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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?

#681

Post by coldtea »

superice wrote: post #508
d0gsg0w00f wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But people's anecdotes are part of their life experience. I trust my personal life experience over anything I read, and if I trust a person, I value theirs over anything I read too. That's just how humans are.

I get it, you like stories of individuals. We should figure out a way you can listen to more stories, so you can form an even better opinion! Perhaps we write them out, shorten them a bit. Or perhaps group them by similarity. And then if we count the types of story per category… and boom, we’ve invented statistics!

And ...boom! we lost the nuance, and shoehorned together disparate elements into a bunch of measurements, as if those explain everything (as opposed to needing explanations and a working theory themselves, and often fitting multiple theories about how they came about).

Not to mention the cases where the numbers are collected or analyzed in bogus ways (from wrong methodologies and false reporting, to p-hacking), and people are asked to cargo cult respect them anyway...

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

#682

Post by coldtea »

superice wrote: post #612
mensetmanusman wrote: post #534

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know how to use statistics to tell nearly any story though, and I would love to trust statistics… It has to do with unknown unknowns.

And I know how to tell any story, it's called lying. Whether you are lying with statistics or lying in a story does not matter. In the end it all comes down to whether you can validate what you've been told. Most people however will skip validation in favor of 'this sounds reasonable' and most people have a worse intuition for statistics than for stories. That's on them though, let's not blame statistics for that sho…

I'd prefer a lie with a story over a lie with statistics.

At least the former doesn't pretend to be scientific or objective, it's just a story.

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

#683

Post by the_real_cher »

Mawr wrote: post #623
ivape wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe it has something to do with the “you are not good enough” treadmill the modern world has everyone on. I don’t think people of yesteryear contemplated if they were ready to start a family. I don’t think they contemplated if a job was the “right fit”, and I doubt they scoured the world looking for their soulmate. So, if you live in our current time period where you are never “complete”, then you may have a hard t…

No need to contemplate anything if your run-of-the-mill average job lets you support your entire family and purchase a house.

People are acting confounded that the birthrate is goong down.

But if people cant afford kids they wont have them.

Its like super simple.

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

#684

Post by coldtea »

Aeolun wrote: post #539
UncleMeat wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Abortions are not the primary reason why teen pregnancy is way down. There's actual data, you know. Fewer teen pregnancies is a reason why birth rates in the US are declining. But it isn't driven by abortion. And it is insane to me that I'm now seeing this "oh actually teen pregnancy wasn't so bad" thing pop up all over the place.

> actually teen pregnancy wasn't so bad I mean, it was a thing for most of human history. There’s a reason biology makes you capable of having children at a young age. Isn’t it kinda bizarre that we think it’s weird?

People today think a 18-19 year old (which is still a legal adult in most places and for most purposes, can drive, go to war, live alone, work, and was always considered an adult throughout history) is "a child".

Of course kind of makes sense when 30 and 40 year olds also behave and live like children and find "adulting" out of their capabilities.

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

#685

Post by coldtea »

npteljes wrote: post #620
Aeolun wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> actually teen pregnancy wasn't so bad I mean, it was a thing for most of human history. There’s a reason biology makes you capable of having children at a young age. Isn’t it kinda bizarre that we think it’s weird?

>There’s a reason biology makes you capable of having children at a young age Biology and evolution doesn't really have a huge baseline. You basically have to survive until you reproduce successfully. Successfully here meaning that the offspring also has to do the same. If this is sustainable - the species is viable. But, us humans like to know better. That's what the entire civilization is all about. And on the path…

>But, us humans like to know better. That's what the entire civilization is all about.

You mean the kind of knowing better that led us to destroy the environment, and appears to be removing whole populations from the gene pool with way below subreplacement rates?

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

#686

Post by 2OEH8eoCRo0 »

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…

My grandmother was scandalously had. If abortion had been legal her entire family tree wouldn't exist. Me, my dozen or so cousins, my father, aunts, all gone.

That's why my father is against abortion.

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

#687

Post by acdha »

swagasaurus-rex wrote: post #436
vjulian wrote: post #408

What we need are 25/30+ year-olds who are completely at ease with sex, who have no hang-ups, and who know how to form strong relationships because they’ve been doing it and having sex freely since they were teenagers. Instead, we have a generation of adults of parenting age who are deeply uncomfortable with sex and emotionally unskilled in relationships. And that’s a big part of the problem. I’m saying a large swathe…

This is an unusual take. People in the past made 4-10 babies per family and they did it by being celibate until marriage. Sex positivity and casual relationships were not normal, and grandparents encouraged marriage before sex, probably because the grandparents knew they’d be partially responsible for raising the kid and wanted to ensure two parents to help care for their grandchildren

This is completely a-historical. Humans have been having sex outside of marriage since that concept was invented and you’re projecting an idealized Western European view on an entire world with a complex history of different cultures. What you’re describing isn’t even true of European history (e.g. read up on hand fasting or the high rates of marriage after pregnancy) and it’s even less so globally. Marriage is in part a financial relationship, and that drive a lot of premarital sex: if men were expected to make a significant monetary contribution (dowry, house/land, etc.) even in the most religious societies many would not be celibate for a decade, they just weren’t having sex in formal legally-binding relationships.

One other key thing you’re leaving out: historically, many women did not have the freedom to choose whether they had children, or often who or when they married. Unless you’re proposing a new take on Ceaușescu-era Romania, that is not relevant to the discussion of fertility rates.

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

#688

Post by coldtea »

Larrikin wrote: post #581
Aeolun wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> actually teen pregnancy wasn't so bad I mean, it was a thing for most of human history. There’s a reason biology makes you capable of having children at a young age. Isn’t it kinda bizarre that we think it’s weird?

Human biology allows your body to get sick and die from bacteria and viruses, sometimes floating in the air. Human biology let's you get a cut on your hand and die from infection. That was a thing for most of history. Do you think it's weird we don't just let people suffer from those things as well?

Yes, I think our cavalier use of antibiotics is a real problem, that could wipe a huge number of people out through the development of populations with huge immune deficiencies and uber-bacteria. Similarly for antiviral resistance.

Plus the need for such drugs itself is overplayed, most of the time the human body can take care of an infection itself. Things like clean water, hand washing, etc, helped for the rest many times over than drugs do.

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

#689

Post by drewhk »

hraedon wrote: post #268
endtime wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

Not it is not stable, it was 1.38 last year (source, from the central statistics authority: https://www.ksh.hu/stadat_files/nep/hu/nep0006.html). This year will be even worse, see top left chart: https://www.ksh.hu/heti-monitor/nepmozgalom.html (live births per month)

(edit: added translation of unit)

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

#690

Post by coldtea »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #383
UncleMeat wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Abortions are not the primary reason why teen pregnancy is way down. There's actual data, you know. Fewer teen pregnancies is a reason why birth rates in the US are declining. But it isn't driven by abortion. And it is insane to me that I'm now seeing this "oh actually teen pregnancy wasn't so bad" thing pop up all over the place.

> And it is insane to me that I'm now seeing this "oh actually teen pregnancy wasn't so bad" thing pop up all over the place. The other side of this is insane to me... the "oh actually looming human extinction won't be so bad" thing. Sub-replacement fertility rates are slow-motion extinction. Animal models where they "bounce back" is irrelevant, those animals have their extremely high above-replacement fertility all…

And of course those animals just have natural temporary dampers to their fertility, not cultural and social ones.
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