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India's surprise baby bust

economist.com

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Re: India's surprise baby bust

#951

Post by ycombinete »

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.

Grandparents, young cousins, older siblings, family friends, aunts and uncles, and extended family beyond. Simply being around frequently, and also easily available when needed. Very little of this has to do with female labour force participation.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#952

Post by ctxc »

koolba wrote: post #909
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #881

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also such a recursive problem - there aren't enough kids, so your kids don't have enough kids to play with, so you don't have more kids I remember almost never sitting inside my house after school. I had two elder siblings and we had probably 30 odd kids in my locality. We would all be out all the time. Safety wasn't an issue because there were some older kids in the group too who could be counted on to keep thi…

> It's also such a recursive problem The recursive aspect is grandparents being 70+ rather than 50+ when they help out.

I feel like with time, 50 is the new 70.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#953

Post by ricardobayes »

m_fayer wrote: post #202
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 have a different pet explanation from the other replies here, and I honestly don't get why it's not talked about more. Basically, our economic reality and expectations have come into conflict with biology and human lifespan. If you want a secured dignified life and basic prerequisites to starting a family, every year that takes a little longer. And these days, almost everyone wants that dignified middle class life…

In my opinion, it's not even about having a dignified middle-class life, more about being optimistic about the future.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#954

Post by cultofmetatron »

trumpdong wrote: post #471
alehlopeh wrote: post #456

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is machismo causing women in Latin America to not know how to read? And which ones are enslaved exactly? This is a ridiculous assertion.

They said women who can read don't like machismo.

plenty of women in LATAM love possessive jealous men. I've seen it first hand.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#955

Post by acdha »

Ntrails wrote: post #738
dgoldstein0 wrote: post #732

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The economics almost certainly play a role, but I think the better way to think about it is how we economize time too. if you are chasing a career, putting in 40,50,60 hours a week - how can you take time off to have a kid? who is going to take care of the kid? Increasingly having kids has gotten more expensive - housing, childcare costs, and general expected investment/supervision of children. In agricultural societ…

> Cheaper / free childcare, better parental leave policies, and cheaper cost of living so that people who want to be stay at home parents can have that option. As GP states, heavily pushing subsidies has not been shown to work. The one thing we know works is restricting access to birth control - I'd bet good money that ups the birth rate in no time. Leave as an exercise for the reader whether it is a good idea xD

One thing to remember is that “heavily pushing subsidies” needs to be more comprehensive than it tends to be when you look at the details: people decide to delay kids for many reasons and societies often fail to address all of them – e.g. if you subsidize childcare but still have a work culture which expects long hours or sidelines mothers, the existence of the subsidy lessens the impact but probably doesn’t get too many people to change their answer. It’s fairly common to find reports of gaps in the supports for even the more generous societies which lead to people stopping at 1-2 kids when they might otherwise have wanted more.

These days, the big factors include not having dealt with climate change: parents are being asked to make a big gamble that the future will be better, and having all of the evidence suggest otherwise is a widely-cited deterrent.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#956

Post by weezing »

BigTTYGothGF wrote: post #160
Auracle wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t necessarily disagree with your overall point, but for some reason at least in US society you’re no longer allowed to broadly talk having kids like you used to be able to. Let me break that norm for a second. So, are other activities more fun than child rearing? Often, yeah. Definitely less stressful. Rewarding? Not in a million goddamned years. Nothing, absolutely nothing, compares to when your kid first walk…

> you’re no longer allowed to broadly talk having kids like you used to be able to I'm not sure that this is the case, could you expand?

Siege mentality, nothing more.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#957

Post by MSFT_Edging »

taeric wrote: post #279
MSFT_Edging wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was just a recently notable example. Even as of 2-3 years ago I used to see them a decent amount. They're a highly visible marker of an insect population that is dropping like a rock. They're also a beautiful creature that I could imagine wishing a child of mine could experience the same way I did, which better illustrates the tragedy of the damage we're doing to the planet.

I'm assuming you still live in the same place? My understanding the last time I took a dive on this is that the numbers are going down, but not in any way that is going to see them gone. You will need to go to where they are, though. And, alas, the PNW is not a place to find them.

yes, Eastern US.

Funny enough I saw a couple last night. 2-3 flying around.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#958

Post by MSFT_Edging »

matchbok3 wrote: post #587
MSFT_Edging wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know the "bring them into this world" thing is overdone, but a big part of me feels it to my core. I haven't seen a firefly in a couple years. If I had a child today, describing this bug to a child would be almost mythical. How many things that we've taken for granted will a child born today never get to experience? Not shallow things like iPods, but genuine miracles of nature we're wiping out at an accelerating pa…

A pawn of consumerism? Please, please, I beg you. Detail a single communist civilization that thrived. Give me a break. The world is actually great, you are just focused on the negatives. Ever think that a child born today would be the one to help solve these problems you are so worried about? What a sad, resigned way to think about the world.

You reworded what I said and changed the context greatly.

Our economic system is a pyramid of consumption, wealth gets concentrated up and relies on an ever increasing lower strata to maintain the status quo. When the lower section stops increasing, it breaks down. I barely want to live in a world of constant harassment by middle men.

I don't want a child to be a pawn in the greater "Population decline!!!!" propaganda mill, where the threat and fault of the failing pyramid scheme is placed on the lower strata rather than the doomsday-bunker class.

>Ever think that a child born today would be the one to help solve these problems you are so worried about?

More sweeping current problems under the future generation's rug. We could solve many of these problems today, but the causes of the problems are protected by the state.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#959

Post by miroljub »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #50
chipsrafferty wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's racist to say that people who don't believe women should have equal rights and opportunities and are equally capable as men - are neanderthals?

You're right. It insults neanderthals, who we are learning were surprisingly advanced.

Interesting, this sounds exactly like nazists rebuttal of criticism.

Re: India's surprise baby bust

#960

Post by m4rtink »

bombcar wrote: post #678
m4rtink wrote: post #571

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can actually see it if you know where to look - edges of big cities but it is most visible in the countryside and smaller towns. And if you want to see how real Armageddon looks like, go visit Yubari: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y%C5%ABbari,_Hokkaido The collapse was due to local coal mining no longer being viable, but it still demonstrates how it looks like when a city goes from 107000 people in 1960 to 5600 i…

Seems somewhat better than Detroit. The question really is - how does an abandoned town hurt us? Sure, there may be some sympathy and loss for "what once was" (same as the pictures of the abandoned classrooms in Prypiat). The US has had similar things happen but the spread out population has given it some resiliency (many towns that "collapsed" when the mill/factory/whatever shut down continue in a strange afterlife…

One general side effect is harder access to affected regions - with less people to serve public transport gets reduced or even abandoned entirely (affect rail lines the most, due to the necessary maintenance needed for safe operation). IIRC there are numerous rural lines scheduled to be closed in the near future in Hokkaido for example (and of course a bunch of them got abolished in the Yubari area).

Is this a problem ? I guess not really & it might actually help the nature regenerate in those areas.

Where it can be a bigger problem is various small islands - where the islands being inhabited makes a big difference in territorial claims & is a very important thing in regards to what China has been doing (building artificial islands, etc.). For that reason I suspect the Japanese government subsidizes island communities quite heavily to keep them going & keeping suverenity over those islands and the surrounding sea.

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