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

science.org

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

#291

Post by neutronicus »

akudha wrote: post #211
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…

Today we are at over 7 Billion. Suppose the population falls to say, 2 Billion or something like that. Is that a big problem? Like, what is the optimal number of people that this planet can support, without wreaking havoc on other species that also live here? 2 Billion is still a very large number... This might sound cruel, but the less humans the better.

There's always an incentive to make more young people to dump grunt work onto.

So without environmental pressure populations are going to grow

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

#292

Post by gromitss »

otikik wrote: post #257
gromitss wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As cheap labor goes down, we are going to be forced into massive automation. There are plenty of challenges around this but the primary problem is going to be the massive concentration of wealth into a few hands. There has to be some form of redistribution that plays well with game theory and doesn’t sour a powerful segment of the population into being against it.

"is going to be"?

Yes, we are nowhere near what it is going to take.

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

#293

Post by gromitss »

adolph wrote: post #252
gromitss wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes I can. A child unborn is not a child killed so it doesn’t fit your classification of “genocide”. We need about a tenth of the humans we currently have on the planet unless we figure out interplanetary colonization. This is a way that is almost entirely painless and can be achieved with almost no coercion. It’s a panacea we desperately need.

> We need about a tenth of the humans we currently have on the planet Which tenth?

And evenly distributed slice is my answer to your troll post Adolph.

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

#294

Post by jay_kyburz »

paxys wrote: post #251
cute_boi wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

do we need that labor pool considering we are progressing in technology? 100 years ago there were no factories we see today etc. But day by day with technological advancement we are automating lot of things. So I really don't think we need that much labor we required yesterday. Is population problem really a big deal considering we already have a big elephant in room already like climate change, scarcity of resources…

While technology has definitely made things better over the last few decades, we are still very, very far from the post-scarcity society that we like to envision. The majority of people on the planet today are still doing back breaking labor in order to survive.

I always thought that when our western governments talk about this problem, they are not concerned with the back breaking work that needs doing, but the amount of tax being paid by younger generations not enough to cover pensions and all the expensive medical conditions old people have.

I think its mostly a financial problem, not a physical labor problem.

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

#295

Post by tsycho »

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…

On the other side, unfettered population growth for the purposes of maintaining a sufficiently large proportion of young people (in a world where people are living longer as well) is basically a Ponzi scheme. We’ll have to eventually stabilize to a sustainable demographic distribution; the earlier the better.

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

#296

Post by xxpor »

gromitss wrote: post #245
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…

As cheap labor goes down, we are going to be forced into massive automation. There are plenty of challenges around this but the primary problem is going to be the massive concentration of wealth into a few hands. There has to be some form of redistribution that plays well with game theory and doesn’t sour a powerful segment of the population into being against it.

Or productivity goes up, since we don't need a massive population doing menial tasks. Just like every time someone has said this for the last 300 years.

Won't someone think of the people picking the seeds out of cotton?

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

#297

Post by frosted-flakes »

woodruffw wrote: post #277
frosted-flakes wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? This policy should incentivize stay-at-home mothers to re-enter the workforce after their children are grown, because no income tax is essentially a pay raise compared to people who aren't eligible.

An incentive that is completely offset by the professional and career consequences of leaving one's industry for nearly two decades. Many women struggle to resume their careers after just a year or two of absence -- are we supposed to seriously believe that Hungarian employers will shrug off an entire child's development worth of absence? There is always an incentive to re-enter the workforce, in the sense that you (…

Better than stay-at-home mothers not re-entering the workforce. Which is the alternative.

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

#298

Post by glitchc »

closeparen wrote: post #233
lotsofpulp wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume people not consuming as much as the people in the EU and USA have a goal of consuming as much as the people in the EU and USA.

Prices show that people in the US have a goal of living lower-footprint lifestyles in walkable urban areas. We can't always get what we want. But which goals are attainable depends on policy choices.

They very much show the opposite over the past couple of years, ever since the pandemic.

Housing prices in suburban and rural areas have exploded across North America. People seem to want their own slice of land distant from others.

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

#299

Post by ridiculous_leke »

sildur wrote: post #82

> When famine struck, U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson initially refused to deliver food aid, citing the country’s high birth rate. I hope there is more context with that statement, because it sounds downright evil.

Well, India was pro-USSR during the cold war and openly opposed US's involvement in Vietnam war.

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

#300

Post by ridiculous_leke »

ffwszgf wrote: post #276
Hernanpm wrote: post #272

I agree it is happening globally, I'm from South America and there are statistics of birthrate fall as well in my country. As personal experience in my company ~90% are single childless and we are in ours 30s 40s.

Latin Americans are a lot more receptive to birth control and sterilization compared to Africans/Arabs/central Asians

Has anyone studied the reasons behind this?
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