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India's surprise baby bust

economist.com

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Re: India's surprise baby bust

#661

Post by bombcar »

Qem wrote: post #585
trumpdong wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately this exponential decay is very unlikely to continue forever. The present structure of society will not survive a 90% reduction in population. Abundant resources (especially housing) and insufficient humans to run a tight bureaucracy will probably lead back to people having babies for fun again and not coddling them to the extreme detriment of their own lives, and human population will stabilise.

> Abundant resources (especially housing) and insufficient humans to run a tight bureaucracy will probably lead back to people having babies If well managed I think this is possible. But it's not given. Another scenario is houses in the countryside, small towns and far suburbs getting empty and soon uninhabitable due to lack of maintenance/infrastructure degradation, and remaining people packing close to core areas t…

Small towns survived for millennia before industrialization; and they could likely survive again, if anyone wanted that life.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#662

Post by mergetree »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #69

This has happened to every single society [*] as it industrializes [0], and offering extensive support and incentives to parents (e.g. as has been tried in Scandinavian countries) does very little to reverse this trend [1, 2]. My hypothesis is that as societies industrialize, they afford their population more and more activities that are simply more fun and rewarding than having children. So many people I know put of…

[dead]

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#663

Post by Qem »

triceratops wrote: post #73
arbll wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a significant risk it will lead to a large reduction in living standards. A lot of things like retirement funds are built with the assumption of infinite growth. This assumption will obviously break one day and when it does I don't see how it could go smoothly. On the plus side, it will likely lead to lower emissions, assuming it doesn't lead to massive wars or other destructive behaviors due to the instabili…

> retirement funds are built with the assumption of infinite growth Of workers. Because retirement funds take money from workers to pay for retirees. Assets and productivity, on the other hand, can grow a lot more than the population. Right now it's considered communism to tax assets. Once we get over that taboo things'll go a lot smoother.

> Assets and productivity, on the other hand, can grow a lot more than the population.

Source? In a growing market, one can spread their investiments to get safe returns that approach the overall economic growth. In a shrinking market, the same logic should lead to small losses, year over years, making investiment much riskier and unactrative. Markets are made of people.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#664

Post by bombcar »

WarmWash wrote: post #276
Spooky23 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kids are cheap when you are poor because you aren’t seeking status. A home in a highly desirable suburban school district won’t support 12 kids in the lifestyle that people demand in those places. Whoever has custody of the kids is fine. The social services benefits scale. They won’t get rich, but they’ll eat. People will be OK. The only people who lose are stupid men who have multiple children with multiple women. O…

You also have the state which pays for most of the top line expenses of having kids. Once you start making money, those benefits don't fade, they instantly disappear entirely.

If you're at a certain income, additional kids is additional income as more and more gets taken care of.

And that certain income can be surprisingly high, as it's often a multiple of the poverty level which is calculated based on family size.

eg: https://www.dhs.wisconsin.gov/badgercareplus/fpl.htm

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#665

Post by [deleted] »

munificent wrote: post #567

I'm always surprised this topic comes up all the time and there's all sorts of navel gazing about economics and housing and other reasons people want to have fewer kids. It seems to me that the simplest and most likely explanation is: Having kids was never a primary motivation. Having sex was. Kids were just a hard-to-avoid downstream consequence of that. Once you have the pill, which makes it much easier to have sex…

[deleted]

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#666

Post by sltkr »

em-bee wrote: post #291
VirusNewbie wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>My hypothesis is that as societies industrialize, they afford their population more and more activities that are simply more fun and rewarding than having children. But this is by and large not true. I've traveled, eaten at expensive restaurants, enjoyed a child free existence into my mid thirties and having kids is a blast [*] My wife was adamantly against having kids when we got together in our twenties, and she c…

having kids is a blast true, but you didn't know until you had them, and society keeps telling us otherwise. we need to change the message and educate youth about becoming parents. but also create a culture where having children is welcome. in the west we complain about kids running around, making noise, being not under control. and most importantly we blame the parents. in china every child is treated like a treasur…

Despite that, China has a fertility rate of 0.93, which is among the lowest in the world, and certainly much lower than the US (1.6).

So it doesn't seem that that cultural difference boosts the fertility rate all that much.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#667

Post by bombcar »

dh2022 wrote: post #271
SoftTalker wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of people think they need to do this but it's really not true. You don't need to have life all figured out before you have kids. And in terms of avoiding complications and having energy, 18-25 years old is probably the best time.

In my city of Seattle you simply cannot have more than one kid in your twenties. You simply do not have the income to pay the Seattle rent / mortgages and pay daycare for more than one kid at the start of your career. Forget about going to a concert or a restaurant: there is simply no money for it. Young people in Seattle either live in studios or 1 bedroom apartments, or live with roommates, or with their parents. Y…

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Re: India's surprise baby bust

#668

Post by bsder »

thanhhaimai wrote: post #401
onetimeusename wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was surprised to find that just as recently as 1970 the median age of first marriage for men was ~23 and ~21 for women.[1] The average age at first child birth for women in 1970 was ~22.[2] There was a change that took place in the late 70s it looks like, probably acquiring education, that started to pretty dramatically raise the age of first marriage and first childbirth. So for me this was realizing that there wa…

In 1970, a single minimum wage income can raise a family and save up for extra. In 2026, a single minimum wage income can barely survive by themselves with no saving in most part of the US.

> In 1970, a single minimum wage income can raise a family and save up for extra.

My memory seems to think that wasn't true.

However, there were a ton of manufacturing and manual labor jobs that were capable of supporting a small family and they didn't need a college degree.

So, you had most young people earning positive money for four years at a very biologically fertile age rather than going into soul crushing debt at that age.

  Then I got Mary pregnant
  And, man, that was all she wrote
  And for my nineteenth birthday I got a union card and a wedding coat
Bruce Springsteen -- "The River" -- which was apparently a fictionalization of his brother-in-law

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#669

Post by bombcar »

tasuki wrote: post #336
Spooky23 wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only thing you lose there are the trips. If anything your social life can blossom. My wife was a city treasurer and had a masters. I was a .gov and later a tech executive.

> If anything your social life can blossom. Yes, if you value spending time with parents of same-aged children. My social life is still fine, but the people I spend my time with are competely different. Not better, nor worse, just entirely different.

That's not true! Sometimes you get to spend time with grandparents of same-aged children!

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#670

Post by bombcar »

trumpdong wrote: post #496
laughing_man wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That one ranks high on my list. If you're a farmer in the countryside children are an economic asset. They can feed the animals, plant, weed the crops, maintain fencing, etc. Once you move to the city, whatever else they are in terms of fulfillment, they're an economic liability. Oddly enough, it's likely the US and Europe defused (and then some) Erlich's population bomb with farm subsidies which pushed people off fa…

Is this still true when machines do the farming?

Yes, because you can let your kids use the machines at ages that would scandalize the urbanites (check the laws for your state, you find things like "twelve year olds can operate farm machinery incidentally on a road or highway").
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