Earlier quoted context omitted.
Topsoil (the oncoming train nobody has noticed yet)
We can make topsoil; we know how, we just don't have the will.
We do know how, but it’s very slow compared to the rate of depletion.
India's surprise baby bust
691–700 of 1001 posts
Re: India's surprise baby bust
#692Earlier 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…
> There was a change that took place in the late 70s it looks like, Birth control.
And abortion.
Re: India's surprise baby bust
#693Earlier quoted context omitted.
Basic statistics, common sense and dire poverty would dictate that there will be a sizable number of unhappy families. If you're surrounded by only happy families then you're privileged. I've seen families where husbands come home drunk and best the wives (in 2026)
You are in the family you help create. It is not just thrust upon you. The existence of despair need not discourage others to thrive.
That’s assuming no disease, mental illness, unforeseen events, injuries, forced poverty, unexpected deaths, etc. A great deal of family dynamics is outside of a person’s full control.
Re: India's surprise baby bust
#694> But demographers have long shown that what really counts is girls’ education.
Interesting, they mention JUST education as the deciding factor. Would it not be education AND birth control?
Re: India's surprise baby bust
#695Earlier quoted context omitted.
> FWIW kids of rich parents do not procreate somehow better even if they are not constrained by housing market. I don't think this assertion holds true at all: https://i.redd.it/5wy659956rsc1.png
Every economic bracket got smartphones and internet. The men are playing Fortnite. The women are on TikTok and Instagram. Babies went off trend so we could collectively do dopamine maxxing as a species. Evolution didn't anticipate this.
Evolution doesn't work like that. What we have here is a dead end. For whatever reason, this system isn't advantageous from an evolutionary perspective, so we don't reproduce. That's natural selection.
Re: India's surprise baby bust
#696Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's 2026 now and we know for sure that applying purely economic stimuli did nothing substantial to birthrate anywhere. FWIW kids of rich parents do not procreate somehow better even if they are not constrained by housing market.
> FWIW kids of rich parents do not procreate somehow better even if they are not constrained by housing market. I don't think this assertion holds true at all: https://i.redd.it/5wy659956rsc1.png
I don't think this shows that people who can afford housing have more kids. And it shows that even households earning over $700k/year are now below replacement (replacement fertility rate is about 2.1).
In the graph, fertility rates decline with income until around $275k. Those aren't families who can't afford housing. Those are well-off families with low birth rates. The birth rates start to climb in that chart only for the ~4% wealthiest families.
Also, you might reasonably conclude from that chart that rich women (in the $400k+ brackets) have more children, but that's not what the chart is actually showing. It's a synthetic total fertility rate, and not the actual TFR. They look at how many children women in that income bracket had this year, and estimate how many children they would have had if kept that reproductive rate for their whole reproductive period. That's going to misestimate the true rate due to selection effects. So, for example, a women who only wants one child is more likely to choose to have that child at 30, when her family income is higher, than at 18. But that doesn't imply she would have had more children if she had more money.
To put it another way, even if giving people more money had no effect whatsoever on their total fertility rate, you'd still expect the graph to curve up like that due to how people time their pregnancies.
Re: India's surprise baby bust
#697Earlier quoted context omitted.
> nice house in a nice suburb! There's your problem. Everyone wants to live in the same set of well established well resourced neighbourhoods. But there's too many of us. Go out in the 'burbs and accept that owning a house implies a commute you will dislike (among a host of other compromises).
Are you joking right now? I’d have to move a thousand kilometres to some shit hole country town to afford a house on a salary I earn by working as a principal consultant in the central business district! Now imagine the same scenario but with a school teacher, nanny, gardener, or inset job title here that is tied to a specific location. When “existence here with the rest of us who have pulled the ladder up after us”…
I am with you sans shit hole country town. Talk about a large brush.
Re: India's surprise baby bust
#698The purpose of life is reproduction and having your own kids is the greatest joy in life. I am a very successful and wealthy entrepreneur who can do anything I wish with my time and I have done everything; travel, rock climbing, super cars, wine tasting, etc etc. Time with my kids is all that matters to me.
> The purpose of life is reproduction There's no "purpose" of life, it just happens, it's physics. > I am a very successful and wealthy entrepreneur So now imagine you're not, and your life sucks because of such "successful and wealthy entrepreneurs" sucking all the wealth. If your life is shit, you naturally don't want to make it even shittier just so you can produce people whose life will also be shit (thanks to th…
The first time it happened it was physics. The next several billion years it was the purpose.
Re: India's surprise baby bust
#699Earlier quoted context omitted.
the reason we have been fighting teen pregnancy is because as a society we decided not to support young parents, and because teen pregnancy happens out of wedlock with the fathers usually disappearing. i believe historically this comes from the fact that mothers used to stay at home, so as soon as you had a child you would not go to school anymore. we could decide otherwise and create structures where young people, s…
> because teen pregnancy happens out of wedlock with the fathers usually disappearing Usually disappeared. Once DNA tests were invented, it became straighforward to go after them. Underrated breakthrough to support children and single mothers.
https://www.ncsea.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Quick-Facts...
In the US, there is ~$115 billion worth of child support debt outstanding. Even with DNA testing, we’re not going after the folks who aren’t supporting their offspring, mostly because they are low income and have nothing to take to satisfy these debts.
https://www.aecf.org/blog/child-support-statistics
> Yet, 2020–2022 data in the KIDS COUNT® Data Center reveal that just 23% of U.S. female-headed families reported receiving any amount of child support during the previous year (down from 26% in 2018–2020). Female-headed families refer to unmarried women living with one or more of their own children under age 18, which may include stepchildren and adopted children.
> One in three kids — nearly 24 million kids total — lives with a single parent, mostly single moms. In fact, according to 2022 Census Bureau data, of the 10.9 million one-parent families with children under age 18, 80% were headed by a mother. This makes women the more frequent custodial parent and the majority of those who need child support.
While fertility rates are down, roughly 40% of annual pregnancies in the US are unintended (per the Guttmacher Institute). There is still much work to do to drive down the rate of unwanted pregnancies.
Re: India's surprise baby bust
#700Earlier quoted context omitted.
The way I understand it, the modern sentiment is to have children meaningfully, raising them being a project parents actively invest into. Contraception brought choice, choice brought up consideration and planning. This all opened the can of "what are we doing" and "why do we do it" and "how do we do it right", that tended to be ignored in previous eras (where having or not having children was not exactly a real choi…
As a dad of (soon) 3, I would say that social media/etc have raised the expectations of parenting. Keep in mind that the kids aren't the only ones growing up and learning - the parents are too. And hopefully learning from their parents too. "Being ready" to have a child is an impossibility so you have to embrace the unknown and be ok with mistakes. Kids are resilient, and many millions have had to do with less.
I understand about the impossibility of being ready. No one is ever ready for something they do for the first time. As any complex and long project, there's theoretical preparation and there's practice with its constant ongoing course correction when (not "if") something doesn't go as planned. It's not an immediate issue or reason, at least not for me.
And another thing I understand is that some people actively want to raise children. You surely do. But I simply don't feel that way. Like, there's no inner sense of calling, or desire, or any moving thought or similar emotion or drive. Nothing like "yes, I want to do it".
And doing this not because I want it, but for the society's sake? It is an idea that makes sense, but but knowing the difficulties and stakes involved, a "why not" is pretty obvious to me. I most certainly don't want to spend significant resources of my lifespan on raising a kid I didn't even want. And thus I'm really glad that it's an option.