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What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

derekthompson.org

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Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#641

Post by frm88 »

interloxia wrote: post #615
121789 wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are looking at the full world numbers, which isn’t really what’s being discussed in this thread. Try filtering for South Korea or the US

Change in births, by age of mother, United States Estimated number of births each year by the age of the mother. 1950-2023 relative change. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/births-by-age-of-mother?s... Birth rate by women's age group, United States https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/fertility-rate-by-age-gro...

The second graph is so interesting. Pulling the slider shows less births but an average increase in the mother's age (which in turn accounts for less births if you're looking at 35+ yo first time mothers you don't expect n more kids to follow for (among others biological/medical reasons)). It would be interesting to have a complementary chart on divorces just to have a look whether existential uncertainty plays a role in age decisions.

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#642

Post by wolvesechoes »

dividefuel wrote: post #202

I see three big reasons why people aren't having kids: #1: Raising kids is really hard. They're expensive. They eed constant attention when they're young, and in modern American society they need to be in a bunch of activities once they're older. And all the various tasks of day-to-day life that don't disappear: work, food prep, cleaning. I spend virtually all my waking hours on work, chores, and childcare. Being abl…

#5 Modern culture is all about egoism masked as pseudo-individualism and self-fulfillment through constant consumption

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#643

Post by mensetmanusman »

vjulian wrote: post #447
swagasaurus-rex wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an unusual take. People in the past made 4-10 babies per family and they did it by being celibate until marriage. Sex positivity and casual relationships were not normal, and grandparents encouraged marriage before sex, probably because the grandparents knew they’d be partially responsible for raising the kid and wanted to ensure two parents to help care for their grandchildren

That time period is so markedly different from ours, the comparison is useless.

The people today who proscribe to these beliefs are the only people above 2.1, it will be the future due to natural selection of culture.

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#644

Post by mensetmanusman »

const_cast wrote: post #454
hatefulmoron wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably either the countries being emigrating from must be at replacement rate, or themselves declining? Somebody has to be producing the next generation, somewhere..

Yes, which is how it is and I don't see this changing any time soon.

You may need to update your priors, the countries where immigrants are coming from are dropping below replacement.

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#645

Post by mensetmanusman »

Henchman21 wrote: post #118
analognoise wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can’t have billionaires with their own private space programs and 5 families with more wealth than 50% of America, and have a stable society. This is just the natural and obvious outcome of what we’re already dealing with. The fertility crisis is just our refusal to deal appropriately with the ultra rich and the collapse of our institutions.

I continue to need someone to ELI5 precisely why we shouldn’t kill those 5 families and redistribute their shit.

Wealth isn’t zero sum, someone could write some code that increases the global wealth by $1 trillion from nothing.

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#646

Post by pseudocomposer »

squigz wrote: post #636
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #446

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having kids when you are young and financially not established is just irresponsible, but particularly female bodies don’t do well having kids older when you are established enough to do so responsibly. I’m having this problem right now with my spouse (we have a kid, but are thinking about another), it’s just super hard to get pregnant without medical help.

Don't the difficulties in pregnancy related to age tend to come up around 40 or older? I don't think the choices need to be "have children at 19 years old" or "have children at 40" - surely having kids at 30-35 is still physically fine and gives you some time to become more financially secure?

If you know anything about dating and relationships, that’s an extremely narrow window. More so if you want 2-3 kids.

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#647

Post by mensetmanusman »

ceejayoz wrote: post #64
missedthecue wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pointing out that even in a profitless world, a dependency ratio of 2:1 is not workable. It literally does not matter how you distribute resources.

Sure, at a certain point, not replacing enough people means the species goes extinct over time. That doesn't mean humanity going down to (random number) 1B people via gradual birthrate declines is automatically (nor rapidly ) going to lead to that, if we have enough automation to handle it, and if we have a plan to stop the process at some point.

The electrical grid collapses in a couple weeks if not for constant maintenance by thousands of individuals. Many parts of our technology society are like that, it will be interesting to see how the system decays.

Automation would need some breakthrough as profound as life itself to be useful without the millions of people behind the scenes making automation possible.

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#648

Post by mensetmanusman »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #115
bryanlarsen wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things that old people need are going to get super expensive with a shrinking population because there are so few working age people providing those services compared to the number of retirees. So you're saying "don't have kids because things are getting so expensive", while the reason they're getting expensive is because people aren't having enough kids....

I’m absolutely telling people not to have kids into a macro that just wants economic slavery to pay back debt of all sorts incurred (sovereign, demographic). Labor was cheap because of a population boom with a root cause of women not empowered. Now empowered, they are having less children (family planning, not having unwanted or unaffordable children). Suboptimal economic systems can change, and they should. Can you…

This is like going along with the crowd in China when they started killing off all their young girls leading to this current population imbalance. The right solution is to go where no one else is at the moment and have large families.

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#649

Post by pseudocomposer »

squigz wrote: post #637
pjc50 wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> scandalously Yes. Society hates teen pregnancy. Some societies will carve out an exception for married teens, which is a whole other can of worms. This is not a change in norms, it's the victory of the norms. People have been told not to have children until they are ready, and finally compliance with that is pretty high. There were even worse alternatives, like the mass grave at Tuam or the Victorian practice of "b…

> The short way to get a baby boom is to make it OK to be a less than perfect parent. There are still lots and lots of shitty parents out there.

It’s almost like our social norms prevent “good” and “okay” people from becoming parents, waiting for a “perfection” they’ll never achieve… but those norms have no real effect on the people who will be “shitty” parents.

Re: What caused the 'baby boom'? What would it take to have another?

#650

Post by acdha »

teitoklien wrote: post #466
kelseyfrog wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When people feel the game is unfair, they quit. When the game is society, the society ceases to exist. It's wild that we find it harder to change the system than to walk away from it entirely. People opt out in a thousand small ways - refusing to have kids, refusing to participate, numbing themselves with distractions, or just mentally checking out. If the core pitch of society is "keep grinding or suffer," it’s not…

Things should be made better I agree, But at the same time. Every single generation before ours had worse life outcomes in everyway than us. They had lower lifespans, struggled with food insecurity, Lack of travel accomodations, no access to education for the majority, nothing. Yet if you speak to anyone from those generation or even from our generation who have lives similar to them, they have far more positivity an…

> Every single generation before ours had worse life outcomes in everyway than us. They had lower lifespans, struggled with food insecurity, Lack of travel accomodations, no access to education for the majority, nothing.

What’s your definition of our generation? What you described is true of multiple generations, and flat out wrong for things like lifespan in the United States which has been declining.

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