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India's surprise baby bust

economist.com

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Re: India's surprise baby bust

#831

Post by trumpdong »

dyauspitr wrote: post #522
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…

It’s not that complicated. As soon as women are educated and have a choice of supporting themselves the birth rate drops. If you want a higher birth rate, stop educating women and disempower them. This is something republicans in the US intimately understand.

Can't decipher sarcasm level

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#832

Post by trumpdong »

Izkata wrote: post #581
yellowdrone wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that is it. We have somewhat of a confirmation with Romania and Decree 770, which led to an increase in children (though that might have been temporary I'm not well versed in the history). I think there is no inherent desire to have children or if there is, it is far weaker than a lot of people think. And it makes sense, evolutionary. If you have a desire for self-preservation, a desire for the preservation o…

Thinking along those lines, a desire to "have children" may have even been bad - no built in stopping point. New child every year, resources overwhelmed...

There was a science fiction story I read about that once, an alien species that would die if they didn't give birth every year. I think they tried everything from hormone modification to mass baby dump pits but they couldn't maintain a stable society for longer than about fifty years when overpopulation killed everyone, so thrt just gave up.

Actually more than one, because I also read one about scientists deciphering messages from aliens who used the word for "baby eater" to mean "good"

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#833

Post by markus_zhang »

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’d argue that most of those support and incentives are barely enough in modern societies.

In modern societies families are atomic. Parents don’t get support from grandparents very often and sometimes they don’t get any support. There is no community support either, or very very little unless you happen to belong in some ethnics. On the other hand, people are more aware these days and regulations are tougher, so you can’t do a lot of things back in the day, like my parents used to leave 4 years old me to my neighbours for work.

So I’d argue that our society is actually more and more difficult for parents to give birth to babies, especially middle class parents because they don’t even enjoy much of financial support anyway — those goes to poorer families.

And this becomes clearer if you look at wealth distribution. Nowadays, in my city, which is considered as the most affordable metropolitan in Canada, it is very difficult for working people to buy properties with median salaries — and rent has gone up too so you can’t say “just rent it”.

All in all, I don’t know about Northern EU but it is harder and harder for working parents in Canada to have babies.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#834

Post by sirwhinesalot »

chrismorgan wrote: post #795
ycombinete wrote: post #766

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 paralle…

I'm a father of 2. If not for my mother in law I would have gone insane by now. Way harder than 1. 1 was mainly hard because we had no idea what we were doing. With 1 it is pretty easy for a parent to take over while the other rests. Not so with 2 kids.

Dealing with a rowdy toddler and a puking newborn at the same time is draining in a way that is impossible to describe.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#835

Post by lucketone »

tw04 wrote: post #809
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…

> and we are going to learn just how impossible it is as western society slowly collapses under the weight of its own social programs. Social programs aren’t what’s causing western society to collapse. Wealth consolidation on the other hand…

Wealth was quite consolidated when most population were peasants.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#836

Post by antasvara »

bombcar wrote: post #661
Qem wrote: post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Abundant resources (especially housing) and insufficient humans to run a tight bureaucracy will probably lead back to people having babies If well managed I think this is possible. But it's not given. Another scenario is houses in the countryside, small towns and far suburbs getting empty and soon uninhabitable due to lack of maintenance/infrastructure degradation, and remaining people packing close to core areas t…

Small towns survived for millennia before industrialization; and they could likely survive again, if anyone wanted that life.

The Venn diagram of "people that want traditional small town life" and "people that currently live in a small town" has a smaller overlap than you'd think.

The small towns in my area are desirable not just because they're small, but because they're small and have the same amenities as a bigger town. These towns are also increasingly relying on debt to fund decades of deferred maintenance just to keep the amenities they already have alive.

This would become dire if (for example) property values fell, as residential real estate taxes make up the majority of tax revenue. This might happen if demand for the town fell (perhaps due to fewer people), which would quickly become a catastrophic cycle (revenues fall, roads and schools deteriorate, which makes the town less desirable, repeat ad infinitum).

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#838

Post by trumpdong »

imtringued wrote: post #762
toomuchtodo wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're describing a systemic problem. An individual problem is: my paycheque is next week but I need to pay rent this week. That's a problem specific to me. A systemic problem is: paycheques aren't big enough to cover rent any more. It's a problem that affects a large number of people. Systems are comprised of individuals but describing a systemic problem from the perspective of one individual doesn't change the nature of the problem.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#839

Post by trumpdong »

btilly wrote: post #85
toomuchtodo wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I could rant about the stupidity of spending fossil fuels, to grow biofuels, for no net gain in energy. But with a definite cost in engine wear. That said, like Democracy, capitalism is the worst economic system, except all of the others that have been tried. And there have been enough alternate experiments that I wouldn't want to literally bet my life on the next one working better.

The free market is a very good starting point indeed, but it shouldn't be confused with Capitalism. Ironically, the free market best embodies the Communist slogan "let a million flowers bloom". Capitalism is more like giving Elon a lawnmower.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#840

Post by trumpdong »

M95D wrote: post #137
theflyinghorse wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Top 1% are too divorced from the real world to have ever seen a cog.

But they have some ideea how many people need to work to make them that much money.

Not really. They think LLMs can replace workers.
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