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

321–330 of 1001 posts

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

#321

Post by Aurornis »

fullstop wrote: post #290
Aurornis wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did you struggle with dirty looks at the park? I wasn't a SAHP but I'd spend time with my kids at a park nearby and people would give me dirty looks for playing with my kids if my wife wasn't present.

Never once.

The internet convinced me it was going to be a problem, but it literally never happened once.

We rotate through parks because the kids love seeing new parks. Nobody has ever given me a dirty look for bringing my kids to the park. It’s a completely normal thing for parents to do.

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

#322

Post by tensor »

bradlys wrote: post #261
myth_drannon wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

It's amusing. The left is always accused of "woke" but the ones constantly crying about it are those on the right. The right will even vote against their own economic interests to "stick it to the woke."

Seems to me we need to fix the narrative here, the right are woke obsessed while the left would rather vote on economic principles like reducing healthcare costs and improving jobs (not just availability but also pay and quality).

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

#323

Post by mountainb »

scottious wrote: post #176
jdlyga wrote: post #68

Once you have a kid, it's obvious why even besides the costs involved. There's not much sense of community, particularly in the white middle class. People are very individualistic and distrusting of others. There's a good reason for some of this, but to have a community you need to be a community member. And that means letting people in, trusting others and being trustworthy, and being out for the group instead of ju…

Every morning I get to my son's school about 10 minutes before the doors open. We arrive by bike and we sit ALONE on the benches near the front door. Meanwhile, the curb is full of extra large SUVs idling with kids just waiting inside the cars. The long line of SUVs extends all through the neighborhood. My son and I are alone because people just won't leave their cars until the doors open. A vast majority of the kids…

If the medium is the message, the SUV communicates that there is only space for the nuclear family members, speed and comfort is of the essence, and the road is the only acceptable avenue for transportation. The sidewalks are for homeless people, jogging athletes, and eccentrics.

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

#324

Post by alephnerd »

lukeschlather wrote: post #314
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…

> No amount of baby cash There is an amount of baby cash that would work. But we're talking enough cash to hire a competent housekeeper/nanny until the child is old enough to take care of themself.

> hire a competent housekeeper/nanny

They would need similar support as well and it's a tower of nannies all the way down (it truly does take a village to raise a kid).

More critically, assuming that you need a housekeeper or nanny in a two parent working household is legitimately ridiculous. And I say this as a 1.5 gen immigrant with a sibling who was raised in a 2 bedroom apartment in the Bay Area while both parents were working with a total household income of around $140k in the 2000s (ie. upper middle class)

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

#325

Post by drowsspa »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #278
JPKab wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

You really don't need to get so elaborate. The shift from agricultural to industrial/service economy explains it well enough. In an agricultural economy, children are an economic assistance, a source of labour, and a means of helping with survival. In our industrial/service capitalist economy, while they are a net good for society ... they are a cost centre for the parent.

Yeah, as soon as you don't need children to help with your work, they don't make much sense in the capitalist individualistic society. That women still choose to do it, honestly... I see as a triumph of the human spirit

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

#326

Post by throw1111221 »

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?

This already happened in 1986.

"The Immigration Reform and Control Act legalized most undocumented immigrants who had arrived in the country prior to January 1, 1982. The act altered U.S. immigration law by making it illegal to knowingly hire illegal immigrants, and establishing financial and other penalties for companies that employed illegal immigrants."

"By splitting the H-2 visa category created by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, the 1986 law created the H-2A visa and H-2B visa categories, for temporary agricultural and non-agricultural workers, respectively."

"Despite the passage of the act, the population of undocumented immigrants rose from 5 million in 1986 to 11.1 million in 2013."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_Reform_and_Control...

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

#327

Post by jedberg »

This is what happens when your population growth is driven by legal immigrants, and then you make your country very unfriendly to legal immigrants by "accidentally" locking them up while at the same time making it really hard for them to become permanent residents.

The Olympics have really driven home to me how America is truly a melting pot. When you look at the Olympians from say Greece, you can say "oh those are Greek people". When you look at the Nordic athletes, you can say the same. Or the Japanese or Chinese.

But you look at the American team, and they don't have a single physical "look". There is a mix of races and cultures, and they're all American. People complain that America doesn't have a culture, and they're kind of right. We have mix of everyone else's.

It will take decades, if ever, to fix this. Some people from all around the world longed to come to America. Not anymore. Now they are looking elsewhere.

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

#328

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#329

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

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…

> My take on it is: you have to make your country/society a place where people will want to have children and feel/know that their children's lives will be good ones.

Anecdata of one - but I think one non-trivial contributor that I haven't seen people talking about is...

From my experience and the experience of most of my friends and family... people actively DON'T want kids until about 30 - and often times that's too late for a number of reasons.

1) because you actively DIDN'T want kids, you didn't prioritize finding a life partner

2) because you actively DIDN'T want kids, you didn't prioritize saving/earning enough to have them with the lifestyle you want

3) if you DIDN'T want kids until mid 30s, often times, that's too old for women (and even for men)

4) because you actively DIDN'T want kids, you've become accustom to a lifestyle that's insanely expensive with kids, so now you can't imagine how you're going to maintain your childfree lifestyle (much better than what you were perfectly happy growing up with) and have kids

Maybe all of these are only top ~10% problems. Maybe I'm in a weird bubble - but pretty much all of my friends that DIDN'T have kids - suddenly started wanting kids around 30 - some of them are trying and struggling - most of them simply aren't finding "the one" - because if you waited too long, most of the best fish are already partnered up - because they were probably smarter than all of us and prioritized that over maximizing income and lifestyle for one.

It seems like all my single friends around 30 talk about how the dating pool is terrible, and most people in the US make enough money that they'd much rather be single than doubling-up income and saving on housing with someone they barely like.

TL;DR: the main discussion seems to be about people that DO want kids, but aren't having them because reasons. There's potentially a larger, more important discussion about why there's a LARGE percentage of prime-birth-age adults that DON'T want kids because reasons.

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

#330

Post by triceratops »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #23
queuebert wrote: post #16

Why do we obsess over growing everything all the time?

We need young people to pay for old people retirement (economically speaking, someone has to be working when someone else is just eating).

Why? I understand that's how the system works now but does it have to? Productivity has never been higher.
Post reply on HN