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

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

#221

Post by louwrentius »

CalRobert wrote: post #193
louwrentius wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Follow the link for context. The whole overpopulation topic is an old scare with ties to eugenics

I haven't said anything about "the wrong kind of people having babies" and have been pro-immigration in another comment so I don't see how this has anything to do with what I said. Would 15 billion people be too many? 20 billion? Are we to imagine that Earth could support an infinite number of people? Because that seems like magical thinking to me. Though a different lifestyle (vegan, low energy consumption, etc.) wo…

The world can sustain the current number of people many times over in terms of food supply. Indeed based on sustainable (vegetarian/vegan) food.

Talking about how many people can be sustained by earth is talking about the wrong thing. It only leads and HAS only lead to the eugenetics part. Because it's always poor people in different countries who gets sterilised.

The real topic is that capitalism and consumerism is 100% unsustainable, right from the start. That is the real debate to be had. That this world is not about human well-being and happyness, but about GDP and growth, making a tiny number of people wealthy at the expense and misery of the majority.

Unfortunately this site - Hacker News - and everything related to it, Ycombinator, Paul Graham, is only fueling the capitalist game.

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

#222

Post by mariusor »

kbrkbr wrote: post #154
throwaw12 wrote: post #23

> This decline cannot be explained by demographic, economic, or policy changes. I disagree with this statement. Put yourself in the shoes of 25 years old and ask why don't you want to have kids? * (economic) difficult to manage finances * (economic) can't buy house, too expensive * (economic) to compete with others in the workplace, I need to work >12 hours/day, can't do with kids or will be laid off. * (sociologic)…

But why is this trend then not visible in Germany? All of what you say applies there too. https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Gesellschaft-Umwelt/Bevoel...

As the sibling post noted, most of the positive natality in Western Europe is due to immigrant mothers. And since the US has quite a strong barrier to entry for immigration they don't benefit from this effect.

[edit] Looks like in term of raw numbers, the US has much more immigrants than Germany for example. But in terms of legal immigrants there's about twice the number in Germany vs. the US for 2021 (dunno how reliable statista is though).

https://www.statista.com/statistics/199958/number-of-green-c...

https://www.statista.com/statistics/894223/immigrant-numbers...

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

#223

Post by mschuster91 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #205
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 Isl…

> 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.

And yet, despite all of that, a blue collar wage was enough to own a home, a car for the breadwinner, a second car for the stay-at-home wife, healthcare, two children and their education. The economic base indicators were just way better than they are for my generation.

Also, politicians actually did something about all the crises you mentioned. The threat of nuclear war and other weapons of mass destructions got tackled by non-proliferation programs or outright bans (on chemical and biological weapons). Threats to the environment such as lead, acid rain or the ozone hole got combatted by banning lead and sulphur in fuels and CFC gases as refrigerants. The islamist terror threat got combatted by carpet-bombing Afghanistan, Iraq and a number of other hellholes, as well as upgrading airports and planes. The oil crisis got under control by introducing consumption limits and an expansion of domestic production to a point the US is a net exporter of oil.

In contrast, none of the modern polycrises got tackled. The financial world has deregulated to the point that we have yet another impending collapse, with actual giant banks like Credit Suisse going down. Migration and its causes aren't addressed, instead we build borders and threaten people with deathly conditions on their travel. Pandemic prevention has gone down the drain so hard that wearing masks and getting vaccines got politicized. Climate change is outright denied. If you don't get top degrees you have virtually no chance at getting a halfway decent paying job. Would-be parents, even young children can see all of that deliberate inaction.

> and we probably need to do something about mental health (which may involve doing something about addiction to social media)

Social media is an useful scapegoat - the mental health crisis (and I'd say also the drug abuse epidemic) is a direct result of our hyper-competitive, individualist everyone-for-themselves environment and the above-mentioned inaction of leadership to crises.

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

#224

Post by colpabar »

taylodl wrote: post #219
throwaw12 wrote: post #23

> This decline cannot be explained by demographic, economic, or policy changes. I disagree with this statement. Put yourself in the shoes of 25 years old and ask why don't you want to have kids? * (economic) difficult to manage finances * (economic) can't buy house, too expensive * (economic) to compete with others in the workplace, I need to work >12 hours/day, can't do with kids or will be laid off. * (sociologic)…

(policy) the middle class was forced to bail out the 0.1% for making bad investments during the crises of 2008. It should be obvious to everybody the U.S. is an oligarchy. It actually has been for decades now, but it was laid bare in 2008. Many people are fighting the oligarchs in an interesting way - refusing to provide them the labor they need to further enrich themselves. The kids born in 2008 would be 15 in 2023.…

Increased/unlimited immigration seems like their preferred solution to the labor shortage problem. So what if a country's population are refusing to work, just bring in people who are used to worse and pay them less than those pesky citizens.

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

#225

Post by ethor »

throwaw12 wrote: post #23

> This decline cannot be explained by demographic, economic, or policy changes. I disagree with this statement. Put yourself in the shoes of 25 years old and ask why don't you want to have kids? * (economic) difficult to manage finances * (economic) can't buy house, too expensive * (economic) to compete with others in the workplace, I need to work >12 hours/day, can't do with kids or will be laid off. * (sociologic)…

These statistics [1] would suggest that sociological factors are in play, especially if you look at the graphs for young people. The number of young men not having sex is at record numbers.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/29/share-ame...

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

#226

Post by taylodl »

colpabar wrote: post #224
taylodl wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(policy) the middle class was forced to bail out the 0.1% for making bad investments during the crises of 2008. It should be obvious to everybody the U.S. is an oligarchy. It actually has been for decades now, but it was laid bare in 2008. Many people are fighting the oligarchs in an interesting way - refusing to provide them the labor they need to further enrich themselves. The kids born in 2008 would be 15 in 2023.…

Increased/unlimited immigration seems like their preferred solution to the labor shortage problem. So what if a country's population are refusing to work, just bring in people who are used to worse and pay them less than those pesky citizens.

Then why do these same people complain so much about being "invaded" from the Southern border? Seeing as how I see them as both xenophobic and racist I see their real fear is the precipitous drop in white women having children. They want labor, and they want it to be white. American, at a minimum.

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

#227

Post by balfirevic »

withinboredom wrote: post #211
AnimalMuppet wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It seems like a natural conclusion: 1. Teach: humanity has done X to the environment 2. Teach: if we don’t do something Y will happen 3. Conclude: I was not alive to do X 4. Ergo: the adults in my life did X 5. Ergo: the adults in my life will continue to do X which will cause Y because I can’t affect meaningful change I don’t automatically assume they start at step 5 at school. I’ve seen his math homework. Is that a…

> what he learns at school may not be right

Wait, you don't teach him that?

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

#228

Post by leereeves »

taylodl wrote: post #226
colpabar wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Increased/unlimited immigration seems like their preferred solution to the labor shortage problem. So what if a country's population are refusing to work, just bring in people who are used to worse and pay them less than those pesky citizens.

Then why do these same people complain so much about being "invaded" from the Southern border? Seeing as how I see them as both xenophobic and racist I see their real fear is the precipitous drop in white women having children. They want labor, and they want it to be white. American, at a minimum.

Immigration has always been an issue in America, even in the past when the immigrants were white, and even now among Hispanics themselves.

There are so many reasons for it (economic, social, political, religious, etc) that are just ignored when the thought terminating insults come out.

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

#229

Post by willdough »

taylodl wrote: post #219
throwaw12 wrote: post #23

> This decline cannot be explained by demographic, economic, or policy changes. I disagree with this statement. Put yourself in the shoes of 25 years old and ask why don't you want to have kids? * (economic) difficult to manage finances * (economic) can't buy house, too expensive * (economic) to compete with others in the workplace, I need to work >12 hours/day, can't do with kids or will be laid off. * (sociologic)…

(policy) the middle class was forced to bail out the 0.1% for making bad investments during the crises of 2008. It should be obvious to everybody the U.S. is an oligarchy. It actually has been for decades now, but it was laid bare in 2008. Many people are fighting the oligarchs in an interesting way - refusing to provide them the labor they need to further enrich themselves. The kids born in 2008 would be 15 in 2023.…

We can either automate production or import workers.

Currently we're automating as fast as possible. Meanwhile people are flooding across the border. Perhaps migrants realize that once ChatGPT is robotized, automation will spread to dominate the economy: there will be less need for labor (immigrant or other).

BTW assuming "oligarchs" control the economy is not a useful concept.

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

#230

Post by pjc50 »

mschuster91 wrote: post #199
berberous wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You think you need two children for one to make it to 18?

The US has seen an insane rise of child and adolescent mortality over the last years [1] - and a large part of this is due to the top death cause: homicide or other firearm incidents [2], a scale orders of magnitude worse than among other developed nations. Add on top of that the rising drug epidemic, the removal of access to reproductive and mental health care... [1] https://news.vcu.edu/article/2023/03/child-and-te…

I didn't really want to bring this up, but .. yeah. The reaction to the deaths of children being to libel their parents by claiming that the whole incident was made up is one of the most incomprehensibly disgusting things about American politics. It should not have been necessary to sue Alex Jones over that, his public audience should simply have evaporated overnight of their own accord.

"Protecting children" is only ever brought up in US politics for dumb controlling initiatives that do anything but protect children. Actually protecting children is taboo.

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