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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

#211

Post by eimrine »

Clubber wrote: post #209
steve_taylor wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone living in megacities is better than urban sprawl, which clears forests and woodlands. More agriculture is required for more people, which means more land clearing. Renewable energy infrastructure needs energy and resources to build and needs to be replaced at EOL. Whether acreage is cheap or not only refers to money, not the environmental cost. And I haven't even said anything about the environmental costs o…

>which clears forests and woodlands. Strictly speaking in the US, it's already cleared. The center of the country, the Great Plains, has almost no trees. Much of the US is pastureland, and you don't have to clearcut a place to live there. >More agriculture is required for more people, which means more land clearing. Which means more efficient agriculture, which we have an abundance of. >Renewable energy infrastructur…

> Which means more efficient agriculture, which we have an abundance of.

Which means more harm for the land. I am a farmer and salting of the land is a problem for me.

> With all the talk about climate change, I've seen very few people do any type of personal sacrifice to change it.

If some person earns 100k annually and another 100M - it means they have to do different sacrifices for holding the climate change. My opinion is that progressive taxation might solve the issue (but I afraid that rich people has both some anticipation of progressive taxation idea and some abilities to obstruct the idea).

Re: Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences

#212

Post by AnimalMuppet »

bombcar wrote: post #60
valleyer wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> will eventually drain cities of young people and those cities will be left behind Where are they going to move to? Or are you saying that there simply won't be any young people anywhere, because they were never born?

Exactly that, it can very quickly snowball and then you just don't need as many buildings anymore. Or look at it this way: https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/20/facts-on-u-s... > There were a record 44.8 million immigrants living in the U.S. in 2018, making up 13.7% of the nation’s population. If the USA was net neutral on immigration (as many people entered as left), the birth rate would be too low, there…

This is a very important point that gets almost no discussion. Two classic "liberal" policy objectives, immigration and affordable housing, are at war with each other.

This is not an "own the libs" comment. Both policy objectives can be morally right, and still work badly with each other.

Immigration makes it much harder to fix affordable housing. That's just reality. It seems to be completely ignored by politicians, though - including those on the right, who seem to have ignored this as a club for beating up politicians on the left.

Re: Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences

#213

Post by lotsofpulp »

airgapstopgap wrote: post #118
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…

Those economic explanations are searching for keys under the lamp post. As Tanner Greer notes[1]: > Structurally the arguments in both countries go like “life is so hard, and things generally so depressing, that I have no desire to bring children into the world.” > In both cases generations previous, who lived through events far more harrowing and whose material circumstances were far worse, did not express similar b…

> And no, it's not entirely about low-education traditionalist groups, certainly not in Israel.

Yes it is, Israel’s high fertility rate is driven by tribes that either explicitly or implicitly influence how many children they want by restricting their financial independence. Same story with all the other countries you listed.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Israel

> The ethnic group with highest recorded TFR is the Bedouin of Negev. Their TFR was reported at 10.06 in 1998, and 5.73 in 2009. TFR is also very high among Haredi Jews. For Ashkenazi Haredim, the TFR rose from 6.91 in 1980 to 8.51 in 1996. The figure for 2008 is estimated to be even higher. TFR for Sephardi/Mizrahi Haredim rose from 4.57 in 1980 to 6.57 in 1996.[30] In 2020 the overall Jewish TFR in Israel (3.00) was for the first time measured higher than Arab Muslim TFR (2.99).

Look at the graph here of the fertility rates of different types of Jews:

https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2022/08/18/...

Re: Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences

#214

Post by lotsofpulp »

tasuki wrote: post #200
Clubber wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's society, not wealth and cost of living, that is causing the dip in children. Yes, people want to party and be free and not have to be tied down and spend money on raising kids. Having kids is a pretty fulfilling experience though. It's not something I understood until I had some. The people that don't have kids will really struggle when they get old and infirm with no one to take care of them.

> The people that don't have kids will really struggle when they get old and infirm with no one to take care of them. I often hear this, but it sounds like nonsense? Why obsess about what happens when you're old and infirm? It's going to suck regardless. One of my great aunts had no kids. She had a great life and lived to 95. As for avoiding struggling, I have a small kid and struggle. If you want to avoid struggle,…

Your aunt’s quality of life probably depended on the labor supplied by a large working age population. Assuming the pace of automation cannot keep up with proportion of working age population declines (i.e. total supply of labor), then it makes sense to predict higher competition for labor, via higher labor AND higher taxes/lower benefits and the political fight for those.

Re: Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences

#215

Post by lotsofpulp »

Eddy_Viscosity2 wrote: post #207

I realize this is from 'the economist' so that means they would of course be thinking about the economy, but it reminded me of those parody news headlines like "Mega-Asteroid to utterly destroy all of Earth, what this means for your 401-k"

It is related because your 401k is for buying labor, and if the price of labor goes up due to shifts in supply and demand, then your 401k is not going to get you as far as you thought.

Re: Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences

#216

Post by LapsangGuzzler »

mullingitover wrote: post #183
LapsangGuzzler wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would also be an absolute horror from an ethical standpoint

Couldn’t be worse than the ethical horror show we’re have today. There are people in positions of power who have created laws with the aim of forcing millions of people to bear pregnancies to term, against their will. This is just taking the coercion out of the equation.

It would absolutely be worse, I can't believe I'm reading a take like this. Automating the creation of humanity could very easily be one of the biggest steps towards creating a slave class born explicitly to fulfill labor demands. Yeah, societal pressure from various angles may nudge people in that direction today, but building technology to serve this purpose explicitly is absolutely worse.

Re: Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences

#217

Post by AnimalMuppet »

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…

> What she's paying for is not having a baby, but reducing child and mother mortality.

True. But in fact, most of us will pay a lot for those things.

Re: Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences

#218

Post by Balgair »

New parent here in the US. My views on this have been swinging wildly over the past months/years, and it's been 'fun' to experience.

Are kids too expensive to have? Hells yes. We're at ~$400/wk for daycare per kid. And compared to others in my social circle, that's pretty cheap! Now add in all the toys, daycare, near weekly MD visits, etc. Kids are really expensive.

But here's the thing. You love them so damn much that you, somehow, make it work. I know people that can't afford the cost of daycare. So they reach out to family, church members, neighbors, etc and make it work. Same is true with most of the costs for kids. They reach out, it sucks for a while, and then they make it work, somehow.

Look, I know what the child poverty rates are in the US, they are appalling. I know what the hunger rates are, similarly, horrible. Mortality rates for birth in the US? Awful. Pick a statistic, the US sucks at it. Sure, okay?

But, somehow, we want more kids.

We just love them. I haven't slept a full nights sleep in years. I'll get 3-4 good hours in and I'm good to go now. Something that would have wrecked me for the next day, I barely bat an eye at. All the poop, snot, fluids, are not a 'thing' anymore. The incessant cries from teething barely phase (you get a sense of a 'real' cry pretty quick). Parenthood is a heck of a ride, especially with the covid-bounce-back in diseases.

I don't know how to explain this to anyone here that is on the fence. I'm more than happy to try to field questions though.

Re: Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences

#219

Post by Clubber »

eimrine wrote: post #211
Clubber wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>which clears forests and woodlands. Strictly speaking in the US, it's already cleared. The center of the country, the Great Plains, has almost no trees. Much of the US is pastureland, and you don't have to clearcut a place to live there. >More agriculture is required for more people, which means more land clearing. Which means more efficient agriculture, which we have an abundance of. >Renewable energy infrastructur…

> Which means more efficient agriculture, which we have an abundance of. Which means more harm for the land. I am a farmer and salting of the land is a problem for me. > With all the talk about climate change, I've seen very few people do any type of personal sacrifice to change it. If some person earns 100k annually and another 100M - it means they have to do different sacrifices for holding the climate change. My o…

>Which means more harm for the land. I am a farmer and salting of the land is a problem for me.

No it doesn't we're already efficient. We've known how to sustainably farm for generations. Efficiency comes from mechanization and computerization and both of those are already done. We're so efficient the government pays farmers to not grow crops. What do you farm?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_rotation

>it means they have to do different sacrifices for holding the climate change.

That sounds like an excuse to not do anything. This is pretty common.

>My opinion is that progressive taxation might solve the issue

It won't as long as the government is corrupt. Plus, you have to figure out how to get polluters like China to stop.

Re: Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences

#220

Post by eimrine »

Clubber wrote: post #219
eimrine wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Which means more efficient agriculture, which we have an abundance of. Which means more harm for the land. I am a farmer and salting of the land is a problem for me. > With all the talk about climate change, I've seen very few people do any type of personal sacrifice to change it. If some person earns 100k annually and another 100M - it means they have to do different sacrifices for holding the climate change. My o…

>Which means more harm for the land. I am a farmer and salting of the land is a problem for me. No it doesn't we're already efficient. We've known how to sustainably farm for generations. Efficiency comes from mechanization and computerization and both of those are already done. We're so efficient the government pays farmers to not grow crops. What do you farm? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_rotation >it means th…

I am groving most foods I consume, not for business but mostly for pleasure to deal with the soil.

We (the humanship) are efficient but not sustainable if to consider few decades only (because intensive farming makes more harm to soil per one dinner), but if to consider at least few hundreds years then the situation is opposite - we are sustainable by the sacrification of efficiency. That's why I consider your argumentation as faulty.

I understand a mechanization point but do not understand how computerization can help me, computerization means just counting faster, store more information and probably self-driving tractors instead of man-driving ones.

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