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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

#831

Post by snowwrestler »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #69
queuebert wrote: post #16

Why do we obsess over growing everything all the time?

The growing population of economically non-productive people requires a growing population of economically productive people to support them. At some point, you could take 100% of the output of the productive people and it would still not be enough to support retirees et al. At the limit, not growing the productive population puts younger generations in a position of existing solely for the purpose of serving the non…

> The growing population of economically non-productive people requires a growing population of economically productive people to support them. At some point, you could take 100% of the output of the productive people and it would still not be enough to support retirees et al.

Economic growth is the result of productivity, which is the product of the number of people working, times their per-capita productivity. If each successive generation is more productive per capita than the last, then each generation can support successively more non-productive people.

But future generations won’t need to support as many non-productive people as we do now, because the Baby Boom will die off. In the U.S., the peak of non-productive populace is only the next decade or so.

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

#832

Post by snowwrestler »

oklahomasports wrote: post #154
biophysboy wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not remotely worried about birth rates. Every tech executive hyperventilating about it is extrapolating social trends decades ahead, which is the same mistake Erlich made when he published the "The Population Bomb". The total fertility rate has limitations as a metric too (it assumes constant birth timing). The fact that they do this coercive paternalism on the very platforms that substitute for real life social…

Predicting population decline is safer than overgrowth. Since with low birth rates we know we need substantially higher than replacement rates to make up for the deficit. Which seems unlikely

Predicting numerical decline is easy and obvious. What is silly is predicting economic or social doom because of that population decline.

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

#833

Post by tsoukase »

Seabiscuit wrote: post #784

As a (young, thus-far childless) woman, I feel it's important to add something that men may not fully grasp and I haven't seen much in the thread so far: what tips the scales in this decision is often not just daycare costs/career prospects, but also the potentially extreme side effects of pregnancy on the body. Going through the process of being pregnant and giving birth is absolutely terrifying to me and most of my…

Childless women don't age well. If they are saved from the effects of a never-pregnant climax on their arteries/metabolism, they will face a dementia cared by nieces. Not that mothers don't have these but physically and psychologically they are much less burdensome. The hormone flooding of pregnancy is a health blessing.

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

#834

Post by handedness »

mattmaroon wrote: post #260
throwawayohio wrote: post #85

Living in a city that this administration has constantly been attacking forced me and my wife, as well as many of our neighbors, to put off our family growth plans. Not only did many of my neighbors lose their jobs, but others are simply fearful of living their lives. We're fine financially, have housing, etc, but at this point why would we go through the stress of raising a child when a masked federal agent might ju…

I certainly don’t agree with the things the administration is doing, but this seems like just hysteria. You are putting off your family growth plans because they might deport a theoretical future undocumented nanny? It is strange to me how generalized partisan fear has become.

If one can't even aspire to use a small portion of their dual tech sector incomes to illegally underpay someone to ensure they must sacrifice neither sleep nor income in the raising of their own children, well, then, the American dream is well and truly dead for all.

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

#835

Post by handedness »

bigyabai wrote: post #482
mattmaroon wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s really not. Define taken away. They’ve absolutely detained some citizens, then let them go. And again, not defending what they are doing, they are awful,but you are probably more likely to be hit by lightning than you are to have any of your family planning go wrong because of them if you are a full citizen. (If you are undocumented here right now, yeah, totally.) Hysterical people think they are being rational…

> you are probably more likely to be hit by lightning I get that you're trying to rationalize this scenario, but this line is completely false. If there was a nation-wide wave of aviation terrorism, it would not be appropriate to say that you're "more likely to be hit by lightning" than risk your life in a plane. The situation has changed, and they're not being hysterical for observing the trends and adjusting accord…

> Lightning has a relatively static chance of hitting you.

That was fun.

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

#836

Post by K0balt »

snowwrestler wrote: post #825
K0balt wrote: post #820

Population decline is disastrous for sprawling developing nations like the United states. It’s bad for fully developed nations as well, but it’s cyanide for developing countries. Infrastructure build out requires a strongly growing population, or it’s just not fundable. For low density countries like the USA, infrastructure is already a disproportionate burden. Population decline will spark a crisis of crumbling regr…

The economics of infrastructure actually improve for stable or shrinking populations because funding can shift from raw capacity buildout (extremely expensive) to maintenance and value-add services (profitable). Observe that the best infrastructure in the world is in nations with slow population growth, like Western Europe, Japan, and more recently the U.S. and China. Whereas nations with very high population growth…

Slow population growth or even stable population is dramatically different from population decline. Usually slow growth is the ideal. But even a modest decline shifts extreme burdens onto wage earners. OTOH, it’s great for buying up property.

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

#837

Post by g9yuayon »

Honest question: why are we so afraid of population decline? For people on the left, it means less consumption, less environment impact, less carbon footprint, and in general fewer damn evil people who are destroying the mother earth. For the right, everyone is responsible for their own destiny including their retirement life so they worry about their retirement spending solely on their own anyway. In practice, Japan seems to be fine. In particular their young people have so many job openings to fill.

So, what exactly are we worrying about? The social security is not sustainable? The medical cost will go through the roof? There's no enough military power? There won't be enough consumption to support the growth (in that case, why do we have to keep growing? Why can't we just stay where we are? Again, not rhetorical questions but honestly curious about the answers)?

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

#838

Post by jvandreae »

ziml77 wrote: post #642
JPKab wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

> 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? Because having kids then was a way to increase quality of life. The kids could be put to work from a young age and help make money. Now, with so much modern tech doing physical tasks efficiently, a kid isn't going to add much value and instead is going to be a money si…

The past is a foreign country. I do not believe "quality of life" in economic terms is a sufficient explanation. The simple Darwinian fact is that, if your culture did not value reproduction sufficiently, through whatever means, it would not have survived to the present. Remember, infanticide was widely practiced historically, and while not as convenient as birth control, provides a significant fraction of the same "benefit".

I do find it a bit ironic that "free child slave labor" is considered a better reason to have kids these days than, say, ancestor worship or nietzschean vitalism.

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

#839

Post by iugtmkbdfil834 »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #821
iugtmkbdfil834 wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can absolutely think it as long as it stops there. There is a reason. At that point in the game, your needs and wants are supposed to be subordinate to those of the kids' long term survival. I could maybe understand this sentiment, oh 50 years ago, when you maybe could plausibly claim you had no idea that child rearing is not exactly easy, but unless a person is almost completely detached from society, it is near…

This is a hilariously narrow view of family life. Life is a lot more complicated and there's essentially limitless possibility between living a life you feel is solely about "paying consequences" or "completely abandoning all responsibility" (which, btw, is still an option. Not great, but neither is the former) But I do appreciate you providing an object lesson in just how taboo it is to even entertain the thought pu…

You can entertain it. You just did. But don't expect standing ovation is my very subtle point.

Quite the contrary, it allows for a very broad range of outcomes, because it deals with reality of the human condition.

Everything always is. Why, tomorrow I could quit my job and start a bar in Hawaii. As arguments go, this one was pretty weak.

Why am I getting this feeling that you completely misread what I wrote.

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

#840

Post by rangestransform »

jimt1234 wrote: post #493

I've said it before on HN, but it's worth repeating: When my parents started a family in the late-60's, my dad had only a high school diploma, yet he supported his wife, 2 kids, 2 cars, and a brand new house. Heck, one of their cars was a 1964 convertible Corvette (my mom still talks about how much she misses that car). That is basically unheard-of these days.

Too bad the rest of the world is no longer in shambles due to war and has other options than buying American
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