India's surprise baby bust • Hacker News Board

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#781

Post by GoblinSlayer » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 10:19 AM UTC

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…

I was home alone, it was fine. What do you mean by "kids can't roam around outdoors unsupervised"?

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#782

Post by rembal » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 10:26 AM UTC

rluna828 wrote: post #416

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…

Some mathematicians ran some numbers and diferent societies have different lowlying fruit. None of his improvements get societies to 2.1, but will theoretically move them to ~1.8. I'll find the source if people ask. 1. End toxic masculinity (machismo) in middle east and LatAM. No woman who knows how to read want to beaten or enslaved. 2. Jobs and Housing: Europe and America respectively. More three bed-room houses wo…

And middle east and latin America have much higher birthrates than Europe, East Asia and the US. I guess most women there must be really unsophisticated (I know you don't mean straight up illiterate).

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#783

Post by sensanaty » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 10:27 AM UTC

I'm in the Netherlands, and my partner and I don't want kids for a multitude of reasons, but the biggest one for us and many other friends of ours is the obscene costs of having a child. Even the ones that really want kids simply cannot afford to have one, because the price of living is simply absurd.

I'm extremely fortunate to be working at a large tech company and I have good money, but even with my income having a kid would be financially ruinous for us. Daycare costs alone are ludicrous, somewhere in the region of 2000-3000 euros PER MONTH. Now, most people get some form of gov't support for things like these, but we definitely wouldn't due to my income, and while I'm well off, I'm not that well off to be able to afford an expense like that.

Not to mention all the other costs associated with having a child, both material like the ludicrous price of housing but also mental.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#784

Post by pyrale » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 10:30 AM UTC

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…

Can you point to such places for sale in a reasonably sized city?

Cuz where I am, any appartment priced cheap is instantly bought up and remodeled into an unaffordable 2020's standards appartment.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#785

Post by makeitdouble » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 10:31 AM UTC

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #781

dgoldstein0 wrote: post #732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was home alone, it was fine. What do you mean by "kids can't roam around outdoors unsupervised"?

Depending on where you live, police will be called.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#786

Post by koolba » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 10:39 AM UTC

sensanaty wrote: post #783

I'm in the Netherlands, and my partner and I don't want kids for a multitude of reasons, but the biggest one for us and many other friends of ours is the obscene costs of having a child. Even the ones that really want kids simply cannot afford to have one, because the price of living is simply absurd. I'm extremely fortunate to be working at a large tech company and I have good money, but even with my income having a…

> Even the ones that really want kids simply cannot afford to have one, because the price of living is simply absurd.

Perhaps the price of living to which you are accustomed to is absurd.

> I'm extremely fortunate to be working at a large tech company and I have good money, but even with my income having a kid would be financially ruinous for us.

Would it though? Couples having been raising children with much less for millennia.

> Daycare costs alone are ludicrous, somewhere in the region of 2000-3000 euros PER MONTH.

Children have a lot of economies of scale. If one spouse stays home to watch them, that covers as many kids as you have.

Spending time with grandparents is also common. This is both cost effective and facilitates generational knowledge and culture transfer.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#787

Post by alexey-salmin » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 10:40 AM UTC

arbll wrote: post #25

hedora wrote: post #5

What’s the problem? We’re committed to destroying livable human habitat for 100M’s to 1B’s of people via global warming. That’ll be less painful if there are fewer people. Lower populations should lead to lower emissions growth too.

There's a significant risk it will lead to a large reduction in living standards. A lot of things like retirement funds are built with the assumption of infinite growth. This assumption will obviously break one day and when it does I don't see how it could go smoothly. On the plus side, it will likely lead to lower emissions, assuming it doesn't lead to massive wars or other destructive behaviors due to the instabili…

> A lot of things like retirement funds are built with the assumption of infinite growth

Not really, just a stable ratio of workers/retirees is enough for this system to work. But what we're seeing is a rapid shift in that ratio, with both less workers and more retirees.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#788

Post by Paradigm2020 » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 10:42 AM UTC

willmarch wrote: post #758

Paradigm2020 wrote: post #743

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not religious at all but... "To those who is given much..." If all they do is not have kids and claim that we are a cancer the minimum they could do is that other classic Speaking is silver but silence is gold... And well I firmly believe the biggest problem is the pervasive desire to be weak and complain by those who have the possibility of actual impact. The battle is lost before it's fought and all. But yeah we ar…

You might not like it, but by choosing not to reproduce they ARE having an actual impact on the world (as this debate about their actions demonstrates). Maybe we, as a species, would have better long term outcomes if we reflected more before blindly charging forward exactly as our parents did (and their parents before them). Maybe they feel we should choose a different course and look for better/different ways of liv…

If talking is impact there is an impact. But it makes the word kind of meaningless (a common issue).

All I know from them is their words... Which I hope we can agree where kind of negative (I personally prefer not to be a cancer hbu ?)

There is no such thing "as a species"... It's not like we are ants... Some groups of humans/individuals are net neutral, some net positive and most net negative.

The question is always about incentives and externalities... and not what we as a nation/city/... Whatever prefer but what we are willing to stop doing...

At the end of the day the world is the way it is because the people who choose the game are the ones who keep playing it.

The thing that got me with his comment is that he based on his website is relatively succesful... Unlike this fake belief that billionaires hold all the power it is in general the 0.1% that hold the power... With the consent of rhe 9.9% and he's most likely 9.9% ...

This not having kids as a noble sacrifice is just choosing to be weak tbh unless he's actually tried but if that is the case it's definitely not in public.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#789

Post by skissane » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 10:43 AM UTC

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…

Last month, the US Census Bureau released their 2025 population estimates. In the ~5 years from April 1, 2020 to July 1, 2025, it estimates Kiryas Joel's population grew from 32,956 to 47,147 – a 43.1% increase. [0] That's not spectacular in the figures themselves–you'll see bigger bumps when new suburbs are established–but it is spectacular in being almost all due to natural increase instead of migration.

Evolution is still working, if we understand it as having both biological and cultural components. Give it a few centuries, and secular people will be outnumbered by ultra-Orthodox Jews, and the Amish, and radtrad Catholics, and Mormon polygamists, and so on. That's the thesis of Eric Kaufmann's 2010 book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? – and I believe, on the whole, he's right.

[0] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/kiryasjoelvilla...

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#790

Post by alexey-salmin » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 10:43 AM UTC

triceratops wrote: post #73

arbll wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a significant risk it will lead to a large reduction in living standards. A lot of things like retirement funds are built with the assumption of infinite growth. This assumption will obviously break one day and when it does I don't see how it could go smoothly. On the plus side, it will likely lead to lower emissions, assuming it doesn't lead to massive wars or other destructive behaviors due to the instabili…

> 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.

You can't eat assets. Retirees need goods and services, these should be produced by the workers and handed over to retirees for free.

No wealth redistribution mechanism can solve the fundamental problem of less workers handing over more and more of their produce to the growing population of retirees.