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India's surprise baby bust

economist.com

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Re: India's surprise baby bust

#881

Post by spaceman_2020 »

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…

It's also such a recursive problem - there aren't enough kids, so your kids don't have enough kids to play with, so you don't have more kids

I remember almost never sitting inside my house after school. I had two elder siblings and we had probably 30 odd kids in my locality. We would all be out all the time. Safety wasn't an issue because there were some older kids in the group too who could be counted on to keep things in line

Now my daughter has just 3-5 kids of her age in my locality, and because they don't have any older siblings, they always have to be accompanied by adults

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#882

Post by tw04 »

lucketone wrote: post #835
tw04 wrote: post #809

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The wealth distribution in England in the 1500s had the top 1% controlling roughly 25% of the wealth.

The top 1% in America today controls roughly 32% of the wealth.

Tell us more about the peasants who got significant time off because the ruling class knew endless work resulted in an unhappy populace.

https://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_...

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#883

Post by noosphr »

trumpdong wrote: post #818
noosphr wrote: post #775

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to get flagged to hell but 'we' do not. Women do. Men can happily wait till their 80s to have three children. We need to get over the fantasy that biology doesn't drive survival. If anyone is upset by that please help fund artificial womb research. There isn't nearly enough money in the space for the sole thing that can prevent human extinction at worst or soylent green at best.

Men's rate of having children with genetic defects rises with age, just not as sharply as women's.

Womens ability to have children drops to zero, mens does not.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#884

Post by pibaker »

belval wrote: post #324
everdrive wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, the hellscape that is Japan. The Japanese are currently fleeing to South Sudan and Darfur in hopes of a better life.

The 42.7M tourists that went there in 2025 just enjoyed seeing the incredible decay of a dying country, a morbid fascination or sorts. /s (obviously)

Cancun has one of the highest murder rates in the world. But I guess we shouldn't care about it because thousands of Americans fly there for vacation every day.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#885

Post by BobaFloutist »

saulpw wrote: post #608
BobaFloutist wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know where you got that idea, but we're not even the most populous species of vertebrates on the planet (that might be chickens). If you include arthropods, ants make it not even remotely close.

"Land vertebrates", #1 is chickens, #2 is humans. But colloquially "animal" does not include ants or fish.

Insects I'll consider fair enough, but fish? Are you leaning on "fish isn't meat"? Otherwise, this isn't a colloquial use I'm familiar with.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#886

Post by rldjbpin »

a true outlier in this, even though other developing countries are mentioned in the article.

most of society is not in productive labour nor have significant female participation in non-agricultural work in the macro level.

almost any theory we apply for population slowdown melts down here. also, there are few regions (also populous) which have still significantly high birth rate.

in urban areas, a lot of asian peers go through a similar situation. crazy high costs to raise a family to stay "competitive": from inception to job market.

handouts will not help as the current social net is not sustainable nor effective. probably for the first time in recorded history would food availability not determine population growth.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#887

Post by guyzero »

Hendrikto wrote: post #793
guyzero wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Canada has always accepted immigrants. Rapidly increasing the number of foreign students to goose the slumping post-secondary education sector did not work out great. Even with the reductions, there are always immigrants coming into Canada.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#888

Post by chopin »

trumpdong wrote: post #815
gradstudent wrote: post #523

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> nice house in a nice suburb! There's your problem. Everyone wants to live in the same set of well established well resourced neighbourhoods. But there's too many of us. Go out in the 'burbs and accept that owning a house implies a commute you will dislike (among a host of other compromises).

Why should it have to? Other countries build vertically in the urban cores. Many places in Europe even build small towns this way. One of the only good things about Europe is that I get to live really close to where I work, and not even have a commute.

Where in Europe should that be? I live in Germany and for example Stuttgart has a shortage of nurses because they can't afford living in a 1 hour commuting range (one way).

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#889

Post by toomuchtodo »

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.

Having children in no way guarantees they will provide for you in old age. Stop by your local retirement home and ask how many kids stop by to see their parents. Free will is a thing, children are not assets.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#890

Post by quickthrowman »

trumpdong wrote: post #846
quickthrowman wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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; It’s very simple. If you make $1M in profit in a year and the following year you also make $1M but inflation was 3%, you earned 3% less money than you did the year before. The nominal profit was the same but the real profit was lower. To earn the same re…

That's not actual growth though, that's just measuring the same business in a different unit worth 0.97 of the old unit. The business can be the same size.

The question asked was “Why is it bad to earn a constant (in nominal terms) profit rather than an increasing profit.” The size of the business is irrelevant to this question. I answered the question, the short answer is ‘inflation’.

When responding to a question, I choose to answer the question the person asked instead of another question they didn’t ask.

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