India's surprise baby bust • Hacker News Board

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#931

Post by missedthecue » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 9:37 PM UTC

sirwhinesalot wrote: post #721

The real reason why nobody is having kids can be summarized by the sentence: "It takes a village to raise a kid". Look up how much time a mother actually used to spend holding their own child vs other people holding that same child. It was something like 40%. When you lived surrounded by your tribe, you had an extremely strong support network that no longer exists in industrialized society. Add to that all the other…

The "village" that used to raise kids was simply low labor force participation among women.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#932

Post by missedthecue » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 9:39 PM UTC

sensanaty wrote: post #783

I'm in the Netherlands, and my partner and I don't want kids for a multitude of reasons, but the biggest one for us and many other friends of ours is the obscene costs of having a child. Even the ones that really want kids simply cannot afford to have one, because the price of living is simply absurd. I'm extremely fortunate to be working at a large tech company and I have good money, but even with my income having a…

If you make very good money and childcare is 30 thousand euro per year, why doesn't your wife raise the children instead of outsourcing it? The answer (and I'm not sure what it is in your case) is the ever-illuminating stated vs revealed preference.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#933

Post by ben_w » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 10:10 PM UTC

b0rtb0rt wrote: post #530

pjc50 wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is table stakes obvious, though? Again we see the weirdness of having an almost exclusively male conversation about the subject. Women are choosing not to have children, and you need to ask them why and take the answers seriously.

because they are on a medication that makes their body think they are pregnant already women have sex drives too, if they arent on birth control they are more likely to engage in behavior that can get them pregnant

> if they arent on birth control they are more likely to engage in behavior that can get them pregnant

Well yes, trivially: it's kinda difficult to engage in behaviour that can get someone on birth control pregnant. The first behaviour pretty much has to be "stop using the birth control".

When I was a teenage boy and learning about periods and the pill for the first time, I thought it obvious that women would choose the pill to stop having periods: they sound awful.

Took a decade or so before I learned that some women actually have much worse experiences on the pill than off. This is presumably why mooncups are really popular. And presumably those also have issues, otherwise I'd have stopped seeing tampons for sale.

I can't tell by your username if you're a woman with the lived experience of what you're stating is the cause of lower birth rates, or one of the many guys like me who just assumed the pill would solve a lot of the problems women talk about?

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#934

Post by analog31 » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 10:25 PM 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…

"Hedonism" seems like an interesting term for a straightforward personal choice.

I don't have a specific reference, but both affluence and a decline of childbirth seem to be related to improving the education and economic agency of women. Society can cope.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#935

Post by dpark » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 10:30 PM UTC

analog31 wrote: post #934

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…

"Hedonism" seems like an interesting term for a straightforward personal choice. I don't have a specific reference, but both affluence and a decline of childbirth seem to be related to improving the education and economic agency of women. Society can cope.

It seems like the right word. Hedonism doesn’t imply debauchery. It’s just prioritizing pleasure.

It’s a hedonistic choice to forgo children in order to enjoy the pleasures of an unencumbered lifestyle. It’s also a personal choice (though I would not say it’s straightforward for most).

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#936

Post by thelastgallon » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 10:43 PM UTC

trumpdong wrote: post #870

thelastgallon wrote: post #659

In a farming culture, children are a profit center: 1) Production of children costs nothing. People married young and children just happen, there are no expensive fertility treatments, etc. 2) children are free labor for decades, helping their dad (family?) expand the acreage. More land = high status for dad. Even today, children can work in the family business without any pay. A child can be free labor, but only for…

Maybe I'm crazy but I think I'd be fine paying a tax to raise all kids - if that's what it costs to keep society alive, so be it. It would probably work out in the neighborhood of child support i.e. pretty high. The problem you're talking about with child support is how it punishes the one individual man and so the rational decision for each individual is to not have kids. A collectivised tax wouldn't have the same p…

Completely agree with you. This is what Govts are supposed to do.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#937

Post by OhioMan2943 » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 10:54 PM UTC

analog31 wrote: post #934

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…

"Hedonism" seems like an interesting term for a straightforward personal choice. I don't have a specific reference, but both affluence and a decline of childbirth seem to be related to improving the education and economic agency of women. Society can cope.

Does "coping" in this situation mean having 75% of any western countries young population foreign born and erasing thousands of years of culture and history?

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#938

Post by skissane » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 10:54 PM UTC

Ifkaluva wrote: post #926

skissane wrote: post #789

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last month, the US Census Bureau released their 2025 population estimates. In the ~5 years from April 1, 2020 to July 1, 2025, it estimates Kiryas Joel's population grew from 32,956 to 47,147 – a 43.1% increase. [0] That's not spectacular in the figures themselves–you'll see bigger bumps when new suburbs are established–but it is spectacular in being almost all due to natural increase instead of migration. Evolution…

I’ve heard this theory before. I think in the medium term it will have some effect, but a lot of these ultra religious groups have high attrition. In the long run, evolution will have to do the job properly and actually genetically make us want more kids.

> but a lot of these ultra religious groups have high attrition.

Many of them actually don’t. How could Kiryas Joel be growing so fast if it did?

80-90% of children stay in the faith, and when 6 kids is considered a small family, and families with >10 kids are common - losing 10-20% in each generation doesn’t prevent exponential growth

The other factor - a constant defection rate combined with exponential growth in the underlying population produces exponential growth in absolute number of defectors - it is easy for outside observers to misread that defector boom (e.g. the “off the derech”/OTD phenomenon) as a sign the sect is in trouble

> In the long run, evolution will have to do the job properly and actually genetically make us want more kids.

Why would biological evolution “have to” if cultural evolution is doing the job for it? Of course, the two work in tandem, but the biological contribution may turn out to be an increase in frequency of alleles that make people happy in high demand sects, rather than direct desire for children

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#939

Post by OhioMan2943 » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 10:58 PM UTC

If you don't find this suspicious I'm worried

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#940

Post by Tade0 » Sat, Jun 06, 2026, 11:26 PM UTC

rembal wrote: post #778

jiggawatts wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m in my fourties’ unable to afford a three bedroom apartment in my city with an income in the top two or three percentile. I’ve had boomers tell me with a straight face that “they did it” so it can’t be that hard despite a 5x increase in housing costs relative to income. I’d have to spend every single post tax dollar for two decades to afford an actual house. Not counting interest and other taxes and council rates.…

A different perspective from Poland: house affordability is equally as bad, so the argument could have been "young people don't have babies because they can't afford three bedroom apartments". But the country had a major baby boom in the 80s, during a (relatively mild) civil war and in the middle of a major economic crisis, when getting anything other than vinegar was a huge problem. And I clearly remember ppl living…

That baby boom was an echo of the first post-war baby boom and fueled by a record 274k newly built apartments in 1979 - a culmination of a decade of ramping up construction when Edward Gierek took over and started borrowing money on a massive scale[0].

As a father of two I can tell you right now why demographics in Poland are in the gutter: most families need two incomes to survive, but:

-Companies insist every employee works full time.

-Women often have nothing to come back to after maternity leave.

-Daycares, kindergartens etc. are open for 9h at most, so pray your commute isn't too long if you have two or more kids.

-Commutes to these institutions have become longer as on one hand more people live in the suburbs while on the other urban planners kinda sorta forgot you need to carve out some land for a school/kindergarten when you're planning a new residential area, so if you live in a recent-ish building forget about leaving the car at home.

Most people seeing all these obstacles just settle on one child, whom they can leave and pick up in shifts.

My family copes by living on a single income, which is still possible today if you're a software engineer, but most likely won't be long term.

[0] In hindsight it wasn't a terrible plan - there was enormaous demographic potential