101–110 of 154 posts
It's the economy, stupid.
You're right. We've gotten too rich. Every bit of data seems to show that the wealthier we get, the fewer babies we have. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1328574/fertility-rate-w...
Wage growth compared to cost of living has been flat to negative for decades. Outlook for the future is low. Of course people aren't having kids.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
As I pointed out already, it is not in fact endless, and most of those poorer countries are steadily becoming richer. South Korea used to be poor as shit, not so much anymore. Eastern Europe has improved massively, parts of it have caught up to parts of Western Europe. China isn't nearly as poor as it was a few decades ago either.
I was thinking of countries more like India and Nigeria, both of which, despite becoming richer and having lower fertility themselves, have populations projected to exceed China's, and both projected to become too hot to live in without big problems. Its not literally an "endless" supply, but its easily enough to cover gaps in the west. If fertility fell 75% in the west, could probably fill it with people from those…
Solution is simple and well-known but requires balls: separate childbearing from marriage politically, and treat it as a full-time job. Institute flat tax charged from all adult population and use it to pay salaries to all women (not "families") with children based on number of children without regard to "quality", variating (guaranteed inflation-adjusted till age of 18) salaries, and taxes, according to the birthrat…
>this will be exploited by the poorest underclass women who will have lots and lots of children to milk the taxpayer (and that's fine!) It blows my mind that people think this way. You're going to get a lot of children who are wanted for fiscal benefits, but are unwanted from a maternal benefit. So yes, number goes up, but at what non-fiscal cost?
Children were genuinely profitable. Not anymore so birth rates plummet.
Nobody can seriously reason how they are going to increase the overall quantity of children while at the same time increase quality of these children('s lives). It's a tradeoff.
But there is a brighter side, if the whole society still benefits from being economically, demographically and culturally solvent, that may offset that tradeoff's quality of life decrease for these children. As we all see it's quite crappy to be a Little Emperor until you are 18 and then realize that education debt + real estate prices = 8===э
Hungary did succeed in raising its fertility rate, but in the last few years it's also been falling. https://www.statista.com/statistics/332502/fertility-rate-in... https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?page=&lo... I suspect that a couple years is not enough to draw any conclusions.
It wouldn't surprise me if policies to boost birth rates partially (mostly?) just shift births forward for a few years -- you have a number of people currently waiting to have kids but putting it off, and the policies induce them to have kids now instead of in 1, 3, 5 years.
Second: even if this were true, it would still be a net win. Babies now are better than babies 3 years from now.
Also, women have a limited number of fertility years. This would give them the chance to have more.
I don't understand worrying about falling birthrates. There are 8 billion of us. I think it's a little premature to be worrying about the extinction of homo sapiens. Something tells me when we're not all working 40+ hours a week scrabbling for the same 20% of the resources, just maybe our birth rate will sort itself out.
There’s a quiet part I am going to say out loud. On a global scale, population decline isn’t an issue. The problem is /where/ the population decline is happening. Most of the global birth rate is made up by countries with low GINI indexes, low education, and high religiosity. Most of the decline is in high GINI index, highly educated, secular countries. This population shift has a seriously high risk of causing the g…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s a quiet part I am going to say out loud. On a global scale, population decline isn’t an issue. The problem is /where/ the population decline is happening. Most of the global birth rate is made up by countries with low GINI indexes, low education, and high religiosity. Most of the decline is in high GINI index, highly educated, secular countries. This population shift has a seriously high risk of causing the g…
Capitalism eating itself?
The open question is whether we're watching a possible regressive backslide... Or the global community pushing forward towards whatever comes after capitalism, because there's clearly a huge slice of those eight billion people that capitalism is doing few favors.
The ratio of housing cost vs real income almost tripled over the last 20 years in Sweden. Add a looming climate crisis and a self-fulfillment-oriented culture and you get very few new babies.
> The ratio of housing cost vs real income almost tripled over the last 20 years in Sweden I think this is all that needs to be said on these articles. (There's a lot more that _could_ be said, such as how few actual birthing HN readers there are, but I think the economics is really simple at the root of it.) Besides, even the countries with really the worst outlook and conditions aren't falling all that fast. Russia…
A lot of real estate is being built and most of it is "low cost" economy class, which in the end lets a lot of people who want that, own an apartment and have children. Home ownership statistics are also great.
The pay is meager but at least jobs are there, meaning that if you own an apartment or a house (often inherited from your ancestors in some form) and is employed, and can fall back to Babushkas' safety nest, you can have children and that will not ruin you. Also, actual child care benefits are fine. Long parental leave et all.
Russia also actually saw a lot of economic growth since both 1999 and 1991. Perhaps the most of all ex-USSR countries, save for Baltic states, but in case of Baltics there's a serious job crunch as far as I know. The pay is nice but securing it becomes a headache. In the end it's easier to move westwards.
I'm not sure why you would assume Russian outlook is particularly bad, especially if we're talking before the 2022. After 2022, too early to say.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hungary recently promised a lifetime income tax break to women who have 4 or more children. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/11/have-four-or-more-babies-in-... Have any other countries seen such a strong fertility rate bump as Hungary? I haven't seen any long trends that look that promising!
Russia has a pretty interesting one. [1] It's been rising every year since 1998, but it comes with a huge asterisk. They had a good fertility rate (by Western standards at least) up until the 1990s. But the collapse of the Soviet Union and the migration to a market economy in the 90s sent everything into chaos, and the country ended up in defacto anarchy for about a decade. But I still think it's relevant, because it…