What happened in the 1960s in the USA?[1] This seems to correlate with women's emancipation and the rise of contraception. Are there any other theories?
1. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Total-fertility-rate-in-...
The Future Is Too Expensive – A New Theory on Collapsing Birth Rates
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Re: The Future Is Too Expensive – A New Theory on Collapsing Birth Rates
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your life, and the world around you, is objectively better than it would have been in the 1930s, when birth rates didn't fall. So while you may see this as a valid reason/excuse for yourself not to have kids, it doesn't explain broader fertility declines.
Higher living standards also raise expectations. Young people of today would view the 1930s as barbaric.
My dad grew up with hand-pump well water, an outhouse, a four-room house his dad built on cinderblocks that was too small for both the girls and the boys so the boys slept in the barn (and I think maybe they had a dirt-floor house at first, that one may have come after he was born), no electricity in his early years, no phone until he was a teen and I think it was a party line until after he moved out. Pretty sure they still had a one-room school house, too (small rural town).
This was the late '40s through '60s, not even the '30s. In the US.
Re: The Future Is Too Expensive – A New Theory on Collapsing Birth Rates
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
Housing in the West was basically turned into another pillar of retiree funding. Old people extract tremendous financial gains from younger generations by either a) selling them decrepit real estate at extremely high prices or b) collecting very high rents on buildings that are even older than themselves (even in the US, which is the king of corporate landlording, they are a small minority; most landlords are natural…
No matter the system you'd end up with the working age population tending for the children and elderly. I don't think that in it self is a problem. You could argue around implementation details though ...
(Near-)retirees are typically the largest voting bloc and usually the only one experiencing any growth in most of the West. It is unsurprising that they get to set policies that solely benefit them at the expense of everyone else, including those that are yet to be born and those who will never be born because of those policies. And why would they care about the future? Retirees, by revealed preference, don't, and why would they? It's not their future they're destroying. Indeed, they're making quite a nice (short) future for themselves by bleeding societies dry.
Re: The Future Is Too Expensive – A New Theory on Collapsing Birth Rates
#114Lack of affordable housing, job insecurity and the looming threat of AI and automation, unaffordable healthcare, unaffordable higher education, inflation, trade/culture/cold/proxy wars, societal unrest and thanks to social media the prospect of a global trend towards the collapse of democratic institutions and a march towards authoritarianism. Sure, let me just bring a couple of new humans into the world—people I’m l…
Your life, and the world around you, is objectively better than it would have been in the 1930s, when birth rates didn't fall. So while you may see this as a valid reason/excuse for yourself not to have kids, it doesn't explain broader fertility declines.
Directionality is the key. Do we see things as getting better, staying the same, or getting worse?
Right now, the future has very very few signs of promise. Humanity is behaving attrocious, being a menace and a monster is amazingly popular, science and free thinking are being cancelled and rounded up by government goons. The very rich prey ever more on everyone else.
Re: The Future Is Too Expensive – A New Theory on Collapsing Birth Rates
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
The human species has eight billion people. If the birthrate is still low when it's four billion, or two billion, I'll start to have concern for the species.
Would that it were a game of SimCity. If/when we get to 4B, 2B, it will be only after displacements of whole populations, mass-starvation, and likely brutal war.
That is quite possible, but I was thinking more that several generations of people not reproducing above replacement rate isn't really a disaster by itself.
If we don't have war, displacement, and mass starvation, and people still decide just to not have as many kids for a few generations, the species will survive (and from a resource consumption standpoint the planet will probably be better off).
Re: The Future Is Too Expensive – A New Theory on Collapsing Birth Rates
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, the population has not "levelled out" in Korea. These dynamics have a pretty long timeline. To give an extreme example, if you, for example, have a city with 10M old people who can't have kids anymore, you can reliably predict the population will be 0 once they pass. The demographic pyramid of South Korea is scary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_South_Korea#/m... Learn how to read these plots and w…
> There are almost no kids in South Korea. That page says 11% of the population is under 15. Rather like global warming, the question is "what are the old people of today prepared to change in order to avert a problem that only becomes acute after they are dead?"
And a population where, say, everyone uniformly lives to 75 should have 20% of its population under 15. So that page says that South Korea has just over half as many kids as it should have for a stable population.
Re: The Future Is Too Expensive – A New Theory on Collapsing Birth Rates
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your life, and the world around you, is objectively better than it would have been in the 1930s, when birth rates didn't fall. So while you may see this as a valid reason/excuse for yourself not to have kids, it doesn't explain broader fertility declines.
Directionality is the key. Do we see things as getting better, staying the same, or getting worse? Right now, the future has very very few signs of promise. Humanity is behaving attrocious, being a menace and a monster is amazingly popular, science and free thinking are being cancelled and rounded up by government goons. The very rich prey ever more on everyone else.
But is it substantially different? The writing from the 30's is extremely pessimistic. In the 50's and 60's everybody assumed that we were all going to die in a nuclear war. And going back in time you can find numerous examples of where the future was worse than uncertain, where an awful future for your children was guaranteed. As an extreme example, many children were voluntarily born into slavery.
I would argue that pessimism about the future is the rule, and the American optimism about the future in the 20th century was the exception.
Re: The Future Is Too Expensive – A New Theory on Collapsing Birth Rates
#118This post argues that collapsing birth rates aren’t just about housing or money — they’re a rational response to the sense that the future is unstable, meaningless, or even dangerous. It introduces the concept of “temporal inflation” — the idea that just like money loses value in hyperinflation, time loses value when people can’t trust the future. Would love to hear if this resonates with others.
I think treating it as a rational process and looking at the reasons behind makes sense, as opposed to "attitudes", in the sense that attitudes and culture are shaped through some processes.
I think that in modern societies children are a bad investment, but not only for this reason. If anything, I think that fertility rates were going down even before uncertainty for the future was up. Another commenter talked about urbanisation, and that in an agricultural society children were an investment, while in an urban one a liability. Some efforts focus on reducing the cost of having children, via social benefits etc, but the core reasons behind making having children actually costly is rarely addressed.
Re: The Future Is Too Expensive – A New Theory on Collapsing Birth Rates
#119Lack of affordable housing, job insecurity and the looming threat of AI and automation, unaffordable healthcare, unaffordable higher education, inflation, trade/culture/cold/proxy wars, societal unrest and thanks to social media the prospect of a global trend towards the collapse of democratic institutions and a march towards authoritarianism. Sure, let me just bring a couple of new humans into the world—people I’m l…
The lower birthrates are also happening in countries like Sweden/Finland/Norway where higher education is "free" and healthcare is also "free" so those are not the reasons why women opt out of motherhood, or at least not the complete reasons anyway. The trend is global so the main reason is most likely something global. In this case couldn't it be simply that motherhood is no longer attractive to women and they want…
My read of your first paragraph is that despite quality of life in the Nordic countries being overall better, it’s still not enough to offset the sacrifices associated with becoming parents.
If you frame this from an economical standpoint, there simply isn’t a single country in the world that adequately compensates parents (especially mothers) for the costs of raising children. These costs are numerous and not just financial — there’s also massive opportunity costs, and that’s to say nothing about the tradeoffs a parent is forced to make (“do I spend more time with my kid or spend more time working to help ensure they have a stable childhood and bright future?)
Simply put, if we want people to raise families it needs to make economical sense to do so. What exactly that looks like can be debated, but it’s likely something along the lines of one of the parents receiving a midrange part time or full time paycheck (depending on if they decide to stay at home or not) on top of the other parent being able to work an hour or two less each day without taking a hit to their paycheck.
Otherwise, it makes more sense to either accumulate wealth until the last biological second and then only have 1-2 children or simply have none at all. That’s what the current system incentivizes.
Re: The Future Is Too Expensive – A New Theory on Collapsing Birth Rates
#120I think a more humane (and likely more successful) way out of this is to not try to convince the childless to have children at all, but to try to convince those with children to have more.
So, I'll pose this question to HN and see what you all say: If you have kids, why not more? (if you're too old/young, just imagine you're the right age)
I'll go first: We'd both like to have more kids, but we honestly don't have the time for another. They really do eat up loads of your time. I already only have ~15 minutes at the end of the day for myself, another one would make me go negative (somehow). Part of this is our situation: my folks need some intensive memory care and my In-Laws aren't really interested in any childcare duties. We spend about an hour a day in the car shuttling about the ones we have, so more destinations isn't too bad, but would be tougher. Monetarily, we're more than fine compared to our neighbors, education should be well and paid for through college (very lucky here, we know). We can and do afford weekend activities. Our religious group is alright, they care, but there is just too many old people that need help and really suck all the charity-time out of the group as is (read: mostly useless for child-care/assistance). So, we're probably going to stick at what we have right now.
I'm free to be questioned about my choices, so don't feel bad asking, though I'll try to keep some anonymity if that is alright.