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Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences
251–260 of 273 posts
Re: Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences
#252[dead]
Re: Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences
#253[flagged]
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Re: Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences
#254[flagged]
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Yes, it's a chore. The more children an average woman has the less time she has for hobbies, work, friends, or even a moment of peace. It's like being a 24/7 house cleaner for the next decade or two, no sane person wants to be that.
As for the rare rich "girl", if she is born into money, It's not likely she will give birth to more than 2-3 kids.
I doubt you will understand my position, since it's extremely rare for men and boys to "take care of a precious life".
Re: Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences
#255As 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…
To offer a escape from the clutches of the global renteering uperclass could provide a vital avenue to a vibrant future for many countries.
Re: Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
A shrinking population does eventually have to lead to smaller (or fewer) cities.
More likely - dried out husks of small cities that shrivel up and die. Look to the US rust belt as a historical indicator. For modern times, climate change has made it impossible to insure some areas of the US (Norther CA fire country, Florida hurricane corridor, etc). Insurers are going out of business or just not paying claims.
Small cities died because of increased crop farming efficiency, factory livestock farming and decreased heavy industry/manufacturing in the US.
I absolutely love the doomerism in your second paragraph. If you listen to those who buy into the whole climate armageddon thing, you would think that by 2030 large swaths of the US are going to be uninhabitable or under water.
No, the West isn’t going to burn away. We just need to resume good forestry practices and not build houses in precarious places.
Similarly in FL, this has little to do with “climate change” but rather an elimination of Government subsidized risk taking so the full insurance cost is bore by the property owners and not taxpayers.
Re: Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences
#257I've been wondering a lot about fertility lately. Almost every married woman that I know of my age group is seemingly unable to have children, despite, in most cases, wanting to. This is often accompanied by PCOS, thyroid problems, or other strange but undiagnosed illnesses. The one exception to this seems to be those of Italian American vintage. Having grown up in Rhode Island I know quite a lot of Italian Americans…
For reference, large scale studies have indicated that infertility rates have plateaued from 1995 to 2019 [1]. Studies from years prior to 1995 indicated that fertility rates were actually _declining_ up until 1995.
I've noticed a pretty common trend of assuming low fertility rates are automatically related to infertility rates, especially in discussions here on HN. The fundamental issue with low fertility is really just that less couples are starting families, and those that are starting families are having closer to 1-3 children instead of 4-7 like in times past (independent of infertility issues).
[1] - https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/newsroom/news-releases/...
Re: Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences
#258Even if you can afford a child, some people might not want to bring a child into a dystopian nightmare.
Re: Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
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,…
> Immigration makes it much harder to fix affordable housing. That's just reality.
Wasn't overall population growth higher back when housing was more affordable?
Re: Global fertility has collapsed, with profound economic consequences
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> building technology to serve this purpose explicitly is absolutely worse The end result of the current trends in population trees will be the collapse of many nations, and pretty much a four horsemen situation that'll follow. Supplementing the unhealthy fertility rates might help stave this off, if we're lucky, and there's no reason to believe it would create any worse of a wage slavery system than already exists.…
> there's no reason to believe it would create any worse of a wage slavery system than already exists.
Yes there is. As terrible as the system is today, people willingly to choose (in most cases) to bring children into the world and (in most cases) accept the responsibility of raising them. Who raises the kids in a world where they're bred via technology? There's a long and ugly history involving church and state-run homes for orphaned kids. You'd be creating a system that would be ripe for exploiting kids at a systemic scale we've never before seen (and to be clear, we've seen global child sex abuse scandals).