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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

#521

Post by koakuma-chan »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #463
WhompingWindows wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not alone, Kraig911. It's very hard to be a parent in modern society. My wife and I's friends have basically vanished from our lives, they have zero initiative or interest in coming over to see the kids or help in any way. They say they do, but they rely on us to take the initiative and make social things happen. After dozens of rejections or silence from dozens of them, it's rejection fatigue with the friends…

> Many of our child-free friends are going to go through a lot of loneliness when they're old I've seen this "kids are insurance against loneliness" logic repeated often, but I don't believe this bares out in reality. I personally know plenty of child-free older couples who remain quite happy and social. I also know plenty of parents whose kids don't speak to them anymore or whose children have lives on the other sid…

So why do you have children? Can't synthesize a reason?

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

#522

Post by jrochkind1 »

If we need more young people in our society in the USA, this is actually the easiest problem to solve -- just open up immigration. As long as lots of people still want to come here (not guaranteed to last forever), not having enough people is a problem only of our own making. If only most of our problems were so easy to solve.

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

#523

Post by mullingitover »

anthonypasq wrote: post #319
mullingitover wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 m…

yeah and? i thought it was generally agreed that the best things worth doing in life are hard? a life of comfort and hedonism isnt fulfilling. We've known this for thousands of year.

Having children itself can often be a form of hedonism. Let's face it: for many, the decision to have a child is very similar to the decision to have an exotic pet. People frequently/usually do it just for the social status boost they expect to receive.

And if we're talking about having children in the context of history: for basically all of history except the rounding error of the past century, children were your social security/pension/401k rolled into one. Children were literally your property, a form of wealth and certainly not a sacrifice.

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

#524

Post by estearum »

echelon wrote: post #510
WhompingWindows wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not alone, Kraig911. It's very hard to be a parent in modern society. My wife and I's friends have basically vanished from our lives, they have zero initiative or interest in coming over to see the kids or help in any way. They say they do, but they rely on us to take the initiative and make social things happen. After dozens of rejections or silence from dozens of them, it's rejection fatigue with the friends…

It's not that being a parent is harder - it's actually easier (excluding the post-WWII American boom years which were a fluke). It's that the floor of being single has risen to stratospheric highs. Being single used to be: boring (no internet, tv, constant dopamine drip. Having kids was an escape from mundane boredom.) Being single used to be: lonely (now we have dating and hookup apps, online games, tons of in-perso…

> It's not that being a parent is harder - it's actually easier (excluding the post-WWII American boom years which were a fluke).

Why would it be easier today?

You used to just open your door and go let your kids run around and hope they're back before dinner. Absolutely nothing like today's ultracompetitive, ultra-regimented world.

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

#526

Post by pantalaimon »

Gagarin1917 wrote: post #306
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…

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 i…

> but there’s no real way to coordinate that in society from the top down without being authoritarian.

PR comes to mind. They managed to convince millions of people that smoking is 'cool', we just need another Bernays to do the same for having kids.

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

#527

Post by AnthonyMouse »

cco wrote: post #251
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…

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?

> How do you square those facts with your view here?

"Richer" countries generally have a higher cost of living. If you get paid twice as much but each sq ft of real estate costs 50% more, what does that do when someone with multiple kids needs 2000 sq ft instead of 750? Worse, what if you get paid twice as much but real estate costs three times as much because land owners keep lobbying for restrictive zoning to impose artificial scarcity?

Maybe it's more important that you be able to get a three bedroom to begin with than that the three bedrooms on the market have new kitchens; more important if you can't afford to send your kids to college in a country where a higher percentage of the people they're competing with in the labor market will have a degree.

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

#528

Post by mjburgess »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #336

This is happening everywhere , including nations with great social systems/healthcare/parental leave/etc. And it happens even when nations try throwing money at the problem. While economic concerns may be worsening the issue - I don't think they're the root cause as many would like to say. I think the root cause is that we have outsmarted our biology. Once you give people education on the risks of sex and pregnancy,…

Children are pensions, that's why poorer nations have lots of children because lots are needed to look after people in their old age. Thus, many of these comments on HN and elsewhere, "make the nation better", only have led -- and will lead -- to fewer children.

When the old don't need households of the young to provide for them, there won't be any.

But this, and the education of women, and increasing productivity etc. are the barrier --- this isnt some "indictment of our culture" -- a sentiment no better than "we're being punished by god"-thinking which turns every weather event into a didactic lesson on people's pet peeves.

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

#529

Post by rayiner »

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…

Don't forget collapsing testosterone rates: https://www.urologytimes.com/view/testosterone-levels-show-s...

I don't know what the explanation is, but I find your's implausible: "Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them." I think that might be true in certain bubbles, but I don't think that explains why the fertility rate has collapsed just as much in Scandinavian countries that have the highest reported happiness ratings in the world.

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

#530

Post by kixiQu »

Gagarin1917 wrote: post #316
pawelduda wrote: post #303

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

That’s looking at history through a modern lens. The reality is, women were not able to control when they got pregnant for almost all of human history. It was just part of life and sex. They weren’t having children as some kind of decades long plan for the benefit of the group… they just had sex and nature did the rest.

It's more complicated than that.

https://acoup.blog/2025/08/08/collections-life-work-death-an...

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