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Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences

economist.com

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Re: Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences

#151

Post by faeriechangling »

aemreunal wrote: post #8

As the article points out, having a choice, and not being pressured by society into having kids one doesn't want, certainly is a good thing. On the other hand, as the article notes: > [...] cannot afford to have more children, or because of other policy failures, such as housing shortages [...] the financial aspect is a huge blocker for those who want to have children. We live in a world where the majority of young p…

I don’t buy the hypothesis that it’s simply lack of means driving the lack of fertility. Poorer countries and poorer times both came hand in hand with higher fertility than we see today.

My hypothesis isn’t that it’s not affordable, it’s that people don’t stand to personally benefit from having kids, and birth control is available, so they don’t. If you‘re willing to tolerate any quality of life, well you might just be able to afford kids.

I also think our attitude towards education specifically is a key driver of low fertility. We have invented a system where we literally take the horniest most fertile members of the population and we have them compete in a boundless contest to accumulate more and more prestigious, time consuming, and necessarily more irrelevant accreditations.

Re: Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences

#152

Post by pyuser583 »

aylmao wrote: post #35
pcurve wrote: post #10

Scary part is population collapse is a slow moving train wreck that is hard to avoid. The population projection for decades from now are set in stone. Yet we are powerless to anything about it.

IMO calling it "population collapse" and a "train wreck" is the wrong way to describe it. This isn't so much a collapse, it's a leveling-off. A train isn't supposed to wreck, but populations are supposed to reach a maxima. The fact historical short-sightedness meant we didn't plan for it properly is an issue. The problem here should be framed around our economic system though, not fertility rates.

We aren’t really reaching a maxima.

There are no constraints preventing population from growing other than people not wanting to have kids.

That’s not a normal constraint. That’s … kind of bizarre.

Re: Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences

#153

Post by fredski42 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #77
SamoyedFurFluff wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I googled this and I don’t seem to be wrong. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/13/upshot/american-fertility...

Being pregnant, birthing kids, breastfeeding them, and raising them to age ~3 sucks for a woman. It could just be that evolution did not bestow humans with a sufficiently easy and risk free process to reproduce, hence the price women demand is too high (in an environment where women can actually price their sacrifice in birthing and raising children due to achieving in financial independence).

So, is emancipation to blame?

Re: Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences

#154

Post by faeriechangling »

tomcar288 wrote: post #55
aemreunal wrote: post #8

As the article points out, having a choice, and not being pressured by society into having kids one doesn't want, certainly is a good thing. On the other hand, as the article notes: > [...] cannot afford to have more children, or because of other policy failures, such as housing shortages [...] the financial aspect is a huge blocker for those who want to have children. We live in a world where the majority of young p…

the material standard of living has been dropping and it's now getting to the point where people can't afford shelter any more and thus no more kids. CA's birthrate has already plummeted to a level lower than in the great depression several years ago. What i don't get is why decreasing fertility is always presented so negatively in the media. falling fertility is a huge blessing in the long run. we can't keep growing…

Because the population decline isn’t evenly distributed, it’s happening as the article points out, to rich people. Who of course complain the problem is that they simply don’t have enough money and that’s why they don’t have more kids.

Re: Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences

#155

Post by rayiner »

aemreunal wrote: post #8

As the article points out, having a choice, and not being pressured by society into having kids one doesn't want, certainly is a good thing. On the other hand, as the article notes: > [...] cannot afford to have more children, or because of other policy failures, such as housing shortages [...] the financial aspect is a huge blocker for those who want to have children. We live in a world where the majority of young p…

> As the article points out, having a choice, and not being pressured by society into having kids one doesn't want, certainly is a good thing.

Why? If elevating individual “choice” and doing what you “want” results in a society that literally cannot perpetuate itself, I struggle to see how that’s a “good thing” much less “certainly” so. To me, it sounds like the sign of an evolutionary dead end—one that’s sustainable in the short term only by arbitraging a world order where wealth inequalities drive many people to leave their homelands for these otherwise terminal places.

Re: Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences

#156

Post by [deleted] »

bane wrote: post #133

There are quite a few comments here about "you need money to raise kids". There are similar statements made about housing size, cost, etc. and those end up on "but you don't need 8,000 sq ft to live!" These are, frankly IMHO, bizarre arguments that seem conditioned on socio-commercial training along the lines of "you need a diamond to propose!". Absolutely none of these are true: - People had sex and stable relations…

[deleted]

Re: Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences

#157

Post by faeriechangling »

ChatGTP wrote: post #114
throwaway29291 wrote: post #5

Perhaps, instead, we can see this as a good thing and plan a graceful way back to a more sustainable population over the course of a century. Just yesterday yet another in a long line of reports talked about how humanity has not just bent but likely broken many of the Earth's ecological boundaries that humans and non-humans alike depend upon. We've known this for decades -- mountains upon mountains of studies in ecol…

IMO "AI" and Robotics will completely destroy any chance of this happening. Imagine armies of robots working 24/7 strip mining everything, logging everything, way faster and way smarter than people ever could. This is what we're making, this is what capitalism will absolutely love. There is no sign of any regulation here from governments, they will want it even more, "GDP! GDP! GDP!". I was really hopefully we'd actu…

Your vision is unrealistic. Society would eventually distill down to two bots trading increasingly large amounts of money between eachother until the end of time after first jettisoning themselves into space.

Re: Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences

#158

Post by volkl48 »

aylmao wrote: post #106
klipt wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A shrinking population does eventually have to lead to smaller (or fewer) cities.

IMO this is getting a bit too ahead of ourselves. IIRC, Russia and Japan are the countries with the most population shrinkage, and they've just lost 5 million and 2.5 million people off their peak. - 5 million / 148 million is 3% down from peak for Russia. - 2.5 million / 128 million is 2% down from peak for Japan. Most importantly, Russia's population decline (which started before Japan's) has leveled off. It hit a…

Russia: Eh, no. That's just a temporary blip caused by a lot of the people born before 1945 not having made it that far, so the population was unnaturally skewed young. Few elderly to be dying off at the time because a large portion of those people died off 50-60 years prior.

They're set for sharp decline going forward, and changes in geopolitics look likely to dry up or outright reverse their modest immigrant flows from former USSR countries.

Japan: Is shrinking ever more rapidly, not less.

Re: Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences

#159

Post by dbgev »

dbgev wrote: post #84

Consider Victorian era Britain, when the average person is much poorer, the air is heavily polluted with coal use, and the medical care is almost non-existant by modern standards. Fertility rate is about 5-6. Then it dropped to around 3 over 100 years and has been on a steady downward trajectory ever since. This pattern is broadly replicated everywhere that industrializes. Whatever the cause, it's not due to wealth p…

Throwing money at the problem (e.g. subsidizing healthcare, maternity leave, etc) probably doesn't help. Look at e.g. Australia and other rich western nations. Per capita health care spending is very high. Per capita wealth is very high. Amount of government money spent on various family support programmes is extremely high. Fertility is still low. Lower than poorer nations, in fact.

Partly I think it's because teenagers / young adults are heavily discouraged from pregnancy. Maybe we should as a society push people to marry early, e.g. soon as they finish high school / during uni.

Re: Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences

#160

Post by chii »

LapsangGuzzler wrote: post #144
thunderbird120 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In this table, poverty is being measured as the percent of the population falling below one half of a particular country’s median household income. That is a measure of income inequality... not poverty. Here is a measure of inflation adjusted household income over time for to address the original point[1]. People are not getting poorer [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N

> That is a measure of income inequality... not poverty. Same thing? What is a measure of poverty if not a measure of income inequality? The concept of poverty categorizes people who do not earn enough to live in society. How are these different?

> The concept of poverty categorizes people who do not earn enough to live in society

no, the concept of poverty is one where a person is dying due to a lack of basic necessities such as food, shelter. Everything else is not required, such as luxuries etc. It's just that as a country gets richer, what some people consider as basic necessities seems to expand - it has now become a basic necessity to have electricity, internet, transport - things that a hundred years ago, would've been considered the realms of the aristocracy.

The distance to median income is not a measure of poverty, but a measure of how far you are from the typical person in said country - a relative measure. An absolute measure of poverty is caloric intake, access to water and shelter.

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