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India's surprise baby bust

economist.com

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Re: India's surprise baby bust

#941

Post by nemothekid »

echelon wrote: post #646
HaloZero wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding of Singapore work culture though is it's intense and competitive. Yes the housing is cheaper and more accessible but it's the same age to get there (maybe a bit earlier). You aren't "economically secure" earlier in life than in Western countries. I don't know enough Vienna's system to speak for it.

This has nothing to do with economic security. Everyone is now dopamine maxxing on smartphones and internet. There's no desire to have kids because kids were a pre-internet and pre-modernity phenomena. Now that we're fully entertained, there's little need for having children. The FYP has enough entertainment to overcome the biological itch. Evolution did not anticipate social media and hyper addictive algorithms. We'…

>Everyone is now dopamine maxxing on smartphones and internet

Childbirth has been collapsing for decades before Mark had launched "thefacebook.com". Japan's TFR cratered in 1960 and never recovered. Did Japan have smartphones in 1960?

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#942

Post by testing22321 »

boelboel wrote: post #203
FeteCommuniste wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Once you have a cellphone to amuse yourself, perpetuating the species is just too much bother?

Phone + PC/TV probably takes an hour or two of people their day on average. If they didn't have access to it I assume they'd be meeting up with other people out of boredom and that'd lead to sex, doesn't seem too strange.

The average American watches 4 to 4.5 hours of TV per day. [1]

Half of people watch more.

[1] https://adwave.com/resources/average-daily-tv-viewing-time

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#943

Post by testing22321 »

trgn wrote: post #154
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…

i put off children because it takes longer to establish a foothold. not because i loved to travel or eat out necessarily, or felt i needed to prioritize hedonistic activities over building a family. but, during that time of getting my degree, figuring out my career, get some savings, etc.. those were the things to fill up time with. i'd trade it all for having kids younger though. it's just that they would have come…

I was 41 when my first and only child was born.

Super happy I had so much life experience, not wanting to go out and party etc.

Trying to keep up with her snowboarding and biking and climbing and hiking and all the rest through her teen years is going to be a great motivator to stay fit and strong.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#944

Post by surajrmal »

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…

What always irks me about posts talking about how the upper middle class cannot afford to raise children is how the conversation ignores the idea that raising children will cause you to alter your lifestyle. You may need to live somewhere else, eat out less, or what have you, but I assure you that you can afford it. Many are simply not willing to compromise on their lifestyle comforts.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#945

Post by nashashmi »

zbentley wrote: post #611
nashashmi wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The theory that improved health and safety and lifespan will shrink the urge to procreate is so far fetched I find it hard to imagine. The longer you live, the more likely you seek connection. It would be easier to imagine that long lifespan and better health makes people less attached to their spouse.

> improved health and safety and lifespan will shrink the urge to procreate Not what I said at all. Note the “even if I grant … (which I don’t…)”.

Oh, I misunderstood. You were only talking about the greater positives of industrialization, to counter ideas against it. That is true without debate. Material wealth going up, plus improved health conditions, are all positives. Material wealth replacing human relationships is not.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#946

Post by analog31 »

OhioMan2943 wrote: post #937
analog31 wrote: post #934

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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?

Now in addition to preserving the economic order, people are responsible for preserving culture and history? That's too much to ask for. Cultures evolve. Our children might not choose to follow our culture. Even within any given western country, people disagree on what the indigenous culture consists of. My country has been described as being in the midst of a culture war.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#948

Post by sirwhinesalot »

missedthecue wrote: post #931
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.

It wasn't just that. Speaking from both personal experience and from second-hand experience I got from my parents and grandparents, there was a very obvious shift that went beyond that.

My mother when she was younger used to live surrounded by extended family and they were always at each other's houses doing things together (I mean the adults, not just the kids, they'd help each other out).

I still grew up with extended family around, my grandparents, parents and uncle all lived right next to each other. I also had cousins nearby but already the shift had started, people were living more isolated.

But everyone still knew everyone and it was pretty safe to just let kids roam around.

That sort of life is gone.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#949

Post by muro »

sirwhinesalot wrote: post #834
chrismorgan wrote: post #795

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I’m reading you correctly, you seem to think that two kids takes twice as much effort as one kid? People broadly agree that cost and effort both grow sublinearly. Especially effort, though it is of course much harder to quantify. But personally I suspect that even four kids (serially) may not cross the twice-as-much-effort threshold. Aging affects the amounts and types of effort required, too. Four kids in paralle…

I'm a father of 2. If not for my mother in law I would have gone insane by now. Way harder than 1. 1 was mainly hard because we had no idea what we were doing. With 1 it is pretty easy for a parent to take over while the other rests. Not so with 2 kids. Dealing with a rowdy toddler and a puking newborn at the same time is draining in a way that is impossible to describe.

It gets better quite quickly though.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#950

Post by imtringued »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #672
defrost wrote: post #644

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should realise (apparently not?) that many people alive today still farm with minimal technology .. moreover there are people alive still hunting and gathering. They've not lost their skill to survive sans tech - unlike, say, yourself. Still, if it helps you - take notes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gmCX7R-W4c

>You should realise (apparently not?) that many people alive today still farm with minimal technology Actually, I know alot more about this than you do. And what you call "minimal technology" is not the case at all. Do you think you could make a plow or use it, supposing you had a mule to go with it? Why do you think it's "minimal technology"? But if you insist it is, I take it to mean that you think just anyone coul…

This is probably one of the worst posts about minimal technology I've ever seen online.

Making rope is easier than getting the license to be allowed to farm industrial hemp.

Even if machines and electronics stop working, you can still extract their metals out of them without the effort of reducing ore from scratch. There are entire landfills waiting to be mined.

Then there is the fact that you're completely uninformed about rural life even just 150 years ago. They used very little steel tools and while the steel tools they did use were essential, the vast majority of them can be shared with the rest of the village.

Even just 200 years ago, most people lived off the land.

The idea that urbanisation turned all of humanity into a helpless class of humans is ridiculous.

The only real constraint is sufficient farm land to support a transition away from urban living, but when you think about it, even that is unnecessary, because there is no reason to abandon the idea of professional farming just because the population declined.

The moment you entertain even just a little bit of modern technology being preserved the argument makes no sense. The amount of power that you can capture with solar panels by far exceeds what human power and horse power can do. Solar panels are only considered inferior to fossil fuels due to the fact that you can burn fossil fuels on demand, whereas solar panels only produce during the day when the sun is out.

But that doesn't negate the fact that the amount of work solar panels can drive exceeds the work a human can do in a day. You can build a slightly less efficient industrial society on the basis of such an energy source. Technology and energy are not going to be the problem.

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