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 off having children (or curtailed the number they had) because they were reluctant to give up the activities only available in a childfree/one-and-done life. Ultimately, we are hedonistic creatures, and having kids is antithetical to the myriad hedonic pursuits available in wealthy, industrialized societies.
[*] Israel is the lone exception, due to its Orthodox Jewish population.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/global-decline-fertility-rate
[1] https://pub.nordregio.org/r-2024-13-state-of-the-nordic-regi...
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 before they start a family.
A degree, an advanced degree, a good enough job, sufficient housing, a little fun to boot. Not until 25, 28, 30, 33, 35.
But we're supposed to have children in our early 20s. That's when we're strong and energetic enough, with good backs, and grand parents fit and willing to pitch in.
When we finally feel ready in our mid 30s, we find that time has conspired against us. Our parents are far away and often ailing and demanding care and attention. We have less energy and more stress and dread the lost sleep. We have the wisdom and worldliness to know just how hard this is going to be. And once we've metabolised all those things, that's when we realize that conception is no longer a question of a great night out and a few drinks. How many kids will be born at the end of that gauntlet? We're finding out right now.
If you want people to have kids, you need to make sure they are economically secure by the time they are of childbearing age... which means before they are 30. To do that, you cannot have supply constrained zero-sum shortage anywhere in society. It means that the cost of an apartment needs to be at-or-below the cost to build that apartment so people can just save up and buy one early on in their career.
We need to not just allowing housing to get built, but actually we need to go as far as subsiding housing that nobody needs so that it's built before that need ever arises.
This is effectively impossible in a democratic society, and we are going to learn just how impossible it is as western society slowly collapses under the weight of its own social programs. It's honestly horrifying to watch.
Ironically, the highest birth rates globally occur where economic security is non-existent, a state of living none of us want to return to. What is truly worrisome about a country like India is that it is facing sub-replacement fertility before fully industrializing. In states with highly unique identities like Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, the native population has already fallen well below the 2.1 replacement mark. While internal migration from higher-fertility northern states fills the gap, it creates significant political and cultural friction.
In developed countries, the state can at least leverage accumulated wealth to bankroll healthcare and social services required by a rapidly aging population. In a developing nation like India, they risk growing old before they grow rich, leaving an aging population without the robust safety nets or fiscal runway of the West- we might even see the country slide backwards into sub-saharan African levels of poverty
1. The Economics of Fertility: A New Era, p50, https://www.nber.org/papers/w29948
1) We can't afford it. 2) There isn't really a "dating scene" anymore. 3) I'm not starting a family in this country.
and that's the end of things because we either can't or won't address their concerns.
As long as your saving is being eaten by asset inflation, no matter how fast you’re running, you’re still on a treadmill.
Smartphones are why we don't have kids.
Unlimited dopamine is why we don't have kids.
The internet is why we don't have kids.
Women like having fun and independence and don't want to be stay at home nannies.
Modern life is TOO FUN.
Fun is why there are no more babies.
Babies are not fun.
Babies are what you do in the 1950's when you're bored out of your mind with nothing to do.
Babies are what you do when you have to wait until next week for your Reader's Digest to arrive in the mail.
Babies are the anti-dopamine.
For the first time in history, we're not bored out of our fucking minds 24/7. Our brains are fully occupied.
There isn't space for babies now that we have the internet.
----
Thought experiment: if you had five million dollars extra right now, would you have a kid tonight?
The answer is probably "fuck no".
And you know why.
Look at the countries still having kids - they're mostly places where women don't have equal rights and smartphone / internet penetration is low.
I both liked Abundance and think there’s truth to what you’re saying.
But it wasn’t what I took away from the book (perhaps it was in there - but what I really got was ‘for a better future we need to stop shooting ourselves in the foot, and be prepared to enthusiastically think of and promote the greater good rather than protecting every single valuable individual thing’)
What we have now is the opposite. We know that housing demand will rise in the future, simply because there will be more people. Instead of the rich investing in housing production to meet this need, we have the rich investing in existing housing because we have effectively stopped production, thus the rich can capture all that value in price appreciation from rent-seeking alone (technically more of it), instead of wasting their time operating a business that builds things.
In my quite affluent city, the most affluent neighborhood has yard signs up every fifty feet expressing that they are furious that the city might develop city-owned parking lots (which are nowhere near their neighborhood) to be high density housing.
One-bedroom apartments in the city center are going for over $3,000 per month.
The rich aren't simply locking up existing housing, their principal concern is preventing any housing from being created, even if it has no effect on them.
But no, when we propose that, all those affluent bourgeois feeding on the young are suddenly poor grandmas just wanting to live the rest of their lives in peace.
Make up your mind, people. Are we going to fix the problem, or are we going to blame Jeff Bezos because some suburban schmucks oppose building apartments. Frankly I don't think Jeff Bezos even cares about apartments. (He has enough money to buy a city block, why would he care.) But it sure feels more righteous to hate Jeff Bezos than argue about real estate tax.
"cost of an apartment needs to be at-or-below the cost to build that apartment"
That's not true, its that the cost to build the apartment is far too high and the cost is totally passed on to a the public, thereby hovering up any disposable income that might go towards having a child.
There can be a profit margin, but the cost needs to be low.
My main point is that, because housing takes a very long time to build en masse, you'd want the housing to start being built before people need it.
It's like any other strategic reserve we have. Since demand can spike, and we can rarely see the spikes coming, but we know they will come, just be prepared by subsidizing the development of that thing. We do it for food, oil, weapons, vaccines, you name it. If we know we will need it in the future anyway, and it take a long time to produce, we create strategic reserves. We should do that for housing.
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. I’d have to work for 70+ years to afford a nice house in a nice suburb!
“Have more children!”
“Make housing affordable!”
“My retirement fund is all in property and banks!”
There’s your problem.
There's your problem. Everyone wants to live in the same set of well established well resourced neighbourhoods. But there's too many of us. Go out in the 'burbs and accept that owning a house implies a commute you will dislike (among a host of other compromises).
Objectively, you don't need a house with a lawn and a back yard to have children, and have them grow up healthy and successful.
Thank fuck voters aren't buying this garbage.
I also find your retort equally misleading. Social housing is a solved issue. The problem is that we are letting greedy developers dictate the type of housing to be built. Kinda what the book abundance never mentions, who actually are the ones with power and how they are wielding it to thwart progress.
Blaming democratic societies is even more frankly bizarre too. America has always been deeply antidemocratic and has thwarted the will of the people at every opportunity of progress (every delegate voted against the bill of rights when first mentioned (took a threat of violence to add it), labor rights, ending slavery, universal suffrage); the problem has always been authoritarians against the people.
>America has always been deeply antidemocratic
Okay, buddy. No need to open a history book to understand what an undemocratic state actually looks like. There are plenty of actual, totalitarian monarchies that still exist.
[1]: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizat...
[2]: https://www.bgsu.edu/ncfmr/resources/data/family-profiles/gu...
In 2026, a single minimum wage income can barely survive by themselves with no saving in most part of the US.
Today, family income is up about 10x, but costs have risen much more than that.
In my opinion the two greatest factors on the reason, in the US at least, for the changes, and not having children were - birth control became widely available in the US in the early 70s, and women entered the workforce in great numbers. This greatly increased the amount of family income, but costs quickly rose to basically eat up all the extra income.
Absolutely not true. Minimum wage has never been sufficient to raise a family. It is (was) sufficient to keep one person out of poverty.
As usual...
Anyway I'm sure the current oil shock and (assuming the clowns get their way) loose monetary policy will be different this time!
I wouldn't limit it to economics either. Socially children are restricting. If you want to be free to travel, move, leave the house on a whim, etc. then kids will interrupt your plans/logistics.
Large families were your source of farm labor.
Large families were your source of labor because you never given a chance to make a better life for yourself.
I've found having children the most rewarding thing to have done with my life. And even so, you are right about the costs. "Million dollar baby" is not just a catch-phrase.
Switch to an industrial society. Having children to do raw physical labor competes directly with tractors and a backhoes. But you can acquire other assets and put more resources in upscaling children through education. And wage work means you can send wives and daughters out to make money.
I think it usually takes a society one or two generations to figure that out and act accordingly.
Adding a thing I harp on. Malthusian limits traditionally is thought to apply to just food and disease. But you can extended that to an industrial wage based economy and the resource restrictions still apply just not to food and disease. Industrialization probably results in structural population overshoot.
However, one big caveat:
"If you want a secured dignified life and basic prerequisites to starting a family"
What you're saying is more relevant to the state of already-developed nations, that are now all in a slow decline. Not so much to newly developed nations, slowly on the rise.
That context established:
The common "we can't afford children" explanation is certainly a significant part of the equation, but I have never bought that it is the biggest reason. Children are expensive, but highly subsidized, and just not expensive enough to explain the whole picture. Your explanation is, I think, the One Big Thing. So many adults today grew up seeing middle-class life as very attainable with a college education and a work ethic. Then, as they became adults, that "attainable" reality inched away as fast as they progressed toward that goal.
The big, tough thing to discuss (tough because of the modern obsession with attacking "entitlement"), is that humans react much more strongly to change in state than to the state itself. E.g. if Alice grows up in a local culture where most people are poor, and Bob grows up in a local culture where most people have little houses and little yards and low crime, and then Alice and Bob both end up poor, then Bob is a lot angrier than Alice. Bob shakes his fist at the world more, and is more likely than Alice to choose to delay having children until he attains what he thought was a totally reasonable American aspiration.
This is highly parallel to the parent's notion of "not having children in order to pursue other things". It's not just that people don't want children - it's that they want children and middle-class lives, and feel uneasy choosing children when it feels like one more bump on the path to a middle-class life.
Highly subsidized? I have to assume you're not talking about America. I pay $3200/mo to send my kids to a very middle-of-the-road preschool. That's almost $40k/year just in childcare costs so that my wife and I can go to work. The difference between a 1-bedroom apartment and a 3-bedroom apartment is an extra $20k/yr or so in my area. Then there's health care premiums, taking them out for activities sometimes, etc.
I can ballpark the cost of having preschoolers in my area as $30k/yr each. And I don't know about you, but I don't exactly see any government subsidies helping me carry that burden.
There's much stronger relationships to religiosity and fertility rates (with a much larger than income based gaps), regional/cultural choices and fertility rates, than income. India, which we are discussion here, supposedly a country where the quality of life is rising, has surprisingly low fertility rates.
IN your example it's much more likely Bob is no longer religious, Bob has moved to an area (or a culture has set in) where having less children is the norm/social structure. Among my social group having a child was very much 'catching' with friends having clusters of children around the same time. A culture of not having children would create the same opposite effect. Instead of talk about coming babies, shared excitement, feeling left out/un-adult, surrounded by hormones, if you have a culture of talking about not having children/justifying delaying/etc you now have 'not having children' as the 'catching' social outbreak.
Paying people to have kids/social promotion has not changed things anywhere. Or in the case of India being discussed, improving conditions have resulted in less children. There is something else going on than your assertion that 'American's are just too aspirational' is impacting India's fertility rate.
So that pretty much kills any explanation that depends on our recent experience, like pressure to get a degree, good job, etc. Seems like there is probably something far more fundamental at work to create a 200+ year trend with a one brief interruption for a couple decades.
I'll add religion to the mix. We're less religious now. Even folks who are religious now(at least in the Christian West) seem to practice a different religion than we did 50 years ago. Religion does many things, good and bad, but it definitely prizes children and reproduction. If it didn't, it would quickly get replaced by a mode of thought/belief which did. I'm not advocating for religion here, just stating that it likely plays a large role in reproduction.
I know for me personally, it's not economic reasons as to why I have not had children, but more a problem of finding the right mate at the right time. Some people just aren't socially fit for each other...
If you just look at India, richer and more developed states have lower fertility compared to poorer, less developed states.
Within states, richer and more educated couples have fewer children compared to poorer less educated children.
These patterns are pretty much universal.
Now contraception has decoupled these things. You can have the relationship you want, and put off children until "sufficient" economic conditions have been reached.
(It is good news that India is at or below replacement rate! The conversation would be very different if in a few decades time India had to find twice as much food and oil!)
I think it's probably a wise thing to advise against having children you can't afford to take care of. I don't think it was something that was explicitly hammered into me or my peers growing up, but we all saw enough examples of kids being raised in poverty to know that we wanted something better for our own children.
Men's too, from 40s up. Not as severe, and not cliff-like in the end like menopause. But it compounds, as the typical couple ages are directly correlated.
- likelihood to get pregnant
- likelihood to bring child to term
- health risk to mother during pregnancy and child birth
- health risk to baby during pregnancy and child birth
- increased likelihood of multiple birth defects
- increased likelihood of genetic abnormalities
I'm not casting aspersions. My wife and I had kids when she was 38 and 40 respectively. But, the numbers for the risks are stark.
- Stress on the relationship of trying and failing for a long time - Stress of fertility treatments, if needed - Likelihood of dealing with inevitable miscarriages on the way to a birth - Overall "medicalization" of pregnancy in middle age, and the stress of all that contact with the medical system
None of this touches on industrialization and higher education, which seem to be the more universal effects, even if one of their bigger effects is merely to delay motherhood.
Even above age 35, 85% of men are able to conceive within 12 months: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11026002/
Like it or not, fertility decline is substantially different between the sexes.
So two kids during university would mean even the measly amount you have to pay back for an European subsided degree would be gone.
I do hope that will be put into effect.
I also believe that this will be better for gender equality than all the other measures taken so far.
I was in too many meetings, where the CV of a young woman was critically evaluated for her propensity to get pregnant as soon as the probationary period was over.
50% of this have to be paid back, free of interest and capped at 10k€. That is not much, but keep in mind that we earn much less than Americans and have much higher taxes.
When was this? In much of Europe that's been illegal employment discrimination for decades. But I suppose employers are less worried if they can be confident that it's unlikely that any of their employees will have children.
Happens all the time in Austria. If you're a woman in your mid 20s to mid 30s, and employer will assume you'll get pregnant soon and go on childcare leave, so they'll pick other candidates if they can. Just because something is illegal doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Illegal things happen ALL THE TIME, and perps get away with it when there's no enforcement or the plaintiff doesn't have enough proof, time or money to fight said injustice. For example, on my street it's illegal to drive over 30kph, and yet half the cars that drive by go over 45 simply because there's no law enforcement nearby to catch them and fine them. If there's no enforcement with direct consequences at scale, then a law is virtually useless.
For an employer to get into legal trouble over pregnancy or racial or nationality discrimination with government authorities, that means the candidate would need to know upfront and have proof that they were discriminated against over those immutable characteristics, which is rarely the case as everyone just gets the same copy-paste legally safe rejection email from HR: "we regret to inform you that you didn't make the final cut because candidates with better experience/qualifications bla bla bla" and that's where it ends. You will never know what they discussed in private.
But that's not the reason women have few kids here. The reason is mostly cultural and environmental.
(And now there's also an AI apocalypse of some kind on the way even if the climate situation can be resolved/survived. And the ever-present threat of WW3 seems closer now than ever)
On pre-industrialized societies, women have barely a choice. On industrialized ones they do. And it turns out that, when given the choice, they choose not to have babies.
If you scoff at the idea of flipping burgers your whole life then just imagine it's changing diapers instead.
> your whole life
pretty sure the diaper changing part only lasts a couple years
Being disabled, and having AI be a risk to the only work I can perform means financial concerns are at the heart of everything. There is simply too much financial risk even without children.
It’s simply the biological clock running out due to convenience and security.
It’ll require a huge culture shift to make kids convenient.
The incentives just aren't there.
When you have kids, you need the freedom to just get up and leave at any time to respond to things. School calls cause your kid is sick, emergencies, you name it. You gotta be there and be available for them, and we need a culture to where that doesn't become damaging to your career, and enough worker protections in place to where you cannot face disciplinary action for that.
this is what i keep repeating over and over again.
I'm not sure that's enough to reverse the demographic slide though, it's been tried.
For our ancestors, they married young, and didn't have access to birth control. Babies weren't really planned, they just happened.
It needs to be a massive package of subsidies.
Children used to be a private good. Child-labor laws and the cost of raising kids flipped that. Children remain a public benefit, but that benefit is realized without paying for the cost. In essence, the cost of all prenatal, neonatal and pediatric healthcare; schooling; the opportunity cost in career and recreation the parents incur from having to raise kids; and the direct costs of feeding, clothing, nannying, et cetera children need to be directly subsidized, probably with a cash bonus on top.
In America this would probably be a ca. $50k/child benefit at the low end.
Society would need to offer something to offset all those costs.
The population just doesn't disappear, it can pretty quickly shrink in just a generation or two leaving huge amounts of infrastructure unmaintained and falling apart with huge amounts of debt that will ensure what remains of society ends up in chaos.
That and the most likely part of the population to shrink is the ones we consider more stable and rational. Cults and religious breeding groups will increasing become the majority of the population leading to some 'interesting fun times'.
"Humans extinct, women most affected"
Pretty amusing how it's always framed as some terrible burden on women to justify more gibs. As if they aren't also the beneficiaries of society thriving and men never make any sacrifices for society. Or that, well, women also "benefit" from reproducing in the Darwinian sense.
we could decide otherwise and create structures where young people, still in highschool or studying, are at the same time able to live together and have children.
How about we undo the mess we’ve created through industrialization? Change the world so people WANT to have kids again?
The economic value of kids and the relative surety that kids will provide for you in your old age are I think very hard to reclaim now, and that was a pretty strong motivator for most of history. You could end all retirement funds and pension systems and so on, maybe?
Most people are biologically wired to want children. "Survive and reproduce" is pretty much the driving motivation of all living things. Most children weren't conceived as a carefully planned retirement strategy. No cost/benefit calculation is required to convince most people to have children, but you can certainly force them into a position where they have to start thinking in those terms. We've just hit a point where societal and environmental factors are discouraging people from doing what they'd normally do.
When given the choice there are plenty of people putting the latter over the former, and the number of women stuck at home while their husband went out to have affairs suggests the reality of kids doesn't actually interest most people. Plenty of folks just want a status symbol, not the responsibility of raising a child.
The need for all of that is considerably different in modernity and more people choose to live without their family close by, and certainly don't depend on them for housing and care as often?
Meanwhile the narrative around having kids is that your life is over after you have them. Partying? Irresponsible parent! Round of golf? You must hate your kids. Triathlon training? Better happen before dawn. Hiking and camping trip? Absolutely not.
There is this sense in society that hedonism is something to be frowned upon, when by definition it is kind of what everyone is after at the end of the day. Pleasurable activities, how awful to engage in them, so the rhetoric goes.
I think we'd see people having kids earlier if there was more acknowledgement that a balance can be successfully struck. That you won't get CPS called if you uber home drunk. Unfortunately in a lot of ways we are still living under the shadow of the puritan society and it has created not only a mental health crisis, but a reproductive crisis.
A lot of the decrease is also correlated with access to birth control which drastically reduced accidental pregnancies which were a decent amount of the fertility rate. Then we attacked teenage pregnancy with a vengeance. In 1957 it was 96/100k teen women had babies, 62/100k in 1991 and now down to the current rate of 11/100k. The postponement of births expands the time between generations which compounds the problem. An 18 yr old could have a baby that has a baby at 18 before a 36+ year old mom has their first child.
All this leads to exponential decay of humanity. In the near term we don't have to worry about extinction but we do have to worry about the pyramid schemes we have to support non-workers (like social security). This will all play out much sooner in Asia where the TFRs can be half of the US/EU. Imagine due to China's one child policy a young working person will soon have to support 2 parents and 4 grandparents somehow. There will be some kind of reckoning and some of the speculation around what it will look like is quite grim.
> In 1957 it was 96/100k teen women had babies, 62/100k in 1991 and now down to the current rate of 11/100k
That's per 1k, not 100k [1]. 96/100k would be an insignificant amount. 96/1000 of girls and women ages 15-19 means that any given year, 10% had a baby, which is a substantial contribution to overall birth rates.
1. Teen Births in the United States: Overview and Recent Trends, https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R45184
i don't think that's what happened. i believe women wanting economic independence (rightly so) and thus pushing into work was a bigger factor.
This was my first intuition.
Then the systems of the world had to make a choice: pay for the old at the expense of the new, or support the new by capping benefits on the old. This takes the form of social welfare programs in most developed countries, but industrialization also clamped down wealth in the hands of those who owned the means of production, and kept it from the hands of labor absent mechanisms of redistribution. Industrialization by its nature necessitates a larger investment to begin competing with established players in ways former artisans and businesses lacked: machinery, labor, logistics, technology, real estate, and materials all require expensive, up-front, and lengthy investment before potential payoff in an industrialized world that pre-industry societies didn’t have to deal (as much) with, thus locking most Capital and wealth into the hands of those who already had it to begin with. An aristocracy on steroids, choking and hoarding the lifeblood of a healthy economy into their private coffers.
This plays out differently in each country depending on its economic maturity and what function it served in the global marketplace, but the outcome was the same: with entertainment being plentiful and cheap compared to the immense risks and costs of child rearing in an increasingly dim future lacking in a cohesive, collaborative narrative to be inspired by, fertility collapsed.
i'd trade it all for having kids younger though. it's just that they would have come at a time that any kind of grip on my future was still tenuous.
Whoever has custody of the kids is fine. The social services benefits scale. They won’t get rich, but they’ll eat. People will be OK. The only people who lose are stupid men who have multiple children with multiple women.
Once you have a little cash, the formula changes completely.
But passing on genes is a pretty arbitrary goal. It's the one encoded in our genes, but (looks around at random object) passing on teacup design is encoded in a teacup. The most teacups are the ones that make people look at them and say "I want a copy of that cup". It's just statistics, not the ultimate meaning of the universe. The humans who think it's the ultimate meaning of the universe may be more likely to replicate - but that's a genetically inherited delusion, not a fact. You can pass on your editor choice just as well as you can pass on your genes.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/no-bitch-dats-a-whole-new-x-w...
Young people in Seattle either live in studios or 1 bedroom apartments, or live with roommates, or with their parents. You cannot raise more than 1 kid this way.
This is the calculus me nu my wife did when we chose to have one kid only. Looking back and seeing how life progressed we made the right choice.
The problem as a country you are doing to disappear demographically if you're choices are near suffering versus having kids.
The problem is that it's literally impossible for most people to have life figured out before hitting 25, and very hard before 30. Importantly, that wasn't the case just one generation ago.
You do need to be able to afford to care for them and be reasonably capable of providing them with a stable and healthy environment to grow up in though. People who are one or two missed paychecks away from homelessness probably shouldn't be thinking about having children, and sadly that's a whole lot of people.
You kinda don't though? The government won't let you starve to death. Surprised there aren't more people welfaremaxxing, TBH.
My parents didn’t have their life figured out and I paid the price with extreme mental and physical abuse as their life entered a never ending downward spiral.
This had impacts on me, which extended to impacts on others.
I’m ok now, after years of intensive counselling reversed the violent tendencies that were beaten into me with their fists over two decades. It did contribute to me not having kids of my own as I didn’t want to repeat the cycle, but other things impacted it as well.
So yeah, maybe it turns out ok in some cases, maybe in others it doesn’t.
i think this is especially extreme in the US where some parents tell their kids that at their 18th birthday they are on their own. that's an insane attitude. not everyone is that extreme, but what ever you experienced is more a failure of society, and less a failure of your parents.
My parents had all the support they needed from their parents, but it wasn’t enough, their life was interrupted before they found their footing and they just never developed that footing once children were added to the mix.
To your point though, maybe if there was more support of parents from society from a larger perspective, maybe it would have been different.
If my upbringing hadn’t been getting bashed into an inch of my life because apparently being unable to afford rent was my fault, I suspect I would have been far more amenable to children.
Sure, you just need to do away with international trips, going out, losing your group of friends, losing your chances for higher education and career progression and all of the associated prestige.
My wife was a city treasurer and had a masters. I was a .gov and later a tech executive.
Yes, if you value spending time with parents of same-aged children. My social life is still fine, but the people I spend my time with are competely different. Not better, nor worse, just entirely different.
People buying more chocolate ice cream than vanilla? Could be changing preferences or Hersheys marketing, or it could be undetected brain worms. People voting for one political party over others? Could be that party is campaigning/governing in a more popular way, could be brain worms.
If there’s evidence of contaminants or whatever influencing behavior strongly enough to change large scale demographic trends, then present it. Otherwise, your best chance at good data is to take people at their word when they say why they do things.
and, the latter is indeed dependent on the former. but, arguing that humans have no free will is an argument that should be tried independently of rebutting the former comment.
You make a philosophical point while the reality is already clear enough. Everyone has a friend with kids so they hear the stories. The “scary” ones stick longer than the nice ones because it’s easier to understand financial woes, health issues, and problems of this kind.
https://homepages.uc.edu/~moscoshn/Personal_webpage/papers/S...
There are also social effects. When half your friends have kids and half don't, you can compare the lives of each and decide which you want to live. You won't be as isolated now if you choose not to have kids... in fact the trend seems to be that having children is the isolating choice.
That's like, the complete opposite of the hedonistic young couple not using protection and accidentally getting pregnant.
How many people in the developed world are really doing that? My social circle is largely child-free into our thirties and forties, and the big motivation is so that we have time for our hobbies and for travel. Almost no one is dedicating their time to altruism. Especially considering that I live in a long-running welfare state, where helping people in need is generally left to the state and private charity is rare (and often has dodgy religious-sect connotations).
These are all real examples of why people I know delayed having kids, curtailed the number they had, or never had them altogether.
Hedonism has negative connotations, colloquially (and colloquially is how we are speaking).
I won't comment on your assertion that the freedom to watch "adult-appropriate movies on a big TV in the living room" is a more fulfilling state of being than parenthood, except to say that I'm very grateful that I'm not that shallow.
That's certainly a factor, though very aggressive financial incentives for parents don't seem to work very well [0, 1, 2]. Not to mention that in rich countries, educational attainment and income are negatively correlated with fertility [3]. My theory there is that people's high-powered careers provide them more self-satisfaction than having kids.
>it's the fact that they can't even afford to buy somewhere to live.
It's funny you mention this. Some friends said they weren't having a second kid because they couldn't afford a three bedroom house, not realizing that kids sharing bedrooms was the norm for middle class families until very recently. Having one bedroom per kid was a luxury just 30-40 years ago.
>I won't comment on your assertion that the freedom to watch "adult-appropriate movies on a big TV in the living room" is a more fulfilling state of being than parenthood
It's not my assertion, it's something a couple deciding to not have another kid literally told me. They missed being able to have substantial amounts of adult time, and were actively counting down the days until their only child was old enough to amuse himself for long periods of time. Having another kid would reset that clock.
[0] https://www.economist.com/europe/2026/03/19/viktor-orbans-pr...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/feb/28/south-korea-fe...
[2] https://worldcrunch.com/culture-society/boosting-birth-rates...
[3] https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/society-at-a-glance-202...
Here is a list of aggressive incentives that will never happen in the US: 1. Fully paid daycare for every week with more than 30 hours worked by any parent
2. Fully paid healthcare until 18 years old
3. Fully paid after elementary school care for every week with more than 30 hours worked by any parent.
> But financial and other inducements are failing to convince couples who cite skyrocketing child-rearing costs and property prices, a lack of well-paid jobs and the country’s cut-throat education system as obstacles to having bigger families.
I know South Korea has both expensive cram schools and a difficult housing market. If the incentives aren't as large as the additional costs from child raising, does it really tell us anything? Ideally you'd want it to exceed those costs.
Of course, that might be impractical or impossible for a government to fund, which is something.
- hedonic pleasures are adaptive. The first time you experience them is incredible. The 1000th time, much less so. - chasing hedonic pleasures is counter-productive. Studies show that people who actively seek out hedonic pleasure are less happy than those that don't.
OTOH, eudaimonic pleasure (aka fulfilment, satisfaction) is much more durable.
Work, hobbies, charity work, and children are avenues towards fulfilment. Far too many rely on work to provide it for them, but that's counter-productive for most.
I am not actually sure that this is consistent across most people who have had children.
But you might be up to something: people are too stressed/anxious/depressed (without children) that adding children seems to them like an impossible burden. Now, I am not sure children would not sometimes actually improve their state (biology kicking in), but definitely is a gamble.
The term "child-free" implies relieving oneself of a disease, the way one describes himself as "cancer-free" or "drug-free". As in caring for children is on par with imprisonment.
Now I don't mind mind people opting out of having children to live a hedonistic life, my only issue is describing it as a noble cause.
Wow, this is an eyebrow-raising degree of uncharitability. There's no reason to attack straightforward words like this.
Also, the parent did not make this implication. They implied it's irresponsible to have children unintentionally or flippantly.
You're arguing a straw man, I didn't mention that the parent made the implication.
I simply refuted a portion of parent's claim that people are forgoing children to foster a care of their community or performing acts of service as they implied here:
"a child-free adult gets fulfillment out of nurturing and caring for others, mentoring, caring for themselves and their community"
> There's no reason to attack straightforward words like this.
If you feel like my interpretation of the term is an attack, that's on you. I simply voiced what the term communicates to me.
As an example, there's a reason Anti Abortionists rebranded the term to "Pro Life" because of the connotation.
Terms do have an intention behind them.
You didn't refute, you just said you didn't think that's what people are doing. In any case it doesn't matter what they do with their time, because it's theirs.
> If you feel like my interpretation of the term is an attack, that's on you.
> Terms do have an intention behind them.
I don't know how you square that circle. You made some claims about the term child-free which are strictly your interpretation and then used it to describe their choice as ignoble.
In both cases you're just ascribing a nobility and morality to having children which just isn't there.
Secondly, I’m allowed to express my opinion about a term. You can disagree and think the term child-free doesn’t have negative connotation but in my read it does. So im not sure what you’re trying to argue.
Close but it’s not about fun, it’s about exploring the new possibilities. There’s simply no time for having kids when you just transition to a new way of life and you don’t know what to do. You maybe want to travel the world or build a house etc so you work more and spend more towards these. The next gen is having more kids.
Bulgaria used to be a prime example of population collapse but today has the highest birth rates in Europe(not just EU). The population will still shrink but as the dust settles people have certainty, know what to expect from life and can make a choice of having kids. Traveling the world can be just a phase in the early 20s, don’t have to grind as much for the basics, the definition of success isn’t getting rich through hard work so a simple and balanced life with kids becomes a feasible and desirable option.
>But having children is not intrinsically non-hedonistic. It's just one of many self-fulfilling activities we choose from
Exactly, and my point is that all the activities I listed (which only become abundantly available in rich, industrialized societies) are more self-fulfilling than having children.
Oddly enough, it's likely the US and Europe defused (and then some) Erlich's population bomb with farm subsidies which pushed people off farms and in to Nike factories in the developing world.
My sense is American farmers have more children than the population at large, but I don't have numbers to back it up. My farmer maternal great grandparents had 12 and 9 children -- I don't think that happens much anymore.
Industrialisation is an inherently compounding event. Thus, it gets concentrated geographically. So you get "hubs" like a tech hub, a manufacturing hub, a finance hub, etc,. So if you study CS, you cannot just take a tech job in a finance city or an export city. You got to move to a tech hub.
So unless your entire family is in roughly the same line of work, it is very difficult to keep a joint family. In fact, contrary to the "more money less kids" hypothesis, the traditional "family business" families that continue to do what their ancestors did, tend to have more kids and live in joint family homes.
Even if a set of parents happened to have 2.1 kids on average, the chance that in the next generation, the two siblings end up consistently living close by each other is very small. So it really only takes 30 years for TFR to fall off a cliff.
Is it really any surprise people would opt out?
Go spend a day with kids and you'll see why people would rather not deal with the mess.
Especially women who actually end up doing the majority of the work.
Add to that the extinction level pressures like climate change and the absolute lack of any benefit whatsoever in being a parent, who is crazy enough to willingly sign up for this if you actually put any thought into it instead of just "that's the way things are though!!!"
Every day I praise the man who did my vasectomy lol
And for little I know about raising children is that it's one hell of a job, that requires extensive knowledge, skill, and constant heavy investment, all being an unbreakable commitment for almost two decades. Messing anything up means another human suffers the consequences. In my mind, a would-be parents have to be really competent to be confident to be able to accept the responsibility, and even then screwups are a given. Skipping on any of that, even unintentionally or from inadequate skills, means a person out there will be left to figure out how to deal with the aftermath of their upbringing. The fact a lot of people skip on all of that and just do it is no excuse.
And thus, personally, I never felt like having children. Not seriously, not after thinking about it in any depth. I messed up two cats already, messing up a human is unnecessary.
IMHO, if a society really needs new people because can't figure out how to support old ones otherwise, it should invest into professional parenting and employ people who are genuinely enthusiastic about doing that work.
a) there is a lot of fun to do "outside there"
but you are MASSIVLY wrong in:
b) children are meaningful, they give you more than the consumption you can have - rent one month into brothel and you will see! ;-)
(source: father of twins, and nearly bankrupt regardless of my tech-job, nontheless my kids me more than our usual career-shit)
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 pace. I can't in good conscious bring a child into a world that so many are focused on absolutely destroying.
It's my protest to allow the pyramid of consumption to collapse. I will not bring a just another customer into the world. I won't bring a child here just so they can be a pawn to try to recover from poor planning.
We as humans need this population collapse. We need to learn how to organize society on long-term sustainability, not a pyramid scheme.
Every time I see this discussion, it's always framed like a call to action, that we need new children to bail out the sinking boat and keep it floating for another generation or two.
Who is focused on destroying the world?
I don't think hardly any super villains exist. People might have a different assessment of what destroying the world means than you do.
They "have a different assessment" but they're still contributing to an extinction event. You don't need to be a super villain. You can simply be selfish. Once scaled to many many selfish people, you have a collective villain.
But perhaps you've heard talk of things like "6th mass extinction event" or "global climate change"?
both of which are direct consequences of our industrialized society?
Look, I'm personally grateful for modern medicine and indoor plumbing, to name a few things. I don't want to go back to some idealized hunter-gatherer past (yes, I've tried it).
And regardless of the actual truth of ecological and climate collapse, or your particular views on the actual truth of these, enough people see enough convincing evidence that the parent poster's view is supported by enough people to matter.
We live in a blessed window.
We should discuss and reason about population size (where we are, where should we be, what should we do), but with a bit less passion. 30 years ago people were all doom about "over-population" and now I see all doom about "under-population".
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.
And most fertility issues people do encounter can primarily be explained by attempting to have children decades later than is biologically optimal.
a) there is a lot of fun to do "outside there"
but you are MASSIVLY wrong in:
b) children are meaningful, they give you more than the consumption you can have - rent one month into brothel and you will see! ;-)
Well mission accomplished.
But this is by and large not true. I've traveled, eaten at expensive restaurants, enjoyed a child free existence into my mid thirties and having kids is a blast[*]
My wife was adamantly against having kids when we got together in our twenties, and she changed her mind in her late thirties; she now says that was the best thing that has happened to her.
Finally, there are many studies showing that people lead happier lives when they focus on someone else, have a higher purpose beyond just hedonism or living selfishly.
[*] - I have a supportive partner who collaborates with me so we both get time away and time off from the occasional drudgery or exhaustion of parenting. I still get time to work out, see friends, have time with my wife, all of that. If I couldn't afford the occasional babysitter and had a partner who was absent most of the time, it would be a lot harder!
true, but you didn't know until you had them, and society keeps telling us otherwise. we need to change the message and educate youth about becoming parents. but also create a culture where having children is welcome.
in the west we complain about kids running around, making noise, being not under control. and most importantly we blame the parents. in china every child is treated like a treasure. sometimes even to a fault. but at least parents are not being blamed for having children, or for bringing them along when they have noone else to care for them. for example children hanging out at their parents workplace after school is normal. in the west that's ground for getting fired.
huh, I didn't know this. Thank you for sharing about your culture :)
In my peer group, it's been about 50/50 between people who seem to really enjoy parenthood and others who are struggling. There are many reasons for struggling, like how they or their spouse handle the stress and how much help they have or pay for. But the biggest one is that kids largely take up a lot of time and energy.
It's hard for someone to expect that they'll enjoy parenthood when they look around and see many parents who are unhappy.
Maybe we should have like with "open university day", "open raise a child day". Some might like it more than imagine, some might hate it more than imagine.
I don't think the religion is the driver here.
see (Middle East fertility rates) https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...
and (OECD fertility rates)
https://www.oecd.org/en/data/indicators/fertility-rates.html
I recall reading an article about the culture of Israel is friendlier towards families/young children. Not sure how that cultural aspect would show up in stats.
- As of 2022, the fertility rates in Israeli cities dominated by specific demographic groups were: Haredi 6.1, Bedouin 4.4, Jewish non-Haredi 2.4, Arab 2.2, Druze 1.8
So the GP's characterization is correct.
Yes, non-Haredi Jewish Israelis have a higher fertility rate than in Western nations. There seems to be a variety of reasons for this including cultural/religious pressure, institutional support and selection bias (in terms of who chooses to immigrate/emigrate).
Why do you say so?
I wouldn't say we're hedonistic creatures by nature. It isn't good for us to be hedonists. I would say that hedonism is simply the nature and logic of consumerism, and consumerism—and indeed, hedonism—derails healthy human virtues, tastes, and habits like a drug and deranges one's ability to reason about reality and the good.
Consumerism is intrinsically market-oriented and thus all about satisfying the desires of the market. In a hyperliberal culture that privatizes and relativizes morality and makes "freedom" from all restraint the ultimate end of human existence—full stop—that means the market is effectively god and that no desire can be wrong (in practice, this is complicated by the unfeasibility of ultimately attaining such a state of affairs).
Naturally, hedonism doesn't sit still. Once it slakes its appetite for something, like a vampire, it wants to move onto something else. Its appetite only grows. Hedonism is a death spiral of indulgence of ever increasing depravity. In an amoral environment that produces people lacking proper moral and intellectual formation (apparently moral formation is "fascist"), and without at least the guardrails provided by law rightly understood, it is an easy death spiral to enter into.
If life is seen as objectively without meaning, then all that remains is hedonism. Our age is full of nihilist thinly papered over with hedonistic distractions.
So we're nihilists. We live in a nihilistic consumerist culture. Nihilism leads to nothingness and death.
But you know what did occur in the 1960s-1970s? The invention and popularization of the birth control pill. Here is the US birth rate [1]. Rising from 1950-1960 then a sudden and precipitous drop in the 1960s until stabilization in the 1970-now range. This coincides with the global drop in fertility rate. How about Germany [2]? Growth from 1950 to late 1960s then a sudden drop until stabilization in the mid 1970s. France [3]? Flat and high until mid-1960s then a sudden drop until stabilization in 1980. UK [4]? Growth from 1950 to mid 1960s then a sudden drop until stabilization mid 1970s. Australia [5]? Growth until 1960 then drop until stabilization in 1980.
Every single developed country in the world is flat to growing and then sees a sudden and rapid decline in birth rate just a few years after mass availability of the birth control pill until stabilization around the time that the pre-birth control cohort ages past reproductive years. The birth control pill is so new that the reproductive cohort that lived prior to its invention is still alive.
My hypothesis is that fertility is just a function of access to cheap, effective contraceptives. The fertility rates we see today are the natural rates when pregnancy is a choice.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...
[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/deu/ger...
[3] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/fra/fra...
[4] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/gbr/uni...
[5] https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/aus/aus...
birth control and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race
in addition to the obvious birth rate effects, i think there are a lot of other sociological effects from everyone being on hormonal birth control that people don’t want to admit
Women are choosing not to have children, and you need to ask them why and take the answers seriously.
women have sex drives too, if they arent on birth control they are more likely to engage in behavior that can get them pregnant
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 walks, talks, tackles a problem they had a hard time doing before, or tells you that they love spending time with you completely unprompted.
For what it’s worth, I personally think a good portion of the birth rate dropping is environmental. Maybe it’s plastics, pfas, or something else nobody is looking at. Some people still have an urge to have kids, completely separate from the urge to have sex. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that testosterone and sperm counts have been dropping among humans and dogs, and that the deliberately child free people I know all veer on the (forgive the derisive slang term, but I don’t know how else to get the point across) “soyboy” type of person - both male and female.
That potential pollution aspect also explains this happening to industrial societies.
This has not been my experience. What has changed is that its now looked-down on to denigrate people who choose not to have kids (in some circles), and that people are no longer treated as heroes for having children. It had historically been the case that people who chose to not have kids were browbeaten about their choices.
I have had no issues talking about my children at all even with people who have remained childless. This is because I respect other peoples' decisions when doing so.
I'm not sure that this is the case, could you expand?
Like the only reasons you can come up with is mystery chemicals or soyboys - seriously?
I think it’s vastly more complex than “insert my favourite political reason” and includes many different factors.
Personally I think it’s telling that only the Orthodox Jews don’t seem to have that problem - with an extremely rigid, strict and misogynistic religion as their primary purpose.
Personally as a male I don’t mind having kids but if I were a woman no way in hell would I have one.
There can be multiple reasons why modern societies have less kids, but the main theme of Orthodoxy is to keep as much as possible the same as in previous generations. So they would be avoiding almost all the possible reasons given for the decline.
If you were to actually know parents at your local area daycare centers/schools, it'd quickly become evident that the "masculine"/"feminine" types are a definite minority.
Total economic stagnation, spiraling population numbers, loss of anything anchored to manual labor, and an aging population.
So far, it looks to be a way for slow extinction of a culture.
https://www.ipss.go.jp/pp-zenkoku/e/zenkoku_e2023/pp_zenkoku...
but it's a problem easily solved by just letting in more immigrants.
Does that sound like an extremely unlikely outcome? Back in 2008, we came within hours of credit cards stopping working. Projections say that if credit cards stop working, food distribution breaks down. Mass hunger is not far behind that. And there is nothing like mass hunger to destroy a society.
Esoteric problems in financial markets have real world consequences. We've gone nearly a century since the last real demonstration of that. Don't discount the possibility that the next demonstration will be within your lifetime. And in our more interconnected world, it's likely to be a lot worse.
Except for the very last step in the chain I find it hard to believe that credit cards play much of a role.
Or are you focused pedantically on credit cards?
https://ilsr.org/ is one resource, there are more.
(to your food example, the US harvests land the aggregate size of the state of Oregon just for biofuels, ethanol and biodiesel; this is, arguable, unnecessary, and there are many other examples of unnecessary economic activity that can be deprecated)
That said, like Democracy, capitalism is the worst economic system, except all of the others that have been tried. And there have been enough alternate experiments that I wouldn't want to literally bet my life on the next one working better.
The demographic future of humanity: facts and consequences [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44866621 - August 2025 (400 comments)
(~71% of the world’s population now lives in countries with birth rates below the replacement level needed to maintain population size, the remainder will follow in time)
300 acres on the westward-facing slope of the interior cascade temperate rainforest. Even if the entire region sees extended drying over the next 50, there will still be sufficient rainfall for crops. All it will need are a few holding pools to reliably produce a year-round supply.
It’s also reasonably remote, difficult to reach unless you know of the specific path, and reasonably defensible.
Survivalist fantasies aren’t realistic.
What does this actually mean? Every time I try to wrap my head around why it's bad e.g. for a business to make a constant profit, rather than an increasing profit; or for the population to dip to some number and settle there, rather than increase; the explanations seem to become circular very quickly. I know it's partially my fault for not having a very strong economic education, but it also feels like something is fundamentally wrong with the theories - like they are making some underlying assumption about what is "good" that I don't share. But I can never seem to get down to it.
The only thing I understand is that as the ratio of old to young grows, more taxes are needed, of course. But that would only be painful during a significant rate of change, not after the number is stable, no? Is that really somehow apocalyptic?
When a certain region in a country gets a cluster of great companies or really any productive advantage you would want more buildings and people there. In a country with a growing population that would make most sense as you need to build houses regardless as there's more people entering the job market who need a home. In a country with a stagnant population for every home you build another needs to be abandoned. This is more expensive especially when this happens enough where a school in the 'abandoned town' closes and a new school should be made in the better town. You can see how the first is more efficient, you don't waste your fine buildings.
Don't forget it's not just taxes, but the allocation of labor and resources. If the entire population magically turned 90 tomorrow, no amount of taxes would be able to provide for them.
When the economy is growing, investment makes sense. Why put your money under the mattress when it could be out there, working for you?
When the reverse happens, investment stops making sense. Why risk your money when it becomes worth more while it is sitting under your mattress?
But stopping investment does not just mean stopping speculative investment. It means stopping investment in other things as well. Like maintenance. This guarantees that things are going to become worse over time. Which is a feedback loop that makes investment even less worthwhile.
This has happened in the USA before. The last time is called the Great Depression. Read through accounts of what it was like. Would you like to go through that now?
History also teaches that the longer it is between economic setbacks, the worse the next one tends to be. We've gone far longer since a depression than at any point in history. Our next one is likely to be correspondingly more terrible.
> When the reverse happens, investment stops making sense. Why risk your money when it becomes worth more while it is sitting under your mattress?
Is it necessary to have a growing population in order to have a growing economy?
For much of human history I'd guess the answer was yes, because the size of the economy was based almost entirely on how much physical work people did, but the modern economy is very different from historical economies.
It seems like you're recommending socialism without coming out and saying it?
It’s very simple.
If you make $1M in profit in a year and the following year you also make $1M but inflation was 3%, you earned 3% less money than you did the year before. The nominal profit was the same but the real profit was lower.
To earn the same real return with 3% inflation you would need to earn $1.03M the year after you earn $1M. If your profits grew less than inflation, you made less money and your company is worth less as a result.
Monetary policy people figures out that a small amount of controlled inflation that incentivizes investing is better than deflation which encourages people to hoard cash. Some people disagree with that.
I invest my wages to take advantage of compound interest. It’s kind of my only hope of having a family / owning a home / retiring. If stuff stops compounding, I’m fucked. Multiply by however many millions of people are on the same position.
I don’t necessarily think the theories are making any assumption about what is good (except for the “greed is good dicks”)but more acknowledging that this is how our system currently works and the first generation to step off this ride will have a horrible time.
Basically, the billionaires dislike it and hence are changing the message. They want you to be ants.
Does this still hold when the majority of labor is no longer closely tied to a finite supply of land? At the time of the Black Death, the majority of men's labor was farming, and having more land directly made labor much more productive[1]. The modern economy feels much more complicated (e.g. if your job involves transporting things/people from A to B, it probably decreases in efficiency as the density of people decreases).
[1] https://acoup.blog/2025/09/12/collections-life-work-death-an...
Remember this line the next time immigration/H1b debates heat up. The same mathematics are at play.
You just said AI Armageddon as if there is an already predetermined ending that is widely agreed upon.
What are you concerned we would run out of?
Helium is probably more limited but for most cases there is alternatives I.e. I believe people use argon.
Idk none of this seems overly pressing in terms of preventing a lost scarcity world
Thinking hard, the only thing we are having shortage is of AI tokens. Thats all we need to plan for or worry about in coming decades.
ai only solves labor, it doesn't solve human greed.
You're not sure humans can enjoy better lives in the future? Like you think things could only get worse?
Schools is a good example, as there are less children, you need less schools and consolidate. So there are less jobs for teachers, now it looks like an equilibrium issue since over time it will balance out. But those teachers who are losing their jobs are adults, tax payers, consumers now and the loss of spending has a cascading effect.
how do phone shops like verizon or t-mobile stay open if people aren't buying? same for phone repair places? more layoffs
more laid off people means less people going out to dinner, ordering pizza, taking trips, buying new cars. those businesses close, and layoff people.
less workers means less tax revinue, either income tax, payroll tax, or sales tax (cuz people ain't buying shit). government offices cut bodies (layoffs) and reduce services. there are now less cops and more potholes.
how do billionaires, whose wealth depends on publicly traded companies and their stocks, keep making money when no one can buy anything? spacex and tesla can make up numbers and stay afloat, somehow, but most stocks will tank.
You don't. You only sell 50 million.
> this leads to layoffs
Why? 50 million people instead of 100 million also means half the employees in the factory, making just 50 million phones instead of 100.
> government offices cut bodies (layoffs) and reduce services
Yeah, but no layoffs (same reason as the phone factory). Fewer people need fewer services. Potholes are indeed a problem. Some roads leading to abandoned places will need to be abandoned as well.
> most stocks will tank
By your argument, those people that can't buy a second phone, also can't buy any stocks anyway. I see no problem here.
Fewer children mean all the industries and gov't services who are employed now to service children will need to downsize, these are lost jobs now before the fewer children grow to adults where they would take over those fewer jobs. All of this will have a effect across the economy.
Pediatricians, Teachers, Toys & Games companies, Children Furniture, School Supplies, Electronics, etc.... All of these are sized with the expectation of the same consumer demand, but when there are less kids to buy and service each of these will be forced to downsize. Again in the long run it works out, but in the short run say next 50 years for people in these markets will see downsizing over time. Can the rest of the economies pick that up?
Lots of new jobs will be needed in health and elderly care - you just ignored those.
> All of these are sized with the expectation of the same consumer demand, but when there are less kids to buy and service each of these will be forced to downsize.
Downsizing happens all the time. It's considered normal by most economists.
Yes, there are domains that are more affected than others. Reduction in population is slow enough to simply let the workers retire without hiring new ones.
You're acting like the birth rates are 0.2 instead of somewhere above 1 (too lazy to check). I remind you that Japan had lower birthrates than that for a very long time and nothing bad happend. In fact, their workplace conditions are improving. Salarymen are finally starting to work decent hours.
Why don't you admit that you're worried about your own quality of life at 70y old and you couldn't care less about future generations and their polution, resources, global warming, famine and refugee problems?
actually, less people would mean less traffic, and less wear on the roads, therefore also less potholes.
freezing and thawing can also be an issue, but obviously only in areas where it gets cold enough.
Because you're not "dwindling the population" in the way you think. You're not taking an "8 billion" number and changing it to "4 billion". You're taking this growing organism, and switching it into a shrinking mode. Worse, you're changing it to "shrinking mode" in a way where you can't switch it out of that mode. It will, by necessity, shrink to nothing.
And it shrinks quicker than you could imagine. When fertility rates are at 1.0 (China), each generation is one half the size of the previous. It doesn't seem like much has changed... there are 4 or so older generations that are still large (but non-reproductive). When you have a 0.5 fertility rate (South Korea), each generation is one quarter the size of the previous.
Human extinction only takes about 12-14 generations at that rate. Less than 350 years. Even before it gets that far though, things get awful really quickly. It's not as if it's 350 years, and then everyone's gone. Those last few generations have no technology, they're huddled around in the dark trying not to starve.
>If there's less population, we need less production and less workers.
This isn't as true as it sounds. Some of our technology does not scale downward. If you need a nuclear power plant, this has a minimum number of workers. Even if you only want half the power, you can't get away with "half the workers". So, as there's less population, some technology will have to be abandoned. If you just employ people at the power plant despite that, then you're by necessity pulling those people from some other industry... it's an opportunity cost thing, and you have fewer opportunities.
Sub-replacement fertility is human extinction. Not in 10,000 years, but in just a couple of centuries.
At that point, the birth rate would quickly rise again, no?
Because if you're back to living in a pre-industrial society, kids suddenly have value again.
So it's likely that either there's a point of equilibrium or the population keeps swinging up and down. Total extinction seems unlikely.
Isn't that enough? Imagine a world where a large percentage of the population are in nursing homes. A humane goal for a nursing home is 10:1 24/7. So that means 1 nurse for every 2.5 residents.
Besides that, it's all about the speed of change. Current Korean levels of population halving every generation is going to cause tremendous upheaval.
Shrinking and growing populations aren't necessarily problematic. What's problematic are populations that shrink or grow too quickly. Infrastructure adapted for N people works well for a number close to N, but not so well for 2N or 0.5N.
There aren't too many people besides Elon Musk that are significantly worried that the US's replacement rate is 1.8 compared to the 2.1 constant population level. But numbers much below that do alarm many.
A few quotes:
> Very little in Korean society seems to give young people the impression that child rearing might be rewarding or delightful. I met a stylish twentysomething news reporter at an airy, silent café in Seoul’s lively Itaewon district. “People hate kids here,” she told me. “They see kids and say, ‘Ugh.’ ” This ambient resentment finds an outlet in disdain for mothers. She said, “People call moms ‘bugs’ or ‘parasites.’ If your kids make a little noise, someone will glare at you.” She had recently vacationed in Rome, where adults drank at bars while their kids ran amok. She said, “Here, people would say, ‘What the hell are you doing?’
> An artist named Daum told me that, when he was young, “if you kicked a ball into someone else’s property, you went and rang the doorbell and got it back.” That city no longer existed: “Now you get yelled at—‘You could’ve broken my window!’ ” There’s a special word for noise between floors. Complaints forced Daum and his wife, Dani, to leave their previous building; one neighbor said, “I can’t stand your children anymore!”
> In the southern city of Gangjin, I stopped at a coffee shop and encountered a sign on the entrance that read “This is a no-kids zone. The child is not at fault. The problem is the parents who do not take care of the child.” The doors of Korean establishments are frequently emblazoned with such prohibitions. The only children I saw on Seoul’s public transit were foreigners. Kim Kyu-jin, who is by all accounts part of Korea’s first openly lesbian couple with a child, told me, “Five years ago, we didn’t think too deeply about ‘no-kids zones.’ Now we think it’s discriminatory. We always call places beforehand to ask if we can bring our daughter.”
As a parent of little kids, I worry much more about them living fulfilling lives as they grow up in the future. I'm concerned about climate change, wars, and an economic system that will allow them to live self-actualized lives. I have no doubt that the population number plays some factor in that, creating problems that must be solved. But ultimately, humans have created amazing technologies and the Earth is bountiful. We can support whatever number of people is on the horizon (whether that number is larger or smaller), but society must choose to do so and adapt.
My greatest fears are that governments and corporations consolidate their wealth and power to only an elite few, bending society to serve that elite. That is a fear exists regardless of the fertility rate.
I think Charlie Chaplin's speech at the end of The Great Dictator is relevant and inspirational: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7GY1Xg6X20&t=2s
Thank you for sharing your article. It's from a view so unlike my own, and it's been eye opening.
If you are currently paying taxes, you are funding Medicare and Social Security (insert whatever name for your country). The deal is that when you retire, the next generation funds your entitlements.
If the next generation is not large enough, that deal breaks down, leading to almost impossible political choices. Do we increase taxes on the remaining working population to fund the larger retired one? Do we defund entitlements and tell retirees to figure it out, when they themselves paid into the system that is now bankrupt?
The result may not be extinction. But losing 90% of the human population won't feel that different if you're living through it.
A relevant book recommend, https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Societies-Choose-Succeed-Rev.... It walks through a variety of past examples of human societies that went through this. There is no reason to believe that our current world-wide society will fare better.
That's not what's happening here. Birth rates are below 2.1 in many countries who are no where close to "outstripping their resources". There are other factors causing the contraction which have nothing to do with resource limitations.
In fact it seems like it's the opposite: richer nations with more resources tend to have lower birth rates. That's the scary part because it means there's no equilibrium to be reached. Birth rates could, in theory, remain low until humanity ceases to exist.
> isn’t that catastrophising
Yes, I'm only putting that forward as the worst case scenario to make the point that this can't just be ignored. As I said in other comments, this almost certainly won't actually result in extinction because there are other corrective factors which would occur long before that, but none of those scenarios are particularly desirable either. (E.g. Civilizational collapse returning humanity to pre-industrical birth rates, global takeover by theocratic governments that ban birth control, etc.)
The only non-catastrophic corrective factors that sound plausible to me involve some kind of intentional collective action on our part that reverses the trend, which won't happen if everyone's attitude is the same as the root commenter's. (Granted, maybe there are other possible corrective factors I haven't thought of, but if so I'd like to discuss what those are rather than just have the problem dismissed with a hand wave.)
I don't fault your logic, but I don't want to accept that disaster is inevitable.
Eventually Universe 25 took another disturbing turn. Mice born into the chaos couldn’t form normal social bonds or engage in complex social behaviors such as courtship, mating, and pup-rearing. Instead of interacting with their peers, males compulsively groomed themselves; females stopped getting pregnant. Effectively, says Ramsden, they became “trapped in an infantile state of early development,” even when removed from Universe 25 and introduced to “normal” mice. Ultimately, the colony died out. “There’s no recovery, and that’s what was so shocking to [Calhoun],” says Ramsden.
Like the mice, our population is going into reverse. And that description of behavior, looks awfully prescient when I compare to humans on social media today...
How did you reach that conclusion?
I thought this was common knowledge, but given the reaction I'm getting in this thread I guess it's not as common as I thought and I should have explained myself better in my original comment.
Granted that's not an imminent threat, it would take quite a few generations at current first-world birth rates. But I still find it a concerning long-term trend, and there are a lot of less severe negative consequences that could occur between now and then. If you care to dig into it more, this podcast episode has a good discussion of the short-term problems, which go beyond just elderly care: https://www.thepoliticalorphanage.com/p/the-great-baby-short...
Also, as I just said, there are less severe short and medium-term problems caused by low birth rates as well so it's not just the looming threat of human extinction I'm concerned about; that's just the biggest and most obvious consequence so it's a convenient counterpoint to people asserting that low birth rates are not a problem at all.
Under another set of criteria (environmental concerns), it's probably a positive.
This just seems self correcting to me - on both axis. It’s an organism not a linear process. It will fix itself later same as it seems to be doing now.
Eh, I think we all know that we could build the housing if we really wanted to.
> This just seems self correcting to me - on both axis.
I agree, but it could a rough ride if the correction is too fast or too far. I think quite a lot of people would prefer the industrial system to keep running, and there is probably a minimum population below which it cannot run.
The argument is - our current economic system can’t handle it.
Well then that’s an argument for changing it.
The last transition was British Empire to US and that was 1900-1945.
We can only hope for something better.
What’s stopping you from being a welder or dentist?
What’s stopping me? Probably some combo of wanting to one day afford a home and a family without having to move to Memphis and the a sense that I’d get bored as a welder and therefore be a bad one.
Man, septic pumper tho…
Don't worry. It's temporary.
If you include arthropods, ants make it not even remotely close.
But realistically, I agree. Civilizational collapse would happen long before extinction, which seems like it would almost certainly return the birth rate back to pre-industrial levels. I just don't think that's a desirable outcome either.
Or, even more realistically, nations with state religions that effectively outlaw birth control and/or women's rights will take over the world, and nations which don't do those things will collapse. That also seems like a bad outcome to me.
Point is, I don't think it's wise to treat this like it's not a problem.
It's virtually flat for eons, and then in the last 100 years it shoots up like a rocket. We didn't hit the first billion people until 1800, but the 8th billion took only 11 years. (2011-2022)
This rate of exponential growth was never sustainable, and it's normal and natural that it's leveling off now.
Changing this, and moving to a society where AI and robots solve the problem of letting people retire (presuming that's possible, technologically) would require a massive shift in how people are, for lack of a better word, valued by society. Right now, we assign a lot of value to individuals based on their level of economic productivity.
It would be a change of considerable magnitude to let AI and robots create the economic value and then distribute it to individuals on some "fair" basis. I suggest that based on the current situation, finding agreement on what constitutes "fair" would be challenging, at best.
More people are needed to fulfill future needs.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48168928
https://www.ft.com/content/fba35eca-df3a-4ad6-b42d-eb08eb7c9...
Spoiler: smartphones, social media, housing.
And now with a smartphone every girl knows that it is not ok.
Maybe the TV and schooling discussed is indirectly related, such as better understanding of proper upbringing, or more ways to see how things can be messed up, and having larger support group beyond family (and children) for said women in poorer countries.
In general there is more focus put on raising a child better and more involvement beyond hedonistic, time or economic reasons and better parenting expected that some don't think they meet the needs or find it harder to do the same for more than one child.
This is a bit of extrapolating from a small anecdotal group, but I wonder how statistically significant said group is.
It really makes you wonder if some actors would feel a need to exercise control over this scarce and limited resource...
That’ll be less painful if there are fewer people. Lower populations should lead to lower emissions growth too.
On the plus side, it will likely lead to lower emissions, assuming it doesn't lead to massive wars or other destructive behaviors due to the instability it will bring.
Of workers. Because retirement funds take money from workers to pay for retirees.
Assets and productivity, on the other hand, can grow a lot more than the population. Right now it's considered communism to tax assets. Once we get over that taboo things'll go a lot smoother.
That changes future value calculations, too.
These are things not to mess with lightly.
Ok? If you choose to spend a dollar instead of saving it, that implies some business will get that dollar. That implies someone will still invest in, build, and run businesses.
> These are things not to mess with lightly.
I agree. It requires a lot of thinking, discussion, deliberation and all that. But the basic math doesn't lie. We will have fewer workers in the future. Machines will make more and more stuff. If you want to continue supporting retirees as promised, then taxing the machines is the only answer.
Otherwise you'll have to break some promises to retirees and pensioners; now that's a real disincentive to save.
The reason wealth taxes never go anywhere is because when you sit down and learn what wealth is, how it works, and what is practical, it makes the most sense by far to just tax things whenever they go back to cash.
Really the only genuine tax loop-hole is the step-up basis on inheritance. Everything else is just an elaborate deferral to pay taxes later.
Allow paying the tax with assets. Put the assets into a black box sovereign wealth fund that's controlled by some mechanical algorithm which sells things at random as needed to fund the government budget. At scale this will be indistinguishable from a whole-economy index fund.
The best part about this is rich people can't beg off by saying "I have to liquidate stuff".
How do you pay with assets for real estate or boats or paintings? An IOU that can be cashed in when the asset is sold. Oh the boat is owned by an LLC so it never changes hands? No problem, the government has a share in the LLC too. (IANAL, IANAA so working out the loopholes is left as an exercise for the reader).
A second benefit is startup shares don't have to get hit with a capital gains tax before the startup goes public. Right now people sometimes pay taxes on shares that are eventually worth zero. Instead if this tax could be paid in startup shares, then there's no unfair tax bill.
As a condition of paying in assets, forbid the government from exercising any control over the assets. No shareholder voting, no board seats, not even choosing the paint color on the boat.
Additionally, this tax can't be on top of income tax. The whole point is to fix the worker-funded tax pyramid scheme. It has to be revenue-neutral with respect to income tax.
There are countries (ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_the_Netherlands#Bo...) that do tax wealth assets (maybe not all, and maybe not perfectly) and they seem to be doing just fine.
plenty of incentive to put money there, ditto for saving.
a saved dollar does not stimulate the economy, either. the whole idea of microloans is that the money gets spent ASAP and goes straight into the economy
Yes, that's the whole point. That's a good thing. Money is meant to be spent, not be hoarded and slept on forever. Money velocity is terrible right now, capital generates more income than wages, this is neither healthy nor sustainable, and certainly isn't fair to the ones actually doing the productive work.
In the ideal society there'd be no Epstein or Thiel, everyone would have a rewarding and productive economic activity.
It's like when the US used to ship our plastic waste to China, and China stopped accepting it. China only had a plastics pollution problem because it was a cheap buck to sweep an American problem under a Chinese rug.
what it means in practical terms is the destruction of the modern social safety net. some declining birth rates are ok but places like Japan, Spain, and South Korea look disastrous.
Pain for whom? The people profiting from cheap labor probably.
Why is such a massive sin to scale down? To slow down a bit, I don't think the whole world is about to collapse, but even if it was, I rather that than turning it all into the hellscapes we see on some of the most overpopulated places in the world just so a mere 1% of the population can indulge.
A pretty consistent trend throughout history is that shit rolls downhill.
"The poor will always pay for it" is a thought-terminating cliche that is often trotted out in support of the status quo (or some mythical past status quo).
How do you know that past status quo isn't actually worse for them than the direction things are trending? Do you think we somehow stumbled upon some global maximum for them [1], and any deviation from that, in any direction is going to make things worse for them?
[1] In spite of, as you say, shit flowing downhill.
We don't see a lot of food shortages these days, but with climate change fucking with agriculture sufficiently, regular famines in the global south might make a comeback... Or might not, if population growth and degrowth projections solve that problem before crop yields are seriously impacted.
Kids are really expensive, and if you want people to willingly have them outside of accidents, you're going to need to pay them a lot of money.
It's just that these policies are very expensive, and right now we allocate our money mostly to make rich people richer and maintain very high QoL for our elderly population. That's a choice we make in setting up our society.
The problem is that there will be far too many people wanting that job, so you have to filter somehow, and that's basically eugenics which isn't the most fun, so I guess you'd have to have a lottery and deal with the fact that like 10% of the population will constantly riot about someone who "doesn't deserve it" getting paid to raise kids.
i don't think so. you can control it with how high the pay is, or only pay for the first two children or something like that...
https://www.nycourts.gov/reporter/3dseries/2006/2006_05238.h...
>In October 2000, however, when appearing before a Family Court hearing examiner to answer Shondel's petition, Mark{*7 NY3d at 325} requested DNA testing. The hearing examiner ordered genetic marker tests, which revealed that Mark is not the child's biological father. The hearing examiner then dismissed Shondel's paternity petition, and Mark abandoned his petition for visitation, having severed his relationship with the child. Shondel objected to the hearing examiner's order, expressing doubts about the laboratory tests and stating that she would be able to show that Mark had always recognized the child as his. Realizing that the hearing examiner had exceeded her authority in dismissing Shondel's petition, Family Court sustained her objection and appointed a law guardian for the child.
>...
>Family Court entered an order of filiation and awarded child support retroactive to the date Shondel commenced the Family Court proceeding. The Appellate Division affirmed, concluding that "Family Court properly determined that it was in the best interests of the subject child to equitably estop [Mark] from denying paternity" (6 AD3d 437 [2004]).[FN1] We agree, based on our precedents, the affirmed findings of fact and the legislative recognition of paternity by estoppel.
and that not just the US, Europe is equally batshit, with France in particular fucking banning paternity tests outright.
they aren't going to pay anything resembling a livable wage for child rearing. firstly, that defeats the purpose, secondly, it would be expensive as fuck.
Everything is better when we have the freedom to make a choice.
Is it? Was it actually her choice? Or was she propagandized into being a fully-available consumer?
Was she fed a steady diet of anti-natalist/anti-family formation and pro-independence (pro-consume) media and government policies from the moment she was born?
But of course, it's only "propaganda" when you don't like it.
On the other hand, we have the "propaganda" which has existed for thousands if not millions of years, needed no technological, scientific or economic advances to exist, and the societies that followed it grew and made all the advances required for the other.
Of the two, I know which seems to be truer and more natural.
You are, of course, the sole free-thinking, unpropagandized person in the world.
We need universal childcare services, provided by the state and available to all, and other childcare-enabling reforms like automatic right to work from home and other flexible working arrangements for those with children.
These won't be popular with everyone, but you'll won't solve the demographic crisis without them.
Birth rates have been falling worldwide, regardless of the level of government support. It's much more a matter of attitudes about having children.
> The economic costs of having children at a replacement rate are simply too high
Nope. My wife and I have 4 children, on a lower-middle-class income in the US. Your lifestyle choices matter a lot. If you want to have children, you can find a way to afford them.
That is the story right there. We as a society spent decades upon decades demonizing having children at a young-ish age. "Your career is more important", they said. We got shows like "16 and Pregnant" to dissuade viewers from having children. People have become genuinely afraid of having kids.
Not until you are in your 30s does the social messaging shift from "only failures have children" to "why haven't you had a child yet?" That change in social pressure often compels one to start to change their mind, but at that point one becomes biologically limited in how many children they can reasonably birth.
4 kids on a lower-middle-class income in the US makes me picture poverty, as someone on a lower-middle-class income whose girlfriend is legally in poverty (and with that being the primary reason we haven't gotten married and had kids yet). If you disagree, feel free to describe your circumstances in more nuanced detail. I wonder if it will really end up being a description of lower-middle-class.
you won't solve it with them either. all of that feel good crap would bump the TFR of an average civilized country by 0.2. how can you have access to all the data in the world and still believe that the reasons are economical and not cultural?
Not just like for the holidays and pass them back when they start crying, but an actual extended period of time dealing with all the issues that they bring.
You've got to be a special kind of idealistic romantic to still see the appeal afterwards. Which is great for you of course if you do. But there's a reason authoritarians across the world are banning abortion and targeting birth control.
I don’t think that’s because of birth rate decline. While authoritarians give lip service to that occasionally, it’s never their primary cited reason (which is usually some combo of religion, purported return to “traditional” prosperity via reduced promiscuity, aggression against feminist political opponents, etc). Also, most authoritarians aren’t that long-term in their goals.
This is not just about women entering the workforce, etc. Something is affecting Human society more "horizontally".
All of these are second-round of reasons.
Primary reason: Materialistic wealth or wealth in general is preferred over human contact.
Effect: People connection drops. Community drops. Independence and Individualism prosper.
Secondary effect: The seeds for family development (community, human connection, village camaraderie) go missing. Growing a family now requires artificial support. When family members grow up, their time is now spread across materialisms and career development. Career development goes up and takes priority. Wealth acquisition takes priority. Except everyone is doing this so basic needs have to be fulfilled with limited resources. All prices are now going up. What was the point of everyone working now? Wealth acquisition. hmm.
Tertiary Effect: Huge workforce looking for work. Wages diminish because supply went up. Businesses prosper. Market caps go up. Business becomes easier. Dominance becomes easier.
4th Effect: Debt goes up to fulfill materialistic quests. Interest locks in people into a debt that grows over time even if the supply of money does not go up. Now people are perpetually looking to complete paying off their debt. And they will perpetually need to work. And worker supply perpetually increases. Freedoms go away. Wealth centers on to certain people. They take over media, entertainment, recreation, and tourism. We end up with a tale of two worlds.
Edit: Before the primary reason goes into effect, I will acknowledge industrialization improved people's access to wealth and materialism. And that replaced human connection.
And reduced illness, increased education, increased access to better nutrition, increased lifespan, increased able lifespan (knees/back/teeth don’t give out as early), and lots more.
Like, even if I grant that this replaced human connection (and I’m not sure that’s true, nor am I sure if it is meaningfully true—access to water replaces thirst, too), some very substantial benefits were acquired in return.
if we further assume that those scriptures were actually inspired by god or some other non human entity then the question is practically unanswerable because the benefit for that creator lie beyond our human life experience.
there are however a few potential theories for why it makes sense. for one god is described as existing beyond space and time. so god would know that birthrates were necessary to spread humanity across the planet, and maybe that was the goal. god would also know that the birthrate would eventually decline, so this would help be to counteract that decline.
we can also ask ourselves, what would be the benefit of a growing population today?
if the purpose of humanity is to push forward an ever advancing civilization, that is, to develop and to thrive, then maybe the goal is to maximize the potential of this planet to feed that many people, or to challenge us to be more efficient at food production. isn't population growth one potential driver for innovation?
or thinking beyond, maybe the goal is to actually push us to colonize space.
The Chinese have discovered that it is easy to crank down the fertility rate, but impossible to raise it again when you want to do that. And they have brutal totalitarianism on their side.
Just a warning about lack of cheap labor for 1 percenters in India should make every boy and girl in India to fulfill national duty to make more babies.
BTW, the fertility rate is _increasing_ now (granted from an existing base of 1.2TFR) in the richer states of india, due to better availability of IVF and in general healthcare.
The combination of lack of prosperity as well as the effect of nuclearisation that I mentioned above was what made it go weirdly low. It's not that low if you exclude unintentionally non-reproducing couples. I'm not saying its replacement rate, but its also not 1.2.
Many poorer states of india will face the same nuclearisation of the family unit, but crucially when healthcare is more generally available, so you won't see those parts go as low as 1.2. Again, replacement rate is almost impossible in a nuclear family unit, unless you manage to substitute something else that contributes the benefits, i.e reinvent joint families from first principles (and maybe it will be better!)
That makes sense. I know that having less people is not a good thing, but I was brought up with the "impending population crisis" thing drilled into my head, so it's difficult for me to be alarmed.
I'm also all for getting women into parity with men. I know that there are a lot of men that will say that this is a bad thing, but I was raised amongst a lot of extremely capable women.
I feel that we need to support parents, if we want more kids. Right now, in the US, having kids is economically devastating, and there's almost no support from the government. I'll bet India is worse (but I could be wrong).
I feel that nature has controls built in. We see it all the time, in other species. I feel that if we drop too far down, the switch will be turned back on again.
[EDITED TO REMOVE TRIGGER WORDS]
You understand that your statement here is very racist? You basically dehumanize people you don't agree with and describe them as lower beings. Basically Untermenschen?
It's highly ironic to say "its dehumanizing!!" to say to a man that his treatment of women makes him a lesser being with the amount of abuse, neglect, and forced labor women are expected to take on by the men "dehumanized" here.
He's not even talking about race, so, not racist?
The latter part seems like the most meaningful cause world wide. Sex is a boredom activity and we just aren't bored in the slightest, ever. I think most married people know that long power outages are the most romantic thing that can happen (though, less now with cell phones).
making a pretty strong statement about yourself there mon ami. that ain't the case for plenty of people
and keep in mind that India has arranged marriages
If you have backup power for your router and ONT/Modem, you should also still have internet service during a power outage. The ISP-owned ONT for a place I lived had a little lead-acid battery attached to it, and during power outages I still had internet service.
After that, communicating with the outside world is hard for most people. Time to make babies ... anyway it's often cold, so snuggling is likely.
Therefore my experience has been that cellphones tend to remain up, even though the power is down.
I've theorize that they become overburdened by the pocket supercomputers that automatically start using it instead of local wifi.
There's no "purpose" of life, it just happens, it's physics.
> I am a very successful and wealthy entrepreneur
So now imagine you're not, and your life sucks because of such "successful and wealthy entrepreneurs" sucking all the wealth.
If your life is shit, you naturally don't want to make it even shittier just so you can produce people whose life will also be shit (thanks to the class society). Since we stopped forcing people to do this, they're naturally excercising their will.
But your wealth depends on them reproducing, so that's a nice middle finger they gave you by not doing so. You're concerned? You should be, that's the message.
Local populations will see very different trajectories, yes. Africa will see population growth and many other places will see steep decline. Societies can choose to keep their current system and take in immigrants, or choose to keep their "national character" (or whatever) and rejig their societies so the remaining productive parts pay for increasing numbers of old people. Grifters (Brexiters, MAGA, Le Pen, etc) will attempt to sidestep such obvious tradeoffs, but they will fail, hastening the decline of these societies.
When you imports loads of people from a low-trust society, which is mainly famous for scamming and the caste system, it’s just a matter of time before you reach the tipping point.
The problem with industrialized societies is that people lost all markers of adulthood. Everything became about worshiping convenience, and once convenience (for short-term pleasure) became "god", people wanted to avoid things they saw as unnecessarily difficult.
To reverse the trend, we need people to understand that the difficulty of life isn't a bad thing, that struggle and suffering aren't bad, they are essential for growth in becoming a better, happier person in the long run.
Would you rather be an ever-weakening wimp? Most people unconsciously say "yes", afraid of the world. Kids are afraid of the chaos in life - suffering that happens when life throws you curve balls, like "what would I do without monetary support?". Even "adults" now are really kids are heart - afraid of losing social security, medicare, etc. "Welfare" programs don't end the dilemma - they only reinforce the childishness and dependency on gov for support.
We need more bold people, people who aren't afraid to suffer because they see the light at the end of the road. Courage separates the men from the boys.
> We need more bold people, people who aren't afraid to suffer because they see the light at the end of the road.
At "the end of the road" there's only death, so it's pointless to suffer just so you can make more people which will also suffer.
