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The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline

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

#261

Post by bradlys »

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?

When the “left” started becoming more about social wokeist policies than about economics and fiscal policy.

I think the reason the left became this way is due to neoliberals trying to fracture the left by getting center left people all concerned about social issues. Secondly, the left became completely disjointed and hopeless many years ago. Once the capitalists had completely thwarted the movements and fucked with the parties, the left collectively realized they really couldn’t do anything against the economic engine that was running against them. So they were left with virtue signaling, woke shit, and so on as a means of trying to get some kind of change.

The left of today is very soft and unwilling to engage in violence. At least in the US. I think abroad there are other movements that are willing to throw down and actually suffer for their principles. Americans aren’t and I don’t think we’ve ever had a real leftist movement here anyway. People will think Bernie 2016 is probably the closest thing we’ve had in 50 years and he’s pretty mild…

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

#262

Post by monero-xmr »

eptcyka wrote: post #235
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.

In the US we already give low income people subsidized or free daycare.

The real issue is how the system didn’t support the middle. If you are broke you get tons of support - healthcare (Medicaid), food (SNAP), housing (section 8), and a myriad of subsidized options for everything, from discounted utilities to childcare. But be middle class and get very little, except paying taxes to support the poor to get everything. Huge driver of political division across the West

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

#263

Post by bombcar »

garciasn wrote: post #184
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

TL;DR: the article argues we cannot fix the population crisis with small tax breaks or traditional values because the modern world has made the cost of raising a child being too high for most people to want to try. --- The article argues that the global drop in birth rates isn’t a moral failure or a biological accident, but a logical response to the pressures of modern life. 1. Myth: People are too selfish/liberal to…

> lack of support is

This is the key - but "support" often gets converted by the modern world into dollars - but there's no rational way to pay someone else to be the parent.

You need support to be much more than just monetary payments - nobody would think you're "supporting" someone going through a mental crisis or drug addiction by giving them a giant ball of cash; it might HELP in some way, but it's not really the totality of support.

Anyway if someone wants to send me a small portion of $280 billion I'll have more kids, you can even get pictures of them now and then! Looking to adopt rich grandparents ;)

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

#264

Post by JPKab »

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…

"Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them."

Then please explain why birth rates throughout human history, when life was vastly more difficult and dangerous than it is now, were so much higher?

Nobody had to meet this bar you set before. Let's just be honest here. There were three recent developments, all of which were, by themselves, good things. But those three things, combined, created an unprecedented phenomenon.

The 3 things:

1.) The birth control pill decoupling sex from pregnancy. 2.) Women being granted autonomy and being allowed to join the workforce and leave marriages without suffering economic and social destruction 3.) Social support programs to create a poverty safety net funded by taxpayers instead of charity

No society on the planet ever had these things until the mid to late 20th century. And these things all contribute to radically reduced birth rates, in every single society that has implemented them together.

This take of "all you have to do is make the society encourage family formation" makes it sound like the three developments I listed are irrelevant, and that humans always just had this explicit menu of options that made family formation an optional pursuit, independent of a good life. That is simply not the case.

We need to be honest with ourselves about the uncharted territory we're in. It's not simple. Modern humans live in what would have been historically viewed as a Utopia. Our ancestors 5 generations back would have viewed our "jobs" as fake. They wouldn't even recognize what we do on a daily basis to earn food and shelter as labor of any kind. We have entire metropolises filled with people with soft hands who have literally never had to participate in their own survival from the perspective of harvesting food or cooking/heating fuel. Your comment just reeks of someone who is disconnected from the historical realities of 99.99999% of the humans who have ever lived.

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

#265

Post by watwut »

jleyank wrote: post #97
bombcar wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many solutions to different aspects of the problem - if we define the problem something like "people get together older, and have kids older, and have fewer." But even if everything was "easy and perfect" (arguably some other countries have this) - you still have something that is generally discouraging people from having kids. The median Amish family income is about $65,000 and typically has six to eight c…

The Amish aren't on the consumer treadmill. They have amazing social support from their community. They tend to be "traditional families" so there's no question re: child rearing. So I guess that satisfies both of the original conditions... But I figure people would prefer a more commercial lifestyle. Particularly on places like HN.

By all estimates, they have also fairly high rates of domestic violence and abuse rates. Which to be fair, traditional families also frequently featured.

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

#266

Post by Hizonner »

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…

> Since the fertility problem is worldwide

Slowed population growth, or even population shrinkage, is worldwide.

The fertility "problem" is only inside some people's heads.

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

#267

Post by andrewla »

epistasis wrote: post #180
gadders wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

ICE threatens everyone, regardless of citizenship. They daily detain citizens without even bothering to ask "papers please". They menace and threaten and intimidate people just out and about in the neighborhood. The ICE raids have little to do with immigration, they are a secret police force meant to cause terror in communities with their lawless violence. It is a politically driven attack on a state that had the aud…

[flagged]

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

#268

Post by Aurornis »

watwut wrote: post #150
supertrope wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The book Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam is about the decline of civil society. Church membership is down. Labor union membership is down. Parents got crushed in the pandemic with school shutdowns, daycare shutdowns, and formula shortages. It takes two incomes to afford a family's lifestyle. Someone has to take care of the kid. Two people have to do the job of three people.

> It takes two incomes to afford a family's lifestyle. Someone has to take care of the kid. Two people have to do the job of three people. Being stay at home parent is one of the most lonely thing you can do. Yes, the parent who works in office and goes bowling with collagues is less lonely. But the one who is spending whole day with a small kid and no one else is much more lonely .They cant go bowling either, becaus…

I had a period of behind effectively a stay at home dad and I disagree with this completely.

Being a stay at home parent doesn’t literally mean you have to stay at home. Take the kids and leave the house. Go on adventures. I met so many people randomly during that time.

It was vastly more social than sitting in an office or working from home alone.

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

#269

Post by foobar_______ »

randusername wrote: post #192
supertrope wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The book Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam is about the decline of civil society. Church membership is down. Labor union membership is down. Parents got crushed in the pandemic with school shutdowns, daycare shutdowns, and formula shortages. It takes two incomes to afford a family's lifestyle. Someone has to take care of the kid. Two people have to do the job of three people.

Second this. Maybe also "The Fourth Turning" It is cool to live in a place where everyone questions the roles society might impose on them, but it's too extreme lately. The cost of community is inconvenience. The price of individuality is loneliness. So much of life is brutally inefficient without networks of trust and reciprocity.

Agreed. Great summary. Postmodernism and everyone tearing down all systems to their roots is fun... until you have no structure left.

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

#270

Post by mattmaroon »

ryandrake wrote: post #113
throwawayohio wrote: post #85

Living in a city that this administration has constantly been attacking forced me and my wife, as well as many of our neighbors, to put off our family growth plans. Not only did many of my neighbors lose their jobs, but others are simply fearful of living their lives. We're fine financially, have housing, etc, but at this point why would we go through the stress of raising a child when a masked federal agent might ju…

Many of our family's friends have already left back to their home countries (bringing their own families with them). Risk/reward calculation has abruptly changed. The risk to your life and livelihood is not worth it, and the reward of living in the US has been steadily declining.

That is almost certainly the reason why they are making such a spectacle of it. Self deportation is the goal.
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