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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

#961

Post by KellyCriterion »

sylens wrote: post #794
kraig911 wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just hard now. Before I had kids I had a network of friends and had a great social life. Now it's just me and my wife. If I want more friends I'll have to have more kids I guess? I have 4 now. One (my first) is severely autistic. Financially the cost? I pay about 6,000 a month in daycare. 2k a month in healthcare expenses. Then community wise. Every time I've gone to take them to the movies, or to a restaurant o…

This is such a great comment. I think people don't realize how much harder it is to raise kids now than the 90s or even early 2000s.

When I was young in the 80ies, my mum worked part-time 4h as basic clerk, mainly for fun and having people around her so that she doesnt have to take care of us for the whole day. My dad worked fulltime as an engineer, the bought a house.

Today, you need 2 top tier salaries to make childcaycare and rent even possible

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

#962

Post by insane_dreamer »

loeg wrote: post #957
insane_dreamer wrote: post #953

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> incredibly rare 312 shootings in the past 5 years [0] that's an average of ~ 1 shooting every 4 school days (across ~ 120,000 schools) that is not incredibly rare; you can try to rationalize it, but if you're a parent and your kid is going to school every day for 12 years, that's about 3000 opportunities for this rare event to happen to them If I'm computing this correctly, that's approximately 4 * 120,000 = 1 / 48…

That 300+ figure (60/year) is including things other than mass shootings people typically think of as school shootings (e.g., targeted gang violence). There are ~74 million children in the US. Even taking your number at face value, it's 0.00000081 shootings per child per year. This is rare.

It's not shootings per child that matters, it's shootings per _school_.

I don't want my child to be traumatized by a school shooting on their school even if they themselves are not killed. That's pretty basic. If multiple people were shot and killed at your workplace, how would you feel about continuing to go there? You think that survivors of a plane crash where other people on the plane died are ready to get back on a plane the next day because "the chances of it happening again are small"?

And I don't care whether it's targeted gang violence or some other type of shooting, it's still an event where someone with a gun is on the school and kills one or more people.

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

#963

Post by KellyCriterion »

JPKab wrote: post #358
Gagarin1917 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. Birth control made it so women can choose how many times they get pregnant. Pregnancy is not exactly a walk in the park, so it’s no surprise it’s decreasing as birth control increases. To override this, society needs to make having kids be “cool.” It’s that “simple,” but there’s no real way to coordinate that in society from the top down without being authoritarian. So it’s a problem that can only be solved by i…

I totally agree, and my argument with the original post was that the author made it sound so simple. Has any society successfully done this yet? Basically, the only prosperous first world groups I see with fertility rates above replacement rate are religious subcultures (like the Mormons, Evangelicals, and Modern Orthodox Jews in the US). I simply don't see any other examples of being able to pull this off.

> rates above replacement rate are religious subcultures

Same in EU

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

#964

Post by jrochkind1 »

pelzatessa wrote: post #605
jrochkind1 wrote: post #522

If we need more young people in our society in the USA, this is actually the easiest problem to solve -- just open up immigration. As long as lots of people still want to come here (not guaranteed to last forever), not having enough people is a problem only of our own making. If only most of our problems were so easy to solve.

It's only a short term solution, as all countries around the world (even those third-world ones, with current fertility rate above 4.0) are experiencing lower birthrates every year. See the movie birthgap

As long as people from those countries want to come to the USA, it would be a problem for those countries and not the USA.

However, "those third-world ones with current fertility rates above 4.0" probably have a ways to drop before it actually becomes a problem for them, couple few generations or so. In that time, the context for all of this could change (50 years ago, people were more worried about too much reproduction? Who knows in another 50).

In fact, for whatever reasons, the most predictable trend seems to be that fertility rates are inversely correlated with standard of living. As standard of living goes up, fertility goes down and vice versa. if those "third world ones" actually drop their fertility to "first world" levels, it would probably mean that their standard of living is such that immigration to the USA won't be so appealing either.

At that point, it seems the global social political context is changed enough that we will have an entirely different set of problems and solutions that are hard to predict now.

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

#965

Post by jacquesm »

rayiner wrote: post #529
Balgair wrote: post #207

I like to hang out on fertility twitter. It's a strange place. Since the fertility problem is worldwide, you get a lot of ideologies mixing about. There's hardcore CCP folks, free market Mormons, radical Imams, universalist preachers, the whole lot of them. They're all trying to share ideas and jumping on the latest research findings from reputable and crackpot sources. They're all looking for the recipe to get peopl…

Don't forget collapsing testosterone rates: https://www.urologytimes.com/view/testosterone-levels-show-s... I don't know what the explanation is, but I find your's implausible: "Only if the mothers in aggregate truly believe that their children will have good lives, then will they have them." I think that might be true in certain bubbles, but I don't think that explains why the fertility rate has collapsed just as mu…

That's because a foreign substance is introduced into their precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual.

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

#966

Post by charcircuit »

acdha wrote: post #928
charcircuit wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is also important, but I think it is a step separate from the birth rate.

They’re pretty tightly coupled. Mothers do the hardest part but human children are incredibly expensive in terms of the time investment. If society wants to have more children, one of the easiest ways to reduce that burden is by sharing the load evenly across both parents. This is also important for political reasons: dads who do half of the work are more likely to understand why the expenses for things like governme…

The father already has to go to work to provide for the family. The burden is already being split. I do not think government provided childcare is a good idea since it would incentivize children to spend time away from their family.

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

#967

Post by [deleted] »

mjburgess wrote: post #528
Night_Thastus wrote: post #336

This is happening everywhere , including nations with great social systems/healthcare/parental leave/etc. And it happens even when nations try throwing money at the problem. While economic concerns may be worsening the issue - I don't think they're the root cause as many would like to say. I think the root cause is that we have outsmarted our biology. Once you give people education on the risks of sex and pregnancy,…

Children are pensions, that's why poorer nations have lots of children because lots are needed to look after people in their old age. Thus, many of these comments on HN and elsewhere, "make the nation better", only have led -- and will lead -- to fewer children. When the old don't need households of the young to provide for them, there won't be any. But this, and the education of women, and increasing productivity et…

[deleted]

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

#968

Post by acdha »

charcircuit wrote: post #966
acdha wrote: post #928

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re pretty tightly coupled. Mothers do the hardest part but human children are incredibly expensive in terms of the time investment. If society wants to have more children, one of the easiest ways to reduce that burden is by sharing the load evenly across both parents. This is also important for political reasons: dads who do half of the work are more likely to understand why the expenses for things like governme…

The father already has to go to work to provide for the family. The burden is already being split. I do not think government provided childcare is a good idea since it would incentivize children to spend time away from their family.

> The father already has to go to work to provide for the family. The burden is already being split.

Haha, are you serious? One of the biggest demographic trends of the last century has been the rise of dual-income households, and we have decades of studies showing that the burdens are not evenly distributed.

Consider also that childcare isn’t a “ha, let’s ditch the kids and go clubbing” thing but a necessity for all but the richest households. Housing costs cause pressure both directly and indirectly: if you have to commute further to afford a house large enough for your family, childcare is essential to retaining the job which lets you afford that family.

I’d also note that I’m not saying the government should always provide everything but rather that to the extent that we decide birth rates falling is bad, we should assume that people are making economically rational decisions. There isn’t a simple nudge to shift a major life decision like this.

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

#969

Post by angiolillo »

somenameforme wrote: post #476
dh2022 wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$6,000 / month in daycare for 4 kids? You have a sweet deal my friend. At the daycare in my neighborhood this does not cover even 2 kids : https://www.kidspaceseattle.org/enrollment - click on Tuition link at the bottom and weep.

Those prices are weird. Why would somebody ever pay that much rather than just hire a private nanny?

> Why would somebody ever pay that much rather than just hire a private nanny?

In my experience the price distribution for nannies and infant/toddler daycares in the same area are largely overlapping bell curves so the decision typically comes down to logistics rather than cost.

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

#970

Post by jonmb »

decafninja wrote: post #829
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…

Some of my friends and family who had kids at a young(er) age - and by that, I mean late twenties or early thirties - seemed totally oblivious to the hardships of parenthood. You’d think by your thirties you’d do some basic research. Most people just have kids because it’s just “what your supposed to do” and don’t give much thought beyond that. I don’t know what they thought to themselves, but outwardly they projecte…

> You’d think by your thirties you’d do some basic research.

I've often had thoughts like this, but had to just accept that people often don't do basic research. For another example, consider how many people work full-time (160+ hours per month) to make money, but have never bothered to take even a 2-hour course on how to manage it well. They spend all that time making money but no time on how to use it wisely. And then they make obvious mistakes. Unnecessary debt, lack of investments, complain that they never learned this stuff in school, etc. Not trying to sound judgmental, but I always found that surprising.

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