India's surprise baby bust • Hacker News Board

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#791

Post by ZeroGravitas » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 10:47 AM UTC

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…

From the abstract of your link 2:

> As indicated by the results: (1) Family welfare policies notably boost fertility, and the boosting effect is long-lasting

There appears to be a concerned effort to claim that incentivising raising children doesn't work.

Clearly the people with (control of) the money don't feel like spending it on this.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#792

Post by broken-kebab » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 10:51 AM UTC

keerthiko wrote: post #589

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.

> FWIW kids of rich parents do not procreate somehow better even if they are not constrained by housing market. I don't think this assertion holds true at all: https://i.redd.it/5wy659956rsc1.png

If this chart showed what you seem to believe it shows, there would be glaring difference between brackets, similar to secular Jews vs Orthodox. What it probably shows is that pro-procreation minority partners has more leverage in pushing their wives/husbands towards having kids when they can appeal to already high economic/social status. Not making a significant change overall though.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#793

Post by Hendrikto » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 10:52 AM UTC

guyzero wrote: post #323

throwyawayyyy wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, if Japan is the world's future, isn't that kind of... good? It's not the first place I think of when I think of a failing country.

Japan is not without problems related to a shrinking population i.e. https://eastasiaforum.org/2026/05/21/japans-immigration-poli... but it's a problem easily solved by just letting in more immigrants.

> but it's a problem easily solved by just letting in more immigrants

This has been tried extensively e.g. in Germany, France, Sweden, Canada, …. It did not work out great.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#794

Post by rahkiin » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 10:52 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…

I’m really interested how you got these numbers. Using some of the daycare providers in our most expensive city (Amsterdam) with an obscene collective income (250k) with 5 full days of daycare (which not many parents even want) I get net 1300 per child.

For 3 days with more normal incomes it is closer to 700-800 euros

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#795

Post by chrismorgan » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 11:00 AM UTC

ycombinete wrote: post #766

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…

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 co…

If I’m reading you correctly, you seem to think that two kids takes twice as much effort as one kid? People broadly agree that cost and effort both grow sublinearly. Especially effort, though it is of course much harder to quantify. But personally I suspect that even four kids (serially) may not cross the twice-as-much-effort threshold. Aging affects the amounts and types of effort required, too. Four kids in parallel (quadruplets) will definitely be more than twice as much effort for quite some time!

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#796

Post by expedition32 » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 11:00 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…

My mother told me that daycare used to be FREE in the 70s and early 80s. She was a working single mother.

Vote long enough for the VVD and you will see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#797

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 11:03 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…

[deleted]

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#798

Post by inglor_cz » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 11:07 AM UTC

koolba wrote: post #786

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 fo…

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

That is not really an actionable observation. The Netherlands is an extremely dense country already, what is OP exactly supposed to do to make their cost of living non-absurd?

> Couples having been raising children with much less for mill

It wasn't just couples then, though. It was the entire village or neighbourhood: cousins, aunts, neighbours, godparents. Nowadays our society is so fragmented that you indeed usually are alone to tackle everything. This change from extended family to nuclear family model definitely has some impact on total fertility.

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

Which also means that there is no spouse's income anymore. Unless your spouse makes really little money, you will end up in a similar financial hole either way.

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

If people have kids in their 30s, the grandparents are quite often too old and sick to help. They may also live way too far to be able to visit daily or even weekly.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#799

Post by inglor_cz » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 11:09 AM UTC

expedition32 wrote: post #796

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…

My mother told me that daycare used to be FREE in the 70s and early 80s. She was a working single mother. Vote long enough for the VVD and you will see man-made horrors beyond your comprehension.

The demographic structure was also different.

Europe has become a pensioner-heavy society since then, these people vote, and vote, quite logically, for the welfare system to support themselves.

All the rich societies which slowly transform from 10 per cent old people to 40 per cent old people will have similar cashflow changes.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#800

Post by inglor_cz » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 11:10 AM UTC

rembal wrote: post #778

jiggawatts wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m in my fourties’ unable to afford a three bedroom apartment in my city with an income in the top two or three percentile. I’ve had boomers tell me with a straight face that “they did it” so it can’t be that hard despite a 5x increase in housing costs relative to income. I’d have to spend every single post tax dollar for two decades to afford an actual house. Not counting interest and other taxes and council rates.…

A different perspective from Poland: house affordability is equally as bad, so the argument could have been "young people don't have babies because they can't afford three bedroom apartments". But the country had a major baby boom in the 80s, during a (relatively mild) civil war and in the middle of a major economic crisis, when getting anything other than vinegar was a huge problem. And I clearly remember ppl living…

I suspect that getting contraceptives was also complicated during the Jaruzelski Junta days.