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The Future Is Too Expensive – A New Theory on Collapsing Birth Rates

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Re: The Future Is Too Expensive – A New Theory on Collapsing Birth Rates

#141

Post by bell-cot »

blagie wrote: post #131
pjc50 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are almost no kids in South Korea. That page says 11% of the population is under 15. Rather like global warming, the question is "what are the old people of today prepared to change in order to avert a problem that only becomes acute after they are dead?"

It's going to become acute well before. It's more like the tragedy of the commons. You need a tax / working base of some size to produce enough stuff. That simply won't be in place when the current kids are adults, and adults or elderly. Barring robots and AI -- which admittedly looks like a very real possibility now -- the current adults will not have enough working-age people to support them when they're old. Indee…

To portray it as an existential problem for South Korea - I'd focus on their next-door neighbor. Elderly folks might be of limited utility when the (North) Korean People's Army marched in. And the South's cyber-defenses might well prove inadequate, to keep their drones and robo-soldiers functioning properly.

Re: The Future Is Too Expensive – A New Theory on Collapsing Birth Rates

#142

Post by [deleted] »

drooopy wrote: post #21

Lack of affordable housing, job insecurity and the looming threat of AI and automation, unaffordable healthcare, unaffordable higher education, inflation, trade/culture/cold/proxy wars, societal unrest and thanks to social media the prospect of a global trend towards the collapse of democratic institutions and a march towards authoritarianism. Sure, let me just bring a couple of new humans into the world—people I’m l…

[deleted]

Re: The Future Is Too Expensive – A New Theory on Collapsing Birth Rates

#143

Post by steveBK123 »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #124
Kivern7 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Children are an asset for net tax-recipients, but a liability for net tax-payers. I grew up in a very poor area and heard firsthand teenage girls excited over how much welfare money they can receive for babies. It's an inversion of the natural order. It's state-manipulated breeding incentives between different classes of people. It's literally eugenics.

Children are a massive asset for tax-payers. Money is a claim on the production of a country. Without that production, money is just a useless piece of paper or useless entry in a bank database. And for a country to produce, it needs people of working age. More concretely, let's suppose you're 92 and you need full time nursing care. You still have retirements savings so should be able to pay for it. Now let's say the…

Yes at a society level, but individual parents bare the costs.

So far rich world governments and individuals haven't found an optimal incentive/cost share ...

Re: The Future Is Too Expensive – A New Theory on Collapsing Birth Rates

#144

Post by [deleted] »

pjc50 wrote: post #12

> Nobody knows Have you tried asking them? In particular, asking the women who are making the career-or-children decision? South Korea is invoked, but it seems like the population there has almost perfectly levelled out at just over 51m: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/kor/sou... of which 20m live in Seoul. This discussion comes up a lot on HN, and it seems to be one where there are answers, but…

[deleted]

Re: The Future Is Too Expensive – A New Theory on Collapsing Birth Rates

#145

Post by steveBK123 »

sanderjd wrote: post #102
le-mark wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We are still grappling with how you incentivize and promote parenthood when the future costs of each child are 6 figues. Six figures? False because poor people have been having children forever and continue too.

Two points: 1. In rich countries (like the US, where I live), some of the cost of children is subsidized for poor people. 2. Middle class parents are very unlikely to raise their children at the same cost as poor parents. If they can afford better things for their kids, they will . There is enormous social (even moral) pressure on parents to make sacrifices for their kids. Note that I think both of these things are g…

Yes, I think the costs/inconveniences/stress of parenting is much more obvious to young working age people than the benefits/fun are.

Re: The Future Is Too Expensive – A New Theory on Collapsing Birth Rates

#146

Post by steveBK123 »

sseagull wrote: post #98
steveBK123 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, the numbers can be a real mess / rich people problems if you have two relatively high paying earners in a household. My parents baby boomer generation maybe the wife was college educated and worked, but the pay wasn't necessarily great AND the cost of childcare wasn't as insane as it is today. In many HCOL/VHCOL areas, people tend to not live near parents anymore so they lose free childcare, and then between t…

Spot on, but this in particular > people tend to not live near parents anymore so they lose free childcare For some reason I don't see this mentioned as often, but I've always felt it a significant root cause (among many of course). Childcare is really expensive, but it used to be "free". I grew up with grandparents/aunts/uncles/older cousins available to baby sit me. But now very much of my cohort have moved away fr…

It fits with everything in the rich world, especially the west, especially the US which is - replacing family/community/social/etc systems with pay-as-you-go solutions. And this is one of many areas it falls apart.

Re: The Future Is Too Expensive – A New Theory on Collapsing Birth Rates

#147

Post by bradlys »

UncleMeat wrote: post #123
pjc50 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Teen pregnancies are at an all time low everywhere in the developed world and it's not just thanks to the availability of contraception, but also a generational shift in attitudes towards risk taking. Yes - and this was a policy objective! People hated teenage pregnancy. Religious organisations condemned it from the pulpit. The Catholic Church in Ireland had a little gulag for teenage mothers: https://www.theguardi…

Yeah it is absolutely baffling to me that the discussion of teen pregnancy never seems to come up in these "oh no birth rates are down" discussions. Like, you told us that a substantial portion of these births were bad for society (and I generally agree) and now you are freaking out that the number of births went down?

Most people aren’t aware - especially in educated UMC circles like this one - how much the birth rate relied on teenage moms.

The birthrate for educated folks has been below replacement for a long time. Teenage moms probably aren’t in their mind cause they were raised among other UMC folks and it just doesn’t happen there. The US has been below replacement overall for even longer. We’ve relied on immigration for 50+ years.

Most of these discussions talk about cost of living and so forth - which are good metrics but the biggest influence of whether people have kids is if they’re getting into relationships. As any country has more women getting online, the birth rate plummets. It’s another factor we don’t talk about in these discussions. Social media has a huge effect on getting into relationships - and therefore having children.

Re: The Future Is Too Expensive – A New Theory on Collapsing Birth Rates

#148

Post by bryanlarsen »

jauntywundrkind wrote: post #140
bryanlarsen wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But is it substantially different? The writing from the 30's is extremely pessimistic. In the 50's and 60's everybody assumed that we were all going to die in a nuclear war. And going back in time you can find numerous examples of where the future was worse than uncertain, where an awful future for your children was guaranteed. As an extreme example, many children were voluntarily born into slavery. I would argue tha…

The future being grimdark isn't new, that's true. But humanity had so much finding out to do. Average material conditions haven't moved steadily forwards, no, but humanity has been overall rising. Science and technology developing, insights to the natural world happening & spreading, cultural elements forming & flourishing. The powers that be in the world were quite regionalized, had their fingers in only small pies:…

> Progress has tapered down.

Maybe you can argue that it's slower now than it was in the late 20th century. But it's still far faster than it was at any other point in history.

You may think we're locked on course, but we're far less locked on course than we were in medieval times or pretty much any other time in history. Changes in medieval times happened, but took centuries, and those advocating for change got burned at the stake.

Of course, it matters less what actually was than the way people thought. It's an almost universal constant throughout history that people thought the future was doomed.

Re: The Future Is Too Expensive – A New Theory on Collapsing Birth Rates

#149

Post by trust_bt_verify »

steveBK123 wrote: post #133
kaibee wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

6-17, the time to actually raise them. It ain't like just because the kid 7 you can leave them at home while both parents go to work.

Right right, but purely mechanically in terms of number of hours in school / after school activities / clubs / sports.. you could most easily have two working parents during that age range.

> ‘most easily’

Seems like you may be underestimating how much work kids, even at elementary age, can be.

Re: The Future Is Too Expensive – A New Theory on Collapsing Birth Rates

#150

Post by ben_w »

gwd wrote: post #65
pjc50 wrote: post #12

> Nobody knows Have you tried asking them? In particular, asking the women who are making the career-or-children decision? South Korea is invoked, but it seems like the population there has almost perfectly levelled out at just over 51m: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/kor/sou... of which 20m live in Seoul. This discussion comes up a lot on HN, and it seems to be one where there are answers, but…

> population there has almost perfectly levelled out at just over 51m This video would beg to differ: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk&pp=ygUWa3Vyemdlc... That said, I am inclined to disagree with his take -- when women and men are both expected to work 996, when housing takes up a huge percentage of your income, when the only way you think you can assure a good life for your children is to pay exorbitant…

> Rather than trying to exhort every single family to have 2.1, find people who are good at child-rearing, give them training, and give them government support to raise 8 kids.

Do you mean more like surrogacy, or more like teacher/personal tutor?

The former… I'm told is medically inadvisable over 5 births, even if humans used to have 10 in the hope of 2 surviving to adulthood. But that may be confounding variables given 5+ is unusual.

The latter is, I think, a good idea that people will object to actually paying for — "teacher" is not as highly respected a profession as it ought to be.

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