> they led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980
You can get car seats that do three across in a normal sedan though
Only in the last few years, and they require a full size sedan.
Example from a Google search (don't know if they are good)
2. Those must be professionally installed
3. Those are pricey
4. Those are, quite by accident, illegal in North America
https://www.amazon.com/Graco-SlimFit3-Forward-Highback-Kunni...
In my country we have had in the last decades the following - car seats, prohibition small children to roam free, prohibition for kids under 12 to be left alone at home, the size of the city apartments has shrunk substantially - from two bedroom to one. The impossibility of stay at home parent. You can add to the list.
We have a dev team in one of the big cities of New Zealand, we need people, and we interviewed everyone available (yes, this must be on site).
When you have jobs, childcare, education, entertainment, government, etc, all inside cities, people migrate towards cities.
I wish I could move further away from the big city but I'd get paid third of my salary, my SO didn't found any openings, and I'd have to buy a second car so my kid could attend their school.
I see what you're saying but not every job is available outside.
Today there are many narrow car seat options on the market, so 3 across seating is possible in full size sedans, but not compact cars. A European company makes a 3-across and 4-across car seat, but it's illegal in the US by accident.
The cost of daycare and education is so immensely larger than the cost of a car, that I don't think cost of a car is a factor. The important consideration with having a child, or another, is how could you possibly afford the daycare and later school.
Lead in the drinking water is okay. Last resort human antibiotics in the farmed animals are OK.
Seems like school shootings are OK.
I wouldn't use "illegal in the US" as something necessarily negative.
Collapsing is the word we use about the biodiversity collapse, or the collapse of some environmental numbers.
There's no catastrophy about having a population shrinking, we are doing that to most of the other species on the planet and only a few people seems to really care.
We are in a humanity re-adjustement, not a collapse.
Japan is already there.
South Korea is at one third the replacement rate.
This is the story almost worldwide, and soon can be expected to be worldwide. In China and India there is also sex selection abortions and male preference to make things worse.
Exponential on the way up, and on the way down.
Reversing such steep declines isn't possible in one generation without a "Marshall plan" for fertility, which means that in one generation the next cohort of fertile females will be half the size of today's if today's fertility rate is half of replacement. If the situation persists then the next cohort will be one quarter of today's.
These declines are much sharper than past growth rates.
What if these fertility declines persist for three generations? How many generations can they persist for anyways?
What goes up ends up to going down at one point.
We are reaching some limits, in a society that was used to think that we could push boundaries continuously endlessly for several centuries.
Declines are also exponential.
Plateuing could have been a thing. But instead we're now in a steep decline mode. It will be 150 years before populations increase again.
Probably many, as long as the growth rate was low enough, or zero. We can't grow forever, but that doesn't mean that the alternative must be to decline and overshoot whatever is a good population size (but alas this is what we are now bound to do).
SK though... yeah, something is uniquely broken there.
"Reversal" isn't possible with our without Marshall plan. What you need is young females and what you have is aging population, no amount of money or political will can change that. Even if we (I'm in Europe) manage to get out of decline, the recovery will take several generations which means a century of time.
South Korea is screwed way beyond repair by my estimates.
The current trend implies that the human specie is collapsing at a similar as the rest of biodiversity, it's not a readjustment.
We built an economy based on the fact that resources and population could grown indefinitely and now we are surprised that we cannot cope with limits. Looks like we'll have to learn it the hard way.
What's desirable is not population expansion but neither is population collapse, it's population stability.
This also has nothing to do with Capitalism being built for perpetual growth: of course it is deemed to fail at some point in a finite world, but that's irrelevant to the topic of demography. If anything, the system will see the population decline as an opportunity, as it means fewer people to share the resources with.
There is only one point of stability and getting there is like placing a basketball atop of a flagpole.
But now we are facing a crisis. For instance the next South Korean generation is set to be half of the current one. And fertility declined strongly there over the past 10 years. Many countries are now at levels SK had ten years ago (well below the replacement rate by higher) and if the trend continue they may end up in the same situation as SK in a few years.
Halving your population over one generation is a catastrophic event.
This is equally concerning as the collapse of the number of bugs. Some people can believe it doesn't matter, but the consequences are enormous.
We have a society that lets people have all the children they want. But they don’t want more children.
I’d note fwiw replacement rate in the US is currently 2.08 children, and current fertility is around 1.6/couple.
On a comment about US policy - With immigration we have a growth in population, without it we will drop rapidly. I don’t think however people will be badgered into having kids by politicians, even with bribing. Most people I know that don’t have or have one kid, including myself, do so because they don’t want to have more kids. No amount of incentive changes that.
You don't necessarily need “more people”, but you'd need population to be at least close to stable.
We can pretend that AI and robots will come soon enough, but that can as well not happen.
Low fertility and no immigration is a recipe for disaster.
“When I was a curly headed baby My daddy set me down on his knee Saying boy you go to school and you learn your letters Don’t become no dusty miner boy like me.”
These jobs aren’t undesirable because they pay too little, they’re undesirable because they’re more difficult and unpleasant than a service or office job. People have been encouraging their kids across cultures and time to strive for higher skilled labor / work not purely for economic reasons alone but because those jobs are better. It’s not a lie they’re unwilling to do it because everyone is unless they have other job options. Forcing people through economic and labor pressure back into their fields for migratory field labor is one of those things that probably sounds good for other people and not yourself, eh?
Majority of people don't have this kind of option to begin with and the more children you have less financial resources you have.
Now, you have both parents in the workforce - even with generous parental leave the mother loses a lot of opportunity in the prime of her career.
Then you have to pay for childcare if both are working (or lose out on one income if they aren't), food, clothing, schooling, extracurriculars. And you're competing in the workforce against all couples with less children. And then when you get old you aren't relying on your children to look after you - this is frowned upon, and you get paid out from your investments or the government pays you a pension. Basically most of modern life is set up economically against having children, and the main reason to is purely the biological drive.
I think all these factors need to be taken into account when devising economic incentives for people to have more children, and the current levels in any country are too low to have enough of an effect.
Your investments and the government pension are financed by the active work of someone’s children. If there won’t be enough of them around your retirement will not be as comfortable as you planned.
Retirement is still dependent on children. Before it was your children. Now it’s a collective mass of children.
Which messes up the incentive structure. People with many children are subsidizing those with fewer/none.
You could make a different bet, e.g. invest into whatever infrastructure they'll need to take care of aging population. But your savings fund likely invests in luxuries for aging big spenders, so...
I am rather curious how this plays out long-term, since there is no investment instrument for "please build train / underground closer to my house".
Who will work in these companies? Who will buy their products and fuel their revenues?
> How many children my neighbor has impacts my social security payments or other retirement disbursements in no tangible way.
All the retirement savings you have, whether state-managed or private-managed, are just some coupons for your share in the economy of the future. If the economy of the future shrinks your coupons will be worthless.
The number of kids you and your neighbor have not only have an impact on your retirement, these kids are your retirement.
The investment happens when somebody sells you the shares in exchange for fiat used to pay off the workers. Who do you buy your shares from? That's where you invest.
As for the first part, holding fiat or assets convertible to fiat when fiat has been issued with interest and must be eventually repaid under threat of confiscation of assets. :shrug: It's basically a game of chicken.
What an extraordinarily perverse view of recent history. Who do you think built and maintained the socioeconomic systems that allowed women to focus on creating and raising children? You could even more easily twist your perceptions such that men have been forced to work hard and short lives serving the whims of women who have enjoyed the luxury of sitting around making babies, singing nursery rhymes, and gossiping over afternoon tea with their friends.
Women have stopped making babies. So men have stopped wanting to make civilisation. We are indeed seeing the consequences of the collapse of this social contract.
This statement completely ignores how our current world is shaped by white supremacy and the patriarchy. Women were prohibited from taking part in anything expect raising children (which even today is seen as contributing nothing).
Women who dared venture outside the home had their work ignored or credit stolen. Eunice Foote and Rosalind Franklin are two obvious examples.
Later, textiles, telecoms and computing were powered by women labour and they were expected to stay in their lane so the men could take credit and the money.
> Women have stopped making babies.
Couples have stopped making babies.
Ownership of assets, like home ownership, also contributes towards the totality of a pension.
In that sense, not owning a home, having to pay rent in old age, is a form of impoverishment. If that rent isn't offset by other sources of income like financial investments.
I'd be worried about expected financial growth of any retirement fund over the long term if population is flat or declining.
Infinite productivity growth is just as detrimental to society as cancer is to the body. We need more sustainable economic models.
The home ownership is real, but you can't feed of that. You can live in your home yourself if you'd like, but if you plan to rent it out for profit you'll need young people to work and pay the rent.
Funny thing is, it's still the children who pick up the tab in both of these cases, just someone else's children.
I agree that economic policy needs to adapt to keep a population growing and healthy, but as of right now I am finding it hard to see any signs of this(in the US at least).
Yeah, but a very large part of that low life expectancy at birth was the very high rate of child mortality that the poster above you references.
If you take out infant mortality the life expectancy wasn't all that different from what it is today. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2625386/
That's misleading because most of the reason life expectancy was so low back then was childhood deaths. If you made it to adulthood at all, you probably would live almost as long as people do today.
As capitalism has yielded to materialism, men and women have forgotten to prioritize the sacrement of marriage.
I'm not here to boss anyone in particular around, but one must judge the tree in general by the fruit.
Wtf are you talking about? It's a man-made contractual obligation used to strengthen financial and political strength.
Marriage is entirely unnecessary in today's world.
Sure, you can point to other factors, e.g. China's One Child policy; war: but the idea that Really Smart People are going to just wave some policy at the problem is laughable.
What works is boys growing into men, girls into women, and families precipitating from actual marriages between them. Pro tip: parenthood is JOY!
The idea that technology has obviated Biology whistles past its own graveyard, voting down anyone daring to point out anyone daring to point out something as obvious as the sunrise.
(And, hey, if Destiny has had other plans than supporting your direct parenthood, the adoption is an eminently honorable alternative.)
There is a gap between the world we live in and the world desired. One solution would be to close the gap.
Among whom? Evidently not among the women who would actually be bearing them.
Like, we have two kids and a top 10% (bottom of the top though) salary, and we have no discretionary income or ability to save (very much) after paying for the costs associated with kids and housing. I can completely understand why people don't want to do that, particularly given that 90% of households in my country earn less than us.
Then I put it to you that their desire isn't above the replacement rate. People with no money manage to have plenty of children.
I'd say in that case they don't have the desire. They may want children all else being equal, but they don't want to put in what it would cost them to have children. Otherwise they would.
a woman in her thirties has very slim chances to find a partner because men in their thirties have unlimited access to an unlimited number of women in their twenties. it's a harsh truth, but burying one's head in the sand doesn't really help.
On the contrary. Maybe the most desirable 20% do, but many men in their thirties have very little access to women of any age.
still, your claim does not invalidate my point, does it?
I don't know where is that you live that men are so desperate and eager to commit to low-value women, but in the world I live in, men in their thirties are unmarried and/or childless by choice.
This is utter nonsense. I met my now wife at 31, and can assure you that I had little to no interest in 20 somethings at that point (having made those mistakes in the past).
Clearly you live in a very different world from me, or you're just trolling (more likely given the green account name).
Ok, this is half humorous and half serious. But I'd wager that the answer is non-zero.
This is all just anecdotal, obviously, but I think childless humans with pet indoor dogs could have less of a desire to procreate for various reasons, but perhaps mainly because the instinctual thirst to care for a living thing is quinched to some extent when you have a pet indoor dog.
Obviously not every or most or even many. But perhaps _some_.
I will add that us having children completely erased the desire to get a dog. We almost got one just before our first born. Now we can't imagine. I think it's a combination of what you're suggesting, and also because a dog requires a lot of time we just don't have now.
Children are long term gain, first decade is rather hard. Teaching and training every day, hour, minute. If one wants to do it right.
On other hand dog might be better that a child hooked to a smartphone from an age of 2 years.
DINKWAD (Dual income, no kids, with a dog) is rising [1]. Hospitality is changing to accommodate this [2].
[0] https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/lifestyle/trends/20231226/sales...
[1] https://www.thehistoryofenglish.com/dinkwad-meaning-origin-u...
Though I'm way more worried about e.g. women rights than the environment.
What's the crisis?
When a generation's female cohort is significantly smaller than the preceding generation's female cohort the increase in fertility needed to offset that is enormous relative to the fertility rate that led to the present generation's small female cohort. And the cultural and other reasons for the low fertility rate are difficult to change too. So the likelihood of reversal is very low, and the likelihood of continued female cohort decreases is high, therefore you have to think a severe low fertility patch will last at least two generations, and if the fertility rate right now is half the replacement rate then that bakes in a population reduction of 50% once the current non-fertile generations pass, so several generations down the line. But the risk of three or four generations of below-replacement fertility is pretty high, and that's how you get into multi-centennial periods. Nothing requires that we bounce back, either. We could go extinct just from refusal to reproduce.
Like everyone suddenly gets raped/killed while all the buildings are burnt down kinds of unpleasant.
Population declines, absolutely -- those are baked into the pie now, and they will be quite steep.
The alternative is, more and more resources will be allocated towards the elderly and by consequence less towards kids, making the problem worse with every generation. Not clear though how to break out of this spiral by democratic means if elderly are the majority.
The amount of wealth an individual can generate and the amount of productivity one can activate on the world has ballooned unimaginably over the past 100 years yet we are still expected to produce 2.4 children to support us in the future.
Something doesn't add up and it feels clearer and clearer that the issue is wealth inequality. Regular people are being asked to breed like cattle to support the lifestyles of the ultra rich. We have enough to cover pensions but it's all being horded.
In 2024 this might have seemed acceptable but with the collapse of credibility in the Western world the clock has begun ticking.
The proximate cause is social collapse, not economic. Maybe the ultimate collapse is economic, but it could again be social.
I did so by giving us fridges, dishwashers, supermarkets and other time savers, but robotic vacuum was the last one.
Self driving trucks and autonomous shops are being rolled out extremely slowly.
And with hollowing out middle class the outlook for 90% standard of living is pretty bleak, without having anything to offer to the 10% besides being cheap factory manipulators.
At some point we really will have to sit down, say the house is complete, hand out free beers and take a breather before getting to the smaller details of furnishing and gardening. Then we can maybe discuss the stars.
It no longer does that, though. Now it just seeks rent, sells luxuries to rich and manipulates masses into overconsumption.
The single biggest predictor for birth rate is people caring about kids or helping out / number of kids. It's that simple.
3h commute cuts into this. Lack of grandparents and neighbourly relations cuts into this. Higher standards cut into this. And we are not allocating more care.
Commute should be minimal. Care should be flexible. In some EU countries, you won't get benefits if the care is provided by both parents equally (alternate every day for instance) or grandparents step in. You get peanuts when you take care of sick kids and risk your career. And so on.
When we build, we keep building huge ass office centres, huge ass shopping centres instead of 4-5 storey houses with mixed usage. The parents have to shuttle kids.
Plaza/garden/playground, kindergartens and small shops at the ground level, offices in upper floors. Next block same, but upper floors residential, good pulic transport, underground only parking. All designed to save the time spent doing logistics.
And finally, care must be stop being a financial trade-off. If your kid is sick, you have to take care of it and receive 100% of the pay. This must be factored into all prices, since we cannot afford not to take care of our kids. Period. Demand this from whomever your import from as well and absolutely do impose tariffs on anyone who doesn't guarantee this and tries to undercut you.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/book-review-selfish-reasons...
TLDR: The reviewer, who has twins under 2, is flabbergasted and can't figure out the book's logistics.
The part at the end where the reviewer actually talks with the author is just comedy gold (to a parent), so I will quote it below (emphasis mine):
"
I was curious enough about this that I emailed Bryan and asked him how much time he spent on childcare when his kids were toddlers. He said about two hours a day for him, one hour for his wife. Relatives and nannies picked up the rest.
I could complain that sure, childcare isn’t overwhelming when you’re only doing two hours of it a day. But honestly, this is about the same amount of childcare I do now. And I do feel overwhelmed. So advantage Bryan.
When I thought about it more, I realized a lot of my overwhelmedness came from not being able to consistently choose the two hours, and from survivor’s guilt about my wife doing her 7-8 hours. When I talked more with Bryan, he recommended hiring more nannies.
...
Instead it had a vibe: stop beating yourself up over your parenting decisions. So I put out a classified ad for babysitters and got two people I really like. Things are a little better now. "
Just, you know, be rich and have other people parent your kid.
My sides! I can't make this up if I tried.
No, actually, it's women's rights. In every single country that has developed, we see birth rates drop as women get more rights.
Why? Because when women have the economic and legal freedom to control their lives, a lot of them choose not to have children. When they don't have that choice, surprise surprise, we don't see that.
Okay, we have a problem here. Turns out having kids, overall, is not a very sweet deal. People by and large only do it if you force them. Okay, we don't want to force them. So now we have to make incentive structures.
It's a tricky problem space because it's tempting to just say "fuck it" and roll back the clock. But I don't think that'll work, because inevitably we'll just re-develop and we're back at square one.
We need novel solutions that incentivize women to have children without pushing them into situations where they can be taken advantage of.
It's hard not to loosely apply it to humanity and especially complaints you hear about gen Z in your head.
A concern I see typically come up when discussing having kids with friends is the strong belief that the world will certainly be significantly worse off for them, if not having water wars maybe even during our lifetime.
Most people agree they'd rather not have children than bring them into the world to live through the nine circles of hell.
Of course, it's also possible this never materializes, but the fact that it is in people's mind alone is enough.
The "empowerment of women" has been hugely successful for society but has eroded if not destroyed the social balance of society.
There's a painful debate coming and if it doesnt happen, someone like Trump will get to choose.
What does this mean? What will they be choosing? I don't get it.
It's a really strange place and a bit fun as a result.
The thing is that low fertility impacts everyone, so you get a lot of strange bedfellows. The fundamentalists of nearly every religion are interacting with each other, not always calmly, but mostly. And they're boosting very pro Marxist accounts for some article or study from a very pro capitalist account. You get radical trad-fems interacting with Catholics and Mormons calmly. You have Pakistanis and Indians not shouting at each other. Even Democrats and Republicans are holding hands and clutching pearls.
Really, it's just the LGBT community's wings that aren't there. Because they mostly have no dog in the pro natalism fight.
They had a conference earlier this year in ... Austin (?). It went okayish. Mostly just neckbeardy dudes with like too many kids and a Mormon bent. But also some good talks from the history folks and some socialists.
I have exactly zero hopes that any of these people stay coherent in this goal. It's just not in the nature of social media to abet it.
But still, an interesting place while it's here.
(I wish it were not so.)
But then you get hardcore socialists from Korea that are pretty worried about the issues there. And some muslim scholars sometimes. Like, I said, it's a 'fun' grab bag of people.
Realistically, once the solution presents itself to how to get people to have more kids, then the whole place is going to splinter as they all go their separate ways and try to implement it and be some '-ist/-ism' again.
Everyone in the pro-natalism sphere is just looking and bumbling about trying to figure out what thing or program or list of incentives is going to make people have more kids. No one has a clue what the recipe is yet, so they're comfortable talking with ideological opposites until that recipe is found and it's winner take all.
Until then, cooperation.
Reminds me a lot of this TNG episode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chase_(Star_Trek:_The_Next...
anovikov•17h ago
ricksunny•17h ago
anovikov•11h ago
atmavatar•9h ago
mrkeen•17h ago
And the world fertility rates are in unprecedented decline. Should we stop making schools free?
yardstick•17h ago
I’d say most countries provide free education to their residents. But, not all.
lnsru•14h ago
yardstick•13h ago
anovikov•11h ago
lurk2•16h ago
This isn’t remotely true.
franktankbank•9h ago