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Baby Boom or Bust?

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Re: Baby Boom or Bust?

#101

Post by toomuchtodo »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #94
ant6n wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d say the higher birth rates in US are due to religion and poverty. I also wonder how many immigrants continue living like in 2nd/3rd world country.

From our experience religion seems more important. There is some support for this observation: https://ifstudies.org/blog/how-income-affects-fertility

It’s important to note the the Institute for Family Studies is pro marriage, pro family, and pro natalist. They advocate for traditional family models and more kids versus less.

https://ifstudies.org/about/our-mission

Re: Baby Boom or Bust?

#102

Post by pengaru »

AlexTWithBeard wrote: post #73
pengaru wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I watch low-income multi-child parents pay for groceries and formula w/EBT and WIC vouchers on the daily. Children are subsidized by the government, it's definitely not cost-prohibitive.

Formula? These parents definitely have too much money to spend.

It's surprisingly expensive! But I've heard it's also not particularly healthy even, being chock full of sugar/hfcs and allegedly plays a significant role in child obesity.

Re: Baby Boom or Bust?

#103

Post by throw0101a »

Animats wrote: post #5
chronogram wrote: post #2

While the article mainly focuses on France, the world is mostly looking at China after its one-child-policy as the greatest example. France is a good example for other things though. Its extremely pro-pension policies makes it very hostile against the young. Both countries at either end of the world were spending their time breeding babies to try to feed them 50 years later.

World is mostly looking at China after its one-child-policy as the greatest example. China's one-child policy was a success. They were able to put on the brakes during the period between health care getting good and standard of living going up, which is when population goes way up. India didn't do that, and their population shot up beyond the country's water supply. France is just leveling off. Japan is in actual dec…

> China's one-child policy was a success.

China's one-child policy was unnecessary. Fertility rates were already dropping for at least a decade before it went into effect:

> China’s controversial one-child policy continues to generate controversy and misinforma- tion. This essay challenges several common myths: that Mao Zedong consistently opposed efforts to limit China’s population growth; that consequently China’s population continued to grow rapidly until after his death; that the launching of the one-child policy in 1980 led to a dramatic decline in China’s fertility rate; and that the imposition of the policy prevented 400 million births. Evidence is presented contradicting each of these claims. Mao Zedong at times forcefully advocated strict limits on births and presided over a major switch to coer- cive birth planning after 1970; as much as three-quarters of the decline in fertility since 1970 occurred before the launching of the one-child policy; fertility levels fluctuated in China after the policy was launched; and most of the further decline in fertility since 1980 can be attributed to economic development, not coercive enforcement of birth limits.

* https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31431804/

* PDF: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/martinwhyte/files/challeng...

> There are two leading candidates for explaining the pre-1980 drop in fertility. First, family planning existed before the one-child policy became a part of it. Pressure was placed on Chinese men and women about the “appropriate” age at which to marry, about the number of children to have and about how rapidly. A 1994 paper by researchers Judith Banister and Christina Wu Harbaugh argued that these measures alone were effective enough to explain the pre-1980 decline, before the one-child limit.[1]

> Second, China was growing during the 1970s. It is therefore possible that it experienced the same declining trend in fertility caused by growth that all currently developed countries experienced at some point. This is typically referred to as the “demographic” transition.

* https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2016/october/china...

Re: Baby Boom or Bust?

#104

Post by throw0101a »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #97
monkeybutton wrote: post #15

My country (Canada) is intent on making up for falling birth rates by increasing immigration. Sometimes I wonder if it is unethical for a rich country like Canada to effectively outsource (offload?) child rearing costs and to some extent education costs to the poorer countries that we are taking immigrants from.

Glad you brought up the ethics, because it is definitely interesting. E.g. if Canada only searches out the best and brightest from struggling countries, that delays the success of those countries be decreasing the average capability level of improving conditions. This of course works in Canada’s favor, because it needs poor countries with conditions that facilitate child rearing.

You're not wrong, but the struggling countries may not have the infrastructure to fully take advantage of the skills and talents of the 'best and brightest'. By going to Canada (or wherever) they could be leveraged more effectively.

A lot of technology is making things easier in struggling countries, and if that technology can be made cheaper and commoditized it can improve more lives at more points of the income spectrum. The best and brightest may be helping to eliminate their own positions by making certain jobs easier to do in more places on the planet.

Re: Baby Boom or Bust?

#105

Post by zaphod12 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #70
AlexTWithBeard wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds almost like that if we (putting the hard hat on and hiding under the table) find a way to exclude one parent from workforce, things will get back to normal.

Your reasoning is sound, but I believe it’s untenable in public discourse (for various reasons).

Forced exclusion sounds terrible. It's about having options, so there is not forced inclusion, which is the trap we've found ourselves in.

Re: Baby Boom or Bust?

#106

Post by [deleted] »

zaphod12 wrote: post #105
toomuchtodo wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your reasoning is sound, but I believe it’s untenable in public discourse (for various reasons).

Forced exclusion sounds terrible. It's about having options, so there is not forced inclusion, which is the trap we've found ourselves in.

[deleted]

Re: Baby Boom or Bust?

#107

Post by toomuchtodo »

zaphod12 wrote: post #105
toomuchtodo wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your reasoning is sound, but I believe it’s untenable in public discourse (for various reasons).

Forced exclusion sounds terrible. It's about having options, so there is not forced inclusion, which is the trap we've found ourselves in.

Long term, the fix is to push wages up so single earners can support a family and a stay at home partner. Short term, don’t have kids if you can’t afford expensive daycare and need both incomes to break even.

Re: Baby Boom or Bust?

#108

Post by monkeybutton »

throw0101a wrote: post #104
mensetmanusman wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glad you brought up the ethics, because it is definitely interesting. E.g. if Canada only searches out the best and brightest from struggling countries, that delays the success of those countries be decreasing the average capability level of improving conditions. This of course works in Canada’s favor, because it needs poor countries with conditions that facilitate child rearing.

You're not wrong, but the struggling countries may not have the infrastructure to fully take advantage of the skills and talents of the 'best and brightest'. By going to Canada (or wherever) they could be leveraged more effectively. A lot of technology is making things easier in struggling countries, and if that technology can be made cheaper and commoditized it can improve more lives at more points of the income spe…

Right, on one hand if you wanted to maximize everyone's contribution, a 'top performer' moving to a rich country and being more productive there is ultimately a good thing. And like you said, if their work leads towards equalization between the two countries its even better.

On the other hand if the output of their productivity isn't flowing back to their home country, Canada/USA/UK/wherever are reaping the rewards tax/tariff-free and the increase in productivity isn't being redistributed.

You wouldn't let a foreign power extract oil or gold for "free" from your country, would you? I don't want to argue against personal liberties but at the same time it could be argued that those rights are being exploited by rich countries to the detriment of poorer countries.

Then there's the whole TFW (temporary foreign worker) program that looks a whole lot like serfdom where landowners in Canada buy labour at below market costs without even extending the notion of citizenship to the workers...

Re: Baby Boom or Bust?

#109

Post by passerby1 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #107
zaphod12 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Forced exclusion sounds terrible. It's about having options, so there is not forced inclusion, which is the trap we've found ourselves in.

Long term, the fix is to push wages up so single earners can support a family and a stay at home partner. Short term, don’t have kids if you can’t afford expensive daycare and need both incomes to break even.

How would it work? Maybe I'm wrong, but once wage goes up there'll be prices growth for housing, daycare and other related things because more families is now able to afford it. It's simply the supply-demand equilibrium. So raising a single earner wage does not seem to do anything good, maybe without decreasing at the same time wage for the second earner (which is unacceptable for obvious reasons).

Re: Baby Boom or Bust?

#110

Post by yourapostasy »

stephc_int13 wrote: post #44
yourapostasy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...we don't need a pyramid. The core financial architecture of the world is pinned upon an assumption of monotonically-increasing global population on a 3-7 generation moving average. So far, history has not been kind to those civilizations exhibiting declining populations over sustained multi-generational spans. We're into generation one or two depending upon your definition of a generation, so we have some time b…

I think that the risk of civilization collapse has been highly overrated and is mostly bullshit prediction.

> …civilization collapse has been highly overrated…

Yep, I wouldn’t even begin to advance a collapse hypothesis until a solid 7 generation trend has been established. However, the common assumption amongst contemporary policy makers is stagnation == collapse. So it is useful to observe for such data.

I don’t buy into that narrative, nor the “stagnation is fine” story, either. I simply don’t have sufficient data to evaluate what demographic stagnation over a few hundred years or even a millennia means at this time.

I will point out however: for many tens of millennia, our species teetered on a knife’s edge of viability, with an asymptotically curved growth rate that might as well have been stagnant. One hypothesis I’m exploring is demographic stagnation is a no-op in the presence of any species-wide median increase in cognitive density.

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