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India's surprise baby bust

economist.com

761–770 of 1001 posts

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#761

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…

There is abortion option. And adoption. But to me it has always sounded like that most make it work somehow. So once there is a kid economics can in many cases workout somehow. Maybe not optimally but somehow. With even more kids later.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#762
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The other 99% is even more dependent on the machine than the top 1%. They can build themselves reinforced bunkers, just in case. What is your plan if, say, the food distribution infrastructure breaks down? Does that sound like an extremely unlikely outcome? Back in 2008, we came within hours of credit cards stopping working. Projections say that if credit cards stop working, food distribution breaks down. Mass hunger…

This is a call for community and durable systems that serve the human instead of traditional systems built to aggregate and funnel capital to a few. The fertility crisis is a capital crisis (taxpayers needed to pay back debt issued today decades into the future, workers for corporate profits), not a crisis for the individual. I see it as an exciting opportunity to maintain and improve quality of life for humans while…

Uh no?

The fertility crisis is an entirely individual crisis. You are a parent and you raise children

Your children's pension contributions are paid out to someone else, leaving less for you.

Having your own children no longer ensures your retirement, so you don't have them in the first place.

The problem couldn't be more individual than that.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#763

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 am guessing you are from some reasonably developed country, you are so well unaware of how deeply biased the system is against most people in third world countries, the amount of suffering they experience is not for the faint of heart.

GP is a pampered 1st world baby simulating „difficulty” in his life because of decadent boredom, likely spending tens of thousands of dollars per year unnecessarily, living in an oversized dwelling with access to education, healthcare, plumbing, a robust justice system and a social safety net.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#764

If you invert the question "why aren't people having kids" to "why did people want kids in the first place" then the fertility crisis makes more sense. Kids were free labor and old age insurance. Now they are extremely expensive pets. Materially they are a net negative in a modern society.

This is almost correct. The way the pension systems are set up, you're donating your children's labor to the pension system as a whole. This means any investment into your children is purely an expense. Meanwhile if you don't have children, you can save money for retirement and let other people's children work for you. This means children are a net positive to society as a whole, but a net negative to the parents rai…

Kids are definitely a net positive for society. They're future taxpayers.

But that's not relevant to couples choice to get pregnant. I've never heard a parent say they had kids so they can pay into Social Security.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#765
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.

[flagged]

Please think about what you just said, and consider whether or not that's any of your fucking business.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#766

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…

Yes, my wife and I live away from family. On the weekends, when there is no nanny, we are at work 100% of the time with him. One's only downtime is when he naps, or when your partner is looking after him.

Once we add a second child to that mix it'll be 100% of each of our time the entire time.

It's pretty extreme.

We both work full time (like most millennial families), so if we couldn't afford a nanny we literally could not have a child.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#767

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 partiall…

There is this thing called a zero lower bound. Then there is this thing called liquidity preference, which is basically the minimum fee someone accepts to part with liquidity.

Add those two together and you will get a minimum positive return constraint on capital.

Capital can only pay a return if it is fully utilized. This means there needs to be enough demand to saturate the machine.

You can never have any form of excess capacity, because excess physical capital does not generate any returns. It actually loses you money, which is incompatible with the positive return constraint.

Since the expected return is positive, the lender has to pay back more than he borrowed, meaning that he has to have more revenue and more revenue is earned by selling more products.

Now, this alone doesn't explain the reason why you have to keep going though.

The question is, when someone demands positive returns and those returns are artificially anchored against zero thanks to the ZLB, why is this bad.

Well, think about what happens if nobody borrows the money. That means the money is still waiting for a borrower and it is not turning into demand. Now there is money missing in the economy. The rest of the money has to circulate faster to compensate the loss of money but it doesn't, because everyone is thinking the same thing.

The problem here isn't on the business side. The problem is that someone decided to use an unsigned integer for something that can be negative.

You need money for daily transactions. You don't care about the nominal value of the money as a "store of value", you care about it as a way to turn your illiquid work output into a liquid voucher you can redeem at any store.

Since modern society depends on money, having the money system degrade is similar to an internet or electricity outage.

So what happens instead is that the government takes on more debt because that is the logic of a zero lower bound.

It also forces the central banks to do QE, because there is nothing you can do at zero.

In both cases, the system is being flooded with the same defective money. Someone will hold onto it, due to their liquidity preference and the lack of negative interest rates.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#768

Naive question- why does the human population need to keep growing? Why can’t we let it shrink? If AI and robotics are going to come to fruition in the next 50 years, why do we need so many people?

Let’s say, it’s extremely unfair to the new generations. They bear crushing social benefits for a majority of old people and are outvoted by the same old people. Until population stops reducing, or social benefits are severely reformed. The latter being the more likely, but not before the economy crashes.

But they’ll be able to live in a recovering environment that doesn’t bear the overpopulation strain.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#769
post #388

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…

> 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.

I’m 24 and have enough money. I want kids. I think I won’t be able to have any. Most of my friends are in the same boat.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#770
post #768

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let’s say, it’s extremely unfair to the new generations. They bear crushing social benefits for a majority of old people and are outvoted by the same old people. Until population stops reducing, or social benefits are severely reformed. The latter being the more likely, but not before the economy crashes.

But they’ll be able to live in a recovering environment that doesn’t bear the overpopulation strain.

LOL. The environment will be destroyed but it won’t be getting any worse anymore. They will be delighted. Just a couple thousand years, maybe a million, to wait out – doable.
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