Third of Japan's 18-year-olds women may never have children: study • Hacker News Board

Re: Third of Japan's 18-year-olds women may never have children: study

#31

Post by bryanlarsen » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 2:28 PM UTC

Barrin92 wrote: post #10

Qem wrote: post #6

That means about 1/3 of male population may never have any of them as well. What haunts me most is to ponder about the world we get when a lot these 18 years old become 75+ years old people with no close living relatives and their social support network mostly gone before themselves. A world of single or no children also leaves people with no uncles, aunts or cousins.

Doesn't take much imagination given that substantial parts of the developed world haul their parents into nursing homes where care is outsourced to the market. The communal, familial support system is already gone.

Nursing homes still need to be staffed, and staffing them 24/7 requires a lot of staff.

Re: Third of Japan's 18-year-olds women may never have children: study

#32

Post by xyzzy4747 » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 2:29 PM UTC

Blikkentrekker wrote: post #16

DrThunder wrote: post #2

I feel like the col is just an excuse for people that don't really want them anyway. Throughout history people have had children with very little material possessions. Talk to someone who went through the great depression about how you don't have enough money etc. to have kids. I think we've just brainwashed ourselves into believing you need to be ultra wealthy to give kids a good childhood. If you literally cannot a…

Why would people make up excuses? They simply don't want them. My “excuse” for not having children is the same “excuse” I have for that I'm not a firefighter: I have no interest in it.

Curious: have you ever considered going to a therapist about this? It's not psychologically normal to never want children. I wouldn't be surprised if it was also co-morbid with other psychological issues.

Re: Third of Japan's 18-year-olds women may never have children: study

#33

Post by hunglee2 » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 2:29 PM UTC

The collapse of fertility is a universal, cross cultural outcome of economic development.

It seems that birthrate only rebounds after some sort of catastrophic society meltdown - total wars or famines - which reset the board at country level and maybe also reset priorities at individual level. Government interventions have a very poor record of success, though we can watch Hungary under Orban with interest - his plan to give women who have 4 or more kids lifetime freedom from income tax - is the sort of radicalism worth trying.

For investor types, might be worth looking into tech eco-system for artificial womb technology. Seems like a solid bet that we may need to start manufacturing humans at some point, sooner rather than later

Re: Third of Japan's 18-year-olds women may never have children: study

#34

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 2:31 PM UTC

orangepurple wrote: post #20

zpeti wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a surface level explanation but there must be deeper reasons why people aren’t having children. Maybe our lives are so comfortable we just don’t want the inconvenience of children. Maybe we’re so obsessed with momentary hedonism that doing something extremely hard for 18 years doesn’t seem worth it. Maybe there are so many generational traumas built up over thousands of years that now that we have som…

I suspect many more are blisfully unaware of what will happen to them when they inevitably end up in a nursing home. I'm not sure what you mean by generational traumas but if you mean what I think you mean they can be overcome. My grandparents vehemently hated certain specific ethnicities till the end because their brothers and sisters and parents were executed ("disappeared") by their soldiers and secret police. My…

[deleted]

Re: Third of Japan's 18-year-olds women may never have children: study

#35

Post by PaulHoule » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 2:31 PM UTC

mellosouls wrote: post #5

This is obviously sad where it is counter to the womens' hopes, but it would be interesting to know what the figures are for men. Previously discussed reports about the imbalances in dating market dynamics (a significant number of young males being without sexual partners) would imply potentially more childless men, but they aren't mentioned here.

Women are the limiting factor in reproduction.

Potentially a man could donate his sperm to a sperm bank and father thousands of children, a woman takes a minimum of 9 months and probably needs some downtime and it all has a big physiological impact.

The reason why women have always born the brunt of efforts to regulate sexuality is because if you control 90% of the women you control 90% of the reproductive capacity, if you control 90% of the men that last 10% could impregnate all the women.

This classic covers the social breakdown and feeling of crisis in the 1970s

https://www.amazon.com/Why-Nothing-Works-Anthropology-Origin...

(which we are doomed to feel the echos of from time to time sense then) but also has a good review of how different cultures have regulated sexuality from time to time such as the gay-positive Mesopotamians who were contemporaneous with the ancient Hebrews who definitely were not.

Re: Third of Japan's 18-year-olds women may never have children: study

#36

Post by ZoomerCretin » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 2:33 PM UTC

DrThunder wrote: post #2

I feel like the col is just an excuse for people that don't really want them anyway. Throughout history people have had children with very little material possessions. Talk to someone who went through the great depression about how you don't have enough money etc. to have kids. I think we've just brainwashed ourselves into believing you need to be ultra wealthy to give kids a good childhood. If you literally cannot a…

It's about time poverty, not material poverty. The Japanese work too many hours to care for children, and the cultural expectations for mothers are very traditional and unpopular.

Re: Third of Japan's 18-year-olds women may never have children: study

#37

Post by throwawaysleep » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 2:34 PM UTC

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #13

I'd also note that plummeting birthrates are also happening in countries that are known for great social welfare, lots of government support for new mothers, and a more egalitarian society overall, like Finland. A lot of people simply don't want kids. Kids take a huge amount of time and investment for about 2 decades of one's life, and that can have a large, significant negative impact on quality of life, especially…

I ponder this question myself on the edge of Gen Z and my life is simplified tremendously if I just essentially pause it in high earning young person mode.

Money is abundant for travel and anything I want. I don't need to figure out dating. Means I don't need to figure out everything from conflict resolution to clothing. I don't need to struggle to buy a ton of housing. I have friends/a sister who will have kids I can just play rich uncle to. I can retire decades early due to overemployment and spend an absurd amount of money every year doing whatever I want.

The Peter Pan life has a lot going for it. I am in my mid 20s and my life can essentially be on coast with a ton of fun for the rest of my life.

Re: Third of Japan's 18-year-olds women may never have children: study

#38

Post by logicchains » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 2:34 PM UTC

seneca wrote: post #23

The lack of sub-replacement rate fertility is happening almost everywhere. It's just hidden in many western countries by mass immigration, but even that is a temporary solution as the source countries face population decline themselves. The knockon effects from this are hard to anticipate, but the known ones are pretty scary. Modern economies don't work when there are more elders to care for than there are working ad…

>Population collapse may be the headline of the century if we can't figure out a way to turn it around.

It will turn itself around eventually because some subsets of society keep having large numbers of children in spite of the pressures of modernity, such as the Amish and ultra-orthdox Jews with fertility rates of around 7-8. These cultures will eventually come to dominate as the lower-fertility cultures die out. It's the law of natural selection: genetic and cultural traits that lead to more children will eventually result in those traits becoming dominant in a population. Right now we're just in a temporary situation where lots of people exist whose genes/culture made them have more children in the pre-modern era but not in the modern era, and natural selection hasn't yet finished eliminating those genes/cultures from the pool.

Re: Third of Japan's 18-year-olds women may never have children: study

#39

Post by zpeti » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 2:34 PM UTC

logicchains wrote: post #26

This is a problem that'll solve itself eventually; the desire to have children is to some degree inheritable, so the people with genes that make them still likely to have children in modern society will outbreed the people with genes that make them unlikely to have children in modern society. Similarly the cultures that make people more likely to have children will outspread those that make people less likely to have…

This is not clear at all. Perhaps people who don't want kids will die out, but if this is a cultural issue that affects our basic human instincts, it could be something that is extremely hard to fix. Perhaps in modern society, whatever you do, people only want 1-1.5 kids?

If that's the case, without a radical cultural change, humans are basically going extinct.

Re: Third of Japan's 18-year-olds women may never have children: study

#40

Post by taylodl » Thu, Aug 31, 2023, 2:34 PM UTC

bryanlarsen wrote: post #31

Barrin92 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't take much imagination given that substantial parts of the developed world haul their parents into nursing homes where care is outsourced to the market. The communal, familial support system is already gone.

Nursing homes still need to be staffed, and staffing them 24/7 requires a lot of staff.

Whatever happened to Toyota's palliative care robots? Remember about 15 years ago when they were doing all those demos and said they'd have them out within 10 years and would be $15,000??

Honestly, even if they were $50,000 it'd still be a lot cheaper than a nursing home and would allow people to live at home.