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Comment by pmlnr | Hacker News Reader

Japan has the problems now we, Western society will be facing in 20 years. This has been true since the 80s, so it's be nice to learn from it, and not follow it.

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In my opinion, the end of cheap fossil fuels necessitates we'll look like either Japan or Africa, and I know which of those I'd prefer. Shrinking GDP or shrinking GDP per person may seem like a difficult call for a country's leader, but as a citizen it's a rather obvious choice.

Lot of western countries have immigration, Japan does not. I dont think the west will follow Japan.

I agree with you but I think we are already starting to face the same problems now.

> This has been true since the 80s, so it's be nice to learn from it, and not follow it.

Unfortunately, history has a tendency to repeat itself. And, even when it's recent history, people are unlike to enact drastic change. Just look at the climate change "debate" :'(

> not follow it.

How? Any idea?

A hard reset through a conflict aka war (and war preparation) on some scale has historically been used to reboot economies. Should Things get bad enough economically it'll happen again.

The obvious method would be to have more children.

Biology puts some limits on that. Fertility of women goes down in the fourth decade of life. The # of aneuploid ova rises sharply.

It is possible that there will be scientific development solving that, but so far, we do not have enough young fertile people to practice your obvious method, unless they were ready to have 4+ kids each.

in vitro fertilization is the development you are looking for, and exists for those who can afford it.

I know quite a lot about IVF, we are currently going through it.

For IVF to work, you need good ova (eggs). You can stimulate the woman to harvest eggs, but in women over 35, the share of ova that have unrecoverable genetic errors (aneuploidy) grows fast and women over 40 hardly have any good eggs.

This might be amenable to future therapies, given that old mice were currently medicated with NMN (a NAD+ precursor) and produced many more good eggs compared to the control group. But as of today, this is the hardest biological limit on IVF efficiency.

You can select for the good ova, but it's true that you are best off freezing eggs and sperm when you are young.

Being able to have kids at 40 does not change the fact that you will still have only 20-30 years left to spend on them.

You obviously didn't read the starting article.

or immigration.

I don't understand why Western countries are not incentivising people to have children.

Where I am in the US the average cost of first birth without c-section is ~$8k to the patient. With c-section it's ~$20k to the patient. ~30% of all births where I am are c-sections. These prices do not include any other treatment to the mother or child, only the delivery fee. I assume these prices include medicaid/VA patients as well, but I cannot confirm. Likely that means people not under government insurance are paying more than what I stated, but I'd go with those numbers with a gun to my head.

So, the simple act of having children in my part of the US is quite expensive.

At the moment (speaking for myself), cost of living is a negative pressure on having children; in a lot of places you can no longer own a house without a double income.

Most European countries give parents monthly stipends for children and even one-off payments for births, so that's.. a little incentive.

Yes. US wasn't incentivizing having children because the population growth historically always used to be a solid 1%. But it ended around 2008, so policy is likely to change soon.

"The West" taken in general predictably provides incentives when it sees effects of small or negative population growth.

Take for example stats for the year 2000 to see how the past shaped policy of today:

  - US 1.1%
  - France 0.7%
  - UK 0.4%
  - Germany 0.1%
  - Italy 0.0%

Some do.

One common tactic is to have very cheap daycare, which solves a huge issue for many. Quebec is the most notable example: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/05/quebec-ch...

You'd need to make a compelling reason for incentivizing it if anything.

Western countries are incentivized by corporate interests. Corporate interests don't care for children because they get in the way of profits. You'd need someone who can rise above corporate interests to do things like health care, children, human rights, etc.

> Corporate interests don't care for children because they get in the way of profits.

Baloney. People having more children is the dream scenario for all business--more children = more consumers = more economic growth.

This has nothing to do with some evil corporate boogeyman.

Just look at the data. There's a direct correlation between rising standards of living and having less children. This is because, if you give humans education and birth control, it turns out most of them don't actually want to have 8 kids.

No, they dream of having customers who buy more stuff.

As employers, having parents take care of children cuts into work and is a distraction.

It won't make much difference, people aren't having children because they don't want them.

source?

Their use of birth control.

Perhaps they are using contraception because there are disincentives, and they are working.

Couples usually need a good prospect for the future to commit to having children. Many don't feel that the future is bright enough.

It'd take a lot of propaganda to turn the ship around. Too many people are focused on short-term returns to collectively sign off on that.

Because we don't want to overpopulate as well.

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