India's surprise baby bust • Hacker News Board

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#561

Post by skipkey » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 1:06 AM UTC

thanhhaimai wrote: post #401

onetimeusename wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was surprised to find that just as recently as 1970 the median age of first marriage for men was ~23 and ~21 for women.[1] The average age at first child birth for women in 1970 was ~22.[2] There was a change that took place in the late 70s it looks like, probably acquiring education, that started to pretty dramatically raise the age of first marriage and first childbirth. So for me this was realizing that there wa…

In 1970, a single minimum wage income can raise a family and save up for extra. In 2026, a single minimum wage income can barely survive by themselves with no saving in most part of the US.

In 1970 minimum wage was $1.60/hour, equating to about $3.3k a year. A typical mortgage was about $126/month. Car payment, around $100. You weren't raising a family and saving on minimum. Median income was about 3x that for a family, so you could definitely raise a family and save at the median. Note, these come from querying AI, but they match my recollections as a child a few years later.

Today, family income is up about 10x, but costs have risen much more than that.

In my opinion the two greatest factors on the reason, in the US at least, for the changes, and not having children were - birth control became widely available in the US in the early 70s, and women entered the workforce in great numbers. This greatly increased the amount of family income, but costs quickly rose to basically eat up all the extra income.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#562

Post by munificent » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 1:08 AM UTC

onetimeusename wrote: post #390

m_fayer wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a different pet explanation from the other replies here, and I honestly don't get why it's not talked about more. Basically, our economic reality and expectations have come into conflict with biology and human lifespan. If you want a secured dignified life and basic prerequisites to starting a family, every year that takes a little longer. And these days, almost everyone wants that dignified middle class life…

I was surprised to find that just as recently as 1970 the median age of first marriage for men was ~23 and ~21 for women.[1] The average age at first child birth for women in 1970 was ~22.[2] There was a change that took place in the late 70s it looks like, probably acquiring education, that started to pretty dramatically raise the age of first marriage and first childbirth. So for me this was realizing that there wa…

> There was a change that took place in the late 70s it looks like,

Birth control.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#563

Post by roenxi » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 1:09 AM UTC

linkregister wrote: post #551

broken-kebab wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's 2026 now and we know for sure that applying purely economic stimuli did nothing substantial to birthrate anywhere. FWIW kids of rich parents do not procreate somehow better even if they are not constrained by housing market.

Early childhood public spending as a percentage of GDP has a strong positive correlation with fertility. That is, among nations that have already experienced the fertility drop associated with women's employment. 1. The Economics of Fertility: A New Era, p50, https://www.nber.org/papers/w29948

I strongly recommend that report to anyone interested, there is a lot of interesting work in it, even just to skim the pictures like I did. That said, I have to say I really don't think "Early childhood public spending as a percentage of GDP has a strong positive correlation with fertility" is a useful takeaway from it. True, yes. Useful no.

Firstly, assuming we're looking at pg 50, seems to be correlation not causation - causation could be reversed (no children -> no need to spend). Secondly, there are so many correlations in that report that picking out any specific one is a bit random.

Also it isn't immediately clear if they're population weighting since the graph makes the US look like an equal to LUX instead of a 300 million person behemoth. To me that seems to make the correlation a minor curio.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#564

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 1:13 AM UTC

ahtihn wrote: post #284

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

> Those last few generations have no technology, they're huddled around in the dark trying not to starve. At that point, the birth rate would quickly rise again, no? Because if you're back to living in a pre-industrial society, kids suddenly have value again. So it's likely that either there's a point of equilibrium or the population keeps swinging up and down. Total extinction seems unlikely.

>At that point, the birth rate would quickly rise again, no?

Hospitals failing. Caloric intake failing. Yeh sure, why not? Let's just imagine that all high technology that acutally props up reproductive success seriously strained or even vanishing will result in things magically correcting.

The same attitudes that have negatively impacted fertility rates don't disappear because things get worse. They're reinforced by it. An economy that collapses because there aren't enough workers doesn't make people say "I want to have babies"... if the media is to be believed, people wait until the economy improves first. Why would that happen?

>So it's likely that either there's a point of equilibrium

All evidence to the contrary? We've actually run experiments with animals. After they crash, the stress and trauma imposed on them keeps them from reproducing at a behavioral level despite resources being abundant.

>Total extinction seems unlikely.

Based on what exactly? Your unwillingness to own up to plainly obvious but disturbing conclusions?

>Because if you're back to living in a pre-industrial society,

Short of time travel, we can't have a pre industrial society, as that's the society that comes at a point in history before industry. What we'd have would be a post-collapse society. They're not the same thing. They don't even resemble each other much.

When moose on the island are nearly wiped out and their predators starve to death, the moose can "swing back up" because moose never have low fertility. It's something like 25.0, give or take. They have a low population not because fertility went low... they have it because baby moose get eaten or starve or die from disease. Once those pressures ease up, the 25.0 fertility is still there and population rises quite rapidly.

When human fertility goes down, it means that humans can't ever bounce back. So unless you're hypothesizing some sort of thing which causes human fertility to rise paradoxically and inexplicably, this reply of yours makes no sense at all. Not even a little. By the time people like you realize how wrong you are, your species will be past the point of no return.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#565

Post by sethammons » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 1:13 AM UTC

saintvlad wrote: post #314

happytoexplain wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 partiall…

> more taxes are needed Don't forget it's not just taxes, but the allocation of labor and resources. If the entire population magically turned 90 tomorrow, no amount of taxes would be able to provide for them.

Jetson style, we should all be complaining about our 3hr workdays. We produce enough. Distribution is the problem.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#566

Post by happytoexplain » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 1:15 AM UTC

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #409

happytoexplain wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, absolutely. I agreed with the parent too, but I think your explanation is not as different as it seems. I think your framing is just more direct and correct. However, one big caveat: "If you want a secured dignified life and basic prerequisites to starting a family" What you're saying is more relevant to the state of already-developed nations, that are now all in a slow decline. Not so much to newly developed na…

If you are referring to the US in your unsupported decline assertion the numbers don't support what you are saying (I disagree the US is more in decline than it was in the 70s/80s. It has different structural problems today, like housing and wealth concentration, but that isn't the same thing). There's much stronger relationships to religiosity and fertility rates (with a much larger than income based gaps), regional…

>your unsupported decline assertion

Why start out pointlessly hostile in your first sentence like this? I can't engage with this. If saying anything without linking a study makes a person some kind of asshole, even smart, honest people couldn't communicate.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#567

Post by munificent » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 1:17 AM UTC

I'm always surprised this topic comes up all the time and there's all sorts of navel gazing about economics and housing and other reasons people want to have fewer kids. It seems to me that the simplest and most likely explanation is:

Having kids was never a primary motivation. Having sex was. Kids were just a hard-to-avoid downstream consequence of that. Once you have the pill, which makes it much easier to have sex without creating kids (and in particular, which allows women to avoid having kids even when they are raped), then the natural result is that there are a lot fewer babies popping out.

Because for the majority of sex acts, babies were never the goal in the first place.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#568

Post by obezyian » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 1:19 AM UTC

thijson wrote: post #301

xeonmc wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So support should be provided for incentivizing younger parenthood then, like guaranteed tuition assistance per children born?

Giving birth to future tax payers should confer sizable tax deductions for the parents. I'm not sure that's enough to reverse the demographic slide though, it's been tried. For our ancestors, they married young, and didn't have access to birth control. Babies weren't really planned, they just happened.

> didn't have access to birth control. Babies weren't really planned, they just happened.

An early form of birth control in my home country was naming your baby Enough (Dosta). Not very efficient, obviously.

edit: it seems this was mostly used for breaking a streak of female babies (the name is feminine). but also in general.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#569

Post by scoofy » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 1:23 AM UTC

accurrent wrote: post #553

scoofy wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really the message of Abundance . If you want people to have kids, you need to make sure they are economically secure by the time they are of childbearing age... which means before they are 30. To do that, you cannot have supply constrained zero-sum shortage anywhere in society. It means that the cost of an apartment needs to be at-or-below the cost to build that apartment so people can just save up and buy o…

I agree that affordable housing is crucial, but the idea that this is 'impossible in a democratic society' ignores global realities. Several democracies heavily subsidize housing—look at Vienna's social housing model or Singapore's HDB system. Yet, this has not solved the birthrate problem; Singapore’s fertility rate recently hit a record low of 0.87. Ironically, the highest birth rates globally occur where economic…

"Effectively impossible" does not mean "impossible."

Yes, Vienna's housing policy is effective... It's also the only place in the world that manages it. I would argue that it is ideal, but nearly impossible to implement. We can't escape the fact that Vienna operates what is effectively a sovereign wealth fund to create all that housing, which works with the subsidiaries of Austria's actual sovereign wealth fund in development. It's a nice system to be born into, it's nearly impossible to bootstrap.

>the highest birth rates globally occur...

Nobody is suggesting returning above replacement rate births. Falling below replacement rate is only a problem long term because it happens slowly, but exponentially. It will cause a displacement crisis that will rival climate change. Lowering world population would probably be a good idea, theoretically, but again, there's a difference between a linear decline and an exponential decline.

>In developed countries, the state can at least leverage accumulated wealth to bankroll healthcare and social services required by a rapidly aging population.

I don't see how this is relevant. One can be both for "abundance" and taxes on wealth.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#570

Post by matchbok3 » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 1:23 AM UTC

shimman wrote: post #432

scoofy wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really the message of Abundance . If you want people to have kids, you need to make sure they are economically secure by the time they are of childbearing age... which means before they are 30. To do that, you cannot have supply constrained zero-sum shortage anywhere in society. It means that the cost of an apartment needs to be at-or-below the cost to build that apartment so people can just save up and buy o…

No, that is you are reading into what abundance is. Abundance is mostly neoliberal economic ideas repackaged for the current iteration of consultants where workers are entirely excluded from the processes, unions are the enemy, and regulation is actually evil this time (pinky swear this time!). Thank fuck voters aren't buying this garbage. I also find your retort equally misleading. Social housing is a solved issue.…

We are letting developers dictate what housing gets built?

Are you a parody account?

Do you understand the thousands of housing regulations in every single parcel of land in the country? Please do 2 minutes of research into FAR, inclusionary zoning, height limits, setbacks, zoning, etc.

I seriously can't tell if you are some left-wing parody account or actually serious. Either way, oooof!