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The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]

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Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]

#311

Post by vonneumannstan »

seydor wrote: post #63
toomuchtodo wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our World in Data: Fertility rate: births per woman - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-born-per-woman?t... To the surprise of demographers, African fertility is falling - https://www.mercatornet.com/to_the_surprise_of_demographers_... - September 19, 2024 > Previously in this space, under the heading “Africa Rising?” yours truly cited The Lancet’s latest population stats on sub-Saharan Africa: Sub-Saharan…

yes those are true but the fact remains that despite the falling rate, sub-saharan TFR is 4.5, while brazil is 1.6, iran 1.7 etc. The correlation of TFR with wealth is a fact

>The correlation of TFR with wealth is a fact

No one is disputing that... We are talking about declining TFR RATES which are happening across the globe universally.

Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]

#312

Post by cubefox »

Ericson2314 wrote: post #205
cubefox wrote: post #138

When I posted the same result a few weeks ago, it got [flagged] in short order: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44520297

I'm sorry that happened to you, but the Atlantic is such a troll, I can understand why it was flagged.

The article was not a "troll".

Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]

#313

Post by nradov »

JackFr wrote: post #289
angmarsbane wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been encouraging my cousin who desperately wants children to have them in her two bedroom apartment but she feels that she needs to have a house first and she and her husband can't afford one. They're in their late 30s. My partner and I are mid-30s planning to have young children in our 2 bedroom apartment, we'd prefer a 3 bedroom but they DO NOT EXIST in our Los Angeles neighborhood. More space means untenable…

Raised 3 kids in a 2 bedroom apartment in NYC. It’s fine. When they go to college, they marvel at the space they have in a dorm room.

Some families make it work and survive but very few middle class Americans would consider this "fine". For better or worse, most people prefer to have more space and privacy. The notion of raising a family in a cramped apartment seems like torture to me, and the birth rates in urban areas indicate that others agree.

Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]

#314

Post by nradov »

Terr_ wrote: post #245
rayiner wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rent is the bigger issue than affordability per se. My wife pointed out the other day that we had our second and third kids shortly after we stopped living in apartments and bought a house. We didn't plan to have a significant age gap between our first (who we had in law school) and our other kids, and we earned a lot of money the whole time, it just happened that way. She's convinced that having the extra space subc…

Hmmm... What if a wide variety of economic actors have somehow managed to slurp up all the surplus that previously went to "paying it forward" in terms of raising children? Rent is a common complaint, but consider the costs of childcare, needing two incomes to stay afloat, etc.

The high cost of childcare also largely comes back to high rents. The management needs to pay for the space, and pay workers enough to afford to live within commuting distance. There are of course other costs to running a day care center (utilities, insurance, supplies) but rent is a major factor here.

Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]

#315

Post by aprilthird2021 »

stego-tech wrote: post #86

Funny, I just wrapped a blog post about this: https://green.spacedino.net/i-dont-worry-about-population-de... Good presentation by the author that reaffirms my own opinions about the topic, specifically that while it sucks and cripples the social welfare programs our (deceased) elders built on the theory of continued population and productivity growth, it's also an issue we can fix with coordination between powers an…

> it's also an issue we can fix with coordination between powers and workers

Which is severely lacking in the most powerful nation on Earth

> It's about building a new environment that puts families, rather than employers, first, and encouraging participation in the creation and maintenance of that environment by everyone regardless of age or demographic.

Again, never going to happen in the USA at least.

The current human model is work > all because we are a capitalist system, and we reward greed because it's the best economic system we put up so far. There will be powerful interests fighting this and pushing all the costs of this heavy system failure onto their workers and consumers etc. and that's the whole problem we are facing...

Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]

#316

Post by aprilthird2021 »

arethuza wrote: post #278
xp84 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sweden grants 68 weeks of shared parental leave and their TFR is at 1.45. I speculate that a different thing is happening in Europe. Every time I hear European takes on issues, it feels like Europe is post-religion, post-values, post-meaning. Everything is relative; pleasure is the only personal goal, and not harming others is the only external goal. Why even have kids? Why get married? It's a lot of work, plus the…

"it feels like Europe is post-religion" You say that likes it's a bad thing?

Post-religion directly correlates with less friends, less peers, less in-built community, etc.

You can have all those things without. Many do. But it requires extra work that organized religion does for you, and we're talking about a problem where people aren't having kids because they are extra work

Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]

#317

Post by neaden »

I remember when I was younger being constantly told that the earth was destined for overpopulation. That if we didn't do things soon to curb fertility there was going to be mass starvation and death. That this was just an inevitability, a certainty unless something was done. There were so many visions of the future based on overpopulation and the problems it would bring. Now we've switched to the opposite side, I never even got to enjoy the apparently brief moment when things were exactly right.

I say all this not to say that this article and all the worries about demographic decline must be fake/overstated, but I don't like the certainty that we just switched our worries from one extreme to the opposite.

Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]

#318

Post by neaden »

api wrote: post #188
xp84 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sweden grants 68 weeks of shared parental leave and their TFR is at 1.45. I speculate that a different thing is happening in Europe. Every time I hear European takes on issues, it feels like Europe is post-religion, post-values, post-meaning. Everything is relative; pleasure is the only personal goal, and not harming others is the only external goal. Why even have kids? Why get married? It's a lot of work, plus the…

Why is fertility so low in Iran then? Or very Catholic Poland? It does not seem to correlate strongly with religion or belief systems. The strongest correlation I see is urbanization. People in cities don’t have kids as much.

Iran specifically was super worried about overpopulation in the 80s and the government began a massive program to decrease childbirth rates. With things like government messaging on small families and providing free birth control. Here is a graph that shows it https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/irn/ira...

Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]

#319

Post by nradov »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #99
cyberax wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The drop in fertility rate is directly liked to migration into dense cities. They are just not a good place to have children. The US resisted the fertility drop for much longer, because of higher suburban population.

This is probably a factor, but I think it’s a mistake to treat cities not being suited for raising children as a hard, immutable fact. They’re bad because rent continues to soar which clashes on two fronts (kids are expensive already and increase space requirements) and we as a society have decided to build our urban spaces (suburbs included) to be explicitly not friendly to children, families, or anybody not driving…

Suburbs might not be friendly to children but they're quite friendly to the parents of small children. When you're pressed for time and need to cook dinner or something it's super convenient to be able to send the kids into the back yard or their own separate bedrooms, knowing they'll be fairly safe and contained for a while.

Remote work is a great option for many people but it simply isn't feasible for any job that can't be done through a computer. We should set economic policies that encourage job growth in suburban and rural areas rather than trying to squeeze everything into a handful of dense cities.

Re: The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf]

#320

Post by tartoran »

neaden wrote: post #317

I remember when I was younger being constantly told that the earth was destined for overpopulation. That if we didn't do things soon to curb fertility there was going to be mass starvation and death. That this was just an inevitability, a certainty unless something was done. There were so many visions of the future based on overpopulation and the problems it would bring. Now we've switched to the opposite side, I nev…

One is bad for the the earth, the other is bad for the economy.
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