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The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline

bloomberg.com

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Re: The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline

#231

Post by bombcar »

compounding_it wrote: post #185
bombcar wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Real people are annoying, hard to deal with, unpredictable, dirty, smelly, all sorts of issues. The imaginary people inside your magic box are perfect, on demand, and don't complain or otherwise bother you when you put them away. What porn is to love, social media is to, well, darn near everything else. Once we perfect donuts over TCP/IP we'll all be perfectly round and content and never need to interact with anyone…

>Real people are annoying They are actually not. In fact once you work on your mental health, you'll find real people the only kind you'd want to talk to. But the real people actually working on their mental health (part of it is reducing device usage to bare necessities) are quite small unfortunately. But I am hoping that will change.

That's the point - real people are annoying because you are annoying. (Not you in particular, but me, you, everyone.)

Dealing with real people in real situations is dirty and messy and not "video-game perfect" like Instagram likes et al - but in the end it is real and you end up discovering that your rough edges have been worn off in the great river of life - just as theirs have been.

In fact, I'd argue that a vast portion of the "mental health crisis" is just that - we're not dealing with each other so we're not learning how to deal with ourselves.

One of the best ways to "grow up" if you will is to have children - because they ARE real people but darn if they're not messy and sometimes insane; you have to learn to deal.

Re: The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline

#232

Post by myth_drannon »

bradlys wrote: post #175
rjbwork wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US doesn't want indiscriminate population growth. It wants white people that were born here to reproduce more.

I think capitalists just want cheap labor. The US itself doesn’t have a unified position on population. Plenty of people want a population decrease because they feel everything is overcrowded.

It's interesting how the sides flipped. Left was strongly anti-immigration because it saw it as a tool of capitalism to drive down wages and just general abuse of working-class rights. Now Left is pro-immigration, and the right is against for the same reason the Left was. When did this change happen?

Re: The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline

#233

Post by mordechai9000 »

ashishb wrote: post #123
phainopepla2 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are some of the myths they bust in that article? For those of us who can't see past the paywall

One really common that myth this article busts is about child care. "Child care is virtually free in Vienna and extremely expensive in Zurich, but the Austrians and the Swiss have the same fertility rate."

I can only speak for myself, but 2 was a good number for me. This amounts to somewhat less than a replacement rate. My wife and I had enough time and energy to give the kids what they needed, and still have some for ourselves at the end of the day. And if either of the kids needed extra resources or attention, we were able to do it without neglecting the other one.

I am not worried about a population decline, to be honest. Even disregarding AI, improvements in technology and food production mean we can leverage resources in a way that would seem like magic to the people alive when my grandparents were born. I would rather take care of the people we have in this world - the whole world, not just my country - than see more people born into slums and poverty.

Even if there is a cliff, I don't think it's an existential crisis. I say without irony, I believe the market will adjust. Wages will go up in jobs that are needed, and workers will have more leverage and more mobility, socially and geographically. It's hard for me to see that as a bad thing.

Even if you believe that technology will let us keep pushing the earth's carrying capacity indefinitely, to what end? It doesn't seem like anyone has a real plan for expanding beyond 8 billion that isn't just a promise that we'll figure it out when we get there. We aren't taking care of the people we have now. Never mind the ones yet to be born.

I don't want to live in Brave New World and I also don't want to live in The Dosadi Experiment. And I don't want to condemn the future people to live like that either. I know those are works of fiction, but both seem plausible (in the general sense) at this point.

(Edit: not Brave New World. I am thinking about a story where people lived in dense arcologies with tight surveillance and social control surrounded by robotic farms. Sorry I can't remember.)

Re: The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline

#234

Post by anonym29 »

Balgair wrote: post #207

I like to hang out on fertility twitter. It's a strange place. Since the fertility problem is worldwide, you get a lot of ideologies mixing about. There's hardcore CCP folks, free market Mormons, radical Imams, universalist preachers, the whole lot of them. They're all trying to share ideas and jumping on the latest research findings from reputable and crackpot sources. They're all looking for the recipe to get peopl…

Israel had a net birth rate increase from 2000-2025 despite being at war and under regular rocket barrages for much of that time.

While they aren't immune from the global fertility decline, doesn't that skew against "their children will have good lives" at least a little?

Re: The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline

#235

Post by eptcyka »

Balgair wrote: post #207

I like to hang out on fertility twitter. It's a strange place. Since the fertility problem is worldwide, you get a lot of ideologies mixing about. There's hardcore CCP folks, free market Mormons, radical Imams, universalist preachers, the whole lot of them. They're all trying to share ideas and jumping on the latest research findings from reputable and crackpot sources. They're all looking for the recipe to get peopl…

Free childcare makes it so much easier. Can’t imagine leaving 80% of my salary at the daycare, but some in the UK do that.

Re: The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline

#236

Post by mullingitover »

brightball wrote: post #162
whatever1 wrote: post #100

Most of the developed countries are facing this. I think our financial/defense systems are not prepared for population decline, so I foresee a lot of turbulence. The new left will call for more immigration and more globalism to avoid wars, but will have to deal with integration of swaths of immigrants. The new right will call for closing of the borders and double down on AI doing the work of producing and defending,…

I've watched most of my life as narratives have been pushed in popular culture, TV, music, magazines, online articles, etc that go out of their way to convince people not to have children. Just some examples of trends I've observed personally. - Scare media about the cost of having children - Scare media about the environmental impact of having children, even calling it irresponsible for the planet - Scare media abou…

> there is nothing in this world that brings people more joy than their families and their children. Nothing.

Counterpoint: Yes, you're giving the standard apologetic we all hear from parents. However, plain and simple, objectively it's typically the most stressful thing you will do in your entire life. It's so bad the US Surgeon General had to put out an entire advisory paper about it[1]:

> 41% of parents say that most days they are so stressed they cannot function and 48% say that most days their stress is completely overwhelming compared to other adults (20% and 26%, respectively).

[1] https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/parents-under-pressu...

Re: The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline

#237

Post by pydry »

Balgair wrote: post #207

I like to hang out on fertility twitter. It's a strange place. Since the fertility problem is worldwide, you get a lot of ideologies mixing about. There's hardcore CCP folks, free market Mormons, radical Imams, universalist preachers, the whole lot of them. They're all trying to share ideas and jumping on the latest research findings from reputable and crackpot sources. They're all looking for the recipe to get peopl…

Theyre probably all correct.

Nobody is exactly in a position to test their ideas though are they?

Re: The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline

#238

Post by lotsofpulp »

AndrewDucker wrote: post #214
Balgair wrote: post #207

I like to hang out on fertility twitter. It's a strange place. Since the fertility problem is worldwide, you get a lot of ideologies mixing about. There's hardcore CCP folks, free market Mormons, radical Imams, universalist preachers, the whole lot of them. They're all trying to share ideas and jumping on the latest research findings from reputable and crackpot sources. They're all looking for the recipe to get peopl…

I think there are two steps: 1) Make people want to have kids. 2) Make it feasible for them to do so. People already want more kids than they're having, so focussing on (2) at the moment is probably the best approach.

Everyone I know who wanted more kids wanted them before having 1 or 2. And it is almost always the men who wanted more kids, as women are more cognizant of the sacrifices and risks.

And this applies to financially secure couples in the US who willingly stop at 1 or 2.

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

Re: The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline

#239

Post by rjbwork »

myth_drannon wrote: post #232
bradlys wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think capitalists just want cheap labor. The US itself doesn’t have a unified position on population. Plenty of people want a population decrease because they feel everything is overcrowded.

It's interesting how the sides flipped. Left was strongly anti-immigration because it saw it as a tool of capitalism to drive down wages and just general abuse of working-class rights. Now Left is pro-immigration, and the right is against for the same reason the Left was. When did this change happen?

I'm on the left and am anti-immigration. Always have been. I think pulling the cream of the crop is objectively good for the country, but bad for the places they come from. Liberal low skilled immigration is just bad for everyone except the handful of people that actually employ them.

Re: The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline

#240

Post by mullingitover »

Balgair wrote: post #207

I like to hang out on fertility twitter. It's a strange place. Since the fertility problem is worldwide, you get a lot of ideologies mixing about. There's hardcore CCP folks, free market Mormons, radical Imams, universalist preachers, the whole lot of them. They're all trying to share ideas and jumping on the latest research findings from reputable and crackpot sources. They're all looking for the recipe to get peopl…

There's another option: you can get them super brainwashed into your cult. Cultists are very compliant, prolific breeders.
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