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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

#131

Post by blagie »

pjc50 wrote: post #45
blagie wrote: post #31

Earlier 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?"

It's going to become acute well before. It's more like the tragedy of the commons.

You need a tax / working base of some size to produce enough stuff. That simply won't be in place when the current kids are adults, and adults or elderly.

Barring robots and AI -- which admittedly looks like a very real possibility now -- the current adults will not have enough working-age people to support them when they're old.

Indeed, the problem is acute only because they won't be dead. We're all counting on our kids to support us when we're old, only now indirectly, via taxes and mechanisms like social security.

If South Korea simply had 1/4 of its current population, everyone would have more space and resources, and things would probably be okay. Property values and economy would contract in absolute terms, but everyone has more stuff.

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

#132

Post by AnimalMuppet »

kspacewalk2 wrote: post #61

Like any single-cause explanations of the fertility collapse, it's fairly easy to poke holes in it. Usually, you just name countries as a counter-argument. For example, North Korea. Better life now than in the 90s, lower fertility. What hope for the future was there in the 1930s Ukraine, in the middle of an artificial famine that killed millions? Higher fertility than mid-2010s Ukraine (nowadays you can blame the war…

A candidate might be "exposure to estrogenoids". But I'm not sure how that plays with North Korea or Afghanistan.

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

#133

Post by steveBK123 »

kaibee wrote: post #104
steveBK123 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like the costs are U-shaped.. 0-5 childcare, then 18-22 college right?

6-17, the time to actually raise them. It ain't like just because the kid 7 you can leave them at home while both parents go to work.

Right right, but purely mechanically in terms of number of hours in school / after school activities / clubs / sports.. you could most easily have two working parents during that age range.

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

#134

Post by AnimalMuppet »

pjc50 wrote: post #72
kspacewalk2 wrote: post #61

Like any single-cause explanations of the fertility collapse, it's fairly easy to poke holes in it. Usually, you just name countries as a counter-argument. For example, North Korea. Better life now than in the 90s, lower fertility. What hope for the future was there in the 1930s Ukraine, in the middle of an artificial famine that killed millions? Higher fertility than mid-2010s Ukraine (nowadays you can blame the war…

The usual one is "availability of contraception and related education for women". I don't think even the fundamentalist states have chosen to and managed to reverse that. Least feminist most collapsed country Afghanistan is still falling: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/AFG/afg... We still don't know what a "modern depopulated country" might look like, that is a whole country where the population…

Plausible. But what about sub-Saharan Africa? Do they not have access to birth control? (Or are they falling too, just started later?)

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

#135

Post by ryandrake »

gilbetron wrote: post #121

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…

The college prep rat race is insane today compared to when I was a kid. It’s become a 10+ year effort to check all the checkboxes.

1995: Have > 3.8 GPA, take the SAT, get a good enough score, write some decent sounding bullshit on an application essay, and bam: you have a shot at a top school.

2025: Start taking AP courses in middle school. Take and excel at advanced science and math classes for 4 years. Take 3 years of a foreign language and become fluent. Have a 5.0+ GPA. Have at least a 1580/1600 SAT. Have at least a 35/36 ACT. (Realistically you want perfect test scores). Be thoroughly involved in (preferably in a leadership role) multiple extracurriculars or sports teams. Have at least 3 letters of recommendation from prominent people in the community. Write an elaborate essay that checks multiple boxes, and a personal statement. After all this, you have maybe a 3% shot at a top school.

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

#136

Post by dagw »

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.

I suspect the big factor is that the opportunity costs have gotten a lot higher over that past 80-100 years. For the median woman in the 1930s, her expected lifetime earnings if she didn't have kids probably wouldn't be that much higher compared to if she took 10-20 years off to raise some kids. Equally the relative quality of life a single income family could expect wasn't too different from that of a dual income family. Today a dual income, no kids, household have opportunities and possibilities simply not available to such a household in the 30s.

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

#137

Post by binary132 »

It’s interesting to think about the implied expectation that my children, who my wife and I have poured out our time, energy, and resources for, will do their part to support and willingly help the childless, who conserved their resources for themselves, in their old age. If I were looking down the barrel of that future, I wouldn’t feel so confident about that eventuality.

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

#138

Post by bryanlarsen »

I know several couples who had children in grad school. They had university jobs which did not pay very well, but had generous maternity and childcare benefits. They were in a grad program that pretty much guaranteed them a good job once they graduated. They were young and healthy. They stretched out their graduation, but nobody cares if you get your masters/phd in 3 years or 5.

Compare that to what seems to now be the normal pattern of waiting until you're financially secure before having children. It seems to work out OK for the guys, but seems far from optimal for many women. Children later in life is really hard on their bodies, and so many of them seem to blow a giant hole in their career that they never recover from.

There were down sides, of course. Most grad students are terribly poor. But they make it work.

I really think that's something we should lean into and encourage as a society.

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

#139

Post by bell-cot »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #47
pjc50 wrote: post #12

> Nobody knows Have you tried asking them? In particular, asking the women who are making the career-or-children decision? South Korea is invoked, but it seems like the population there has almost perfectly levelled out at just over 51m: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/kor/sou... of which 20m live in Seoul. This discussion comes up a lot on HN, and it seems to be one where there are answers, but…

> This discussion comes up a lot on HN, and it seems to be one where there are answers, but people don't like the answers, so they go back to feigning ignorance. A real interesting data point that made reconsider some of my assumptions on birth rates in developed nations is Israel. There is a really interesting piece (albeit with a conservative bias) that can articulate this far better than I can. [0] [0] https://nat…

The Nat'l Post just says "it's cultural".

Without data on the relative affordability of living and having children in Israel, and on how parent-friendly (especially mom-friendly) life actually is there - that's 95% useless for comparing to other countries.

(Yes, I get that a very pro-child culture could translate to very pro-child policies.)

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

#140

Post by jauntywundrkind »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #117
jauntywundrkind wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

The future being grimdark isn't new, that's true.

But humanity had so much finding out to do. Average material conditions haven't moved steadily forwards, no, but humanity has been overall rising. Science and technology developing, insights to the natural world happening & spreading, cultural elements forming & flourishing. The powers that be in the world were quite regionalized, had their fingers in only small pies: there was similarities across the world but it was characterized more as many individual experiments rising and falling, a variance among societies where many things were being tried in many ways. The difficulty in survivng (for much of this time) was overall characterized by the difficulty of finding food in the world, which was brutal work but work against nature.

Today, things are so different. We all see (or can see if we want) the whole world. Progress has tapered down. The bold efforts for progress like the New Deal and international order (UN) have been worn down or unrepaired (notably the security council sotuation). But more than all that, we have lost the civilizational diversity that fed change and growth. We don't try new things, our systems don't shift: we are locked on course, path dependence amid the vast global network of international trade. The efforts to try new things are small tweaks, of limited scope: Obamacare (much protested), 4 day work weeks, some small scale UBI. We have seen so few attempts to house and feed the populations of the world, so few attempts to broaden education. The millions of enterprises across the world keep being hoovered up into ever larger companies with ever more high up and far off seats of power, the 0.1%'s ascent over us all and control of the world's money supply and markets extends and extends.

The stagnancy and unflinching singular trajectory we are all locked into is pitiful. Humanity feels so a long for the ride of a couple absolutely insane pathological freaks. That loss of diversity, the consolidation of many things into fewer and fewer, is an evolutionary stagnancy which even if unconsciously experienced weighs enormously heavy on the human souls of today. It feels terrible, feeling like as the wheel turns, it's not the rise and fall of civilizations, but now the plight of us all, enmeshed, and knowing that we do so very little have so few levels to pull, so few positions of any real power to steer this.

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