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India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

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Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#171

Post by ativzzz »

bhouston wrote: post #105
lotsofpulp wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am curious what the market rate for pregnancy, giving birth, and breastfeeding will end up being. After seeing what it is like, if I was a woman, even the best current European benefits would not be enough.

In Hungary, if you do it four times you are exempt from paying taxes for the rest of your life: "Hungarian women with four children or more will be exempted for life from paying income tax, the prime minister has said, unveiling plans designed to boost the number of babies being born." https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47192612

Women with four children will most likely be full time moms for the majority of their productive lives so that's a pointless benefit, unless this policy manages to somehow reverse gender roles as well.

Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#172

Post by [deleted] »

ako wrote: post #116
mastax wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many European countries have extremely generous benefits for raising children, but it has been broadly ineffective at raising birth rates - with the possible exception of the Czech Republic. I agree though that governments are going to try, and they may find a way to do it. There was a good episode of The Weeds podcast, "Baby making vibes," which talked about this. Some of it is focused on the American political lens…

European countries may have generous benefits for raising children, but they’re not even close to covering the costs of children. I doubt there are many people who will decide to have children based on these benefits.

[deleted]

Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#173

Post by paxys »

gizmo686 wrote: post #60
bhouston wrote: post #47

This is good to a degree. But it does mean India joins much of the rest of the world with sub-replacement fertility with just a few outliers. The challenge now switches to how to move from sub-replacement to sustainable fertility. Japan and South Korea are leaders in sub-replacement fertility with not that much success in finding a path towards sustainable population. Both I believe are still dropping. This is the gr…

Is there a need to a sustainable population rate? There are about 8 billion humans on the planet. We can sustain a sub replacement birthrate for generations. There is a good chance we can sustain it for long enough to solve aging; or at least significantly push back the ~100 year limit to human life. Once we do that, we will need generations of sub replacement fertility just to compensate for having more generations…

Just by simple numbers – no, you don't need a sustainable population rate. We were perfectly fine as a species when the population was half or a tenth or hundredth of what it is now, and will still thrive if it gets to that again. The problem is the demographic breakdown. If the rate of growth is decreasing it means that when your current population ages and exits the labor pool there won't be enough young people to replace them. And with better medical care and increased life expectancy these old people will still hang around and need care.

This is a problem that every large, developed country faces today, and they generally solve it through immigration. But what happens when every country is in the same situation?

Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#174

Post by kspacewalk2 »

rmk wrote: post #137
zpeti wrote: post #48

Global population will basically top out at 9-10bn. I look forward to the problems we will face then, and the apocalyptic narratives the media will invent about this new problem. Here's my shot at a few: - Even with better quality of life its going to be hard to make people who are over 70 work productively. But without children less and less people will need to take care of this large old age group. And they will ne…

Unless there are more pandemics and wars that intervene. This pandemic has killed an estimated 10-12 million people, according to the Economist. I think we are perhaps 80% of the way to an endemic with successive mutations becoming less and less lethal, so perhaps the true death toll is in the 15-20 million range. Any large scale war between nation-states can have a pretty high death toll if things escalate out of co…

>This pandemic has killed an estimated 10-12 million people, according to the Economist.

Every time I see such claims, I still cringe at the thought of figuring out what it actually means. The details are gory, and can be summarized simplistically by saying "death with COVID ≠ death from COVID". In other words, figuring out true disease toll is a rather ambiguous problem, as stated.

Can someone point me to a reference where this subject is rigorously treated, without skipping over the gore, but is still accessible to a non-expert (say, to someone who has undergrad-level understanding of health stats)? Could be a paper, a meta study, a blog post, whatever.

Like with this estimate, for example, I'd want to know if it's 10-12 million people who died within X days of a positive PCR test for COVID, or something less naive.

Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#175

Post by naravara »

bhouston wrote: post #53
zpeti wrote: post #48

Global population will basically top out at 9-10bn. I look forward to the problems we will face then, and the apocalyptic narratives the media will invent about this new problem. Here's my shot at a few: - Even with better quality of life its going to be hard to make people who are over 70 work productively. But without children less and less people will need to take care of this large old age group. And they will ne…

> I predict these issues will cause bigger problems than population expansion ever did. I think that unfettered population growth would have caused massive issues -- you could say that global warming is one of its legacies. But there will be a whole host of new issues as we face this new challenge of moving towards sustainable fertility. I suspect we will see a lot of government intervention with incentives towards l…

Wealth inequality is one of the drivers of reducing family size. As well-compensated, high-status professions require either high up-front costs in education and socialization or high risk early investment the rationale shifts from "needing a lot of hands to keep the family firm going" to "needing to dedicate a lot of resources to set the kids up for success."

In other words, the economic incentives today are to "go tall" rather than "go wide" with your kids if family wealth and status is the aim. If inequality is high this becomes more pronounced because the top of the heap will be more desirable and more competitive.

Really I think it'll depend on how good the robots end up being. If they're very good at replacing humans then labor won't be able to bid up its pay rates. If the robots are shitty, though, it might work out okay.

Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#176

Post by nradov »

mastax wrote: post #76
bhouston wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I predict these issues will cause bigger problems than population expansion ever did. I think that unfettered population growth would have caused massive issues -- you could say that global warming is one of its legacies. But there will be a whole host of new issues as we face this new challenge of moving towards sustainable fertility. I suspect we will see a lot of government intervention with incentives towards l…

Many European countries have extremely generous benefits for raising children, but it has been broadly ineffective at raising birth rates - with the possible exception of the Czech Republic. I agree though that governments are going to try, and they may find a way to do it. There was a good episode of The Weeds podcast, "Baby making vibes," which talked about this. Some of it is focused on the American political lens…

The incentives in France have also been somewhat effective relative to peer countries, however they're still below replacement rate.

Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#177

Post by godelski »

zpeti wrote: post #48

Global population will basically top out at 9-10bn. I look forward to the problems we will face then, and the apocalyptic narratives the media will invent about this new problem. Here's my shot at a few: - Even with better quality of life its going to be hard to make people who are over 70 work productively. But without children less and less people will need to take care of this large old age group. And they will ne…

A lot of these problems can go away if we can get automation right and done soon enough (though it comes with other problems itself). With automation Western nations need not rely on immigrants as much for labor as their own populations decline and age. Some services can also become a lot cheaper, like food delivery and even the food itself.

I often think we frame things poorly. Wealth inequality is a problem the same way coal is a problem. It's the effects. The problem with global warming is the amount of infrared sensitive gases in the air. A coal fired plant that had zero net emissions (ccs) wouldn't be an issue. Similarly the problem with wealth is that if it is pooled up capitalism doesn't work because it needs a flow and exchange of goods to operate efficiently. Personally I don't care about the wealth gap and the top earners, I care about the bottom. If we can make all the essentials cheap enough it makes money far less valuable in the first place (solving the same problem but with different framing).

Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#178

Post by nradov »

z3t4 wrote: post #156
zpeti wrote: post #48

Global population will basically top out at 9-10bn. I look forward to the problems we will face then, and the apocalyptic narratives the media will invent about this new problem. Here's my shot at a few: - Even with better quality of life its going to be hard to make people who are over 70 work productively. But without children less and less people will need to take care of this large old age group. And they will ne…

When the cost of human labor goes up, the inequality will go down. One question is if cities will keep growing, or if we will see decentralization. The corona pandemic has proved that many jobs can be decentralized using modern communication technology. While the average population gets older, we are also more healthy at higher ages, so we might not need as much care.

In the US and some other developed countries we are not more healthy at higher ages. Life expectancy has flattened out of even declined. Obesity rates are rising.

Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#179

Post by danuker »

mpol wrote: post #130
zpeti wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Climate changes are way exaggerated. Almost all official predictions by IPCC etc, which aren’t addicted to clickbait, say that over the next few decades we will lose some GDP growth due to climate change. But world GDP will still grow. There won’t be starvation, or famine, etc. This is not the world ending apocalyptic scenario that’s thrown around in the media. Perhaps a few countries will become uninhabitable, but I…

Two decades, sure, but two centuries? If sea level is about to rise 1 or 2 or 3 meters, things will surely change more than what we see now. I live in the Netherlands, I am not worried about myself. But the world for our children might look different in this regard than ours. And we should not fall into the trap that it only exists when it touches us, then it will be way too late.

> but two centuries?

I believe the sea level rise will indeed affect the Netherlands. I hope technology will progress so as to allow cheap relocation, or conversion of buildings to seasteads.

I'm pretty sure two centuries from now there will also be completely unforeseeable problems, but also solutions. If you look at old predictions, we feared lots of things that did not turn out to happen: alien invasions, meteor strikes, nuclear war, a disease killing most of the population (COVID-19 has only killed https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stories_set_in_a_futur...

Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#180

Post by selimthegrim »

jimbob45 wrote: post #64

We struggle greatly to actually understand population numbers in many countries. Consider Afghanistan, where the numbers were in part made up until recently[0]. I really wish we could see more background on these numbers. [0] https://youtu.be/WF3Rkt42wPY?t=266

So they actually won’t hit 40m in a few decades? That’s hopeful
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