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India's surprise baby bust

economist.com

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Re: India's surprise baby bust

#61

Post by arbll »

marcuskaz wrote: post #34
i_idiot wrote: post #8

What's the strong case against population dwindling other than supporting aging population? Given the AI armageddon, it just makes sense to reduce the population. If there's less population, we need less production and less workers. Of course, countries have to deal with oldest population for a brief period of time.

The basis of capitalism is on growth. How can you continue to grow revenue constantly if there aren't more people to buy products or use your services. Additionally tax revenue decreases as fewer people are working, so less government services and employment would be available. Schools is a good example, as there are less children, you need less schools and consolidate. So there are less jobs for teachers, now it loo…

I don't think it's specific to capitalism. Any system needs workers to produce enough for retirees and children. If you have more retirees and less workers any system is going to struggle.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#62

Post by ssl-3 »

fhdkweig wrote: post #36
wolfi1 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

when there is a power outage it is most likely that the cell towers are down, too

In the US, cell towers have battery backups so emergency calls can still go through. I imagine most countries do too.

My experience in the US is that when the power drops, the cell networks immediately become mostly useless.

I've theorize that they become overburdened by the pocket supercomputers that automatically start using it instead of local wifi.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#63

Post by kaan0200 »

miroljub wrote: post #20
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #12

> But demographers have long shown that what really counts is girls’ education. That makes sense. I know that having less people is not a good thing, but I was brought up with the "impending population crisis" thing drilled into my head, so it's difficult for me to be alarmed. I'm also all for getting women into parity with men. I know that there are a lot of men that will say that this is a bad thing, but I was rais…

[flagged]

I think he's making a sarcastic statement about the revealing of sexist men, who think that, "because they are men, they are superior" when reality is just balancing out the ingrained sexism in all of our societies.

He's not even talking about race, so, not racist?

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#64

Post by calepayson »

pelagicAustral wrote: post #29

> But as India and others hurtle through their demographic transition, the consequences will not be pain-free. Pain for whom? The people profiting from cheap labor probably. Why is such a massive sin to scale down? To slow down a bit, I don't think the whole world is about to collapse, but even if it was, I rather that than turning it all into the hellscapes we see on some of the most overpopulated places in the worl…

> Pain for whom? The people profiting from cheap labor probably.

A pretty consistent trend throughout history is that shit rolls downhill.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#65

Post by win311fwg »

9cb14c1ec0 wrote: post #31
staminade wrote: post #11

Unless they roll-back women's rights and improvements in child mortality, societies will need to radically overhaul their entire relationship to supporting parenthood in order to reverse this trend. The economic costs of having children at a replacement rate are simply too high. We need universal childcare services, provided by the state and available to all, and other childcare-enabling reforms like automatic right…

> We need universal childcare services Birth rates have been falling worldwide, regardless of the level of government support. It's much more a matter of attitudes about having children. > The economic costs of having children at a replacement rate are simply too high Nope. My wife and I have 4 children, on a lower-middle-class income in the US. Your lifestyle choices matter a lot. If you want to have children, you c…

> It's much more a matter of attitudes about having children.

That is the story right there. We as a society spent decades upon decades demonizing having children at a young-ish age. "Your career is more important", they said. We got shows like "16 and Pregnant" to dissuade viewers from having children. People have become genuinely afraid of having kids.

Not until you are in your 30s does the social messaging shift from "only failures have children" to "why haven't you had a child yet?" That change in social pressure often compels one to start to change their mind, but at that point one becomes biologically limited in how many children they can reasonably birth.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#66

Post by happytoexplain »

calepayson wrote: post #42
i_idiot wrote: post #8

What's the strong case against population dwindling other than supporting aging population? Given the AI armageddon, it just makes sense to reduce the population. If there's less population, we need less production and less workers. Of course, countries have to deal with oldest population for a brief period of time.

Shot in the dark but my sense is that a lot of our economics presumes growth and, if we don’t get it, a lot of terrible stuff happens. I feel pretty confident that ai will eventually be a large driver of growth but I do worry about whether it'll come soon enough.

>a lot of our economics presumes growth and, if we don’t get it, a lot of terrible stuff happens

What does this actually mean? Every time I try to wrap my head around why it's bad e.g. for a business to make a constant profit, rather than an increasing profit; or for the population to dip to some number and settle there, rather than increase; the explanations seem to become circular very quickly. I know it's partially my fault for not having a very strong economic education, but it also feels like something is fundamentally wrong with the theories - like they are making some underlying assumption about what is "good" that I don't share. But I can never seem to get down to it.

The only thing I understand is that as the ratio of old to young grows, more taxes are needed, of course. But that would only be painful during a significant rate of change, not after the number is stable, no? Is that really somehow apocalyptic?

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#67

Post by OutOfHere »

vachina wrote: post #14
i_idiot wrote: post #8

What's the strong case against population dwindling other than supporting aging population? Given the AI armageddon, it just makes sense to reduce the population. If there's less population, we need less production and less workers. Of course, countries have to deal with oldest population for a brief period of time.

The top 1% is freaking out at the thought of population shrinking because the cogs of the machine won’t turn itself.

Isn't that what AI and robots are intended to be for? As for the customers, B2B could still work.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#68

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft »

i_idiot wrote: post #8

What's the strong case against population dwindling other than supporting aging population? Given the AI armageddon, it just makes sense to reduce the population. If there's less population, we need less production and less workers. Of course, countries have to deal with oldest population for a brief period of time.

>What's the strong case against population dwindling other than supporting aging population? Given the AI armageddon,

Because you're not "dwindling the population" in the way you think. You're not taking an "8 billion" number and changing it to "4 billion". You're taking this growing organism, and switching it into a shrinking mode. Worse, you're changing it to "shrinking mode" in a way where you can't switch it out of that mode. It will, by necessity, shrink to nothing.

And it shrinks quicker than you could imagine. When fertility rates are at 1.0 (China), each generation is one half the size of the previous. It doesn't seem like much has changed... there are 4 or so older generations that are still large (but non-reproductive). When you have a 0.5 fertility rate (South Korea), each generation is one quarter the size of the previous.

Human extinction only takes about 12-14 generations at that rate. Less than 350 years. Even before it gets that far though, things get awful really quickly. It's not as if it's 350 years, and then everyone's gone. Those last few generations have no technology, they're huddled around in the dark trying not to starve.

>If there's less population, we need less production and less workers.

This isn't as true as it sounds. Some of our technology does not scale downward. If you need a nuclear power plant, this has a minimum number of workers. Even if you only want half the power, you can't get away with "half the workers". So, as there's less population, some technology will have to be abandoned. If you just employ people at the power plant despite that, then you're by necessity pulling those people from some other industry... it's an opportunity cost thing, and you have fewer opportunities.

Sub-replacement fertility is human extinction. Not in 10,000 years, but in just a couple of centuries.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#69

Post by MontyCarloHall »

This has happened to every single society [*] as it industrializes [0], and offering extensive support and incentives to parents (e.g. as has been tried in Scandinavian countries) does very little to reverse this trend [1, 2].

My hypothesis is that as societies industrialize, they afford their population more and more activities that are simply more fun and rewarding than having children. So many people I know put off having children (or curtailed the number they had) because they were reluctant to give up the activities only available in a childfree/one-and-done life. Ultimately, we are hedonistic creatures, and having kids is antithetical to the myriad hedonic pursuits available in wealthy, industrialized societies.

[*] Israel is the lone exception, due to its Orthodox Jewish population.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/global-decline-fertility-rate

[1] https://pub.nordregio.org/r-2024-13-state-of-the-nordic-regi...

[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10049131/

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#70

Post by Ajedi32 »

vachina wrote: post #14
i_idiot wrote: post #8

What's the strong case against population dwindling other than supporting aging population? Given the AI armageddon, it just makes sense to reduce the population. If there's less population, we need less production and less workers. Of course, countries have to deal with oldest population for a brief period of time.

The top 1% is freaking out at the thought of population shrinking because the cogs of the machine won’t turn itself.

If the "cogs of the machine" freeze up and economy tanks the top 1% will be fine. You might not be.
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