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Adults over 65 will outnumber children by 2029

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Re: Adults over 65 will outnumber children by 2029

#141

Post by xboxnolifes »

eigencoder wrote: post #106
throw-the-towel wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You jest, but I'd think it really is the opposite. Hard to care too much for a child if you've got five spare ones.

Do you have children? Because I've never heard a parent think that way

I think it's a little brash, but I do think that if we could accurately measure "care" that people with 1 child care statistically slightly more for them than those with 5 might care about any individual one. Not that they don't care, but that the one with 1 would worry more. Like how families with 1 daughter and multiple boys might dot on the only daughter a bit more.

Re: Adults over 65 will outnumber children by 2029

#142

Post by Razengan »

So what?

Improving healthcare and medicine should be one of the core goals of civilization, so eventually we should have healthcare good enough to enable "practical immortality": No "aging" and no deaths save in extreme cases or physical accidents/violence.

In an ideal future, the majority of humans SHOULD be all over 100 years old! and hale and healthy as a 30 year old.

The problem is not "how long most people have been alive", maybe the problem is our unwillingness to reassess social assumptions established >2000 years ago:

That everyone has to "work", everyone has to "earn", everyone has to constantly "buy", and that everyone has to constantly pump out babies so they can also keep doing the same...

Re: Adults over 65 will outnumber children by 2029

#143

Post by arjie »

cyberax wrote: post #140
arjie wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well personal space and personal time were not in abundant supply in our times of growth. It is true that urban areas have far fewer children than rural areas and that this is a worldwide property. It’s a pity since I like the ability for kids to walk to places and take the bus or train and I’ve grown up in a rural place (pythons and peacocks, cows and birds, scorpions and cobras!) and in a highly urbanized environme…

> I personally think it’s just opportunity cost. Nope. It's just time and personal living space. It's THAT simple. Go on, try to plan your day with transit and no car if you have 3 children (with 2-3 year age gaps). You'll find that this really works only if everything is concentrated, or if it's a full-time job for you. That's why we hear so much about "15-minute neighborhoods". But when everything is concentrated,…

That's how I grew up in a family of four in India and my parents are surgeons so we didn't really have them able to take us places for the majority of time. TFR at the time was 4.0 and we had access to contraception etc. and the majority of our trips here in SF are on foot as well. There are therefore some hidden assumptions here. We do take the car to the paediatrician etc. but I should soon have an Urban Arrow / R&M bike and will see how it performs.

Re: Adults over 65 will outnumber children by 2029

#145

Post by pstuart »

iamnothere wrote: post #139
pstuart wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If things don't change, those in power in the US will succeed in making the second a reality. There is a "replacement" crisis but it's being addressed by pearl clutching and those advocating for forced birth. Having children is expensive all the way around. And women's reproductive rights have enabled them to (rightfully) make their own choices about motherhood. To state the obvious: children literally are the future…

A people that will not or cannot reproduce itself must eventually step aside for a people that will. Those who govern us see us as an economic zone to exploit, so perpetuating core social values isn’t really a concern. Although even countries who recognize this problem are having trouble finding a solution. It may simply be that the future doesn’t look very much like the “developed world”. The only nations (or large…

Your assessment is depressingly reasonable.

I have a thesis that people need stories to inform and inspire them. I also believe that this problem is technically solvable, and that the stories we have today are either backwards (the woman belongs at home making babies and taking care of daddy), or too hand-wavy (we just need to fund Head Start and make schools free).

I'm all for the latter approach but it doesn't address the fact that children are money, time, and energy vampires (albeit lovable and worthy of those things). We need more than that. Programs that augment school itself (the arts, scouting, DIY/maker stuff, etc). Those exist but are not evenly distributed and we need way more of it.

Lastly, the "village" part of encouraging communities to help families thrive instead of struggle; to make sure that kids have the options they need rather than turning to drugs, gangs, etc.

C'mon everybody, let's kumbaya!

Re: Adults over 65 will outnumber children by 2029

#146

Post by cyberax »

amluto wrote: post #112
cyberax wrote: post #36

Keep building these bike lanes and 15-minute neighborhoods. So that people don't even think about having children. Make sure people have no personal space and no personal time. That's how we reduce the Earth's population!

Given a choice between: (a) non-walkable neighborhoods with big houses, big roads and cars everywhere, versus (b) smaller houses or apartments but fewer cars, walkable neighborhoods, and bikes (and other small mobility devices that small kids can use) I can tell you where being a kid seems more fun. And I’ve personally been to both sorts of places recently and observed how the kids behave. Sure, with big lots, kids h…

And I can tell you that (a) is actually where the children _are_. And (b) is where the people go to die.

> Sure, with big lots, kids have lots of space in their own backyards. And big cars make soccer-momming easier. But, when kids can easily and safely get somewhere else approximately on their own, the whole situation seems better.

It seems better, but it's actually not better.

Besides, suburbs can be improved quite a bit by adding local parks, mandating sidewalks, etc. We're also on the cusp of the self-driving revolution, and pretty soon children will be able to just get into a cab by themselves.

> and everyone gets to experience an appropriate amount of independence for their size.

And how do you get to that point from 0 children?

Re: Adults over 65 will outnumber children by 2029

#147

Post by littlexsparkee »

missedthecue wrote: post #110
BigTTYGothGF wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

15-minute neighborhoods with bike lanes are exactly the kinds of places good for raising kids in.

This is what the policy wonk idealists say, but the undeniable evidence going back hundreds of years is that dense cities are fertility shredders.

They're talking about raising kids already born, not conditions for having one in the first place. We should separate discussion of the environment from the cost which is the really the main factor for why parents decamp for the suburbs. Causality goes the other way - it's not the compact nature that reduced fertility but the fact that dense neighborhoods are rare and pricey in the US.

Re: Adults over 65 will outnumber children by 2029

#148

Post by cyberax »

BigTTYGothGF wrote: post #136
cyberax wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they're not. They are places where cities go to die. Walk in Tokyo and try to find children there.

> Walk in Tokyo and try to find children there There might a few more things going on there than just density, perhaps operating on a national level.

There really, really are not. Tokyo is the prime example of the urban density runaway spiral.

Japan has a declining population, yet Tokyo prices are skyrocketing. Some people now live in "microapartments" where you can cook while sitting on a toilet.

Yet spacious houses are literally sold for nothing but transaction fees, just 2-3 hours away from Tokyo.

Re: Adults over 65 will outnumber children by 2029

#149

Post by amluto »

cyberax wrote: post #146
amluto wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given a choice between: (a) non-walkable neighborhoods with big houses, big roads and cars everywhere, versus (b) smaller houses or apartments but fewer cars, walkable neighborhoods, and bikes (and other small mobility devices that small kids can use) I can tell you where being a kid seems more fun. And I’ve personally been to both sorts of places recently and observed how the kids behave. Sure, with big lots, kids h…

And I can tell you that (a) is actually where the children _are_. And (b) is where the people go to die. > Sure, with big lots, kids have lots of space in their own backyards. And big cars make soccer-momming easier. But, when kids can easily and safely get somewhere else approximately on their own, the whole situation seems better. It seems better, but it's actually not better. Besides, suburbs can be improved quite…

Got data? I think any even remotely serious attempt will discover a very mixed bag. I had an LLM pull data from various places in California and New York (because doing it by hand is a pain), and there isn’t really a clear trend either way as to where the children are.

Palo Alto has a surprisingly large number of children under 18 and under 5, and Palo Alto is fairly walkable as California cities go. Fresno and Bakersfield (not so walkable) are higher. There seems to be a larger fraction of young children in Brooklyn than in less subway-covered areas of the NYC metro area.

In general I suspect that children in the US are mildly skewed toward more suburban areas, but not strongly. There are plenty of children in dense areas.

But my claim wasn’t about where the children are — it’s about where the children can have more fun on the basis of the structure of the neighborhood.

Re: Adults over 65 will outnumber children by 2029

#150

Post by jaredklewis »

geye1234 wrote: post #42
mostertoaster wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Overpopulation is not a problem. Maybe in a couple countries. But not for the world, and not for the west and definitely not for America. As the population has grown poverty has decreased.

Yep, absolutely right. Energy is very easy to produce cleanly (nuclear, and solar is looking better and better). The barriers to doing so are political and financial, not technical. They will be made worse by having an aged-heavy population, which is less innovative, less willing to invest in the future, and less willing to try new things. And it makes a poorer society, obviously. Malthus has been proved wrong at eve…

> Lack of children is about to bite us very, very hard.

Why is everyone so sure of this? My own instinct is just that we'll adapt to it and it will be fine.

It's just seems like the equivalent of making one of those charts that shows we're going to run out of [some critical resource] by [some date]. They are always wrong, without exception. Because as the resource becomes more scarce, we adapt our societies to become less dependent on it. You can't just extrapolate that trend lines or relationships between statistics like GDP and population continue into the distant future; it almost never works.

I don't have my own competing, grand prediction of how the distant future will pan out. But my thinking is that societies are extremely complex systems and when one variable is tweaked, generally all the other variables also adjust to compensate.

I'm not against growing populations, just not overly concerned about depopulation either.

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