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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

#381

Post by phainopepla2 »

Bratmon wrote: post #353
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. It's funny to me that of all the crazy crackpot theories on fertility Twitter, you picked the craziest and crackpotiest. I'm actually really eager to hear why you think Chad, Somalia, and DR Congo are the countries where people feel the most optimistic…

It's possible that the things that would motivate people to have children in poor undeveloped countries are very different from the things that would motivate people to have kids in wealthy developed countries. So OP's take could be right for the US but wrong for Chad.

Of course, it could also be true that a certain level of affluence and freedom for women simply results in a strong downward pressure on birth rates, which is what I think is most likely. (I am not advocating for rolling back women's rights).

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

#382

Post by avgDev »

phil21 wrote: post #297
cco wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't seem to be supported by the data, the "nicer" and richer a country becomes, birth rates drop. And basically the opposite is true for countries with a high birth rate. How do you square those facts with your view here?

The richer a country gets the more individualist you can become, is my basic theory. Raising a kid as an atomic couple apart from extended family and community is a horrible experience for the parents. It takes a village and all that. Parenting is utterly exhausting if you are doing it alone with a partner and responsible for every waking moment of childcare. You see this in immigrant communities in the US. The demog…

As someone with unsupportive family, I feel this.

I have a single child, we both work. It is tough.

I grew up in a small town in EU, my parents had a lot of help from their parents and I was able to play outside with friends early on. Everyone knew each other. My life in the US is nothing like this.

The first 5 years, I've spent $100k on daycare, and this is relatively "affordable".

I try to be an active and involved parent, add home projects/maintenance, and other things like health issues and I have zero energy and a lot of burn out.

When I was younger I did not understand why people stick around jobs for long. Now, I do.

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

#383

Post by mattmaroon »

throwawayohio wrote: post #371
mattmaroon wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I certainly don’t agree with the things the administration is doing, but this seems like just hysteria. You are putting off your family growth plans because they might deport a theoretical future undocumented nanny? It is strange to me how generalized partisan fear has become.

What? This happened a few blocks from my home: https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/08/17/dc-arrest... As did this: https://www.thedailybeast.com/ice-goons-tear-down-pro-immigr... These neighborhoods are high income, predominantly white, and filled with families. My oldest has come home terrified because he turned a corner while playing outside and physically bumped in a guardsman carry a rifle. I get it that…

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

#384

Post by macintux »

Bratmon wrote: post #353
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. It's funny to me that of all the crazy crackpot theories on fertility Twitter, you picked the craziest and crackpotiest. I'm actually really eager to hear why you think Chad, Somalia, and DR Congo are the countries where people feel the most optimistic…

Population growth has rarely been a problem in poorer societies. Every fully developed country (afaik) has seen birth rates decline; that's the context.

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

#385

Post by JPKab »

eptcyka wrote: post #333
JPKab wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife worked in several daycares in her early 20s, including an extremely expensive "Bright Horizons" location in a very affluent area. Even premium daycares provide inferior care to infants and young toddlers versus parental/family care. The economics of a business being in charge of your child demand this. Something that shocked her was at this super expensive daycare she worked at, the infants were basically giv…

I am not arguing that parents should be deprived of paid parental leave until they are ready to go to preschool/daycare. I sm arguing that once the child is old enough to do that, it shouldn’t have to kneecap family finances to do so.

I agree. I think that paid parental leave and then later, paid daycare is an amazing investment of government resources. If we diverted a fraction of what we spend on retirees who had good jobs their whole lives and don't even need assistance to child care, society would benefit.

We spend far too much on former taxpayers instead of fostering and forming new taxpayers.

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

#386

Post by CoastalCoder »

mattmaroon wrote: post #270
ryandrake wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Self deportation is the goal.

Perhaps.

GP didn't say whether or not there were any legal clouds over the persons he's describing. The answer to that makes a big difference to his point.

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

#388

Post by BugsJustFindMe »

JPKab wrote: post #377
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I think your point is correct about the lack of optionality for women being in the workforce, but there are entire regions of the United States where it absolutely is optional. I live in one of them (Lynchburg, VA, which is filled with young evangelical Christian families that live in apartments and the mother stays at home) and my coworkers live in another (Salt Lake City, Utah which also has a ton of young moms sta…

> And I realized then that many Americans have utterly warped ideas about the level of assets you need to have to enable family formation.

I agree with this. I also believe that modern people have become substantially...hmmm...dumber about expenses like food? People think it's impossible to make delicious nutritious meals quickly and cheaply, but in fact it's actually very easy and you just need to actually consider it as being possible, and you need to be willing to spend 5-10 minutes of effort. It's appalling to me the number of people who think that cooking anything beyond boiling water is mysterious or who will argue that it's impossible to eat well on a budget by pointing exclusively at niche products that only exist to satisfy a drive for extreme novelty and ignoring staples.

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

#389

Post by epistasis »

andrewla wrote: post #267
epistasis wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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For anybody looking on, this sort of Big Lie behavior is extremely common in the US these days. All that crazy stuff Europeans are seeing with JD Vance and Trump's Greenland behvaior is what everyday Americans experience on a wide range of topics.

Having somebody link to a source that directly refutes their own claims, while acting indignant, is something I've experienced multiple times in the past week! It's quite shocking.

When the Trump administration went so hard on open lies that are directly contradicted by videos we all saw of ICE events, it was vice-signaling that started even greater amounts of bearing false witness. Openly lying seems to signal "in-group" status these days, like the sign in the green grocer's shop[1]. Get people to lie about the evidence they see with their eyes, and the become completely controlled, because to do so is to have total subservience to their master. No more eyes or ears except for those of their master. People that used to have values slowly abandon them, all in service to the lie that they are living. "The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."

That is the state of the US at the moment. I have hope that we can return to our former sanity, or at least ensure that the reigns of power are in the hands of normal, centrist people instead of the extreme fringes, but it is in no way certain.

[1] As Carney recently referenced from Vaclav Havel; here's a recentish essay on it: https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/the-power-of-the-powerless-v...

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

#390

Post by thewebguyd »

malux85 wrote: post #369
Bratmon wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. It's funny to me that of all the crazy crackpot theories on fertility Twitter, you picked the craziest and crackpotiest. I'm actually really eager to hear why you think Chad, Somalia, and DR Congo are the countries where people feel the most optimistic…

Im no expert but my gut feeling is that theres more than 1 reason people have kids. In "richer" western countries one of the strongest factors in that decision is "will my child have a good life" - that seems pretty sane to me, I wouldn't say that was the craziest and crackpotiest. But maybe in other poorer countries it's something like "having sex is the only pleasure I get in this unbearable hellscape of an existan…

> But maybe in other poorer countries it's something like "having sex is the only pleasure I get in this unbearable hellscape of an existance"

Also, in poorer countries, having kids becomes a necessity for survival. Places without safety nets, elder care, etc. You have kids to both take care of you as you age, and also as labor to help with survival.

That pressure/need doesn't exist in most of the west, so that incentive is gone.

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