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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

#621

Post by xeromal »

Night_Thastus wrote: post #576
anal_reactor wrote: post #563

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're implying that people incapable of planning next Thursday are thinking about their pensions. Poor countries reproduce a lot because they still have a lot of people functioning on the level of biological impulses rather than rational thought.

That...may be pushing it a lot. People in poorer countries are just as capable of rational thought as anyone else. The difference is in the education they've received, the resources they have access to, and the rights individuals have. Mentally, there's little difference - minus effects of things like malnutrition in severe cases.

I grew up in the rural South (America's Third World) (N. GA) in the late 80s / early 90s and tons of children were born out of wedlock because kids were bored and fooling around. Bored, horny kids like to have sex. Now there are so many way to occupy yourself digitally that I think these is happening less. It's not that poorer areas are dumber, it's that they had less access to entertainment and sex is free.

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

#622

Post by toephu2 »

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…

Yup, and the U.S. is a low-trust society as a whole.

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

#623

Post by toephu2 »

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…

That's an example of a low-trust society.

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

#624

Post by TheGRS »

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…

I'm not a parent but where I live in Portland a big trend has been bike buses. A couple of parents ride with a group of kids to school, I see them often. That time before class started was always an awesome time where we'd talk about video games and trading cards and stuff, I'd be really disappointed not to see that.

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

#625

Post by Balgair »

achierius wrote: post #374
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, or white picket fences, or coercion, or lack of birth control, or whatever other set of schemes you can make, none of that matters. This is a profoundly unscientific statement. All of these things matter, you just aren't willing (or rather think, correctly, that our society is not willing) to try them in earnest.

Per the studies that I have seen over on Fertility Twitter, none of them seem to really make much of a difference.

Right now they are on a meme where they want to turn large tracts of national parks into suburban developments because some study said that apartments are bad for families. I ... its ... yeah...

All the studies seem to contradict, meaning that likely they are having little to no measurable effects.

'Yeah, we just need to try harder though'.

I mean, yeah, we're mostly trying to exhaust those 80-20 effects right now and see if anything sticks. From the little I have seen: nope. It's the proper way to look at it. Go for the cheap stuff with big effects, then see.

But you're right, it may be more like a 99-100 thing, where you kinda have to get it all right before it kicks off. We don't seem to know right now and are still exploring the space.

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

#626

Post by Balgair »

01284a7e wrote: post #556
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…

RE: 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. --- "Every healthy creature tends to multiply himself." - Albert Camus, "The Myth of Sisyphus" People aren't "healthy" (happy, secure, etc.) in America...

Lord isn't that true...

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

#627

Post by Balgair »

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…

> And I don't have the policy recommendations to enact that. I'm just a dweb on the Internet. But that is my take.

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

#628

Post by acdha »

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?

There are two competing factors: how much of a choice do women have and the opportunity cost of that choice?

If you look at the data, in rich countries much of the drop has been the reduction of unintentional teen pregnancies: women have better knowledge of and access to contraception, and they know that their lives will be better off from taking advantage of advanced education and building a career before having children.

Unless we’re talking about taking away the basic human right of bodily autonomy, that means that everything else must, as OP highlighted, focus on removing the negatives. This has to be done comprehensively to work: if, say, you provide free daycare but it runs 8-4, a professional parent probably isn’t going to change their estimate of the costs of having a child much at all since it’s still disruptive in ways which likely affect their long-term career trajectory. The richer the country, the more that matters: higher income is paired with higher cost of living and more opportunities which will be harder to take advantage of as a parent.

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

#629

Post by tayo42 »

xyzelement wrote: post #599
kraig911 wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just hard now. Before I had kids I had a network of friends and had a great social life. Now it's just me and my wife. If I want more friends I'll have to have more kids I guess? I have 4 now. One (my first) is severely autistic. Financially the cost? I pay about 6,000 a month in daycare. 2k a month in healthcare expenses. Then community wise. Every time I've gone to take them to the movies, or to a restaurant o…

As a dad of 3 I have huge respect for your 4 and I doubt there is much I can offer you in terms of information but I think I would have more complaints similar to yours had my wife not been a lot wiser and more proactive than me, so I'll share. First is where you live. I would have picked based on access to nature and cost, she made us pick based on where other families live and proximity to family. In my town everyo…

Do you live in the US?

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

#630

Post by tonfa »

insane_dreamer wrote: post #532
scottious wrote: post #475

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am friends with a lot of other parents already. I do go out of my way to make friends. I already organize bike trips to the museum and stuff like that. I'm a very social person. What I'm saying is that there are a lot of forces keeping people solitary and anti-social. This is just one of them. I know for a fact that some of these families waiting in their SUVs live a short walk from the school. Yet still they choos…

> I don't want him going close to the cars because they've LITERALLY been pumping out pollution for 10-15 minutes (those early spots are very coveted). I have to tell my son to hold his breath when we bike on the empty sidewalk past these idling cars. social-interaction problems aside, why are the cars idling? seems like the school/city would have an ordinance prohibiting that

So glad to live in a country where you'd get fined for that :)
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