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India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

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Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#221

Post by cute_boi »

hersko wrote: post #133
cute_boi wrote: post #97

doesn't matter to be honest. We are already overpopulated and those who says it isn't just doesn't know how many people live under poverty and are simply privileged. I understand if we manage resources properly we have very high carrying capacity but it is not pragmatic to solve all those problems. Human greed, corruption has no bounds and will always hinder and there is no solution, is there? Rules, laws are general…

I disagree with just about everything you said. "We are already overpopulated and those who says it isn't just doesn't know how many people live under poverty and are simply privileged." This makes no sense. As the global population has grown, less people live in extreme poverty [1]. Your entire comment is basically saying life is hard so people should not be born? This is absolutely the best time to ever be alive in…

You source [1] doesn't disprove it to be honest. It is not because of population growth that less people live in extreme poverty. It is because of technological achievement and progress in society. Basically its the time (considering we progress) that is eradicating extreme poverty not the population growth. You are linking wrong data to prove me wrong. In fact, overpopulation means more pressure on resource which we already can't mine due to various reason.

You connected nursing home with wrong thing again. The problem with less fertility is that when there are lot of old people many people can't go to factory and old people can't work. But with technological advances one people can manage a lot of machines due to automation. Anyway, nursing home is easier to manage today than it was 100 years ago.

Your entire comment is basically saying life is hard so people should not be born? This is absolutely the best time to ever be alive in history. Is it really? Your source clearly says "Most people in the world live in poverty. 85% of the world live on less than $30 per day, two-thirds live on less than $10 per day, and every tenth person lives on less than $1.90 per day"

Would you like to be that 85% who wants to live on less than $30 per day? So, you are trying to conceal the difficulty saying life is hard but in fact it is extremely hard for many people.

Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#222

Post by omegaworks »

JPKab wrote: post #95
zpeti wrote: post #48

Global population will basically top out at 9-10bn. I look forward to the problems we will face then, and the apocalyptic narratives the media will invent about this new problem. Here's my shot at a few: - Even with better quality of life its going to be hard to make people who are over 70 work productively. But without children less and less people will need to take care of this large old age group. And they will ne…

Agreed. Think about the fact that the result of a low birth-rate with better medical tech keeping older people from dying when they otherwise would have. The result will be a far higher percentage of voters in democracies will be beneficiaries of the work of people younger than them. They will increasingly vote to expand the benefits they receive, at the expense of the younger folks who have to pay higher taxes to fu…

>I've paid Social Security and Medicare taxes for 25 years, since my first paycheck, and it's not likely I'll ever receive anything from these programs based on current projections.

This is a purely political decision. When Paul Ryan made this assertion in Congress to justify privatizing the system Alan Greenspan shot him down[1]. The government chooses how many dollars to allocate to Social Security and Medicare. Whether those dollars come from taxes elsewhere is almost entirely irrelevant.

The only factor is whether seniors will get enough from the program to buy what they need to live. This has as much to do with the prices of goods as it does with the size of the benefit itself. We will need to ensure we have the production we need to meet the demand by investing in sustainable, productivity amplifying technologies. The reality is with population aging or stagnating we will need one worker to be able to produce what two or more was able to to keep prices stable.

I think the pressure to do this is already being felt by workers here in the US. It's one of the main reasons why there is so much apathy from the ruling classes when it comes to ensuring workers can earn a living wage from one job. The people in charge would rather we keep the conditions such that one worker must work three jobs to scrape by than make the costly investments to increase productivity.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNCZHAQnfGU

Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#223

Post by jimbob45 »

bhouston wrote: post #105
lotsofpulp wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am curious what the market rate for pregnancy, giving birth, and breastfeeding will end up being. After seeing what it is like, if I was a woman, even the best current European benefits would not be enough.

In Hungary, if you do it four times you are exempt from paying taxes for the rest of your life: "Hungarian women with four children or more will be exempted for life from paying income tax, the prime minister has said, unveiling plans designed to boost the number of babies being born." https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-47192612

This is super interesting and everyone I’ve showed it to at work agrees. I suggest you make this a new post here on HN.

Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#224

Post by dcist »

naravara wrote: post #193
reducesuffering wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That won't end until young people actually show up to polls just as significantly. Politicians cater to their voting constituents and the elderly show up to vote stronger. Some of this is due to our suspect "you have this 1 Tuesday to do it" voting day. But what young people can do is make it socially unacceptable to not vote like the elderly do to each other.

Young people don't vote as much partly due to lack of habit, but also due to their jobs having less flexible scheduling and voter registration rolls being tied to where you live. Old people live in places longer, young people move more. It's simply a much bigger paperwork hurdle to get registered, find your polling place, etc. And that's assuming you can take time off and politicians have actually bothered trying to…

It's ridiculously easy to vote and with early voting being extended for WEEKS and mail-in voting also an option, there is no excuse other than apathy, ignorance, or laziness. If you can submit a tax return, you can vote.

Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#225

Post by bluesmoon »

When I was a child about 40 years ago there was a slogan "हम दो, हमारे दो" which translates to "We are a couple, we will have two children". Then in my teens it turned to "हम दो हमारे एक", ie, "We are a couple, we will have one child". It was on TV, in print ads, on the sides of buses, everywhere. There was also a huge move to make contraception easily available to every woman in the country. Then in the 90s TV was privatized and it all disappeared.

Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#226

Post by cute_boi »

paxys wrote: post #173
gizmo686 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there a need to a sustainable population rate? There are about 8 billion humans on the planet. We can sustain a sub replacement birthrate for generations. There is a good chance we can sustain it for long enough to solve aging; or at least significantly push back the ~100 year limit to human life. Once we do that, we will need generations of sub replacement fertility just to compensate for having more generations…

Just by simple numbers – no, you don't need a sustainable population rate. We were perfectly fine as a species when the population was half or a tenth or hundredth of what it is now, and will still thrive if it gets to that again. The problem is the demographic breakdown. If the rate of growth is decreasing it means that when your current population ages and exits the labor pool there won't be enough young people to…

do we need that labor pool considering we are progressing in technology? 100 years ago there were no factories we see today etc. But day by day with technological advancement we are automating lot of things. So I really don't think we need that much labor we required yesterday.

Is population problem really a big deal considering we already have a big elephant in room already like climate change, scarcity of resources, poverty, water crisis?

Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#227

Post by ElectronShak »

soperj wrote: post #216
ElectronShak wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, although I don't look at Christianity as religion, from my understanding of the new testament..Christ was crucified basically because he didn't follow "the law of their fathers"..religion essentially. The aim is not to convince though, but to raise the question, why does our generation think that anything scriptural cannot be treated as fact. Why are newtons laws fact, but not his convictions? Are we so take…

Newton's laws are not fact, but scientific theory that's been tested through experiment and observation over hundreds of years. His convictions are just opinion.

For me, the problem is the double standard that is applied to historical writings; Mention Scripture, "Oh, those are just someone's words", Mention a scientific manuscript from the same time "Oh, my, what a genius"!

How many of us actually get to prove newtons laws for ourselves? How many of us consciously wake up and say, today I will test out gravity? But isn't the law of Gravity real, yes it is!

Thing is, most of what we know, we have read from what others have done or experienced, more in the scientific field. Why can't we apply the same standard to scripture? Maybe if we study deep we can prove the things written therein

Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#228

Post by jevoten »

baybal2 wrote: post #168
lotsofpulp wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume people not consuming as much as the people in the EU and USA have a goal of consuming as much as the people in the EU and USA.

They very much do, but now they have to pay "carbon tax" invented by people who were responsible for most of the pollution until China

But they also have access to solar, wind, and nuclear technology that were far less developed when the countries you are blaming were industrializing.

Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#229

Post by cute_boi »

zionic wrote: post #197
cute_boi wrote: post #97

doesn't matter to be honest. We are already overpopulated and those who says it isn't just doesn't know how many people live under poverty and are simply privileged. I understand if we manage resources properly we have very high carrying capacity but it is not pragmatic to solve all those problems. Human greed, corruption has no bounds and will always hinder and there is no solution, is there? Rules, laws are general…

The US is massively under-populated.

this article is about India not US so I am taking from that perspective. And India is over populated...

Re: India defuses its population bomb: fertility falls to two children per woman

#230

Post by wyager »

zpeti wrote: post #48

Global population will basically top out at 9-10bn. I look forward to the problems we will face then, and the apocalyptic narratives the media will invent about this new problem. Here's my shot at a few: - Even with better quality of life its going to be hard to make people who are over 70 work productively. But without children less and less people will need to take care of this large old age group. And they will ne…

> Global population will basically top out at 9-10bn.

There's a lot of hubris behind predictions like these.

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