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India's surprise baby bust

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Re: India's surprise baby bust

#891

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading about it in books and watching anime won’t prevent them from going functionally extinct in less than 200 years.

No one cares. Japanese culture today is nothing like it was 200 years ago.

I care. I don’t want the country of Japan to be a bunch of starving geriatrics a few decades from now.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#892
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…

Yeah, exactly that. Most friends I have in Canada only started to have families once they were able to secure appropriate-sized dwelling. Which didn’t happen until late 30s. And current generations possibly cannot afford it at all in many jurisdictions. And stories I read from back in the day were “a factory worker and a teacher bought and paid off a house in downtown Ottawa in 3 years” are just insane. If I had that kind of purchasing power today I’d have more kids for sure.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#893

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They didn't say "(in nominal terms)" and businesses are expected to grow in real terms.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#894
post #780
post #666

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Despite that, China has a fertility rate of 0.93, which is among the lowest in the world, and certainly much lower than the US (1.6). So it doesn't seem that that cultural difference boosts the fertility rate all that much.

china destroyed its fertility rate with the one-child policy. so that is not comparable.

That's an easy answer, but it doesn't explain why nearby/culturally related countries like South Korea and Taiwan have similar or even lower fertility rates, despite never having a one child policy.

And of course China's fertility rate now is even lower than it was at any point when the one child policy was in effect.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#895
post #8

What's the strong case against population dwindling other than supporting aging population? Given the AI armageddon, it just makes sense to reduce the population. If there's less population, we need less production and less workers. Of course, countries have to deal with oldest population for a brief period of time.

If you believe extraordinary individuals are a product of nature and we don't know how to nurture them into existence then it makes sense. Whatever confluence of events triggers an Einstein has the greatest number of chances to occur.

Either way it seems dumb to structure our entire economy and future around elder care. I guess that is what you get when people older than 60 have 65% of the wealth and people under 40 have 7%.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#896

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 think this is close but misses the only thing that really matters: birth control makes it a choice. We are just 3 generations into being able to decide whether or not sex means kids. And making that positive choice takes a lot of energy.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#898
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…

At no point in history did we have economic security at child bearing age and the assumption that it has a correlation with number of children seems to go against the data.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#899

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…

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

Very attractive numbers. I should look into the daycare business. I am guessing the people running daycare centers probably have several tax incentives too.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#900

One interesting factor about India is the minimum age of marriage. For males, it’s 21. For females, it’s 18. There have been attempts since at least 2021 to increase the age for females to 21, and I’ve talked with some that thought it was 21. Marriages below the legal ages definitely do sometimes occur. Personally, I think setting it to 21 for males is unwise, and setting it to 21 for females would be sheer madness.…

It's not only reaction against child marriages. Thr prevailing culture is to marry off girls as early as possible, affecting their higher education. It also causes lower workforce participation among women as at the point of marriage they typically neither have higher education nor they are employed. Then immediately after marriage there is demand for bearing child, after which they no longer have time to look for employment.

Early marriage basically kills job opportunities and subsequently female workforce participation is lower.

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