Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The US is flirting with its first-ever population decline

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 1001 posts

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

#301

Post by andrewla »

epistasis wrote: post #223
andrewla wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think he blames the immigrants specifically, so much as illegal immigration as an institution. The only "punishment" that most people want for illegal immigrants who have committed no crimes other than the immigration violation itself is for them to be deported, which really does not seem like a punishment at all -- it's just undoing the criminal act. Like if you stole some money from a bank and then had to g…

There are such deep contradictions in these thoughts. You think that the illegal immigrant is going to starve without the criminal employer? When just a second ago you were saying they should be deported, and that "most" people think that's OK? We all lose when these immigrants are deported, and every mass deportation means simultaneously a mass deprivation of rights and a mess of big mistakes that ruin people's fami…

What can I say, I contain multitudes.

I think that yes, they should be deported. This is not a punishment.

If your solution is that they should not be deported, but employers should be prosecuted, then you're saying that you want the immigrants to starve.

If your solution is that they should not be deported, but we should extend labor protections to them and force employers to hire them legally, then I think there is some merit to this. This is closer to the libertarian open borders argument, and I once found it very appealing. Entitlement abuse is the main argument against here in my mind.

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

#302

Post by a_tartaruga »

AdamN wrote: post #199
koolba wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US has endless backlog of people waiting in line to legally enter the country. It doesn’t need to keep any illegal aliens to meet its immigration goals.

Wouldn't it be simplest to just legalize the people who are here and at the same time also open up immigrant visas too?

> Wouldn't it be simplest to just legalize the people who are here

I recently went down this rabbit hole a bit thinking this was the obvious solution and was surprised to learn that the Reagan administration legalized all illegal immigrants in the USA in 1986: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Reform_and_Control....

State control over employment and borders in the US is just too weak to prevent people coming over and so 30 years later this leads right back to the initial state.

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

#303

Post by pawelduda »

JPKab wrote: post #264
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…

> 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?

One of reasons is because more hands were needed to deal with the difficulty

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

#304

Post by maxfurman »

fragmede wrote: post #295
goodmythical wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Captain’s Log, Stardate 48492.1 We have entered orbit around Sol III-bis. Long-range scans suggested a pre-warp civilization at the peak of the Information Age. However, upon arrival, Lieutenant Uhura reports total silence across all hailing frequencies. No radio, no subspace chatter, not even leaking analog television waves. Yet, life sign readings are off the charts. It is a ghost town inhabited by eight billion gh…

Was this written by a human? It's far to entertaining to have been written by an LLM.

I see an em dash! Honestly, mixing cast members from different series might be exactly the kind of mistake that an LLM makes. But it made me smile, so score one for the robots.

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

#305

Post by ndiddy »

compounding_it wrote: post #135

My darwinian theory: About 11 years ago I went on a bus in Rochester, NY. It was bizarre to me that every person in the bus (about 12-15 people aged between 18-25 maybe) were buried in their phones. No one was talking to each other, not looking outside, nothing. I had the latest iPhone but since America was new for me I mostly spent time looking at the world around me and talking to people. I felt sad that the social…

I watched this video a while ago that said something similar. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ispyUPqqL1c

The decline in birthrates isn't related to growing living standards, as poorer countries also have declining birthrates. Turkey has a lower birthrate than the UK, and Mexico has a lower birthrate than the US. Places like North Africa and South India have seen declines in birthrates comparable to the West.

He makes the argument that declining birthrates are due more to a fall in coupling than a fall in people in relationships choosing to have kids. He brings up that birthrates would actually be increasing if marriage rates remained constant. This means that all the incentives countries push such as subsidized childcare or tax breaks to have kids are putting the cart before the horse, as a growing share of young people don't have a partner to have kids with to begin with.

He then brings up that the fall in coupling a country experiences is roughly correlated to the rate of mobile internet usage in that country. 46% of American teens say they use social media "almost constantly" vs. 24% a decade ago. People would rather use social media than go out and meet others. He points to South Asia as an example, as it's experienced a relatively smaller decline in marriage rates, and mobile internet usage there is lower than in the rest of the world.

I suppose it's yet another way that cell phones are impacting society.

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

#306

Post by Gagarin1917 »

JPKab wrote: post #264
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…

Yep. Birth control made it so women can choose how many times they get pregnant. Pregnancy is not exactly a walk in the park, so it’s no surprise it’s decreasing as birth control increases.

To override this, society needs to make having kids be “cool.” It’s that “simple,” but there’s no real way to coordinate that in society from the top down without being authoritarian.

So it’s a problem that can only be solved by individual change and convincing others one on one that it’s desirable. And people don’t like that.

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

#307

Post by gambutin »

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…

Let’s be honest: children are usually forced on people. It was simply an expectation of your family and society in general for you to have children. This pressure is gone in western societies.

"How dare you asking me when I will have children?"

It’s also not necessary to have kids for retirement anymore.

Look at the top 3 countries with the highest fertility rates over the last 10 years:

- Chad - Somalia - DR Congo

Outside of Africa it’s Afghanistan and Yemen.

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

#308

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

JPKab wrote: post #264
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…

> 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?

> The birth control pill decoupling sex from pregnancy.

Boom. Done. You had the answer already and just didn't reconcile your own thoughts.

You really need to interpret the comment you're replying to in the context of here and now, not 100 years ago before people had a choice about whether to get pregnant from sex. Doing otherwise is misleading.

Within the context of people having more choice about pregnancy, the critical remaining piece is that the world is economically and societally absolute shit for people to have children in. Women don't just have the option of entering the workforce, they increasingly need to because a dual income household is now the market expectation in relation to cost of living in developed cities and especially cost of living with children in developed cities. Not to mention the capitalist class war overtly amplifying economic disparity instead of reducing it. Not to mention the environment, climate, justice, and social wellness being gradually destroyed by plutocratic christofascists on a grand scale.

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

#309

Post by drowsspa »

anthonypasq wrote: post #298
drowsspa wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People compare themselves to their perceived neighborhood in time and space, not to peasants from 5 thousand years ago.

you think people in Chad are optimistic about the future of their village and are therefore having lots of kids? Give me a break dude.

Who do you think is their perceived neighborhood in time and space?

(edit) And moreover, they still need their children to help with their work... So honestly, any analysis that doesn't take this huge confounding variable is just silly

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

#310

Post by lotsofpulp »

anonym29 wrote: post #234
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?

Total fertility rate is the correct metric for comparing how many kids a woman or couple is deciding to have. The birth rate is just boosted by Haredi Jews having outlier amounts of kids, presumably because its a cult where women don’t have many rights.

https://www.taubcenter.org.il/en/research/israels-exceptiona...

> Among Jews, the TFR among Haredim has fluctuated around 7 children per woman since the 1980s, and around 2.5 children per woman among the secular and the traditional who identify as not religious. However, Haredi fertility in the 2007 to 2013 period was lower than in the 1990s, while fertility in the non-Haredi Jewish population has increased since then.

>Even among Jewish women who self-identify as secular and traditional but not religious, the combined TFR exceeds 2.2, making it higher than the TFR in all other OECD countries.

Post reply on HN