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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]

#391

Post by mindslight »

baron816 wrote: post #22

The mid-century Baby Boom occurred after a surge in affordable home keeping technologies (vacuum cleaners, washing machines, refrigerators, etc). I think a rebound in fertility will have to come from technology. Specifically, robots to help with child care and new fertility treatments to allow women to have children later in their lives.

> robots to help with child care

Tell me you don't have kids without telling me you don't have kids.

From an "efficiency" perspective, one can already eliminate 90% of the work of childcare by putting your kid in a sturdy playpen with a secure hard top and wearing noise canceling headphones. People don't really want to do this, for the most part.

The interactive learning is the entire point of childcare. Having machines raise your kids will make it so you end up with kids that were raised by machines. Is that what you want? It seems like this is basically already a thing, with the varying amounts of screen time that parents will allow kids.

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

#392

Post by Klaster_1 »

mindslight wrote: post #391
baron816 wrote: post #22

The mid-century Baby Boom occurred after a surge in affordable home keeping technologies (vacuum cleaners, washing machines, refrigerators, etc). I think a rebound in fertility will have to come from technology. Specifically, robots to help with child care and new fertility treatments to allow women to have children later in their lives.

> robots to help with child care Tell me you don't have kids without telling me you don't have kids. From an "efficiency" perspective, one can already eliminate 90% of the work of childcare by putting your kid in a sturdy playpen with a secure hard top and wearing noise canceling headphones. People don't really want to do this, for the most part. The interactive learning is the entire point of childcare. Having machi…

What if robots were to assist with other tasks while the parent was preoccupied with the child? Like cooking, cleaning up, laundry, shopping.

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

#393

Post by myrmidon »

WalterBright wrote: post #385
myrmidon wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"The government" is not actually accruing wealth in pretty much any western democracy-- in fact the exact opposite is happening everywhere. To me it seems clear why government budgets have increase so much. Since the emergence of modern nation states, government responsibilities have grown tremendously, and mostly for good reason: - Infrastructure basically went from dirt roads to highways/railways/airports - Tremend…

> "The government" is not actually accruing wealth I tend to agree with that. But there's no doubt it is dissipating vast amounts of wealth. > it seems clear why government budgets have increase so much There's a vast amount of waste in government spending, and waste as a result of heavy regulation. If you're really interested, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-ame...

I do agree with you that there is a lot of overhead and waste in the healthcare industry and government in general.

But this insight is, to me, just not really actionable.

Almost every large organisation seems to end up with a good amount of bloat/overhead sooner or later, and this even includes former super-lean and super-focused enterprises (Intel, Google, AWS, ...), so I don't see how you could ever sidestep this problem completely with the government.

Just cutting regulators and government responsibilities in general also seems a really bad idea to me. Reading that article, how many of its complaints would be solved by fully deregulating and letting the market take care of things?

1) Avoidable infections exacerbated by laziness/cost cutting

2) Lack of price/cost transparency

3) Healthcare costs being wasted on advertising/middlemen

4) Doctors specializing in fields that pay well instead of the ones that are most needed to improve health outcomes

I'd argue that none of those would be improved by switching to unregulated private healthcare, and a bunch of them would very likely get worse.

Another thing to consider when cutting regulation are huge possible negative externalities in general.

Just take leaded gasoline as an easy example (because the bill for CO2 emissions is not in yet). The industry basically "self-regulated" until the 60s (and only because it became infeasible to continue hiding lead toxicity by paying or threatening scientists, which it had done for the previous decades): Total costs/damages were enormous-- probably millions of lifeyears lost, but industry/shareholders did not pay a dime after reaping the profits.

How could drastic cuts in regulations avoid disastrous outcomes like that?

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

#394

Post by pmarreck »

xp84 wrote: post #354
lotsofpulp wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I notice you didn’t mention any of the health or physical risks women face in partnering up with a man, pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, infant rearing (lack of sleep), loss of income and potential income due to career stagnation (meaning loss of financial security). Given what we know of how pervasive harassment and violence against women was and is, could you envision a scenario where total fertility rate neve…

> most prefer to experience 2 childbirths. A few will go for 3, in case they didn’t get a boy or girl, but the amount that want more than 3 is basically negligible. I guess in societies that hadn't succumbed to nihilism, what people "prefer" was less of a direct line to what people would do. > health or physical risks women face in partnering up with a man, pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, infant rearing (lack o…

> The risk to the father is that he has children with someone who will change and treat him like dirt, leaving him to choose between staying there for his child and being miserable, vs leaving and being financially ruined and potentially unable to move on

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

#395

Post by xp84 »

ponector wrote: post #378
xp84 wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Became a parent mid-30s and I cannot agree more. I didn’t feel old right away, but my first child is somewhat special-needs and it feels like parenting him has aged me 20 years in the past 7. This is a special case, but even with a ‘normal’ kid it’s still true. The #1 thing I would tell any young person who would listen is that if you want them, finish having children by like 27. I know for most people, that represen…

>> The #1 thing I would tell any young person who would listen is that if you want them, finish having children by like 27 Unless one is from a wealthy family, following this advice basically means to give up a career. Being a mom without a career is being insecure, it could end up in abusive relationship.

Anyone can end up in an abusive relationship, not just women. Choose well, indeed. And choose a career which offers generous benefits.

Also, I know women who work in tech who did that advice and are fine. They make high enough salaries to afford good daycare (or it is provided onsite).

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

#396

Post by mindslight »

Klaster_1 wrote: post #392
mindslight wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> robots to help with child care Tell me you don't have kids without telling me you don't have kids. From an "efficiency" perspective, one can already eliminate 90% of the work of childcare by putting your kid in a sturdy playpen with a secure hard top and wearing noise canceling headphones. People don't really want to do this, for the most part. The interactive learning is the entire point of childcare. Having machi…

What if robots were to assist with other tasks while the parent was preoccupied with the child? Like cooking, cleaning up, laundry, shopping.

Sure, but those are incremental gains rather than some sea change. And for the most part that market already exists. The problem is those things have no easy answers. From the list the only thing I can see is some sort of decluttering robot that picked up and put away all the scattered toys, so robot vacuuming could be done. Maybe some kind of integrated laundry machine that did washing and drying in the same space, then a conveyor that sorted/folded/stacked clothes? Those would be helpful, but would ultimately just end up as another "buy this expensive gizmo also, to make your life slightly easier"

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

#397

Post by WalterBright »

myrmidon wrote: post #393
WalterBright wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "The government" is not actually accruing wealth I tend to agree with that. But there's no doubt it is dissipating vast amounts of wealth. > it seems clear why government budgets have increase so much There's a vast amount of waste in government spending, and waste as a result of heavy regulation. If you're really interested, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2009/09/how-ame...

I do agree with you that there is a lot of overhead and waste in the healthcare industry and government in general. But this insight is, to me, just not really actionable. Almost every large organisation seems to end up with a good amount of bloat/overhead sooner or later, and this even includes former super-lean and super-focused enterprises (Intel, Google, AWS, ...), so I don't see how you could ever sidestep this…

Every large organization does indeed accumulate bloat/overhead sooner or later. For a profit making company, this means it loses its competitiveness and then falls. For government, this means it gets a bigger budget.

The leaded gasoline example is also a disaster. That does not generalize to every regulation being good. For example, regulations prevent victims of the Palisades fire from rebuilding. For another example, rent control.

Reading the article, the bit about Lasik eye surgery resulting in major reductions in cost is pretty illustrative.

Some years back, Frontline did an episode on dental care fraud. It seems the government set up a program to pay dentists to do major dental operations on poor people. Clinics then set up solely to do major dental operations on poor people, and raked in the government money. The trouble was, those people did not need dental operations. Frontline's "solution" was to propose heavy regulation. That won't work, either, because medical fraud to get government money is rampant and pervasive.

You might also consider the software business, which has pretty much zero regulation. It is also a gigantic engine of prosperity in the US, despite having driven costs down to literally zero. There have been many proposals to regulate it, but fortunately none have managed to do so.

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

#398

Post by getajob1160 »

mensetmanusman wrote: post #303
anonym29 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Take a family of five kids and give them a bedroom for each kid when young and they’ll end up clustering in one or two. Do you have anecdata on this? I grew up with a single sibling, and we had to share a room as young children due to economic circumstances, but we were both very excited to get our own rooms when our parents bought a larger house. I have no kids of my own and don't plan on having any, but I'm fascin…

I have 8 kids, they cluster at night, sing to each other, recite poetry, and talk late into the night. It’s more similar to how families slept for millennia.

sounds like a potentially abusive situation.

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

#399

Post by marssaxman »

angmarsbane wrote: post #355
marssaxman wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This did not stop people in the past. You read of three-room New York tenements holding families of ten, or families with half a dozen children living in a single-room frontier cabin, and this was considered commonplace. My parents raised eleven children in a typical four-bedroom suburban tract house. I wonder why modern people would be different?

They didn't have birth control then so it was much less of a choice.

Well, then we should say that it is something related to availability of birth control which has caused the change, not some novel preference for living space.

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

#400

Post by xp84 »

api wrote: post #56
rendang wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which people are saying we need to curtail womens' rights because of underpopulation?

It's a huge theme on the secular nationalist right. Visit Xhitter for 5 minutes.

This seems like a wild take. All that I see right wingers saying is that there are huge benefits to families when a mother doesn’t have to work, that we should not exclusively frame being a SAHM as some kind of brutal oppression, and that we should advance policies that make it easier for families to do that.

Is there some shitposting fringe that says dumb things like “abolish all BC”? Yes, just as there are matching “sOcIaLiSt” idiots who think that if we “just” confiscate all of Musk and Bezos’ net worth, it’ll pay off everyone’s student loans plus pay for UBI, free college in perpetuity, and buy all of Gen Z nice houses.

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