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Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline

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Re: Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline

#111

Post by HedonicEscal8r »

skissane wrote: post #95
Balgair wrote: post #92

I hang out on fertility related sites and on twitter. It's an odd bunch. You have hardcore Jewish rabbis hanging with radical imams and dyed-in-the-wool Chinese communists and everyone in between. It's an issue, like climate change, that effects us all equally. No one has any good ideas about the root causes nor the solutions. It's apartments, it's land use taxes, it's cost of living, it's governmental policy. Sure,…

> No one has any good ideas about the root causes nor the solutions. I think if you look at ultra-Orthodox Jews and the Amish, the answer is obvious - the easiest way to maximise fertility is to convince people that God exists, has commanded them to reproduce, and to minimise engagement with cultures that don’t share that commitment; the root cause of low fertility is most people in the current population don’t belie…

By the 23rd century, sexual reproduction will be vastly transformed by technology. The discussions we're having now will be unrecognizable.

Re: Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline

#112

Post by HedonicEscal8r »

rowanseymour wrote: post #84
OutOfHere wrote: post #59

[flagged]

I know plenty of women who have delayed starting a family and they were well aware of the increased risks.. as they struggled to meet the right person, establish themselves professionally etc. They were certainly not brainwashed.

I know someone who knew such a women that benefited from this suggestion, so for what it's worth: women who feel strongly about having kids but are struggling to find a suitable partner should consider instead finding a suitable sperm donor through the appropriate legal channels, and raising the kid alone.

Re: Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline

#113

Post by skissane »

HedonicEscal8r wrote: post #111
skissane wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No one has any good ideas about the root causes nor the solutions. I think if you look at ultra-Orthodox Jews and the Amish, the answer is obvious - the easiest way to maximise fertility is to convince people that God exists, has commanded them to reproduce, and to minimise engagement with cultures that don’t share that commitment; the root cause of low fertility is most people in the current population don’t belie…

By the 23rd century, sexual reproduction will be vastly transformed by technology. The discussions we're having now will be unrecognizable.

I think it will make less of a difference than you think.

Do you think people who have 0-2 kids would be signing up to have 10+ if only we could grow babies in vats? I doubt it. By contrast, >10 kids is actually quite common in communities like Kiryas Joel.

Most of the expense of children isn't the physical burden of pregnancy, it is the time and effort and expense in raising them. Making pregnancy easier won't make a huge difference to the birth rate, because for most women the burden of raising the child weighs much more heavily on her mind than the pregnancy itself does. Babies in vats would be an enticing option for wannabe single dads, gay male couples, women with medical issues – but the actual increase in "births" from those groups taking up that option is likely to be relatively modest. And natural biological reproduction is extremely cost efficient, due to millions of years of evolution optimising it – even after growing babies in vats becomes technically feasible, it is going to take a lot longer before it can compete on price with doing it the natural way.

Of course, you could outsource the raising of your kids to AI robot nannies – but, that raises serious concerns about how well-adjusted they'd be, about the ethics – and apart from that, who would want to? Most people want to have kids because they actually want the emotional relationship of being their parent – absent religious conviction pushing them to do otherwise, they'd rather have a few they can invest in as individuals, than a large number with most of the actual work of parenting outsourced to AI.

Re: Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline

#114

Post by dribbiy8 »

Ysx wrote: post #24
pfannkuchen wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay but if other groups aren’t doing it, the planet is still doomed and now your group is worse off. Congratulations, you have accomplished nothing!

The environment is doomed either way without action. Is the issue that some demographics will become more dominant?

[dead]

Re: Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline

#115

Post by throw-the-towel »

ryandrake wrote: post #106
thegrim33 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes sense, but it's probably pretty far down on the list of "what could we put money towards in order to increase birthrate". Could probably get a lot more result for the money by funding efforts to pair people together, make them want to have kids, make them more financially equipped to have kids, etc.

Or, why not lean in to falling birthrates and try to build a society that doesn't rely on the population needing to increase infinitely? Everyone just acts as though replacement birthrate is simply something we must meet or exceed, because of dumb "line must always go up" economics. Can't we envision a functional world where the global population is halving every 40 years rather than doubling every 40 years?

But who'd pay the pensions then?

Re: Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline

#116

Post by ponector »

balfirevic wrote: post #110
ryandrake wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, why not lean in to falling birthrates and try to build a society that doesn't rely on the population needing to increase infinitely? Everyone just acts as though replacement birthrate is simply something we must meet or exceed, because of dumb "line must always go up" economics. Can't we envision a functional world where the global population is halving every 40 years rather than doubling every 40 years?

Barring not-yet-invented advances in automation, shrinking population means fewer and fewer people providing goods and services compared to the number of people that need them, which means worse and worse poverty for larger and larger fraction of people.

>> fewer and fewer people providing goods and services

Many of them are not needed anyway. Close half of the fast food joints. Or fire half of the IT people. Go back to levels we had in 2006!

Re: Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline

#117

Post by nielsbot »

mrweasel wrote: post #30
nielsbot wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

don’t non-US countries already do this?

Yes, and it's not working, birthrates are still declining. The one factor that more than anything triggers declining birthrates are the level of education among women. We're going to have to adjust to smaller populations, unless we wish to devolve as a society.

…or stop educating women!

I’m joking. But some religious types say it unironically.

Re: Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline

#118

Post by bdangubic »

zdragnar wrote: post #100
bdangubic wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

no one (I mean this, not one person on Earth) will be swayed to have a baby given your offer.

Changing the birth rate begins with changing the culture that discourages families of a certain size. Such a program would be a good first step in stating that bearing and raising children is something we value as a society. Coincidentally, I had a similar suspicion about the free/subsidized fertility treatments- the rate of people not having children due to needing medical intervention is small enough that subsidizi…

I was commenting on

> A fairer, more effective strategy would be subsidizing the first year or so of the child's care- diapers, food, clothes, cribs, vaccines and such.

And not anything political. United States is so fucked beyond repair when even commenting on birth rates turns into “being on the left politically”

Re: Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline

#119

Post by mike_hearn »

julianlam wrote: post #19

Every time this sort of news pops up, I think "why aren't they incentivising and subsidizing fertility treatment"? You want to raise the fertility rate, yes? You could convince an entire population to have more babies the hard way (social or economic pressure). Or literally just let the people who are already trying, but can't for some physiological reason, have one. They already want children, if they're pursuing fe…

It's obvious but not useful:

1. It's been tried and doesn't work.

2. The main reason people can't have kids is waiting too late (or being unable to find a partner and get married). This happens for social reasons. If you make it easier to wait longer and still have children, then people will just up the amount of time they wait and you're back to square one.

Re: Falling fertility on the left as key driver of US birth decline

#120

Post by vkou »

xyzelement wrote: post #50
novia wrote: post #3

Captain Planet literally told children who cared about environmentalism to "keep families small" to save our planet. https://youtu.be/tZCg9HsDntY It's not difficult to take that to the next logical conclusion, no children means less resources used.

Likewise in the 90s the idea of fearing unintentional pregnancy was intentionally infused into teen oriented TV shows and PSA. It created the idea that pregnancy is something to avoid unless you are super ready which is understood to have moved the needle. There's something beyond idiotic about a society that frames it's own reproduction as a negative.

There's something beyond idiotic about a society that goes out of its way to make having children an absolutely batshit insane decision for anyone before their mid-thirties.

Doubly so when it blames children's television for its ills, instead of the obvious suspects of nuclear families (who have no free adult time for child care), dying rural areas (which push young adults to move away from their parents), a fucked up and unaffordable healthcare system, an ever-growing chasm between haves and have-nots, and the expectation that children should not be left unsupervised for even a moment (by either their parents, who presumably have to work for a living, or by a paid babysitter, who the have-not parents are somehow supposed to afford) until their teens. Oh, and in more recent years, the redder regions of it have also been waging and winning a war against women's reproductive health. Not to mention the war against the 'wrong'[1] kind of immigrant.

No, it's clearly television that's at fault.

---

[1] The definition of 'wrong' changes every fucking week, suddenly and without warning. You'd have to be insane to have a child when you or your partner can lose your/their status, and be arrested and deported at the whim of the tweeter-in-chief. The amount of work the 'family values' party has been putting into tearing families apart is really something.

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