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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

#121

Post by gilbetron »

Two things I think are the main drivers, one is easy access to effective birth control (I consider this a great thing) and that is often mentioned. I think the other thing, though, is it is much easier to be entertained these days. People don't understand how boring it was 30+ years ago. I'll go back and play games with my son from when I was young and the games almost always are much more dull than I remember.

There is a profound amount of entertainment and education at our fingertips, much of it available literally at all times. This includes adult entertainment, so it's easy to alleviate, uh, "needs". A lot of kids in the past came about from boredom.

Also, because of the access to information, a lot of people realize that raising a kid is, for most people, kind of a sucky job. I love my son and would do it all over again, but the actual job of parenting has a lot of boring stuff that pushes me back into social spheres with people I gladly left years ago. There are some people that love the job through and through, but I just don't think most adults are like that. And we can easily understand that as an adult now. Plus the pressure to execute perfectly is intense. My parents had me, my mom carried me around until I was school age, and then basically my life was my own after that - they cared about me and were good parents, but they only vaguely were paying attention to me (I was a 3rd child and generally good kid, so it was easy). GenX experience through and through. These days? My son is in high school and the insane rat race for college is something my son and wife and I are just saying "no thanks" to. He'll go somewhere and figure something out, but kids are literally spending 60-80 hrs a week on school and "extracurriculars". Too much pressure!

Really, there are just all kinds of factors now present that all push down the birthrate.

Re: The Future Is Too Expensive – A New Theory on Collapsing Birth Rates

#122

Post by drewbug01 »

Balgair wrote: post #120

I 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 th…

> I 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 think you've largely answered your own question, by reflecting on your own circumstances. I suspect there are plenty of people who would not mind having more kids per se, but simply cannot afford to (in terms of time, or in terms of money, etc).

We are planning on a second kiddo, and I can barely fathom how we'll make it work with what little time we have left. At least in the US, we simply don't have a society that makes it easy or feasible to have kids - financially or otherwise.

Re: The Future Is Too Expensive – A New Theory on Collapsing Birth Rates

#123

Post by UncleMeat »

pjc50 wrote: post #97
Tade0 wrote: post #85

I don't think it's that and it's more about how conscious a decision it is nowadays. It's not the future - it's the attitude towards it. Teen pregnancies are at an all time low everywhere in the developed world and it's not just thanks to the availability of contraception, but also a generational shift in attitudes towards risk taking. Overall people are having children later and therefore fewer because they feel tha…

> Teen pregnancies are at an all time low everywhere in the developed world and it's not just thanks to the availability of contraception, but also a generational shift in attitudes towards risk taking. Yes - and this was a policy objective! People hated teenage pregnancy. Religious organisations condemned it from the pulpit. The Catholic Church in Ireland had a little gulag for teenage mothers: https://www.theguardi…

Yeah it is absolutely baffling to me that the discussion of teen pregnancy never seems to come up in these "oh no birth rates are down" discussions. Like, you told us that a substantial portion of these births were bad for society (and I generally agree) and now you are freaking out that the number of births went down?

Re: The Future Is Too Expensive – A New Theory on Collapsing Birth Rates

#124

Post by bryanlarsen »

Kivern7 wrote: post #76
le-mark wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We are still grappling with how you incentivize and promote parenthood when the future costs of each child are 6 figues. Six figures? False because poor people have been having children forever and continue too.

Children are an asset for net tax-recipients, but a liability for net tax-payers. I grew up in a very poor area and heard firsthand teenage girls excited over how much welfare money they can receive for babies. It's an inversion of the natural order. It's state-manipulated breeding incentives between different classes of people. It's literally eugenics.

Children are a massive asset for tax-payers. Money is a claim on the production of a country. Without that production, money is just a useless piece of paper or useless entry in a bank database. And for a country to produce, it needs people of working age.

More concretely, let's suppose you're 92 and you need full time nursing care. You still have retirements savings so should be able to pay for it. Now let's say there are more people needing nursing than there are nurses. What happens to the cost of that nursing? It goes up until some cannot afford to pay and demand balances supply.

Without a working age population, your retirement assets will be inflated away into worthlessness.

Re: The Future Is Too Expensive – A New Theory on Collapsing Birth Rates

#125

Post by UncleMeat »

gwd wrote: post #68
spicyusername wrote: post #59

Everyone is going to want to reach for their favorite modern problem, but every point in history is fraught with sociopolitical and economic challenges. Today is not special, in that regard. My personal favorite reason is just that this is the outcome of birth control. At no other point in history could people decide how many kids they want, and when you give people the choice, they just aren't going to choose very m…

Birth control was available to the Baby Boomers's parents, and the result was... a baby boom. My two grandmothers had 7 and 5 children respectively in spite of the availability of birth control.

Griswold was in 1965. We had laws banning birth control.

The Pill was first used in 1960.

Yes, condoms existed. But they were stigmatized, sometimes criminalized, and substantially less effective than hormonal birth control methods developed and popularized during the 60s and 70s.

Re: The Future Is Too Expensive – A New Theory on Collapsing Birth Rates

#127

Post by rightbyte »

formerly_proven wrote: post #113
rightbyte wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wh…

My experience joining a political party as 3X yo is that the (near)retirees are eager to throw mandates at you because you are young.

The early 20s and 5X+ are the ones that have more time for politics. I would not read some inter-generational class warfare into that.

I wouldn't broadly blame generations for things. It is like that silly Karen meme service workers have. We are part of the problem too.

Re: The Future Is Too Expensive – A New Theory on Collapsing Birth Rates

#128

Post by UncleMeat »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #53
shadowgovt wrote: post #9

Earlier 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.

It's amazing that we had oodles of "population growth will cause mass-starvation, we need global policy to limit the population to the current size" worries on the run up from 2B to 8B and now we've got "population decline will cause mass-starvation, we need global policy to limit the population to the current size" worries.

And the global population isn't falling. Birth rates are only below replacement among certain groups.

Re: The Future Is Too Expensive – A New Theory on Collapsing Birth Rates

#129

Post by bryanlarsen »

Balgair wrote: post #120

I 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 th…

Talk to upper middle class people that have 4 or more children. They'll likely tell you that life gets easier after the 4th and subsequent children. I've heard of fathers describe it as switching from "man-to-man defence" to "zone defence". Your experience and parenting skills no longer have to be learned. Older children help with care for the younger. And not inconsequentially, your expectations rationalize.

My wife wanted more than our 2 children, but medical reasons prevented us from having more.

Most of my children's friends are in 2 child families. IMO middle class people tend to stop at 2 for financial reasons. OTOH, we know several couples who are both surgeons or in similar occupations. They tend to have either 0 or 4+ children.

Re: The Future Is Too Expensive – A New Theory on Collapsing Birth Rates

#130

Post by aaomidi »

kspacewalk2 wrote: post #70
drooopy wrote: post #21

Lack 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.

Statements like this are mostly useless.

People don’t measure happiness in aggregate. Just because I can fly anywhere in the world in a few hours, doesn’t make up for something like loneliness.

There’s categories of “happiness with life”, and some of them are much, much worse than a century ago.

It could very well be that those carry a lot more weight than tech.

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