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Forget about overpopulation, soon there will be too few humans

maartenboudry.be

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Re: Forget about overpopulation, soon there will be too few humans

#91

Post by bcaxis »

silverquiet wrote: post #72
timmg wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many of my acquaintances simply cannot afford the costs of multiple children. I can't speak for your friends. But I think that when someone says "can't afford" what they really mean is "I'd rather spend that money on something else". Some people literally can't afford children. But those in the middle class (or better) in the US certainly can . It would just take money away from other parts of their lifestyle: the…

A luxury lifestyle is cheaper than a child. The last estimates I’ve seen are around $300K (and that was before the recent bouts of inflation) to raise a kid and that didn’t include college. So that’s like a Lamborghini, right? Or a lot of fancy vacations. And that’s just one kid; you might get some economies of scale with more, but the marginal costs are there too.

If this was actually true I'd be bankrupt many times over.

Re: Forget about overpopulation, soon there will be too few humans

#92

Post by Depurator »

These are shallow arguments built on the good old techno-optimist view that technology will solve all our problems by perfecting resource extraction.

"With novel technologies like precision fermentation and vertical farming, we could further shrink our “foodprint” by at least three quarters, thus freeing up more space for nature to flourish."

That is just silly speculation. For example, vertical farming may just be a vehicle for impact investors in silicon valley to diversity their portfolio into the new hot mega trend of saving the planet.

Its hard to justify a high-tech intensive verticle potato farm as net effective than just having half the mouths to feed from a traditional potato field.

Re: Forget about overpopulation, soon there will be too few humans

#93

Post by bcaxis »

silverquiet wrote: post #85
timmg wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that is fair. I don't know if it is "rational" (for some sense of that word): kids will excel if they are, simply, loved. Sure, going to great schools is nice. But having a supportive home is way more important than those expensive things.

Are you going to send your kids to a less than great school?

I paid for school myself. No help from my parents.

If it is paid for by others, will they really value it? A lot of children just don't value what is handed to them.

Re: Forget about overpopulation, soon there will be too few humans

#94

Post by vehicles2b »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #59
gklitz wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you believe that people are perfectly fungible and that an Indonesian man will become accepted as Japanese This is never going to happen going from the firsthand accounts I have heard from non-ethnically Japanese people who are by all accounts Japanese. As in born and raised in Japan, Japanese as first language, Japanese culture, norms etc. Japanese society is simply too racist or xenophobic at its core. If you…

There are, quite literally, third and fourth-generation Korean-Japanese people who are still not considered fully Japanese. The most famous example is probably: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yoshihiro_Akiyama This guy is a fourth-generation Korean-Japanese athlete, but was still never considered Japanese by the Japanese fanbase, he was frequently booed and heckled, and he went on to compete under the S.Korean flag. A…

For people who are looking for a book to read and also interested in learning about the immigrant life in Japan, I can highly recommend the historical fiction novel “Pachinko” by Min Jin Lee. It follows the story of multiple generations of a Korean family that moves to Japan sometime after the Japanese annexation of Korea. It describes in detail the struggles mentioned in the above comment across multiple generations of Japanese who don’t have a home in either Korea or Japan. (Another example of such are immigrants from Pyongyang, and returning after the Korean War would mean going back to North Korea.)

Re: Forget about overpopulation, soon there will be too few humans

#95

Post by timmg »

silverquiet wrote: post #90
timmg wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't have kids. Wasn't able to. But I went to subsidized Catholic schools through junior high. Then a public high school. Then a "state" university -- where we had "in-state" tuition that was reasonable. My dad was an auto worker. My mom was a nurse that ended up with a career in administration as I got older. (He was also an alcoholic and may parents divorced -- but that's a longer story.) We were fine. I did just…

I would have thought that great (or perhaps at least very good) schooling was a bit orthogonal to whether they were public or private. At least I feel that I went to great public schools, but lived in a city where some people went to terrible public schools. That said, I think most people want better for their children; certainly my blue-collar parents cajoled me via all their means to go to school so that I wouldn't…

> I would have thought that great (or perhaps at least very good) schooling was a bit orthogonal to whether they were public or private.

Actually, I guess that is true. I grew up in a blue collar area with pretty bad (or maybe just "average") schools. So I do (erroneously) relate public schools with being bad :)

I certainly would want more for my kids if I had them. But I (and most people) do have more than my parents did.

Re: Forget about overpopulation, soon there will be too few humans

#96

Post by silverquiet »

bcaxis wrote: post #91
silverquiet wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A luxury lifestyle is cheaper than a child. The last estimates I’ve seen are around $300K (and that was before the recent bouts of inflation) to raise a kid and that didn’t include college. So that’s like a Lamborghini, right? Or a lot of fancy vacations. And that’s just one kid; you might get some economies of scale with more, but the marginal costs are there too.

If this was actually true I'd be bankrupt many times over.

I'm sure it depends on how you do things. I think the housing square footage and vehicle requirements a lot of people say they require seem way too high to me. But I suppose there are some regulatory requirements that must be met these days - I was looking at an old station wagon with some buddies and noted that it had what I called the "unrestrained child tub" in the back. I bet you could fit six kids in there easy since there were no seat belts at all. Obviously that wouldn't fly today. Nowadays, it's "I need an SUV with a 3rd row for the kids".

And houses today are also probably a lot bigger than they need to be; often justified as a requirement for families. I don't think it's really necessary, but I seem to be an outlier with my 950 square foot house.

I imagine you've made more pragmatic choices, but I think there is also an element of luck; a lot of people get bankrupted by medical needs, and each kid is a reverse lottery ticket there. Speaking as someone who was once a kid with a lot of medical needs that didn't always get addressed, I can tell you that that does happen sometimes. And I needed to go to school; with my medical issues, the trades or military or whatever was never an option, so someone had to pay for that.

I guess all I can say is "shit's tough"; sometimes you get lucky, but I never seem to.

Re: Forget about overpopulation, soon there will be too few humans

#97

Post by silverquiet »

timmg wrote: post #95
silverquiet wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would have thought that great (or perhaps at least very good) schooling was a bit orthogonal to whether they were public or private. At least I feel that I went to great public schools, but lived in a city where some people went to terrible public schools. That said, I think most people want better for their children; certainly my blue-collar parents cajoled me via all their means to go to school so that I wouldn't…

> I would have thought that great (or perhaps at least very good) schooling was a bit orthogonal to whether they were public or private. Actually, I guess that is true. I grew up in a blue collar area with pretty bad (or maybe just "average") schools. So I do (erroneously) relate public schools with being bad :) I certainly would want more for my kids if I had them. But I (and most people) do have more than my parent…

> But I (and most people) do have more than my parents did.

Are you a baby boomer? Because this is not true for my generation, the millennials[0]

I mostly think generational "conflict" is foolish (I mean, I get to inherit from the wealthiest generation in the history of the world, so it's not all bad I guess?), but it is worth considering that people who have come of age and lived through different periods of history will be shaped differently and have different views of the world. If those views lead them to believe that having children is not desirable, than so it is; I don't know that there's really much to be done in the end anyway.

I'll hazard a guess that you're Gen X based on our brief conversation here, which I believe was actually the first US generation to see themselves worse off on their parents than average, but I think the difference is almost negligible? Certainly it's bit of an in-between generation, squeezed by the bulges of the Boomers and their echo generation, the Millennials, and I'm honestly not too up on the dynamics there.

[0]https://www.businessinsider.com/millennials-net-worth-versus...

Re: Forget about overpopulation, soon there will be too few humans

#98

Post by snapplebobapple »

A_D_E_P_T wrote: post #25

I've spent an awful lot of time in both Croatia and Japan, and the problem looks more or less the same in both places. Croatia has had sub-replacement fertility for decades -- plus the migration of young people to other EU countries that offer higher salaries, or to Zagreb if they can't find a job in Denmark or Germany. Japan has had sub-replacement fertility for decades -- plus the migration of young people from sma…

Immigration is not the solution. Identifying what policies make your nation an ecological sink where humans go to die childless is the solution. Immigration is a temporary solution that has negative consequences vs just having a birthrate above replacement and it only works as long as some place has a very high birthrate. Which is increasingly untrue as more countries catch the low birth rate disease pioneered in the first world.

Re: Forget about overpopulation, soon there will be too few humans

#99

Post by vehicles2b »

timmg wrote: post #22
philips wrote: post #4

The article is heavy on criticism of population decline and light on an argument of why it is so bad. As a parent in the USA I also don’t buy the argument that it is all education and birth control driving these changes. Many of my acquaintances simply cannot afford the costs of multiple children. And for others climate anxiety makes them question the future.

> Many of my acquaintances simply cannot afford the costs of multiple children. I can't speak for your friends. But I think that when someone says "can't afford" what they really mean is "I'd rather spend that money on something else". Some people literally can't afford children. But those in the middle class (or better) in the US certainly can . It would just take money away from other parts of their lifestyle: the…

I’d like to know if the following are relevant to the discussion. Here is the fertility rate by state: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/fertility_rate/fer...

Here is the cost of living by state: https://www.consumeraffairs.com/homeowners/states-with-lowes...

Some interesting states are West Virginia.

Cost of living is hard to calculate and I don’t know the best source. This one might be better: https://www.epi.org/resources/budget/budget-map/

Idk if the fertility rate is factored into the cost of living calculator … if it is then I guess the measure isn’t relevant.

Re: Forget about overpopulation, soon there will be too few humans

#100

Post by kthejoker2 »

silverquiet wrote: post #72
timmg wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many of my acquaintances simply cannot afford the costs of multiple children. I can't speak for your friends. But I think that when someone says "can't afford" what they really mean is "I'd rather spend that money on something else". Some people literally can't afford children. But those in the middle class (or better) in the US certainly can . It would just take money away from other parts of their lifestyle: the…

A luxury lifestyle is cheaper than a child. The last estimates I’ve seen are around $300K (and that was before the recent bouts of inflation) to raise a kid and that didn’t include college. So that’s like a Lamborghini, right? Or a lot of fancy vacations. And that’s just one kid; you might get some economies of scale with more, but the marginal costs are there too.

Yeah this wildly off.

4 kids, typical tech salary ladder career / upper middle class lifestyle, my marginal costs are maaaaybe another $40k year in total ... and I get about a $25k tax break for having them.

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