India's surprise baby bust • Hacker News Board

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#711

Post by Drupon » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 6:17 AM UTC

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…

>due to its Orthodox Jewish population

and its use of United States tax dollars to fund social services that make it possible to raise their broods that American citizens simply don't get.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#712

Post by Drupon » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 6:20 AM UTC

chr1 wrote: post #583

scoofy wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really the message of Abundance . If you want people to have kids, you need to make sure they are economically secure by the time they are of childbearing age... which means before they are 30. To do that, you cannot have supply constrained zero-sum shortage anywhere in society. It means that the cost of an apartment needs to be at-or-below the cost to build that apartment so people can just save up and buy o…

Cost of a great apartment by 1920 standards is affordable to anyone before they are 30, the problem is that they want to add lots of nice but non-essential things to that house driving the price up. If you subsidize building houses, you merely will drive up standard of living without moving childbearing age. The problem is about priorities not resource constraints. And solution will be either enough people/countries…

>Cost of a great apartment by 1920 standards is affordable to anyone before they are 30, the problem is that they want to add lots of nice but non-essential things to that house driving the price up.

Absolute bullshit drivel because there's no GrEAt ApARmenTs by 1920 STanDArDs available in any major cities like there were in the 20s. Everyone has to rent a GreaT ApARtMENt bY 1920 StAnDaRDs instead because they just LOVE renting GrREAT ApaRTmeNTs BY 1920 StanDARds instead of buying them for the equivalent of a car payment today.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#713

Post by akudha » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 6:24 AM UTC

i_idiot wrote: post #8

What's the strong case against population dwindling other than supporting aging population? Given the AI armageddon, it just makes sense to reduce the population. If there's less population, we need less production and less workers. Of course, countries have to deal with oldest population for a brief period of time.

I don’t know what the right number is, but 8+ Billion doesn’t seem sustainable. It might be, if humans respected the environment, are nicer to each other etc. Since that doesn’t seem to be happening anytime soon, the next best option might be to just have less humans, which hopefully might lead to less pollution, less exploitation of the environment etc

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#714

Post by thewhitetulip » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 6:28 AM UTC

willmarch wrote: post #693

matchbok3 wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's also neglecting the fact that Indian boomers are very nosy and the culture pressures adults to have kids but gives 0 support. Neither culture nor religion or the govt does anything to help.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#715

Post by ezst » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 6:29 AM UTC

em-bee wrote: post #307

nemomarx wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did people want to have them in the past, and what shifts do you think could undo industrialization enough to return to that? The economic value of kids and the relative surety that kids will provide for you in your old age are I think very hard to reclaim now, and that was a pretty strong motivator for most of history. You could end all retirement funds and pension systems and so on, maybe?

how about making your pension depend on the number of kids? take an average pension now: X=100%, take half of it as a base, and then add a quarter or one fifth per child. so a childless person gets half the current pension, 1 child gives you 75% or 70%, 2 children 100% or 90%, 3 children 125% or 110%, etc...

Sounds good, until you start arbitrarily punishing people who, for one reason or another, just can't have kids (reasons can be many, for one, biology is a bitch).

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#716

Post by ezst » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 6:33 AM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #410

xeonmc wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So support should be provided for incentivizing younger parenthood then, like guaranteed tuition assistance per children born?

We spent decades fighting teen pregnancy for this?

Yes I wonder why. Teen pregnancy sounds so amazing and inconsequential for individuals and societies alike that teens should just be inoculated as a rite of passage or something...

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#717

Post by N_Lens » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 6:37 AM UTC

dyauspitr wrote: post #525

guyzero wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Japan, a country famous for no one knowing what its culture is.

Reading about it in books and watching anime won’t prevent them from going functionally extinct in less than 200 years.

Ever heard of Malthus?

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#718

Post by nazgul17 » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 6:39 AM UTC

scoofy wrote: post #569

accurrent wrote: post #553

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that affordable housing is crucial, but the idea that this is 'impossible in a democratic society' ignores global realities. Several democracies heavily subsidize housing—look at Vienna's social housing model or Singapore's HDB system. Yet, this has not solved the birthrate problem; Singapore’s fertility rate recently hit a record low of 0.87. Ironically, the highest birth rates globally occur where economic…

"Effectively impossible" does not mean "impossible." Yes, Vienna's housing policy is effective... It's also the only place in the world that manages it. I would argue that it is ideal , but nearly impossible to implement. We can't escape the fact that Vienna operates what is effectively a sovereign wealth fund to create all that housing, which works with the subsidiaries of Austria's actual sovereign wealth fund in d…

Exponential decay isn't impossible to manage if the exponent is reasonable (i.e. closer to 1, i.e. if the average number of children per woman was closer to 2.1). It's just going down too fast.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#719

Post by globular-toast » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 6:40 AM UTC

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…

Yeah. I think there's a couple of reasons why people think this way:

1. There is still shame associated with wanting sex. We're not ashamed of wanting food or sleep, but sex, oh no,

2. People change after having children and it's permanent. They forget what they were like before. It's kinda like taking LSD or something. These things can fundamentally change you as a person.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#720

Post by purav0788 » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 6:45 AM UTC

nercht12 wrote: post #358

The problem with society is that people are commonly selfish, so the majority of people only do things that benefit them. Children benefited ancient societies. The problem with industrialized societies is that people lost all markers of adulthood. Everything became about worshiping convenience, and once convenience (for short-term pleasure) became "god", people wanted to avoid things they saw as unnecessarily difficu…

I am guessing you are from some reasonably developed country, you are so well unaware of how deeply biased the system is against most people in third world countries, the amount of suffering they experience is not for the faint of heart.