Live data from Hacker News

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

science.org

411–420 of 427 posts

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

#411
post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the margins, sure, there suburbs are gaining a little relative to the city. On the whole, though, cities are vastly more in demand than suburbs.

Disagree strongly. Just look at suburb housing prices in the Bay Area versus within SF itself. People want to be close to cities, but if it means giving up a single family home they’ll gladly live in the suburbs.

Where are you seeing this? San Francisco condos run $1077/sqft, more than the most expensive county for single family homes, San Mateo, at $1022/sqft.

Correspondingly the price per square foot in Manhattan is about $1300, while Queens and Staten Island run not even half that.

People may choose to put the savings from less desirable environments into larger homes. But there’s no reason condos shouldn’t be as large as houses. Urban environments are just so scarce that the only way even pretty rich people can get them is to compromise on space.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1234783/average-sales-pr...

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

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cultures that feel threatened tend to produce lots of babies to give them a better chance of survival =).

I'm not worried about my survival, I'm worried about my theoretical children's survival

But, by not having children, you ensure their demise.

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

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 referenc…

> "death with COVID ≠ death from COVID" My favourite take on this: "I have Type 1 diabetes. I am healthy enough to run ultramarathons. If I get attacked by a bear & the ICU has trouble managing my blood sugar while caring for my bear attack wounds...and I die... the bear is the cause of my death. "[1] But it's irrelevant since these meta studies always use excess deaths over average because of reportings issues (both…

This could be solved if we used tagging in the data. E.g. everything should be tagged that played a role. Bear, ICU skill, T1D, etc.

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

#414
post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not seen as bad. There's nothing wrong with mothers being at home, if they want to be. The observation is that women, like all beings with agency, don't always want to be at-home mothers and we (modern, liberal societies) broadly agree that people shouldn't be forced or economically coerced into doing things they don't want to do.

We as a society broadly agree people shouldn’t be economically coerced into doing things we don’t want to? That’s not true in the least. We use economic incentives to drive desirable behavior everywhere.

Coercion is a high bar, one that not every incentive or nudge clears.

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

#416
post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're going to die regardless. Is it better to die younger from lack of health care than die older with dementia and bed sores? I've only witnessed the latter. Doesn't seem like something I'd like to go through.

I think that's a very defeatist/nihilistic point of view. Since we're all going to die eventually anyway, we should aim to improve our standards as much as possible so we or our kids get to enjoy a better old age than what old people get right now. Our ancestors have gone through much worse to build the better world we enjoy today.

sort of what I was saying though. Life in a home doesn't seem enjoyable.

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

#417
post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that isn't the alternative. The alternative is having an incentive for having a sufficient number of children to prevent population decline, combined with separate subsidies for child support (professional childcare, etc.). Even better, drop the emphasis on mothers: allow either parent to claim the tax deduction, or devise a structure in the deduction is graduated with a return to the workforce. There are plenty…

Exactly just outsource raising of the child so we can extract the maximum economic benefit from every citizen. Don’t waste your time raising the next generation! That doesn’t boost our GDP!

This is a pretty ridiculous distortion: not only is childcare not "outsourcing" of one's child's development, but it's also one of the oldest and most traditional vocations. It predates our modern economic structures by thousands of years.

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

#418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the entire world had south Korean levels of fertility it would take... 70 or 80 years to end up with a couple billion people again. In reality the problem right now is we are adding about 100m people living on two dollars or less a day every year but nobody has any real solutions for getting them above the poverty line or slowing the growth of that segment.

What’s wrong with what we’ve been doing? Emancipate and educate women, vaccinate and educate children, and suppress the worst of male-supremacy ideologues, and fertility comes down.

100mish people are born on two dollars or less a day and it's not slowing down , that's what.

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

#419
post #398
post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes because I identify with sentience on earth in general even though I identify with being human more

This makes no sense. What does who you identify with matter?

Because identity and values/"what matters" are intertwined.

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

#420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cynicism is a massive contributing factor to my vasectomy. Don't underestimate doom and gloom :)

Cultures that feel threatened tend to produce lots of babies to give them a better chance of survival =).

A cultural response is cultural, there are no laws of nature here. It’s entirely possible that the availability of cheap hormonal birth control changes everything.
Post reply on HN