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What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

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Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#261

Post by alexey-salmin »

louwrentius wrote: post #179
bpbp-mango wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

having kids is, by default, right and moral.

You made that up. It’s very easy to think of circumstances where it would be very immoral because of all the suffering the children will have to endure.

Moral norms evolve to ensure survival of it's bearers.

Basically under no circumstances it will be immoral for the population at large to have kids because such moral norms will quickly cease to exist. Eather because it's bearers cease to exist or more likely because they move on to more suitable moral norms.

I say "more likely" because humans obviously didn't get extinct despite bringing kids into the world of suffering for about a million years.

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#262

Post by Havoc »

Yizahi wrote: post #122

War, duh. No, really, the only reason for that happening was a total war. War caused devastated countries to collectively sign Bretton-Woods which affirmed USD as a reference currency and allowed USA to externalize a lot of it's issue, both immediate and future. Allowing this externalization, plus major political influence in the first decades after the war, plus rapid innovation accelerated by the war allowed USA to…

That was my first thought too - USD world reserve - but other countries had similar prosperity and child booms so can’t be that. At least not primarily

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#263

Post by itake »

dan-robertson wrote: post #226
itake wrote: post #161

My $0.02 is being a mom sucks. In modern relationships, men just want to work and come home to a cooked meal and clean house, but their wives are working just as many hours the men are. Having kids means tension in relationship, unpaid labor by the woman, and stress parenting kids. Even if the husband steps up, he still can't breast feed for 3 hours per day. Pregnancy is really terrible on the woman's body. Post-part…

You say ‘modern relationships’ but I feel like you’re describing a stereotypical 1950s relationship in that paragraph. The lack of contrast surprises me.

in the 1950s, your choice for life partner is the 50 kids in your high school class. Women got married below the age of 25 and didn't have careers.

Today, Tinder and Instagram gives you access to literally the entire planet of single people and the illusion that you have the chance to be with one.

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#264

Post by XorNot »

crtified wrote: post #178

My anecdotal experience, which illustrates how changing societal norms may be contributing. Around 1960, my grandmother scandalously fell pregnant with my mother in her late teens. The child was adopted out - well, not out - in. To her own grandmother, to be raised as a "younger sister" to her own mother. Around 1980, my mother scandalously fell pregnant with me, in her late teens. Despite family disapproval, the chi…

[flagged]

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#265

Post by itake »

lisbbb wrote: post #254
itake wrote: post #161

My $0.02 is being a mom sucks. In modern relationships, men just want to work and come home to a cooked meal and clean house, but their wives are working just as many hours the men are. Having kids means tension in relationship, unpaid labor by the woman, and stress parenting kids. Even if the husband steps up, he still can't breast feed for 3 hours per day. Pregnancy is really terrible on the woman's body. Post-part…

Being a Dad really sucks, too--I'm unemployed at 52 at what should be the height of my career when my kids really need someone who is making money so help pay for college tuition and my wife has cancer, so save it how rough breast feeding is when breast feeding only last about a year or so anyways.

I'm sorry you're going through that. I don't mean to discount the man's issues with modern dating. We are trying to do our best, but its still really hard.

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#266

Post by angmarsbane »

mcoliver wrote: post #50

Having children younger. This builds villages and generates the community flywheel. The problem now is that it's close to impossible for the vast majority of younger people to buy a home with a single income. So the choice becomes dual income and farm out the raising of your children (requires even more money and negates the benefits of enjoying your children which is part of the reason to have them in the first plac…

It's even less about buying a home now and more about just affording a second or third bedroom in a rental. If you look at job centers, even when they do build multi-family they aren't building family sized units.

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#267

Post by snowwrestler »

I find it funny when people talk about the baby boom and then also worry about maintaining 2.1 babies per couple.

Like, it’s right there in the name: a “baby boom” was an unusual surplus of babies. And that obviously means that when all those babies age long enough, there will be an equal sized unusual surplus of deaths. And while that is happening, even steady fertility will look like less than replacement.

But now that that 100% predictable thing is happening, everyone is freaking out.

The same thing happens with discussions of the Social Security Trust Fund, which was intentionally inflated to pay for the baby boom retirement. And now that it is deflating—as intended!—everyone is acting like it’s a crisis.

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#268

Post by hraedon »

endtime wrote: post #166
mcoliver wrote: post #50

Having children younger. This builds villages and generates the community flywheel. The problem now is that it's close to impossible for the vast majority of younger people to buy a home with a single income. So the choice becomes dual income and farm out the raising of your children (requires even more money and negates the benefits of enjoying your children which is part of the reason to have them in the first plac…

In terms of incentives, Hungary has attempted this with tax policy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_policy_in_Hungary Seems to be working!

"Working" is a pretty generous description of a policy that, at a cost of 3-4% of GDP, has raised the fertility rate from its low of 1.23 in 2011 to about 1.55 today. That 1.5ish TFR is pretty stable, too: there's been almost no improvement since 2016.

No country has figured this out, and if getting to (just!) replacement rate requires healthcare-like expenditures as a % of GDP, it is genuinely unclear to me how we do that on a global scale.

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#269

Post by itake »

Analemma_ wrote: post #237
triceratops wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In modern relationships, men just want to work and come home to a cooked meal and clean house As a man in a "modern relationship" I strenuously object to this. I mean yeah I want that (who wouldn't?), but I know I'm not going to get it because my partner has a job too so we have to help each other. Literally every one of my married male friends also regularly cooks and cleans.

Since you're posting on Hacker News you're probably in a pretty high income bracket, and your married male friends probably are as well. High income brackets have seen pretty steady marriage rates, and as someone also in this bubble, they tend also to have men with more egalitarian views on marriage. But the flipside is that high-earners tend to delay childbirth-- they have to, because you need a lengthy period of ed…

thanks for sharing! I have definitely heard the "waiting for a stable career" from a few partners, despite me having a great situation.

I will take a look at your linke tho

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#270

Post by tayo42 »

lisbbb wrote: post #249
Qem wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry for your loss.

What loss? It was not her but her "girlfriend" which I don't even know how to correctly interpret these days. Is she saying it was her love interest or just a friend who is female? Heaven knows! Kids aren't even dating anymore hardly. My son (15) is having a horrible time navigating social interactions. The girls at his school are all horrible people, it seems (not true, I'm sure, but I constantly have to hear about…

Idk if that's anything new. There was a movie about this 20 years ago
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