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India's surprise baby bust

economist.com

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Re: India's surprise baby bust

#721

Post by sirwhinesalot »

The real reason why nobody is having kids can be summarized by the sentence:

"It takes a village to raise a kid".

Look up how much time a mother actually used to spend holding their own child vs other people holding that same child. It was something like 40%.

When you lived surrounded by your tribe, you had an extremely strong support network that no longer exists in industrialized society.

Add to that all the other factors like:

- both parents working often without the grandparents nearby or even willing to help

- unnafordable housing, even when renting

- effectively delayed adulthood (university) into the 30s

- falling fertility from whatever chemicals we're poisoning ourselves with

- anti-natalist messaging

- etc.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#722

Post by nazgul17 »

m_fayer wrote: post #202
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…

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…

Just thinking aloud.

Could it be that the "stories" we consume (books, movies, TV, games) fill our heads (as in, focus our attention) with ideas that don't overlap much with family life? It's all about single people doing cool or fun stuff, with the occasional tired parents.

I wonder how hard it would be to give credibility to the hypothesis (yeah, "verifying" it would be much harder). What's the correlation between "percentage of time spent on non family focused stories" and "children per woman born in the following 5 years"? Sounds like a super noisy signal. Maybe averaging by country or even city could strengthen the data.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#723

Post by tpm »

chr1 wrote: post #583
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…

Cost of a great apartment by 1920 standards is affordable to anyone before they are 30, the problem is that they want to add lots of nice but non-essential things to that house driving the price up. If you subsidize building houses, you merely will drive up standard of living without moving childbearing age. The problem is about priorities not resource constraints. And solution will be either enough people/countries…

> Cost of a great apartment by 1920 standards is affordable to anyone before they are 30, the problem is that they want to add lots of nice but non-essential things to that house driving the price up.

This statement is not true in locations where you can make decent money.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#724

Post by fc417fc802 »

nazgul17 wrote: post #722
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…

Just thinking aloud. Could it be that the "stories" we consume (books, movies, TV, games) fill our heads (as in, focus our attention) with ideas that don't overlap much with family life? It's all about single people doing cool or fun stuff, with the occasional tired parents. I wonder how hard it would be to give credibility to the hypothesis (yeah, "verifying" it would be much harder). What's the correlation between…

That seems like unnecessary complexity (and also doesn't match my own observations). You're replying here to a theory that it seems to me is sufficient on its own to explain the phenomenon, unless you see some issue with it? I'm not certain the theory is correct but I think it's entirely plausible and more importantly I've yet to encounter a better one.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#725

Post by [deleted] »

jbxntuehineoh wrote: post #526
voiceofchoice wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't think child rearing is work then you won't understand why women choose not to have kids in the first place. You cannot be a parent and choose not to work, period. Just because you're not getting paid and ordered around by an adult boss doesn't mean being a trad wife is magically somehow not work. In fact, at least with a regular 9-5 you get PTO and time off. If you scoff at the idea of flipping burgers y…

_obviously_ they meant "work" as in "employment", stop being obtuse > your whole life pretty sure the diaper changing part only lasts a couple years

[deleted]

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#727

Post by lenkite »

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…

And this is terrific news for the future. A nation of our size just cannot afford to have more than ~400 million people without severe issues causing extremely poor quality of life. We are already bursting at the seams at 1.5 billion and will be suffering deeply when it reaches 1.8 billion. (Also, the current adult population is higher than the official figures)

We have severe water scarcity, severe deforestation, severe pollution - the list of problems is endless. Some of these problems are being covered up by our current government by stupid changes in measure - agriculture is now treated as "forestation".

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#728

Post by toasty228 »

zb3 wrote: post #555
nercht12 wrote: post #358

The problem with society is that people are commonly selfish, so the majority of people only do things that benefit them. Children benefited ancient societies. The problem with industrialized societies is that people lost all markers of adulthood. Everything became about worshiping convenience, and once convenience (for short-term pleasure) became "god", people wanted to avoid things they saw as unnecessarily difficu…

I'm so happy people are rejecting your masochism (assuming your comment is not sarcastic) and are not falling for this scam of suffering anymore. > We need more bold people, people who aren't afraid to suffer because they see the light at the end of the road. At "the end of the road" there's only death, so it's pointless to suffer just so you can make more people which will also suffer.

> At "the end of the road" there's only death, so it's pointless to suffer just so you can make more people which will also suffer.

But sitting 8 hours a day in front of a rectangle emitting light and prompting llms to generate code for your overlords for the next 45 years definitely is not pointless

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#729

Post by Voultapher »

sirwhinesalot wrote: post #721

The real reason why nobody is having kids can be summarized by the sentence: "It takes a village to raise a kid". Look up how much time a mother actually used to spend holding their own child vs other people holding that same child. It was something like 40%. When you lived surrounded by your tribe, you had an extremely strong support network that no longer exists in industrialized society. Add to that all the other…

Honestly that resonates with me. I haven't made up my mind 100% about the topic, but I can say it would be an easier decision if there was a stronger support network. Watching single children be bored and play with their semi-enthusiastic parents makes me sad.

But it's not all doom and gloom, there are plenty of areas where families live and you see gangs of kids of various age-groups roam the streets and parks.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#730

Post by accidentallfact »

Ifkaluva wrote: post #609
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…

I’m going to try to win the award for the most controversial theory on this thread. The real reason we are having population shrinkage is because evolution did a crappy job. It didn’t tune us to want to have kids, it tuned us to want to have sex, and it linked to sex to reproduction. As we got smarter, and eventually develop contraception, we are essentially reward hacking evolution’s crude hack. What’s going to happ…

>I’m going to try to win the award for the most controversial theory on this thread.

Extremely easy to beat that.

You can see that global population used to stay at around half a billion until around 1700. The growth is a recent thing.

So let me propose a more controversial theory - lead made people have a lot of children.

You can't beat this.

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