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India's surprise baby bust

economist.com

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Re: India's surprise baby bust

#731

Post by toasty228 »

voiceofchoice wrote: post #374

I encourage anyone surprised that people would opt out of babies and raising kids actually spend time with kids. Not just like for the holidays and pass them back when they start crying, but an actual extended period of time dealing with all the issues that they bring. You've got to be a special kind of idealistic romantic to still see the appeal afterwards. Which is great for you of course if you do. But there's a r…

Your body go through a lot of hormonal changes when it's your own kids, of course it does not work as well with other random kids...

But of course people on this forum believe we're basically machines and that machines are interchangeable, they're so far in the techno bubble they forget we're just some kind of complex apes

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#732

Post by dgoldstein0 »

scoofy wrote: post #388
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…

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…

The economics almost certainly play a role, but I think the better way to think about it is how we economize time too.

if you are chasing a career, putting in 40,50,60 hours a week - how can you take time off to have a kid? who is going to take care of the kid?

Increasingly having kids has gotten more expensive - housing, childcare costs, and general expected investment/supervision of children. In agricultural societies, kids often helped out with the farming; send them to school and they are around less to help. Say that kids can't roam around outdoors unsupervised, and caregivers have to spend even more time watching (older) children. Etc. And as people increasingly move further from where they grew up to chase good jobs, that means they are on average further from their families who would have helped with childcare in previous generations.

The economic realities factor in too - people are waiting longer to get married because they want to date financially stable people, and financial stability is on average taking longer to achieve. But if you had to move to a more expensive city, further from family... that's a recipe for couples where both work and perhaps have to work to make their finances work. Babies have become a luxury item in these higher cost of living places.

if we want more children, we need to make it easier to be a parent. Cheaper / free childcare, better parental leave policies, and cheaper cost of living so that people who want to be stay at home parents can have that option.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#733

Post by Vecr »

tuatoru wrote: post #704
smarm52 wrote: post #694

> But demographers have long shown that what really counts is girls’ education. Interesting, they mention JUST education as the deciding factor. Would it not be education AND birth control?

Traditionally, female years of education, child mortality, and GDP per capita (in order of importance) explain 85% of fertility, and the residual is not biased in either direction. source: Lant Pritchett, long-time development economist. Edit: I don't think anyone outside the Taliban seriously wants to reverse the trends in any of those 3 factors.

Robin Hanson on the first, incentivized with the ability to sell shares in your child.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#734

Post by toasty228 »

zbentley wrote: post #398
nashashmi wrote: post #370

Lots of theories here. Industrialization. Wealth. Education. First world transformation. Kids' expense. All of these are second-round of reasons. Primary reason: Materialistic wealth or wealth in general is preferred over human contact. Effect: People connection drops. Community drops. Independence and Individualism prosper. Secondary effect: The seeds for family development (community, human connection, village cama…

> I will acknowledge industrialization improved people's access to wealth and materialism. And reduced illness, increased education, increased access to better nutrition, increased lifespan, increased able lifespan (knees/back/teeth don’t give out as early), and lots more. Like, even if I grant that this replaced human connection (and I’m not sure that’s true, nor am I sure if it is meaningfully true—access to water…

We went too far though, the main causes of death in the west are now all due to overconsumption, more than 50% of westerners are overweight, etc.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#736

Post by Gud »

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…

Or perhaps a small percentage(You are only explaining half of the equation.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#737

Post by chrisco255 »

accidentallfact wrote: post #730
Ifkaluva wrote: post #609

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Lead? Lead was used for millenia. The Romans made copious use of lead.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#738

Post by Ntrails »

dgoldstein0 wrote: post #732
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…

The economics almost certainly play a role, but I think the better way to think about it is how we economize time too. if you are chasing a career, putting in 40,50,60 hours a week - how can you take time off to have a kid? who is going to take care of the kid? Increasingly having kids has gotten more expensive - housing, childcare costs, and general expected investment/supervision of children. In agricultural societ…

> Cheaper / free childcare, better parental leave policies, and cheaper cost of living so that people who want to be stay at home parents can have that option.

As GP states, heavily pushing subsidies has not been shown to work.

The one thing we know works is restricting access to birth control - I'd bet good money that ups the birth rate in no time. Leave as an exercise for the reader whether it is a good idea xD

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#739

Post by socalgal2 »

scoofy wrote: post #388
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…

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…

There's no evidence of this what-so-ever

Every indication points in the opposite direction. The more abundance the less kids. Read the data.

Your intuition is just flat out wrong. People don't want kids because they don't want kids. Pretty simple. Society changes with abundance. That abundance leads to more leisure activities more education which leads to a more diverse set of options for life and so more people choose some option that does not include having children.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#740

Post by defrost »

chrisco255 wrote: post #737
accidentallfact wrote: post #730

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Lead? Lead was used for millenia. The Romans made copious use of lead.

And the Romans had many children?

Humans had many offspring for millennia, humanity has had fewer offspring since lead has been banned.

I'm not the one proposing the theory, but that's a correlation.

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