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Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate

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Re: Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate

#361
post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I heard the most bizarre & unexpected opinion first-hand from an obgyn. Prior to this I was firmly in the nurture camp of nature/nurture, but this obgyn's opinion on adoptions shocked me out of my complacency. I am hoping Sapolsky's latest book may shed some light on the subject without the Wade/Murray "bell curve" implications.

Do you really think genetics don't matter? Depending on the study, IQ heritability is between 60-80%.

Okay but that just implies that having a wide distribution of IQ is well adapted to our natural environment.

Re: Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate

#362
post #92

I have 3 kids with one due at the end of the year. All are from the same woman and we’ve known each other since being teenagers. We are planning to have 5-7 total. They really add a richness to life. It’s fun to see people stare when we go out.

I have 2 kids and I wouldn't mind more, but where do you put them? Our house has 3 rooms. If we have bunk beds they're probably going to be annoyed as teenagers. Maybe I'm thinking about this too hard lol

Re: Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate

#363

Something has deeply deeply changed in society for a fertility rate to go from 6 to 0.8 in 60 years, the living memory of a single life. Before, society grew with the average working age person only needing to half support an elderly retiree. Now, that same working age person will need to support more than 2 elderly retirees themselves, over 4 times the resources. Has it occurred to people that, maybe, modern fertili…

Or maybe it means we had too many children and are now trying to go back to an optimal population size.

Re: Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate

#364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you provide some of these sources for folks open to educating themselves?

You can look for M. Bairoch's research for instance ("Révolution Industrielle et Sous-Développement") Some other put the "start" of industrialization way before, at the end of the Renaissance. As I understand it, there was a progressive flow of industrialization that was clearly visible in Belgium/Netherland, and also started brewing in the other surrounding countries, but the "Industrial Revolution" term was coined…

Everything I can find says that it (industrial revolution) spread from the UK to continental Europe, which a massively oversized chunk of industrial tech coming from the UK. I'm happy to have my mind changed but the general consensus is that it did start in the UK. The book you cite is in French and appears to have very little in the way of reviews or anything? One book against the consensus of the field is certainly not without precedent but it's kind of difficult to evaluate.

Re: Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate

#365
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It gives a child a normal childhood and saves them from a system of foster care that can never fully meet the needs of a child?

Much respect to those who adopt, but bloodlines matter

Nurture > nature. Bloodlines are an archaic form of currency since there's no influence/treasury/crown to inherit.

Re: Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate

#366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then why the 1. Inverse relationship between household income and fertility rate? 2. Enhanced child tax credit (US), child benefit (UK), Medicaid (kid gets sick?) 3. Insanely progressive taxes on income?

I think to some degree, what the parent says is true, but I think it has more to do with how much richer parents feel they need to pour into getting 'the best' for their child. Decent preschool and daycare is expensive. Private education is expensive, or test prep to get into good selective private schools. Tertiary education is extremely expensive, more so if you're trying to pad your kid's application with a bunch…

Yes the system doesn't want children, if the children have an easy time we just add more roadblocks. I can't wait until everyone has a PhD before they can start their career as a barista.

Re: Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate

#367
To me, goverments 'green' measures are just patches that won't work, but are very likely to ruin the lifestyle of the middle class, while the affluent keep theirs untouched.

At the same time, the only real solution that is population decline, is 'spontaniously' happening without any policies like one child per couple, and so.

If the economics of an older population are much easier to solve than our progressive destruction of the environment... Why not incentivice policies to keep people childless?

Re: Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate

#368
post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Addiction, and specifically OUD is complicated, but there is real evidence that genetics plays a sizeable role in the physiological dependence side of it. However the main risk factor for trying and then abusing opioids, for example, is trauma, typically but not only in childhood. Basically, it’s both nature and nurture, as most things are. Where the percentages lie for both, I don’t think we know yet.

Trauma is deeply intertwined with genetics. For instance parents who have genes that increase impulsivity are more likely to e beat their kids exposing them to trauma, the kids are more likely to do dumb things that expose themselves to trauma, and the kids are more likely to do impulsive things like try drugs. So it's hard to disentangle what portion of the effects of trauma are direct and which are confounds.

Oh yeah, definitely. It's a complicated mess of variables, that I don't even know how one would begin to tease them apart, but that's also why I firmly come down on the side of "it's both" -- as not all trauma is directly from biological parents, for example.

Re: Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate

#369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Wanna guess what happens in that welcoming environment? My guess is people feel inclined to make some babies. I would assume the exact opposite given that this will probably probably crank up pressure on working-aged people as more and more old people need to be supported by fewer and fewer young. I would also assume a significant exodus of the young to places with actual opportunities rather than a country sized re…

This feels like a non-issue. The boomer generation is probably one of the wealthiest generations in history. And the younger generations have for the most part been fairly underemployed. Feels like there is more than enough slack in the labor markets to handle the extra work, and taxes could be targeted towards the wealth assets of the boomers (stocks, real estate, etc...).

A lot of the people doing physically demanding labor are also outside the country.

Re: Korea shatters its own record for world’s lowest fertility rate

#370
I think that this trend is self-reinforcing: When you have fewer children, you need to activate a larger part of your young population for work. A big pool (the largest?) is women who traditionally don't work or work less than men. Working makes it difficult to raise children (and might make the decision to have them difficult, too). In consequence, you end up with less children this year and run short of workers 20 years later.

Child care will never fully remove this effect for three simple reasons: Child care workers are scarce (as they are, traditionally, mostly women), children can only deal with child care for a certain amount of time (it is really exhausting for smaller kids), and getting the kids to and from child care acts like extra hours of unpaid work for the family.

So if a state wants to have a more stable local population, I think it will be inevitable to subsidize families more directly: Reduce working hours for parents (equally, of course) and fully pay the difference (would be really interesting to do a cost/benefit calculation here). Give out other perks (cheaper mortgages, maybe parking space or other permits, first choice when it comes to vacation, maybe the parents get a vote for their children and so on). Finally, the state might even turn to penalizing child-less adults or "nudge" people into having babies (e.g., by taxing contraceptives).

If you don't agree with such an active role of the state, consider the alternative: active control of migration. This in turn brings its own set of problems that all nudge the state to take authoritarian measures (for instance border control ala US-Mexico).

Consequently, any industrialized state has to take an active role regarding demographics and I think it will look somewhat dystopian in our eyes.

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