Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

India's surprise baby bust

economist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 1001 posts

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#211

Post by mekdoonggi »

swat535 wrote: post #148
happytoexplain wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The term "child-free" implies relieving oneself of a disease, the way one describes himself as "cancer-free" or "drug-free". Wow, this is an eyebrow-raising degree of uncharitability. There's no reason to attack straightforward words like this. Also, the parent did not make this implication. They implied it's irresponsible to have children unintentionally or flippantly .

> Also, the parent did not make this implication You're arguing a straw man, I didn't mention that the parent made the implication. I simply refuted a portion of parent's claim that people are forgoing children to foster a care of their community or performing acts of service as they implied here: "a child-free adult gets fulfillment out of nurturing and caring for others, mentoring, caring for themselves and their c…

> refuted a portion of parent's claim that people are forgoing children to foster a care of their community or performing acts of service

You didn't refute, you just said you didn't think that's what people are doing. In any case it doesn't matter what they do with their time, because it's theirs.

> If you feel like my interpretation of the term is an attack, that's on you.

> Terms do have an intention behind them.

I don't know how you square that circle. You made some claims about the term child-free which are strictly your interpretation and then used it to describe their choice as ignoble.

In both cases you're just ascribing a nobility and morality to having children which just isn't there.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#212

Post by FuriouslyAdrift »

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.

We only have one modern example of demographic crash to study... Japan.

Total economic stagnation, spiraling population numbers, loss of anything anchored to manual labor, and an aging population.

So far, it looks to be a way for slow extinction of a culture.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#213

Post by Veserv »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #69

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 of…

Except in [0] the birth rate is relatively flat between 1950-1970 and then suddenly starts a rapid reduction. Developed countries have already been industrialized for 100 years by that point. The modern work day and access to many modern fun and rewarding activitys have been available for literal decades. Mass urbanization already occurred. Many of the modern household appliances have been in use for decades. Antibiotics, vaccines, and childhood mortality had already been dramatically reduced to within the vicinity of modern norms. In developed countrys female workforce participation, education, and political activity were material with no clear fundamental shift in those metrics in the 1960s-1970s.

But you know what did occur in the 1960s-1970s? The invention and popularization of the birth control pill. Here is the US birth rate [1]. Rising from 1950-1960 then a sudden and precipitous drop in the 1960s until stabilization in the 1970-now range. This coincides with the global drop in fertility rate. How about Germany [2]? Growth from 1950 to late 1960s then a sudden drop until stabilization in the mid 1970s. France [3]? Flat and high until mid-1960s then a sudden drop until stabilization in 1980. UK [4]? Growth from 1950 to mid 1960s then a sudden drop until stabilization mid 1970s. Australia [5]? Growth until 1960 then drop until stabilization in 1980.

Every single developed country in the world is flat to growing and then sees a sudden and rapid decline in birth rate just a few years after mass availability of the birth control pill until stabilization around the time that the pre-birth control cohort ages past reproductive years. The birth control pill is so new that the reproductive cohort that lived prior to its invention is still alive.

My hypothesis is that fertility is just a function of access to cheap, effective contraceptives. The fertility rates we see today are the natural rates when pregnancy is a choice.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...

[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/deu/ger...

[3] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/fra/fra...

[4] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/gbr/uni...

[5] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/aus/aus...

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#214

Post by g3f32r »

mekdoonggi wrote: post #108
vkou wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no amount of money (that society could ever afford to pay) that could convince my wife to have children.

Yep. And that's good! That's freedom of choice. Similarly, my wife wanted children, and there's no amount of money that could replace the joy of having our child. Everything is better when we have the freedom to make a choice.

> Yep. And that's good! That's freedom of choice.

Is it? Was it actually her choice? Or was she propagandized into being a fully-available consumer?

Was she fed a steady diet of anti-natalist/anti-family formation and pro-independence (pro-consume) media and government policies from the moment she was born?

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#215

Post by canucker2016 »

myth_drannon wrote: post #191
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #69

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 of…

[*] All parts of the Israeli population have high birth rates, even the secular Jews. I find it misleading to single out Orthodox Jews as the main contributor. You don't do that to Evangelical Christians or Mormons, or some other groups in US. I don't think the religion is the driver here.

It looks like a regional phenomenon - countries near to Israel have a similar fertility rate.

see (Middle East fertility rates) https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...

and (OECD fertility rates)

https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/fertility-rates.html

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#216

Post by FuriouslyAdrift »

John7878781 wrote: post #184
eudamoniac wrote: post #136

The desire to procreate above replacement levels is probably heritable, so it will all work itself out naturally.

Given that intelligence is ~60% genetic, if well-educated people are having kids less, then are we going to start getting dumber?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#217

Post by danny_codes »

RickJWagner wrote: post #111
triceratops wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> retirement funds are built with the assumption of infinite growth Of workers. Because retirement funds take money from workers to pay for retirees. Assets and productivity, on the other hand, can grow a lot more than the population. Right now it's considered communism to tax assets. Once we get over that taboo things'll go a lot smoother.

That would destroy the incentive to save. Why put aside a dollar now, only to have it taxed every year? Better to spend it while it’s whole. That changes future value calculations, too. These are things not to mess with lightly.

Depends on implementation. For example, a wealth tax that has a "cap" at some ludicrous amount of wealth, like $10M, would effect very few people and therefore be insignificant for the average worker. So 99% of people would continue saving with no change at all to their behavior. The externalities could be nice though, since it'd distribute capital more efficiently. Sort of a general stimulant to the economy.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#218

Post by danny_codes »

BobaFloutist wrote: post #138
vkou wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about the pain from overpopulation and a glut of uneducated labour? Doesn't that shit roll downhill, too? "The poor will always pay for it" is a thought-terminating cliche that is often trotted out in support of the status quo (or some mythical past status quo). How do you know that past status quo isn't actually worse for them than the direction things are trending? Do you think we somehow stumbled upon some gl…

What overpopulation?

Visit Jakarta

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#219

Post by porridgeraisin »

FeteCommuniste wrote: post #194
porridgeraisin wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue it is due to nuclearisation of families, that has always accompanied industrialisation. See my other comment on this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48416228

Fascinating hypothesis. I wonder if technological and economic progress makes "nuclearisation" inevitable, i.e. people can just move wherever the best money is at.

I would change it from `can` to `almost forced to`. Since I am seeing nuclearisation live, here are a few observations.

Industrialisation is an inherently compounding event. Thus, it gets concentrated geographically. So you get "hubs" like a tech hub, a manufacturing hub, a finance hub, etc,. So if you study CS, you cannot just take a tech job in a finance city or an export city. You got to move to a tech hub.

So unless your entire family is in roughly the same line of work, it is very difficult to keep a joint family. In fact, contrary to the "more money less kids" hypothesis, the traditional "family business" families that continue to do what their ancestors did, tend to have more kids and live in joint family homes.

Even if a set of parents happened to have 2.1 kids on average, the chance that in the next generation, the two siblings end up consistently living close by each other is very small. So it really only takes 30 years for TFR to fall off a cliff.

Post reply on HN