The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007 • Hacker News Board

Re: The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007

#201

Post by akomtu » Wed, May 17, 2023, 1:28 PM UTC

albertgoeswoof wrote: post #37

pjc50 wrote: post #12

The other day someone was complaining about too many people in the housing thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35962521 The two are linked. Having children is at least partly an economic choice. People have spent decades working against "teen moms" and "single parents" and "welfare queens". Everyone is very clear that you must not have children unless you can comfortably afford to do so. And not just now, th…

> Are the people who want others to have more children prepared to pay for it? This implies that more people make society poorer. Which is false. People don’t consume a finite set of resources, they create more. As populations rise the net general standard of living goes up, not down. For source, check out all developed nations over the last 200 years, and human history to date. USA actually has an advantage here as…

Fish, livestock, forests, land are all finite and we're already consuming them at such rate that by the end of the century our planet will become a desert. Adding a few more billions people won't help the matter. Solar ans other clean energy won't create more food and land. What would help is a drastic novel method of resources management.

Re: The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007

#202

Post by EForEndeavour » Wed, May 17, 2023, 1:32 PM UTC

furyg3 wrote: post #41

wunderland wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If women push back childbirth to their 30s, fewer births with happen overall because quite simply fewer women will be able to conceive.

> in the United States during 2018-2020 (average), the highest fertility rates per 1,000 women were to women ages 20-29 (80.1), followed by women ages 30-39 (75.3) [...] Source: https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=birth+r...

Note that these age-specific fertility rates measure the number of births per 1,000 women. This does not directly measure how easy it is for a woman in that age group to conceive (what OP referenced), because fertility rate is confounded by the degree to which women (1) actively try to conceive (versus avoid conception), and (2) decide to carry pregnancies to term.

Re: The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007

#203

Post by AnimalMuppet » Wed, May 17, 2023, 1:36 PM UTC

withinboredom wrote: post #179

anjc wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you going to raise this with the school? It seems highly inappropriate on their part

Why would I bring my son’s opinions up with the school? Because they learned about global warming? Nah, we had a sit down talk about it and how it isn’t “any one specific person’s” fault.

Because from the description, one of two things probably happened: Either the school taught a secular version of a "put the fear of God into them" lesson, and your kid came home in feeling like he literally should not have been born, or another kid talked to him with the same result. That's a really unfair message to hand a 9-year-old.

Re: The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007

#204

Post by EForEndeavour » Wed, May 17, 2023, 1:43 PM UTC

blackoil wrote: post #132

withinboredom wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an American who moved to the EU after having a child in the US, when I tell people we had to pay for our son on a payment plan, they cringe. Yes, we had insurance, but ironically, the calculated conception date was 2 days before we got insurance -- reality is that we got insurance when we decided to have a kid, so the calculated date is actually wrong. Thus, it was a pre-existing condition and insurance wouldn't c…

May sound cruel, but I don't find that outrageous. Purpose of insurance is to pool the risk. 100 people pay 1$, one unlucky fellow meets an accident gets 98. In case of pregnancy/delivery it is not a truly random event so society will have to pool for a planned event. For such events we need government support proxying for society not some insurance company.

You don't think it's outrageous or at least cringeworthy that an insurance company used a one-size-fits-all, deterministic, possibly opaque and proprietary math formula to estimate an inherently fuzzy date based on a chain reaction of biological processes with duration error bars far exceeding one day, and then mechanically making an all-or-nothing coverage decision because of a TWO-DAY difference between that speciously precise date and the date on which enrollment forms were filed?

That may be the way the contracts and laws are currently set up, and if we want to have a child without going bankrupt, we have to play the game. But it's simultaneously possible to recognize that the system produces some deeply ridiculous cases such as this one.

Re: The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007

#205

Post by AnimalMuppet » Wed, May 17, 2023, 2:00 PM UTC

mschuster91 wrote: post #49

> The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007. This decline cannot be explained by demographic, economic, or policy changes. What a load of bull. Obviously, there is no single one explanation - the entire point of such articles is that they don't get just how bad the combination of causes actually is. To explain: my generation (i.e. 1990 and onwards) have experienced multiple and, to make it worse, overlapping d…

OK, but go back.

We had the Cuban Missile Crisis, which came dangerously close to causing a nuclear war. Even after surviving that, we still lived under the threat of sudden nuclear death until about 1990. We also had massive inflation in the 1970s, combined with economic stagnation. We had inflation at 14% in 1970 (IIRC). We had the hollowing-out of American manufacturing - it started back then. We had a wave of Islamic terrorism, we had oil crises. We had conditions that were, maybe not worse, but didn't appear all that much better. (I'm not old enough to go back to the Great Depression and World War II, but things didn't look optimistic then either.)

Then 1990 came. The wall came down; the USSR dissolved. Everything was going to be wonderful from then on. The good times were finally here, and they would continue forever. When that optimism didn't pan out, people may not have been mentally prepared for living in, essentially, what people had always lived in.

> The US has to fix access to healthcare, and we all have to fix rents - the primary cause of people not having kids is because they literally cannot afford them.

That I think I can agree with, except that we also need to fix blue-collar pay, and we probably need to do something about mental health (which may involve doing something about addiction to social media).

Re: The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007

#206

Post by Jochim » Wed, May 17, 2023, 2:01 PM UTC

carlmr wrote: post #78

throwaw12 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

* (sociologic) no trust in your partner (which is partly related to social networks and porn in some ways). they can divorce anytime, because it is easier to divorce than trying to resolve issues in the relationship, which will leave you as a single care taker of the kid, which creates 2 issues: (1) do you want to raise alone, making kid feel half family (2) can you actually raise alone with current demand at workpla…

Number one is very true. My generation has so many children of divorced parents that I don't see these trust issues ever being fixed. I'm not sure if it's attributable to porn though. I think it's rather our individualistic, bordering on narcissistic, culture that is driving this. As the old saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child. The next best thing after the village is the family. But in a society where t…

The alternative of growing up with parents/grandparents that obviously despise each other isn't any less harmful.

Re: The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007

#207

Post by smith002 » Wed, May 17, 2023, 2:01 PM UTC

willis936 wrote: post #188

carlmr wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Number one is very true. My generation has so many children of divorced parents that I don't see these trust issues ever being fixed. I'm not sure if it's attributable to porn though. I think it's rather our individualistic, bordering on narcissistic, culture that is driving this. As the old saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child. The next best thing after the village is the family. But in a society where t…

Divorce rates are going down and have been for generations.

you’re insane, divorce has exploded since the 50s

Re: The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007

#208

Post by somenameforme » Wed, May 17, 2023, 2:01 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #93

somenameforme wrote: post #77

As an interesting contrast China (which is also suffering fertility issues) just launched a new pro family/fertility campaign [1]. It's so weird how little coverage this issue receives in the West. Fertility will be one of the biggest factors in shaping our future, to say nothing of its more immediate impact on economic factors, retirement, and general social stability. I think the big issue is that we live so much l…

The formal end of the "one child policy" in China was only 2016.

Definitely, but they seem to be facing the 'Iran problem.' [1] In the early 90s Iran's population was exploding, and so they started on a major 'family planning' commitment, which ultimately proved too successful. In the 80s they had a fertility rate upwards of 6. By 2000, they were below replacement. And it just kept falling.

So in 2012 they understood they'd really screwed up and tried to reverse it by starting an equally hard push back towards big families. In 2012 their fertility rate was 1.89, as of 2021 it's down to 1.69. [2] China's even worse off. In 2016 their fertility rate was 1.7. It's now down to 1.08. In general it seems much easier to reduce fertility than it is to raise it.

That the West is just ignoring this is crazy, especially because in the West fertility is strongly inversely proportional to income. So not only are we failing to even sustain our population, but generational poverty is spreading like a virus.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_planning_in_Iran

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Iran

Re: The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007

#209

Post by themaninthedark » Wed, May 17, 2023, 2:06 PM UTC

CalRobert wrote: post #195

fileeditview wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The collapse of civilization is happening since the dawn of civilization. Jokes aside, I have heard both points made. Yours and the one from the parent poster.

We had pretty stable temperatures from the dawn of civilization (the end of the last ice age) until about 30 years ago.

From 1300 ~ about 1700 there was a "little" ice age that cuased widespread famine and cultural disruption.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age

Yes, the current temperature shift now is greater but it has been ongoing for a much shorter period of time.

Re: The U.S. birth rate has fallen by 20% since 2007

#210

Post by kypro » Wed, May 17, 2023, 2:08 PM UTC

erfgh wrote: post #200

kypro wrote: post #31

> No obvious policy or economic factor can explain much of the decline. I mean, if people literally can't afford to have kids what do we expect to happen to the birthrate? I want kids more than anyone I know yet realistically I'm never going to have them. I'm 33 now and like most people in their early 30s I'm no where near in a stable enough position to raise kids. I mean who the hell even owns a home Here in the UK…

I don't understand this mentality. Who told you that you need to own a home to have kids? I don't understand this connection that everyone seems to be making. To me it sounds like an excuse.

You don't necessarily need to own a home, but I think we'd agree most want to be in a good place financially before raising kids. Having a foot on the property ladder and living somewhere you can raise a family over the long-term is clearly part of this for most people.

You're right that couples could just rent a place and try to get on the proper ladder while trying to raise kids, but realistically I think most would want to do things the other way around. But to your point not owning a home is one of the compromises people who really want kids will be forced to make to have them today.