamenting the fact that we could support X times as many people as we do now if we all just sacrifice Y. When I look around the world today, I think the biggest resource that is lacking is economic opportunity. Huge swathes of people are desperate, angry, and depressed, I think because there is no opportunity…

> When I look around the world today, I think the biggest resource that is lacking is economic opportunity. Huge swathes of people are desperate, angry, and depressed, I think because there is no opportunity for them. The best case scenario for huge numbers of people is stagnation.

> A shrinking, aging population would fix this problem. The demand for labor will go up, the supply will go down. Bad for the investor class looking for profits, good for reducing economic inequality. People will be able to profit from labor again.

To a large extent, that lack of economic opportunity is a political choice that was made by the selection of particular parameters for the economic system. Trying to engineer a shrinking population to force different parameters to be chosen is an indirect way of addressing the true problem.

Re: The global fertility rate is falling

#824

Post by LargesseBargess » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 6:08 PM UTC

gxon wrote: post #373

creato wrote: post #345

It is disturbing that people take for granted that this is an economic problem. This thread is full of people lamenting the fact that we could support X times as many people as we do now if we all just sacrifice Y. When I look around the world today, I think the biggest resource that is lacking is economic opportunity. Huge swathes of people are desperate, angry, and depressed, I think because there is no opportunity…

To add to that, even if we can technically support a lot more people with the sustainable resources we have, which I personally doubt, getting close to our max capacity means we will have zero wiggle room when things go wrong. With climate change accelerating and guaranteed to cause drastic changes to our environment, a lot of things will go wrong at the same time. The analogy I like is your income/spending ratio. Ye…

Also, I can't see any of our problems going away or getting better/solved with more people.

Re: The global fertility rate is falling

#825

Post by jjoonathan » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 6:10 PM UTC

snowwrestler wrote: post #282

jjoonathan wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Old calculus: "I need to have lots of children so they support me in my old age. No matter the cost." New calculus: "Between retirement accounts and welfare, society will support me in my old age. Children are really, really expensive." It's economics, plain and simple. Of course there's a "top" and the "top" does dictate the structure. If you doubt that, ask: what percent of your income do you pay in taxes, and what…

If declining birth rate is a matter of what people can afford, we should look for some sort of correlation between wealth and birth rate. To the best of my knowledge, the correlation is somewhat negative --that is, rich people have lower average birth rates than poor people. How can it be economics "plain and simple" if even people who can easily afford to raise large families choose not to? Mark Zuckerberg and Prisc…

For the same reason that the CEO of the fortune-500 I work at ran around with a broken phone screen for the better part of a year: things cost time and energy, not just money. Children even moreso. Being cash-rich doesn't make you rich in time and energy.

Re: The global fertility rate is falling

#826

Post by mjburgess » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 6:23 PM UTC

tsimionescu wrote: post #706

mjburgess wrote: post #689

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDP growth is one of the most strongly correlated metrics with "health, happiness, mathematical research, etc." Capitalism is the greatest force in history for increases in human wealth, happiness, abundance, etc., ie., for growth Consider any metric of interest over the last century, and esp. the last 40 years: https://ourworldindata.org/

That only works because the data doesn't take into account any kind of shared wealth. Large swathes of people lived in tribal communities which had different concepts of ownership and property, but were not 'poor' by any common definition from their times. GDP data completely ignored these types of societies, which formed the majority in some areas of the world before colonization. Even then, most of the escapes from…

Yes they were, extremely poor.

Child mortality rates and mortality rates in childbirth have been c. 20% for most of human history, up until c. 1940.

Almost all human beings for almost all recent history have been agricultural works (over 90% in 1800) which is a severe and precarious state.

If you wish to go before settlements into nomadic hunters and gatherers note that this cannot produce "mathematical research, healthcare, etc." -- ie., the desirable things stated.

At this point you're just pining to be a dog. You may prefer a shorter, more brutal, more violent life... but I think, rather, you just need a fantasy of a utopian "before time" to justify you enmity towards the status quo.

> how some can claim Capitalism is the important factor here.

Err... when do you think they started their massive reductions in poverty?

When they stopped blaming various other people an liberalized their markets (in china "The Capitalists" and in India "The British Empire"). Within a few years of introducing captialist reforms these societies dramatically reduced poverty.

Re: The global fertility rate is falling

#827

Post by mjburgess » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 6:25 PM UTC

Aunche wrote: post #765

sqrt17 wrote: post #532

Earlier quoted context omitted.

according to that logic, lawyers, CEOs, line managers and HR should be paid what they were 100 years ago, as they do not directly produce. They're not, it's effectively through competition with other jobs that their pay is determined. Intuitively, "pay according to productivity" makes sense, but productivity gains have far outpaced the pay of workers while the money went elsewhere. Let's face the reality that product…

> according to that logic, lawyers, CEOs, line managers and HR should be paid what they were 100 years ago Is that not true? Carnegie and Rockefeller were even relatively richer than the CEOs are today, and I'm sure their lawyers were compensated for as well as today's richest lawyers as well.

yes, for almost all of human history wealth inequality has been (far) worse than it is today.

The only period of relatively more equality was post-WW2. Inequality then, as ever, has only been reduced by mass death -- either in the form of wars, or plagues, famines etc.

The mechanism of wealth acquisition, ie., investment /(preferential attachment), necessarily iterates towards increasing levels of inequality.

Re: The global fertility rate is falling

#828

Post by dang » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 6:28 PM UTC

empath75 wrote: post #646

dang wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamebait comments to HN. You've been doing it a lot, it's not what this site is for, it destroys what it is for, and we eventually ban such accounts. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I’m not sure it’s my fault that a bunch of racists replied to this that you had to moderate.

You have to follow the site guidelines whether others do or not. Any other approach would guarantee a downward spiral.

Please don't miss that the issue here is the pattern of comments by your account, not just what it posted in this thread.

It's true that we don't moderate everything. That's because we don't see everything. Flagging the worst comments is helpful, as is emailing hn@ycombinator.com in egregious cases.

Re: The global fertility rate is falling

#829

Post by sdinsn » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 6:34 PM UTC

creato wrote: post #345

It is disturbing that people take for granted that this is an economic problem. This thread is full of people lamenting the fact that we could support X times as many people as we do now if we all just sacrifice Y. When I look around the world today, I think the biggest resource that is lacking is economic opportunity. Huge swathes of people are desperate, angry, and depressed, I think because there is no opportunity…

> A shrinking, aging population would fix this problem. The demand for labor will go up, the supply will go down.

In the short term, absolutely. But after a generation, the old working population has retired and the smaller new working population cannot support them.

Re: The global fertility rate is falling

#830

Post by concordDance » Wed, Jul 15, 2020, 6:56 PM UTC

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #603

sweeneyrod wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people you know are almost certainly not representative of the world at large. Maybe 80% is a bit high, but the number is certainly over 50%. The median global person earns less than $3000/year.

It's not very usefull to make a point of: "unlike you, some people have to live under tyrany or war" My bet is that of people living in functioning democracies, the percentage will be in like 20-25%.

Probably much higher for those living in the UK with its insane housing prices (10x the hours worked per square meter of Chicago!)