We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US | Hacker News Reader

We Expect 300k Fewer Births Than Usual This Year in the US

nytimes.com

209 pointspseudolus444 comments

Birthrates are a powerful, but lagging/post-hoc indicator of public policy effects. It's worth noting that we tend to associate high birthrates with poverty and negative social outcomes. Except, when rates are low we (western countries) use immigration from high-birthrate societies to shore up the population replacement rate, as the article notes. When you look at who is having kids in the US and Canada, the families, (or specifically, women) who have 2 or more children are either exceptionally wealthy (90th+ pc) or exceptionally poor.

I'd speculate this is because if you are either rich or poor you have stability in that your life circumstances aren't going to change that radically, and hypothesize it's mainly educated middle class people who are having kids below the population replacement rate, if at all, because their lives do not find a relatively stable equilibrium. The mix of the promise of upward mobility that is always just out of reach, and the risk of "losing it all," creates a condition of constant low-level stress similar to other species that do not breed in captivity.

If you have the Malthusian or environmentalist worldview that fewer people is better, this is a positive (if cynical) development. But even that's not going to work because public debt and entitlements mean shoring up a replacement rate population with immigration from high-birthrate societies. The other thing is the people who are having kids create even more polarized opportunity, where the life outcomes of a 3-kid wealthy home vs. the outcomes of a 3-kid working class or public-dependent home are going to be alien to each other. An (increasingly rare) person from a single-kid middle class home is not only a social minority, but has to create more of their own opportunities because they are an outsider to both societies.

IMO, the covid baby bust is only a symptom of a much larger and longer term macro-decline, and just the beginning of the real and inevitable consequences of the post-war baby-boom generation.

Unfortunately much of the financial system (in the US anyway) is highly dependent on population growth. Many existing entitlements were created during periods of uncommon birth-rates with the expectation that the babies being born will grow and reproduce at the same rate as their parents. This growth hasn't materialized, and much of the existing growth can be attributed to immigrant inflows. Regardless of the environmental arguments against overpopulation, we are living in a competitive world, and historically, declining birth-rates have often not been favorable for sustaining sociopolitical influence and relevance or economic growth and stability. We are however, living in a unique time were robots and AI can potentially pick up the slack for whatever losses of productivity a lower population may cause. We will however still have to operate in a period of growing stagnation and inequality. Wealth will be less available through incomes (as it already is), and inequality, without the proper counter measures, can inflate to the levels more familiar in Jane Austen's time. You have more economic growth if you give 1 million people $100 dollars (since they are more likely to spend it on goods/services) vs giving $100 million to one person (who will likely spend the bulk of their money on financial instruments). An economy needs many people to spend money to grow, we’re now expected to have less people with less money to spend.

"Unfortunately much of the financial system (in the US anyway) is highly dependent on population growth."

I came to this discussion ctrl-f'ing for "deflation" and while I got zero hits, your comment is close enough ...

I will abstract one level deeper and rephrase what you said as:

"Much of the financial system is highly dependent on economic growth."

There continues to be fervent discussion of the results of QE over the last 10 years and the results of various covid stimulus packages and how these things could be inflationary, etc., etc.

Some of this may come to pass - we may, indeed, find ourselves in geographic or temporal pockets of inflation - possibly very high inflation.

Make no mistake, however: the world we are living in is massively deflationary and even dramatic and innovative attempts to maintain (low) inflation are barely keeping us above water ...

What do you mean? Inflation can be easily created - just create more dollars and credit them to people's bank accounts; you will soon see all kinds of prices going up.

If this was true, then the monetary policies of the 2008 financial crash and the 2020 pandemic would both have created consumer price inflation. They haven't. We've seen some asset price inflation instead. In effect we did create a bunch of dollars and credited them to people's home equity and mutual funds... where it just sat there doing a whole bunch of nothing to consumer prices and wages.

Having things cost more isn't an issue if the economy grows at relatively the same rate as the nation's money supply. For the economy to be considered inflationary, the money supply has to outgrow economic growth. The OP is making the argument (at least how I interpret it) that economic growth has been stagnant, and that the money supply hasn't been effectively put to work in the real economy. The US inflation rates are more a reflection of central bank activity vs the actual economy (which is deflationary).

Yes, but you have to give the dollars to the right people.

If we were truly suffering from an aging society then where is all the inflation? Where are all the rich old people spending their money but not finding enough workers to do everything they saved their money up for?

It's probably because retirement has to be financed by the individuals themselves. Nowadays retirement means cutting spending today so that you can spend tomorrow. There are rich old people who aren't cutting down on spending but simply keep saving their wealth and there are poor old people who are cutting down on spending to build up savings, even though they are officially above the retirement age. This leads to a savings glut which is something you cannot fix by adding even more money into asset markets.

> however: the world we are living in is massively deflationary and even dramatic and innovative attempts to maintain (low) inflation are barely keeping us above water

That reflection isn't looking down at the surface of the water, but rather up at the air that we need to head towards to stop drowning. Monetary inflation is a large part of what's killing the middle class. All that offshoring was supposed to cause lower prices to compensate for decreased need for domestic labor. Instead a whole bunch of monetary inflation was induced to force everyone to keep working the same amount, at jobs that no longer exist. As long as the Fed continues with its maladaptive policy that is directly opposed to technological progress, most all productivity gains will continue accruing to the upper class.

Why do you feel we're living in deflationary times?

I also would like to hear rsync's answer. But I'll make a guess:

The (world) population is no longer growing (much). But productivity growth hasn't stopped. The result is that stuff gets cheaper, that is, the same number of dollars buys more. That's deflation.

Worse, we've gotten to the point where many people have what they need - not necessarily everything they want, but most of what they need. (I'm not going to buy twice as much food if my salary doubles. I'm not going to drive twice as many cars. I'm not going to buy a house that's twice as big. I'd use almost all the money to pay off debt and to invest.) That makes it hard to create inflation in the basic stuff, because you can't make demand exceed supply.

Exactly. Just because tech is cheaper doesn’t mean food or my cost of living has decreased.

Because we are. Without taking action to curb it, the US will start to see deflation take hold. This is due to an overall aging demographic who are beginning to leave the workforce, an overall increase in savings/investment across the population, lowered rates of consumption, the younger demographic having less children, higher rates of education and on and on.

This has already begun to in both Germany and Japan. In the former, they've been able to curb things through government intervention. Japan on the other hand has really struggled.

Don’t mean to butt in, but personally, the fact that I’m typing this on a piece of $300 hardware (phone) that would have cost millions in the 80’s, hundreds of thousands in the 90’s, and definitely over a thousand in the 00’s is a good indicator.

> We are however, living in a unique time were robots and AI can potentially pick up the slack for whatever losses of productivity a lower population may cause.

Productivity growth is currently the lowest it's been since before the industrial revolution. AI and robotics may be revolutionizing a few specific domains. But there's no evidence that they're replacing the need for human labor any time soon.

That probably will happen at some point. But probably not in our lifetimes or even our children's lifetime. We still need able-bodied workers to run the economy.

> Unfortunately much of the financial system (in the US anyway) is highly dependent on population growth

It's not the financial system, it's the underlying economy. Back in the day, people had to have kids so there was someone to take care of them in their old age. The financial system abstract, but does not eliminate, that structural feature of the underlying economy. You still need young bodies producing goods and performing services for the elderly non-working population.

>You have more economic growth if you give 1 million people $100 dollars (since they are more likely to spend it on goods/services) vs giving $100 million to one person (who will likely spend the bulk of their money on financial instruments).

The US spends the majority of it's Federal Budget on giving small amounts of money to the non-rich, to the order of trillions of dollars per year.

Also, when someone puts money into a financial instrument, that money usually flows immediately into productive use. Capital flows are attributed with about 30% of the economic growth over the last century, which is a huge increase in quality of life, especially for the most poor.

>Also, when someone puts money into a financial instrument, that money usually flows immediately into productive use.

Yes but only under the assumption that aggregate demand always exceeds supply, which isn't true nowadays and that's why the economy is broken.

As a new father, I share this perspective. To get an anecdotal sense of our financial struggle, we have 2-4x the net worth that my parents when they were our age, but cannot afford the same house that I grew up in and doubt we ever will.

I’ve been thinking about this lately. Similar to you, the house I grew up in is much more less affordable now than it was when my parents bought it.

However, in my case it’s not really the same house any more. At the time, the location was thought to be on the outskirts of town, away from the desirable areas. As the city grew, this location became the desirable area. If I look to what is now considered the outskirts, I still see new construction in the $300K range (pre-COVID anyway), which is similar to the inflation-adjusted price of the house I grew up in.

At some point we can’t escape supply and demand with more buyers fighting over the same limited housing supply.

Many of my friends have been moving to less popular cities and up and coming towns as they start raising families, and it pays off. Obviously not an option for everyone’s situation, but thankfully the increase in remote work is relieving some of the pressure in overcrowded cities.

That's what I don't understand, if population growth is stagnant or declining, how is it these housing prices are reaching such heights?

Home prices keep reaching new heights in some areas due to:

1) Migration. Immigration from outside the country, but also internal immigration within the country from less economically vibrant parts to more economically vibrant regions.

2) Falling interest rates keeping the monthly mortgage payment the same or lower despite higher principals

3) Expectations that the price trend for homes will continue to look like the past. This expectation can lead to people buying more housing than they would normally consume.

4) Shrinking household sizes. You have gone from an average household size of 3.33 in the 1960s to an average household size of 2.53 today. That may not seem like much but you would need ~25% more housing today to accommodate the same population.

5) Larger house sizes. From a median of about 1000 sq ft in 1950 to 2300 sq ft today.

The above can combine to keep pushing up house prices in some areas (as we see in the US) even as the population growth of a country stagnates.

You can find cheap housing, the problem is it's all in places where most people don't want to live. For example, Detroit, or any of thousands of small towns all over the US.

Not picking on Detroit, it's just an obvious example of a large city that used to have a much larger population.

Because nobody wants to hold currency for extended periods of time.

> That's what I don't understand, if population growth is stagnant or declining, how is it these housing prices are reaching such heights?

Housing prices around me are directly correlated to school quality. The same house near a good school is literally 1.5x-2x the price.

The supply of good public schools is very limited. A good private school is ~20-30k a year. Figure that is worth 300k, not even counting that that over the years tuition prices will go up.

So people pay to live near one of the handful of good schools.

Seattle stopped busing kids awhile back, instead aiming to keep kids at "local" schools (IMHO to save money), so now unlike the opportunity I had as a kid (test well, get into a good school in the "right" part of town) the city is perpetuating generational poverty.

This has the effect of making pockets of the city have well rated and poorly rated schools. Previously schools were kinda mixed in quality, good programs and teachers at many different schools. Sure some had a reputation, but now the ratings are incredibly bi-modal, and housing prices follow that distribution.

Oh also in the last decade, the population has increased by 21 million. The growth rate is slowing, but it isn't zero. The way American cities are managed, it isn't possible to add sufficient housing. E.g. in 2019 around 40k people moved to the Seattle metro. 14k building permits were granted[1].

To put that in perspective, the most construction friendly city in America, Houston, approved 38k permits. (Not sure if these are for housing units, are permits overall inclusive of multi family dwellings).

FWIW Dallas got ~131k new people (US Census Bureau)

No surprise there is a problem. American cities are not capable of building fast enough.

[1] https://www.wfaa.com/article/money/economy/dallas-fort-worth...

Interest rates is much of it. Just calculate the total payments for a 30y, 100k mortgage in 1980 when the interest rate was 15%. It's 455k in total. The same amount as a 300k mortgage for today's 3% interest for 30 years, also 455k total. In other words, the monthly payments / total payments are the same and thus just as affordable at 3x higher prices, simply because interest rates dropped so much.

Second, there's indications of further concentration. If you have a 10x10 square of land and 100 people, you can each live on one square (spread-out) You can also all live on one square (concentrated). The price levels of the homes in the lived-squares of course grows the more we concentrate, even if total population is constant.

Concentration isn't a straight-line, e.g. NY depopulated in the 80s, but does tend to arc towards further urbanisation, further concentration, further population density. In large part because cities are knowledge/network centres, and our economy is based on knowledge/networks, whereas before our economy was based on e.g. agriculture, which is the opposite of concentrated. I'd be very interested to see if that will ever change due to a working-from-home / remote-work, and even virtual reality to have meaningful social and entertainment experiences remotely. It used to be if you lived in a small town, there'd be few jobs, few bars to meet people, few concerts to go to, no cinema. Many moved to the city despite higher prices, less room, noise and pollution and crime, in search for work and social life. But with remote work and VR, the calculus might change. (not 100%, but many a little bit, enough to bring a little bit of balance to the ever-growing concentration of people in a few big cities).

One explanation is rising amounts of space per person, the apartments are just getting bigger.

Because people want to live in the city. I bet you can find really cheap houses in the countryside.

Iirc A couple of days ago there was even a post up on HN that listed places where the government would give you land for free, and I think also some starting capital.

In the U.S.

1) Population continues to grow due to immigration and higher birth rates among immigrants.

2) Population is growing in some areas and declining in others, which is matched by housing prices increasing in some places but falling in others.

To some extent homes in affluent are expensive because they are expensive. Most rich people don't want to live near poor people and so they'll pay extra for that even if it seems economically irrational.

The US is still growing its population, via immigration rather than births.

Rich elites buy-out all properties/flats in cities because its a better overall investment taking to account inflation.

People who slave in that situation consider themselves unhappy and thus consider moving to a houses outside of the city. Due to limited infrastructure outside of the cities -> only a part of outskirts are really habbitable for those families. The demand in this case is higher than supply.

Demand is so low only because city politicians are too inefficient in providing new places with infrastructure.

We make up for it with immigration. I believe legal immigration is well over a million a year.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/08/20/key-finding...

Same, but the "outskirts" has gone from a 30 minute drive to work to a 2 hour drive to work. At some point something has to give.

Yup. This is the same phenomenon in India as well - the salary is "high", so you can splurge on furniture, buy reasonably priced cars etc. much easier than earlier generations. But we cannot afford to buy the same house my parents lived in at our income level.

This always feels like a weird argument.

In the part of Maryland (USA) that I live in, quite a few areas are named after families who lived here in colonial times, and they were granted huge swaths of land. But a descendant from one of those families today can't reasonably expect an estate of hundreds of acres. There's just not enough land to go around with the size of today's population.

Obviously, that's taking it to the extreme, but the population of India has probably doubled since 1980 or so. I don't know your age or your parents' ages, but there are certainly far more people in India now than when your parents were your age, so it wouldn't make sense for an equivalent amount of wealth to buy an equivalent piece of real estate compared to previous generations.

This mostly makes sense if real estate is already fully utilised, but it isn't.

I can't speak to India, but there's a feeling broadly in North America of having "new development" and "expansion" over time. Cities are much, much larger now than they were 40 years ago, and people imagine that the new farm land subsumed and developed should be available for a similar price relative to income to what it was 'back then'.

The XXX-acre rural farmland wasn't as valuable as the same space in town when purchased as a lot, but now it holds as many homes as that downtown space used to. Is it worth the same today, relatively, as that space was then? No, they're both worth comparatively way, way more than they were.

I don't mean to suggest that scarcity isn't a part of the equation here, more that there are a lot complex factors involved, e.g. wage levels relative to inflation over time.

Have you accounted for development induced appreciation? Perhaps a similar home further from the city center would be a more suiting comparison?

Anecdotally, in central New York housing prices have gained only modestly. The 2008 financial crisis didn't have a large effect on prices here either. But... development in central New York is near zero.

The Amish are fleeing high land prices in Pennsylvania. There is development of a sort.

Given that good jobs remained in the city center, and commutes are not faster than they used to be, the point is not very relevant.

The exact house or equivalent in a similarly populated area as the one your parents bought in? If the former, I imagine it's because the area has developed significantly since.

Exact house.

But why would you expect to be able to afford the same house even with higher net worth?

I mean, my folks bought a house I can afford either but when they bought it, it was on the edge of the city, not a desirable area in a 2nd tier city. That’s why it was cheap. Now it’s in a historic neighborhood, highly desirable in a city where everyone wants live.

I could afford a house similar to the one they bought in terms of those qualities. In fact it would likely be cheaper compared to salary.

Show me an affordable house in on the edge of NYC in the "undesirable" neighborhoods. Even if you pick neighborhoods past where subway lines end (a very undesirable quality for city property to have) that also happen to be high crime areas it is still too expensive for anyone to purchase. Like two examples look at New Lots/East New York and South Ozone Park/Jamaica. Both fit my description above, they are at the very edge of subway access, and are high crime areas, and both are too expensive for normal middle class people to buy property in.

Contrast this with great people I've met who are ~60 now, who just stumbled into the east village/alphabet city in the 1980s in their mid-20s and bought up cheap houses while bumming around paycheck to paycheck. What area of NYC or the valley can I do that in now? If the answer is none, and you can't point me to a city in the midwest or south where buying up cheap affordable property IS going to turn me into a multimillionaire when I'm ~50 what does that mean for our growth/stagnation culturally and as a country? This is the difference, there is no place that even has the faintest whiff of a city that is about to take off where such gains would even be possible.

In other countries that have similar issues in Europe, where a lot of cities are unbelievably expensive there are two solutions that you see a lot. One is that it is culturally common to live with your entire extended family and not be able to afford a house, and the second is welfare or new home ownership incentives that make it more viable. "Rugged Individualism" in American mindsets and cultures makes both options seem untenable but clearly we have to adapt.

1980s NYC did not have “the faintest whiff of a city about to take off”. That couple bought property in a crime ridden part of a crime ridden city. Tompkins Square Park was an open air drug market.

The equivalent today is a bad area of Detroit. I’m certain you can find something affordable there today. I doubt it will turn you into a multimillionaire, but if we were having this conversation in 1984 everyone would doubt buying in the East Village would get you anything other than mugged or shot.

Indeed. We make some 25x what my parents did, but with them I grew up in a property with a wonderfully large house and many acres of land. Yet here I am stuck in tiny house with no yard to speak of and couldn't possibly afford anything more given current cost of housing and land.

Is is it you that are the outlier or your dad? What kind of housing did your grandfathers and great-grandfathers have?

The point is precisely that neither of them is an outlier within their respective time -- they are normal people who want "normal" housing: i.e. just enough to raise a family in.

The parents born in the 30s-50s could largely afford to purchase homes large enough to raise a family in, but far fewer people born in the 70s-90s will be able to do the same.

This isn't really true. First, what's considered "big enough to raise a family in" has doubled since the 1950s-1970s. I grew up in an 1,100 square foot house built in the 1950s. The starter homes around us are double that size.

Also, as the U.S. grows, the "frontiers" obviously shift. Since 1970, the U.S. has grown from 205 million to 330 million, and the number of people per house has gone down significantly. Back when it was built in the 1950s, the house I grew up in was in a new development in a boring suburb of D.C--itself a boring city with mainly GS-scale government jobs. Now, with all the tech jobs in the D.C. area, it's become a more desirable, upscale place.

What used to be the boring, middle-class suburb is now somewhere around Kansas City, MO or Greensboro, NC. Houses in those places are just as affordable as the houses you grew up in. In fact, when you account for growing house size and falling interest rates, they are more affordable: https://donsnotes.com/financial/real-estate.html

> The parents born in the 30s-50s could largely afford to purchase homes large enough to raise a family in, but far fewer people born in the 70s-90s will be able to do the same.

Does not explain why home sizes grew 2.5x since the 1950s, while the average household size dropped from 3.4 to 2.5. (which is in large part due to the many single-person households).

There's many indications that we're enjoying much more real estate per person than ever before, real estate which is also much more luxurious and located in much more interesting locations, with better schools, more safety, more amenities etc.

Second, we tend to easily forget that the past wasn't divided equally. Being a woman and running your own household independent from a husband was a pipe dream for many women back then. Buying a home was a pipe dream for many black families, too. There's lots of such examples. This past we speak of where 'we all' had it better is often actually a bit of a narrow view of certain groups of people having it better, ignoring others who definitely didn't. Whereas now the average person is better off, in small part at the expense of a smaller group who used to dominate before.

This is highly dependent on society/nation standards. I grew up in a 750 sqft apartment (family of 5). My wife grew up in a 440 sqft (family of 4). Now I consider 250 sqft/person to be a palace, but in the US it's probably considered unlivable.

My point is that, at least in the US, the post World War II economy was unusual and the factors that lead to it are unlikely to ever be repeated.

We are reverting to the status quo ante about what middle class means.

I have the same job as my father. Grandparents immigrated at a young age and grew up in the same area of the city.

Makes you wonder whether you ever thought not having a baby might be a sensible option.

Please share the equation that determines the sensible option. I guess we'll disagree over the optimization ...

Some contend that this isn't a sign of poverty but rather a sign of wealth.

i.e., suppose every consumption good becomes 10x as cheap overnight. Cars, food, phones, clothes, travel by air, electricity, movies, music.

What would happen to home prices? Well, it's likely they'd skyrocket. All the additional disposable income has to flow somewhere, to some asset, and that's often real estate.

There's some indication that that's been happening. Of course there's many other stories in real estate which clearly indicates we're less well off than before, particularly certain groups.

But there's also many indications we're better off, but simply spending more of our money on RE, because in part, we can, because in part, we want to.

For example, compare the average home size (square footage) in 1950 to 2020 and anywhere inbetween, it's a pretty straight line that ends up a 2.5x increase.

Then compare the average persons per home, it decreased from about 3.4 to 2.5, in large part to the large number of single-person household, a luxury not affordable in the 1950s, especially not to women in a much more patriarchal society than today.

This means we've seen a tremendous increase in the square foot per person. That's a measure of wealth. The fact home prices skyrocketed due to the demand for these luxuries, and the (by definition) ability for Americans to afford to push prices to these levels, should not necessarily be seen as an affordability crisis, but rather as an indication of wealth.

Yes, if prices of bread skyrocketed and we were all consuming less because of it, that's poverty. But if the average bread consumption per household grew by 2.5x, and the average number of people eating that bread in the household dropped by 25%, then you can't quite say that on average we're less well-off, bread-wise.

And homes aren't the same as in the 1950s either. Today's homes are well-equipped with many luxuries and comforts. Finally, high prices are a bit misleading without taking interest rates into account. In the 1980s for example interest rates were 15%, you'd pay your home in full every 6 years in interest alone. Just look at the historical trend of interest rates, they're at record lows. For example, a 30 year mortgage of 100k at the 1980's 15% interest rate, costs as much in total payments, as a 30 year mortgage of 300k at today's 3% interest rate. A 3x price increase alone has absolutely no effect on affordability in the past 40 years due to the massive drop in interest rates. If you take into account the fact that nominal income grew by 5x since the 1980s as well, plus the larger square footage and the fewer people per home, it's easy to see why the cost of a square foot has actually become way more affordable. And given many things got so much cheaper, it's easy to see why so much wealth has flowed to RE.

Definitely don't want to pretend like there's no housing affordability issues anywhere, but I do want to nuance the view a bit that we're generally worse off than previous generations, in which housing is an oft mentioned example. But on balance, it's not really the clearest example for this generational loss of quality of life that people tend to think it is.

A different environmentalist worldview that I was raised with (as one of four kids of environmentalist parents):

Kids raised with an environmental mindset will have a larger positive impact than having fewer or no children. Their impact will outweigh their environmental footprint.

I’m curious how the logic works for that. I’ve always assumed that there’s effectively no way for an individual human to net-negative their own emissions/energy consumption/whatnot, just because of the sheer amount of material they need/use/consume (at least, in a Western society). A few outliers (Greta Thornberg?) may be able to effect sufficient policy to counteract their own environmental impact, but in the general case I don’t see how raising a kid with a strongly environmental-conscious mindset is at all better than just... not having a kid.

I've given a lot of thought to this. Here's a few points I think about:

0. Your own environmental impact is significantly reduced, so the baseline to "counteract" is lower than "Western society".

1. Change happens incrementally. Moving the needle in small ways slowly changes the big picture. Greta is moving the needle in big ways within her lifetime, but like you say, that's not the norm.

2. Raising awareness and leading by example can have an outsized impact in your community.

3. Voting and other political involvement (won't turn this political, but every vote matters, especially for local issues that might be decided by 50-100 votes).

4. Supporting companies that align with your values. Consider the total dollar spend of an individual over the course of their life.

5. Charitable giving. Tons of great work is being done around the world by non-profits. Even if you don't pursue a career in non-profit work, donating is tax deductible and goes a long way.

6. Raising your own children with a similar mindset.

7. Inventing and supporting new sources of energy, materials, and efficiency.

Interesting analysis, but I think you are discounting the number of people in each of these groups. Percentage basis, yes, the rich and poor will have more children. But both groups are not the 80% of the middle (using your 10% cutoffs on either end).

So I don't think children from the non-rich and non-poor society are going to be aliens in the world anytime soon. Sadly though, fewer will know life with siblings. To meet groups of siblings, you'll find more rich and poor - but only at their birth. Any number of those will change positions in society in any direction.

I could not agree more.

Whereas historically having kids used to be a "social" decision in various respects, it has now become a socio-economic decision for the reasons you point out.

If anything, I would argue that the economic shock of the pandemic (aside from the horror stories you hear from WFH parents who have kids) and the inequality it has exposed in our financial systems has cemented the idea for a lot of middle class millenials to have no kids/fewer kids.

It was always a socio-economic decision. Kids were your retirement plan before we came up with things like 401ks.

This is a very interesting perspective to me, because I know it’s relatively common in non-Western (or maybe just non-American?) cultures that parents move back in with their kids when they get old, or more generally that extended familial units are far more cohesive than they are in the States.

....Which then means your extended family (and own children) are indeed a ‘retirement plan’, because the expectation is that they’ll be around to support you when you’re unable to support yourself.

But the intensely individualistic American lifestyle doesn’t lend itself to that thinking very well, so there’s less incentive for folks to have kids for their own interest.

(Indeed, as a mid-20s couple, we’re more often told the ways in which children _limit_ the lives of the parents, rather than augment them.)

> An (increasingly rare) person from a single-kid middle class home is not only a social minority, but has to create more of their own opportunities because they are an outsider to both societies.

I don't follow: is a single kid from a middle class family an outsider to kids from other middle class families where they have 2 or 3 kids? I mean, I understand that middle class is neither rich nor poor, but what's the difference for a unique child compared to middle class families with serveral kids?

Do the siblings typically provide opportunities for their brothers/sisters? (I'm personally launching atm a new endeavor with my brother but I don't see that as particularly common).

I'm also not sure what they're getting at but here's my anecdote FWIW.

I never fit in well with the other welfare kids that came from families with many kids. Nor did I fit in with the middle class and up kids always flexing their Nikes, vacations, cars, and other vapid things I could never dream of getting.

My circumstance did allow me to mingle with the various classes and see how they live and succeed. The poor families rapidly introduce the kids to low pay manual labor jobs in grocery stores, farms and the like. The better off families got their kids fun summer jobs near their summer homes working banana stands or giving guided tours.

The differences become even more stark in college, for those who went that is. The relationships gained from introductions made by the well offs family and friends pay massive dividends immediately if you speak the right language. By which I mean one doesn't speak like a poor person. Between private job offers, highly paid internships, and favor trading the poor kids don't just have the deck stacked against them, they're playing with the cards and chips that've fallen off the table, but only against the other poors.

The one constant between classes is drug use. There's a lot of drug use in all these groups, even the DARE/ROTC/AP kids. The difference is that the poor kids self medicating away their shit hand, while the rich kids are rebelling against their parents, self medicating their home problems like abuse and emotional neglect, or trying to get an edge in classes/work. Rarely do well off kids fall into hardcore addiction. I've seen a lot of kids taken to very expensive rehab clinics multiple times. Poor kids don't get these vacations and access to world class shrinks.

Siblings tend to follow the familial mean. Sure sometimes a rich family has a complete failure of a child, but most of the time they're mediocre middle management coasting through life on their laurels continuing the time honored tradition of trading favors with and smoothing over the rough patches for their kids and siblings. Siblings in poor families do the same things, but with limited means comes limited success.

To clarify, if you are a 3+ kid poor person, you will come from a family that is likely very poor. If you are a 3+ kid rich person, your parents are probably 95th percentile.

If you aren't from the neighbourhood for the first group, you're not trusted, and if you don't just know certain things, you aren't trusted by the second, because each group quietly assumes you're really part of the other. It's what we used to call class, and that's what I meant by being alien to each other.

There are exceptions. The most interesting ones are religious communities. Few people who belong to a church would accept being called poor no matter what their income was, and religious people with middle class jobs have lots of kids as well.

The other anomaly is the new institutional who have the iron stability of things like academic tenure, teachers unions, municipal and state employees, who only receive that stability at an age just as their fertility starts to wane, and usually after sacrificing it to get there.

It would be hard to argue that public policy has been anything but anti-natal for the last 50 years.

I have neither the "Malthusian or environmentalist worldview" nor the opposite, which seems to be dangerously close to a "nationalist or eugenics worldview". In other words: any grievances about birth rate on a population-wide level run the risk of spurning legislation or other changes with the purpose of forcing (with varying level of vehemence) individuals to make reproductive choices they otherwise wouldn't.

Specifically, it's hard to interpret the universal drop in birth rates among societies as they advance on anything but women exercising their newfound freedom not to have children. Many attempts to reverse the trend will thus look to reverse these changes.

To be sure, there are other policy ideas one could advance, and some examples of them working well, such as universal childcare, mandatory parental leave for both genders, and some others that share the distinction of having zero chance to become law in the US.

I'm taking the liberty to advocate for ignoring any population-wide concerns about birth rates because even in the most extreme cases such as Germany or Japan, and even moreso in the US where it's relatively mild, the effect just isn't strong enough to lead to any insurmountable problems. Given a bit more automation and medical advances that keep people not just alive but fit, the problems of an ageing population seem to be solvable, especially as long as there is still significant will to immigrate, which does not seem likely to abate.

Perhaps this is a marker of the divide in worldviews.

If we can't develop a country and a society people willingly want to have kids in, what is it for?

People do want to have kids, but the physical process of going through pregnancy and birth is brutal and dangerous. The people who have to do it quite rationally don't want to do it four times in the same decade once they have any other choice, even if it would be socially optimal. The best thing we can do at this point is develop the technology to create babies outside of human wombs.

> The mix of the promise of upward mobility that is always just out of reach, and the risk of "losing it all," creates a condition of constant low-level stress similar to other species that do not breed in captivity.

I think there's a mix of underlying causes for it, but I think college is one of the big ones. If you want a stable life, college may help. Many people go to college. However it is not conducive to having children while you do it. Then you graduate, and move into the job market.

Except it doesn't have the stability it used to. Pensions are gone, and rewards for loyalty remain too low to be compelling most place. So people job hop to get raises. You have to make sure you earn enough to live stably and comfortably, and also fund your retirement after all. Declining real wages also mean that you hit the "comfortable and stable" stage of life later in life (if at all).

The push to equalize the gender income gap also puts downward pressure on the birth rate, imo. Pushing women to want to be mothers is wrong, but it does seem that it would increase the birth rate. It may also be harder to get to higher paying jobs while handling pregnancy and children, which could discourage having children. To be clear, I'm not blaming women, those were horrible societal acts and I don't think we should revert them, just noting that the birth rate in a more equal society might be lower.

And lastly, I think social media has taken "keeping up with the Jones" to a whole new level where you're trying to compete on a global scale. Even if you can avoid that, there are ads lurking around every corner trying to convince you to spend money on things you don't really need. I'm not against the premise of ads in general, but they're so pervasive now. You can't do anything without someone trying to convince you to buy something. I truly believe it creates more pressure to spend, which creates downward pressure on peoples' ability to save. If ads were really that easy to resist, they wouldn't be worth much, and Google would be a tiny company.

I agree with you. The only way out of this is via automation. If we have high enough automation, costs will drop despite lack of growth. In the end the world will be a stark 0.001% who own the automation and the flat 99.999% who subsist on leisure and boredom.

> In the end the world will be a stark 0.001% who own the automation and the flat 99.999% who subsist on leisure and boredom.

Leisure? Or poverty?

This strikes me as a return to the default state for much of human existence and the current reality for much of the world's population.

I agree, and here's where I have to plug the excellent "Rules for Rulers": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

Basically - a bit of an oversimplification, watch the video for a full explanation - democracies only stay democracies because giving people a relatively good life happens to coincide with citizen productivity, which increases leader wealth. If a country relies on a source of revenue that itself doesn't rely on the citizenry, then improving the lives of the citizenry is more or less irrelevant to the leaders, as in authoritarian governments.

That's what makes automation so scary. At a certain point, no country will need rely on the majority of the citizenry to produce wealth. Which means we are screwed.

> I'd speculate this is because if you are either rich or poor you have stability in that your life circumstances aren't going to change that radically,

In the U.S. this may be due not to 'stability', but Medicaid.

To be clear, Medicaid benefits are a hot mess of bureaucracy. To paraphrase Voltaire: 'The point of Medicaid is to ensure that no two people are covered under the same set of rules'.

That said, Medicaid covers ~22% of the U.S. population. The Medicaid yearly income cut-off for a 2-person household is ~$57k/year. Most of the costs of a pregnancy are covered under Medicaid [0].

What are such costs? Well, again, it's very complicated, no birth is 'standard'. And googling this is going to lead to a wide range of answers. But in my local area for a first birth, one baby, no c-section, no epidural, no emergency measures, you're looking at ~$20k out of pocket. And that's with a 'good' HCP. C-sections go to ~$80k, and those are ~20% of first births in my area. Again, the costs will vary wildly depending on many factors.

Then you add in check-ups, vaccinations[1], standard illnesses, ear infections, etc. Medicaid will mostly cover these things, while anyone making more than the cut-off must pay them out of pocket with their HCP discounts, if applicable (again, caution, it's super complex bureaucracy).

The interesting thing is to look at other countries with mostly functional universal healthcare systems. What has happened to their birthrates based on income when you look at how much a mother can be expected to pay for a birth? From what I can recall, there seems to be no real difference as compared to the US, correct?

[0] https://www.growingfamilybenefits.com/medicaid-coverage-duri...

[1] They may be free, but it depends on your HCP. Sometimes the nurse to inject will bill pretty high. I've gotten ~$300 bills for vaccinations before.

I've never heard of anyone paying $80k for a c-section out of pocket, and I know a lot of people that got them. Hell, my wife had to have 2 and the total bills were around $25k, and we paid around $2k out of pocket after insurance.

Again, I'm just going off of what google returned to me about the area where I live. The costs are going to vary wildly from state to state.

> when birthrates are low we use immigration

This is why I don’t believe in ecology. Every 5% we save on water, is being used by our leaders to stuff more population on the same land.

It defeats the purpose of saving: Public policies cancel individual efforts, such as my friends who chose to have no kids for ecology.

Capitalism is a way of forwarding global constraints to individuals, and exponential house prices communicates that the territory cannot survive with more people. Yet, not only do we increase population (so all those “no kids” friends are up for disappointment), but we bring those newcomers to the levels of consumption of middle classes, using lowered prices so they can afford 70% of mid-class consumption levels.

Since our leaders break the relationship between environmental constraints and costs, by offering free housing, food and subsidized public services, people believe it is ok to be 120 people per square kilometer, and we can afford to love and welcome more people. No! Each additional individual emits greenhouse gases! We’re already emitting ~3x the affordable rate! We should have taken the naturally decreasing population to smoothly become more sustainable, but our government decided to add 0,5-1% population per year, artificially! Our land can’t afford more people!

The only solution is having fewer babies worldwide. National borders don’t stop people from moving where opportunity is.

Imposing our point of view to other countries would be neocolonialism. A country should be free to make more babies, if that come from another assignation of resources and if they have control. Unless we start that their babies is our problem (Sorry it’s a bit crude - but this topic is a minefield anyway so I’m just stepping on each of them to test them).

India or China seem to deal well with extremely high density of population (...because their political system can withstand extreme inequality/poverty), while the West’s balance is lower. But with the same density as China, Africa overflows a lot.

Maybe “their babies is our problem” is a natural consequence of the Marrakech Pact (which blurs the lines of economic migrants, paving the road to guaranteeing they can migrate)?

> public debt and entitlements mean shoring up a replacement rate population with immigration from high-birthrate societies

There are very few of these left, and the ones that still exist are also in declining fertility, even if still above replacement.

> When you look at who is having kids in the US and Canada, the families, (or specifically, women) who have 2 or more children are either exceptionally wealthy (90th+ pc) or exceptionally poor

Source?

I don't understand your view that population growth is required to manage debt. Isn't it inflation that reduces the future value of such debts?

Population growth ostensibly creates economic growth, which generates tax receipts to pay down public debt. We're about to hit a wave of massive inflation, which rewards asset owners and punishes workers and savers.

Further, I used to think that millennials were poorer than they think they are, but then it clicked they absolutely understand, and that's why they behave exactly like the poor people they subconsciously recognize they in fact are.

If you took the traditional criticisms of how the poor manage their lives you'd get things like, a lack of long term planning, blowing money on gaudy status signalling to attract other poor partners or mates, a temporary and transactional attitude to work, lots of unsecured high interest debt, hyperbolic reactions to perceived slights, superstitious beliefs, extreme promiscuity, isolating and sabotaging people who make their own way as not being authentic, a lot of people would unironically say those are racist and classist stereotypes, without seeing that they accurately describe the lives of ostensibly middle class white millennials.

They know they're poor and they're acting like it, and they have less hope than policymakers imagine. Inflation wouldn't make a difference because they don't have any savings, and they don't have assets, it's just another force they're subject to.

"So we drink and dance and screw, because there's nothing else to do..."

>They know they're poor and they're acting like it, and they have less hope than policymakers imagine. Inflation wouldn't make a difference because they don't have any savings, and they don't have assets, it's just another force they're subject to.

The entire point is that inflation forces asset owners to do something useful. Inflation is beneficial to those who are dependent on an income.

Millennials actually are less promiscuous and have sex later and less often than their previous generations.

So your points are not only classist, but wrong too.

This is probably mostly covid related. But I personally don’t even consider kids. Kids are a life long commitment. I’d only make that commitment if I felt long term stability or at least optimism. Austerity and cynicism dominate the US right now though. It’s a recipe for strife, struggle, and things that rip families and countries apart. It doesn’t have to be this way in the US.

> Austerity and cynicism dominate the US right now though.

This is greatly exaggerated by news media and social media, especially with everyone stuck at home. The contrast between what I read online and what I see in the real world has never felt larger.

Austerity refers to reduced government spending, which is the opposite of what we’re experiencing right now. We’re spending so much that my CPA friends are working overtime to help businesses figure out what to do with their stimulus money. Prices for goods like lumber are through the roof because construction demand is off the charts. My local construction companies don’t have any availability until Q4, if they’re taking bids at all.

Obviously we have problems that need to be addressed, but the combination of 24/7 news media and politicians competing for our attention has exaggerated these issues to the point that we’re losing our ability to put things in perspective or judge the absolute scale of social issues.

This is not meant to be a cynical take, but where do you see investment in America right now that's not being done in a corporation?

All I see is "we can't afford to do this" while the military wastes trillions of dollars on pet projects.

When I look at how other countries treat their citizens, I can't help but think of the guy who calls us, "human capital stock."

That, IMHO, is how the U.S. views its citizens.

Borrowing rates have never been lower and corporate debt issuance has never been higher. Companies are investing.

What I experience in real life is pretty bad. My extended family went from being really close and compassionate to hateful and unable to be in the room with others.

Your world might be nice, but not everyone else's is.

(I'm sorry about your family. I'm not trying to discount your experiences, just bring the GP comment proper context). I don't think you understood the parent comment. They weren't saying that everything is rosy, they were saying that the economic doom and gloom portrayed in the media (especially surrounding COVID) does not make the current economic reality. The context was not social polarization.

Ultimately people are the cause and our media is a symptom. Folks want to hear doom, outrage, oversimplified & radical takes, and the reinforcement of their beliefs. That sells. Supply and demand. So your outlet can play ball or get steamrolled by someone who will. I think mywittyname is right to focus on the people, not the media symptom.

> My extended family went from being really close and compassionate to hateful and unable to be in the room with others.

I can't speak to your personal situation, but from what I've seen this is usually driven by the exact trends the person you're responding to is pointing out. Exaggerated media and politics.

> We’re spending so much that my CPA friends are working overtime to help businesses figure out what to do with their stimulus money.

So really what you and @lanai are talking about seem to identify you both are in completely different strata.

As the US experiences more and more social/economic stratification, these separate realities become more divergent (canonical YMMV).

It's peak ignorance to pretend everyone has the same conditions as you. Stats show many people are suffering.

This is pretty much the crux of why we see unrest and increased polarization. There are the afore mentioned CPAs with just too much stimulus money to spend, people buying houses faster than they can be built, or the high net wealth individuals that might as well be aliens on mars (and coincidentally can't wait to do). Meanwhile people are falling deeper behind on rent payments with delinquency figures at 25% in NYC, unemployment figures hovering around 10%, small businesses forced into insolvency, and a radically different landscape when this is all said and done.

Those at the very top made out like a bandit, and there are a cohort of the PMC that will to be fine. For this group to be so out of touch with reality to downplay or outright ignore these issues is a direct path to a very angry segment on society.

I did not want to have kids. Then one day I realized that for the past 3 billion years my ancestors had been passing the torch. I was not going to be the one to let down the team. I felt a duty to give my genes a chance to fight it out in darwin's cage match. I can not guarantee my genes will win, but if I fail to reproduce I guarantee they will lose.

Looking back, I am not sure this justification makes any sense, but it was how I thought at the time.

In any case it's moot now because it turns out kids are great fun to have around and generally make life better. Except the car seats, car seats are a pain in the ass.

I'm always suspicious of anecdotes that go "I never wanted to do [thing], and then I had a thought that changed my perspective on [thing] though it's not really logical up front, and then [thing] happened and now I love [thing]." I always suspect it's the psycological immune system [1] kicking in to alter your own perceptions of [thing] so you don't go crazy, because [thing] was originally something you Did Not Want and being stuck with the consequences otherwise would just drive you nuts.

Specifically with the biological imperative argument... I've always felt the opposite effect: being aware that my biology so wants me to have children makes me doubt whatever impulses I may have towards having children as being motivated by what I want, and instead being motivated by an evolutionary adaptation that doesn't take my psychology into account.

[1] https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_the_surprising_science...

It also reminds me of the choice-supportive bias.[1]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choice-supportive_bias

>I can not guarantee my genes will win, but if I fail to reproduce I guarantee they will lose.

It's probably not so wise to make decisions based on anthropomorphizing genes. They don't want anything other than to replicate, given that they're replicators and if they didn't they wouldn't continue to exist, that's all there is to it, it's a pretty meaningless affair.

I feel paying more attention to one's cultural legacy probably makes more sense than passing one's hair colour on.

That's not to say that having kids can't be fulfilling because many people get a lot of joy out of raising kids, but having attachment to a bunch of nucleotides seems kinda degrading to be honest

Perhaps it would be better for your other genes (shared by living relatives) for you to not have kids and thus not potentially spread the genes that are causing hesitancy around having kids. :)

I've never had kids, but I have many sisters and cousins who have, so my genes have already been passed on.

I'm personally mostly indifferent and sometimes want my own, but it's my wife's choice more than mine and she has medical issues that would make pregnancy extremely unpleasant and dangerous.

Your ancestors were just fucking without contraception. They weren't trying to "pass on the torch" or anything silly like that.

Historical creation myths seem to say otherwise. E.g. those referring to seed, or fruit of the loins, or commandments to multiply.

Maybe not consciously, but what about subconsciously?

Kids might make your life better, but they probably would have been better off had you stuck to your plan of not having them.

Such doom and gloom! You really believe the future is gonna be so bad that children would be better off not existing at all?

The world has huge issues, sure, but it's still far better to be alive now than any time in human history. The only way the future could be worse is if this idea becomes mainstream and the prophecy self-fulfilling.

Not existing is better than existing? Suicide rates should be 99% then right, because if you’re not a 1%er it’s not worth living.

That said, I do fear my kid will live to see something we’ve made apocalyptic movies about. Hell, we all might.

I get the impression that you are not very happy in life.

Pretty much every single generation other than your parents (assuming you’re 25-40) had a tougher time and lived in a world with a more uncertain future. Every generation, going back millions of years.

That's not even remotely true.

The vast majority of humans had very very stable futures. Like tens of thousands of years stable.

Civilization as we know it is very very recent and unstable.

The Cold War seems to have evaporated entirely from the collective imagination. For nearly half a century, people had a not unreasonable expectation that a nuke might end the world at any moment.

Prior to that, you had WW2, the Depression, WW1, slums and brutal industrial factory jobs and before that mostly subsistence farming. The idea that life today is so precarious and difficult is absurd. We just aren’t used to difficulty.

> We just aren’t used to difficulty

This is it absolutely. We can’t even fully understand how easy our lives are. I’m an adult with mouths to feed, yet both my wife and I barely know how to cook. And that’s only our biggest problem assuming we have access to food. We certainly have no clue how to procure food outside of retail.

This is part of what worries me for my kids. It’s been so easy, the equilibrium is more difficult. As we know from covid, weather events, etc our whole way of life is a fragile house of cards.

The Cold War is still going on.

We are still at risk of nuclear destruction. Not only are the old weapons still around but we are making new ones for some crazy reason. (Check the Doomsday Clock, I'm not the only person who has noticed that atomic war is still threatening this planet.)

You have to take the long view: For approximately a million years we lived in very stable societies (as judged by the artifacts and art left behind.) In fact the people of Sentinel Island and some other places still live this way.

Very recently, since roughly 10k to 15k ago, we started doing agriculture and cities. Since then things have been rough: wars, famines, societies collapsing, etc.

Despite that, in the last 400-500 years, we have developed science and technology, which has increased and accelerated civilization but not stabilized it.

Now of course some people have had it pretty good for, say, the last century or so (I date it from the ready availability of hot and cold running water in the tub. If you can take a hot bath you're ahead of the game, IMO.)

And that's great! And more and more people are getting in on that, which is also great!

But if you want to say, as you did, that "Pretty much every single generation other than your parents (assuming you’re 25-40) had a tougher time and lived in a world with a more uncertain future. Every generation, going back millions of years." that's wrong. It's only going back a few thousands of years, at most, and then only for a small fraction of the people on Earth.

That's before the problem that luxury the few are enjoying is bought at the cost of the life or our whole planet! Is it really so great after all if some people get to live well for a generation or two but then everybody (that survives) has to live in post-apocalyptic hell?

Sentinel Island will be destroyed by the rising ocean in a few decades or so. The folks that have lived there for some 40,000 years will die or be forced to migrate. That's on us, not them.

Stable may be correct. But part of that stability was high infant / child death rates and very low life expectancy.

A good fraction of the pre-civilization humans were killed by a blow to the head...

In historical Europe, the probability of dying due to skull fracture varied between 2 percent (some places in England), 7 percent (London) and 20 percent (Croatia).

Not to mention early death from famine and disease and other forms of homicide.

The notion that we've got it harder now is wrong on all counts.

There's a case to be made that we've got new existential risks due to technological progress (climate change, nukes, AI), and that's accurate, but tech/civilization will also help us to offset other existential risks (asteroid impact, pathogen). So that's up for debate.

> That's not even remotely true.

I beg to differ - when's the last time you heard of a famine or major war in the 1st world? (same cannot be said of elsewhere, it is true)

> when's the last time you heard of a famine or major war in the 1st world?

Does what we're doing (I'm Team USA) in the Middle East count?

In re: expectations of a stable future and the pros and cons of modern civilization, in the USA more people have died in car accidents than in all the wars we've fought.

Following this logic, Niger must be filled with stability and optimism, and Norway is similar to the US in instability and pessimistic outlook for the future.

That's a valid perspective, but times have been a lot worse in the past. It's a good job our ancestors didn't think like this.

It's not that they didn't think like this but that they couldn't.

Thanks to readily available and affordable birth control individuals have much more freedom to make reproductive choices that benefit themselves.

What those individual freedoms do to society as a whole is another issue but it is entirely within the ability of western governments to increase birthrates through policy. The fact that they don't is most interesting.

Ehh... I wouldn't assume that's the whole reason. It's been known for a pretty long time how to not have a baby if you don't want one, physically.

Two other factors are religion, and the fact that children are now expenses into their mid-twenties rather than income-generating/household-contributing in their teens.

There’s plenty of counterpoints to this around the world and including in the USA today. Our ancestors just thought differently about family, progeny, and themselves than we do, and that’s fine.

True, birth control does make that choice easier.

This isn't true. There were ancient, relatively effective methods of birth control. And if you really couldn't care for kids they became orphans.

Also with larger extended families and closer knit societies many people would "gift" their kids to others who were barren.

5 out of my mother's 15 cousins were adopted (without their parents dying).

History is not a monotonically increasing function of progress. Things can and often do get worse in the short term and there's no reason the past can't be better than the present.

You could say now is a local minimum, but in what time period? Out of the last twenty years? Maybe. The last hundred? Probably not.

That's a very sensible perspective. Unfortunately, you will probably, as most people do, change your mind about this and decide to have children anyway.

http://www.paulgraham.com/kids.html

Makes sense. Time are certainly filled with more strife and struggle than the Great Depression, Dust Bowl, polio epidemics and two World Wars.

>Time are certainly filled with more strife and struggle than the Great Depression, Dust Bowl, polio epidemics and two World Wars.

I really don't see how you could possibly come to that conclusion. I think your outlook may be affected by Mean World Syndrome:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mean_world_syndrome

Seriously, people need some fucking perspective. Yeah, things aren't too hot right now, but that's because all you do is consume the 24/7 newscycle and worry about what some nobody on Twitter is agonizing over about Disney's latest TV show. The world is the safest it's ever been. Aside from Covid, many massive killers of the past are no longer a problem. Our ancestors would be shaking their heads if they saw the prosperous times we live in now, but don't choose to have children.

I was reflecting just this morning how glad I am that I don't have children. (And I don't follow the 24/7 newscycle or use Twitter.) You want perspective?

The Doomsday Clock is still set to 100 seconds before midnight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock

> Aside from Covid ...

Covid isn't the last virus. And the tools we use to fight it are also the tools we could use to make worse ones. (Every tool is also a weapon. As long as people are willing to hurt each other technology is fraught with danger.)

Here's a brand new failure mode to worry about: "A puzzling lack of thiamine is disrupting some marine ecosystems." https://www.hakaimagazine.com/features/the-oceans-mysterious...

We don't yet know how bad it is nor what's causing it.

And where the hell are all the bugs!? It's warming up now and there's nobody out there. That should scare the fuck out of you. It does me.

How many habitable planets are there? One. There is one habitable planet.

>The Doomsday Clock is still set to 100 seconds before midnight.

>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Clock

The same article points out it's not exactly objective, and I'm inclined to agree. It's more of a political (ie. subjective) statement that the world is fucked rather than an objective measure.

>Cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker harshly criticized the Doomsday Clock as a political stunt, pointing to the words of its founder that its purpose was "to preserve civilization by scaring men into rationality." He stated that it is inconsistent and not based on any objective indicators of security, using as an example its being farther from midnight in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis than in the "far calmer 2007". He argued it was another example of humanity's tendency toward historical pessimism, and compared it to other predictions of self-destruction that went unfulfilled.[24]

You’re worried about the Doomsday Clock? You realize it’s just made up right?

Where will those children sleep? Every bedroom you add drastically increases the cost of already exorbitant housing. That’s just one of many basic necessities out of reach to most people, but it’s probably the biggest.

This study seems relevant https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2378023121996854

> Fewer young adults are engaging in casual sexual intercourse now than in the past, but the reasons for this decline are unknown.

And this recently discussed article

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/20/opinion/sunday/endocrine-...

> Scientists are concerned by falling sperm counts and declining egg quality. Endocrine-disrupting chemicals may be the problem.

While endocrine disruption or inhibitors are very likely a factor to blame, I think we also have cultural and socioeconomic factors compounding the problem. There are so many who just don't want to deal with the current dating and casual sex culture. The rewards for time investment and effort just aren't that high compared to alternatives available to many, compounded by other factors of daily life competing for that time.

In heterosexual groups, it's challenging for many men (from my experience) who are interested in casual sex but the effort is simply too high for them to pursue so they largely just check-out (I know quite a few heterosexual males who just feel like it isn't worth their time anymore). In other groups like the LGBTQ+ arena, specifically gay men, it's not nearly as difficult to find the sexual reward many seek and as a result, you'll find casual sex seems quite high. I have quite a few friends here as well and they continue to seek and find causal sexual encounters, dates, etc. or at least they say.

I'd be very interested to see if any empirical data exists that shows casual sex rates over time, normalized, and broken into heterosexual and non-heterosexual groups. If there's a similar decline in both groups then I suspect endocrine disruption may be the real problem. If there's less correlation, I'd tend to think much is culturally driven.

Our entire society has been flooded with low effort high (short term) reward entertainment activities.

Psychology has been weaponized to optimize addictive behavior loops. Instead of going outside and talking to people being the norm, now people have to make a concerted effort to pull themselves away from their psychologically addictive pocket sized happy fun device, convince others to do the same, and then arrange a time to go out.

Socializing is messy, painful, and difficult. But for the majority of human civilization, there weren't very many alternatives for entertainment!

> who are interested in casual sex but the effort is simply too high for them to pursue

They are outcompeted due to a lack of initiative and willpower; that's evolution doing its job.

This comment is needlessly flippant. The move to online dating (and social media profiles in general) has radically shifted how dating works. A quick look at any research from OK Cupid or others who investigate perceptions, ratings, etc. very clearly shows that it’s become a meat market where a small number of men get a disproportionate amount of the available dates. Before online dating, expectations were generally more in line with reality and dating was far less of a chore.

Evolution is not prescriptive. Just because a certain outcome is favored by evolution doesn't mean that outcome is good.

>Poverty no doubt discourages marriage, but doesn’t always prevent it. And it seems to be positively favourable to generation. A half-starved Highland woman may bear more than 20 children, while many a pampered fine lady is incapable of bearing any and is generally exhausted by two or three. Barrenness, so frequent among women of fashion, is very rare among those of lower station.

>Luxury may inflame in the fair sex the passion for enjoyment, but it seems always to weaken—and often to destroy—the powers of generation

Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

Given that he wrote that when North America was a rebellious colony where no chemicals were in common use and that we essentially all much, much, much richer than the rich people he talks about here it seems more likely to be something fundamentally human.

Didn't a study just come out showing that casual sex is declining because kids have other things (mostly video games) to do?

Table 2 has several hypothetical factors that seem more likely culprits

Important to note the 300k is a hypothesis

> Official birth data from the U.S. National Center for Health Statistics will not be available for many more months, but some states have already released provisional birth data. In January 2021, which would be the first month in which all full-term babies born were conceived after the lockdown began, births fell by 7.2 percent in Florida and 10.5 percent in California, after adjusting for secular trends, seasonal variation and the use of provisional birth data.

I'm surprised by this, as I had expected the opposite. Couples are spending a lot of time together being confined to their home without much entertainment, so I'd expected that to result in more baby making

I guess the stress from the uncertainty of the future and lack of personal space more than countered that

Time for me to adjust my assumptions about the world... And probably check my privilege, since I'm massively underestimating the impact the pandemic has had on a large part of the population

>Couples are spending a lot of time together [...], so I'd expected that to result in more baby making

But a counteracting force is that some couples think 9 months ahead and are afraid of delivering their baby in a COVID-overloaded hospital.

COVID makes the opportunities for conception easier but adds to the stress and uncertainties of delivery and postnatal care. (So maybe more sex activity but also more contraception to prevent pregnancies.)

It's like that anecdote I heard of the forced shelter-at-home lets people do home-improvement projects but some are afraid of getting on high ladders because if they fall and seriously injure themselves, they are afraid the busy hospital won't be able to see them quickly. COVID changes the risk profile even for people who don't get COVID.

> But a counteracting force is that some couples think 9 months ahead and are afraid of delivering their baby in a COVID-overloaded hospital.

My wife works in a maternity ward.

Babies are a high priority. They're fully prepared to deliver babies from covid-positive mothers. (And, yes, there's been plenty of covid-positive mothers.)

And, because visitors are strictly limited, it's actually quite easy in the maternity ward.

I went in because we got pregnant thanks to being stuck at home. It's much more peaceful without a parade of visitors, but super-scary because some of the delivery rooms have negative pressure machines in case there's a covid-positive mother.

We have two kids (meticulously over-planned :) ), but when I look back to the incredible level of uncertainty that was in the world in March-May of last year, we'd have taken significant precautions to not get pregnant during that timeframe.

No one knew what hospitals were going to look like in July 2020, let alone Feb 2021. I'm glad that we are in a stable situation where providing in-hospital labor&delivery care is reasonably safe, but you couldn't have really banked on that to be the case at the critical start of the process.

During the height of severe covid cases in my area a lot of hospitals were not even allowing spouses in during delivery, so yes it was still relatively safe but definitely not the same.

It's not the fact that hospitals cannot handle it.

It's when you consider the cost-benefit of the increased risk associated with being in the hospital during a pandemic and possibly experiencing stronger symptoms/complications because of the pregnancy if getting sick, the scale tips away from trying for kids.

The uncertainty isn't just the COVID overload, but also no doulas/support people, and not knowing if the father is even going to be allowed in the building in case something unusual happens.

I’m in San Francisco, where we’ve consistently had some of the most restrictive policies.

My wife is pregnant and they’ve told me the whole time that I’d be allowed in for the birth, but while rates were climbing I’ve been unable to attend any appointments or ultrasounds. It’s been kind of surreal knowing that, yes, we’re having a baby, but not having been able to really see it.

Now that rates have dropped, I’m finally going to be able to attend my first ultrasound today and I’m totally stoked!

My wife and I had our first son at the end of 2019, right before the outbreak. We’ve heard from friends that women are delivering wearing a mask now.

My wife thinks that she wouldn’t be able to do that and that she would pass out. The level of breathing required to deliver a baby is intense.

She has basically threatened the livelihood of my genitalia if I impregnate her during the pandemic. She’s kidding, right? ;)

Caring for a baby once it's born is also harder without the support available from family to bring food, babysit older kids, etc.

> adds to the stress and uncertainties of delivery and postnatal care

Another lurking factor is the availability of grandparents to assume some of the early child care. Movement restrictions can remove this assistance entirely from new parents.

I’d do the opposite. The pandemic is the perfect time to have a kid if you were thinking ahead. Sure, in the short term it might suck, but in the long term, your kid will be amongst a smaller generation. That means more resources can be diverted to them in schools and other activities. Daycares pressed for money because of a sudden drop in the supply chain may start lowering fees a bit for a while. Colleges receive less applicants, mortgage lending, etc... And since a lot of the families that can afford to have kids in a pandemic are probably more affluent, that means a better selection of romantic partners close to the same birth year with better than average socioeconomic status.

It’s a great time. You don’t want to have your kid during a massive boom. They’ll just be a mini boomer.

I guess, although I do believe I've heard the argument that the baby boomers had every step of their lives tended to politically because of what a massive voting block they represented - nobody wanted to screw over that block. Small generation? Ok let's sacrifice them to the benefit of other interests!

Outside the couples though, there's a lot less mingling going on. Dating during Covid... Awkward.

So, maybe off topic, maybe not.

i have a cat. She's a good cat, mostly. We get along pretty well, mostly.

Before the pandemic, there were large parts of the day when we didn't see each other.

Because we knew we would be separated much of the day, we found time to play around when we were together. I'd throw a toy and she would squawk and chase after it then look at me excitedly until I walked down the hall, picked it up, and threw it back the other way. Then when she was tired it would be time for treats and petting. Good times.

Play time was a valued time for both of us, as we knew that soon we would be separated for many hours, possibly days. Time together was special.

Now, we have nearly unlimited time together, and when I want to play, kitty is tired or hungry or wants to stare out the window at the pretty birds and squirrels and swats at me and tries to bite me if I persist in trying to initiate play time.

Meanwhile, when kitty wants to play, I'm often at my desk trying to focus on my work and probably trying to understand why this awful corporate group has cut another ticket about outdated software to our team when I'm on call. So when kitty jumps on the back of my chair, climbs onto my shoulder, and then flops down on my keyboard with a 'come pet me' look, I pick her up and toss kitty on the floor and tell her to leave me alone.

There is no play time anymore.

My cat died recently and I didn't get that experience before then. He always knew when I was ready, somehow.

My wife and I had decided to start trying for a second child around the beginning of 2020, after the outbreak we put those plans hold because we didn't want to have to make repeated trips to the doctor/pediatrician/hospital where all the covid was. What was our employment/financial situation going to look like? In the spring of last year a million people were loosing their jobs a day at one point. Also, friend of ours, a PA in an emergency room, told us witnessed more than one miscarriage due to covid, so no, we are waiting for now.

My wife and I started talking about having a kid and.. oooops!

The maternity visits are fine. The major consequence is that only mom can go. I didn't get to see the ultrasounds this time around.

For the maternity ward, just make sure to have an N95 or KN95 mask. Keep it on AT ALL TIMES that you are outside of the room. The hospital we went to had negative pressure machines in case a mother was covid positive.

Have your kid. You'll be fine, and when you're old, you won't regret it.

Dads were allowed the whole process here. But nobody else. It was nice to be free from in-laws, friends, overbearing family members...

Around here the fathers (or any visitors) weren’t even allowed in the delivery room, not to mention being forced to labor with a mask on. An awful experience for the mom. Nevertheless some of us are crazy enough to build our families even during these times because, like you said, it’s about the long plan.

I'm sad to hear that you've been impacted by the pandemic in this way. I hope the vaccine rollout and improvements in control of the spread will reestablish the security you need to provide for a second child

> And probably check my privilege

That's a weird way of putting it. Not having a good model of others' experience is a universal experience, and something that should be treated as a reason to not make assumptions about others, not a sign that you're privileged.

> should be treated as a reason to not make assumptions about others

That's what checking ones privilege is. I'm in a position where my financial security, mental well-being, and future prospects would make it a good time for me to start a family if that was what I wanted. Same goes for many of my friends and colleagues, who have in many cases done exactly that

I think this article shows that this security does not extend beyond my social circle and that it's a privilege to have such a level of security

But my point is that such a misunderstanding of other people is not a symptom of privilege, its a symptom of being human. You probably don't know how billionaires as a class (and generalising people by a demographic is overgeneralising too) are experiencing covid either, but that isn't a question of privilege.

I guess I just don't like the idea of taking a universal human experience and casting it in terms of privilege. You're not blinded by privilege, you're blinded by the lack of generalisability of the human experience (or the lack of omniscience).

We are no longer purely instinctual animals unable to control our drive towards reproduction. Oppertunity for sex is no longer the controlling factor. Economic realities now dictates when and where we choose to reproduce.

But after seeing footage of a highschool prom where, because covid, the kids were only allowed to dance back-to-back, and the health advice about having sex through walls, maybe we are soon going to have more basic issues too.

I think that's a good point. I probably should have elaborated a bit, that I wasn't talking purely instictual increase in sexual activity, but also an increase in opportunity to discuss and plan having a baby

No idea what it really is but it would make sense for the instinct to be quite the opposite to prevent inbreeding.

Lots of people stopped dating, bars are closed, etc. I suspect the decrease in drunken sex is probably a large reason for the decrease.

That reminds me of something I’ve occasionally wondered about.

Just in terms of total population and ignoring all else such as quality of life and economic impacts, is alcohol’s net effect to lower population growth (drunk driving deaths and such) or to raise population growth (drunk sex or other related poor decisions)?

It doesn't answer the question you posed, but I read a study[1] just yesterday that estimated that the largest factor of young people having less casual sex now than they did ten years ago is a reduction in drinking rates. It was still a minor factor (explains about 25% of the drop, by their estimation), but it seems less alcohol use does correlate with less casual sex.

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2378023121996854

Actually 300k birth due to drunken sex paints a very dark picture of society.

It's a social lubricant, even in healthy relationships wanting more children I'd bet many are conceived drunk.

Not all death on the street are because of alcohol.

Actually how does one actually do that 'check your privilege'? Is it like a checklist for takeoff:'privilege on? check!'

A couple of easy wins:

- are you describing what you'd do in a situation without considering that other people are in different situations with different constraints, both external and of human fallibility?

- have you said "why don't they just" or a similar form of words, without at least coming up with your own potential reasons why that might not be easy?

(This is like writing "works on my machine" on a bug report. You know not to do that, so don't write "works on my lifestyle and background" on other people's bug reports about life)

You think about things from different socioeconomic perspectives. It should be pretty obvious that the pandemic is not a year long stay at home tea party for many people.

If you only consider you experience as a wealthy tech worker you might not understand this.

I completely understand that I happen to have it good because I'm in the tech industry and have been unaffected financially due to the pandemic. However, I'd hardly call myself "wealthy" and it's hardly the year long tea party from my perspective either...

Become aware of it and acknowledge it.

Consider ways to improve your perspective around those without the same privilege, and adjust your communication so that it isn't incorporating arcane assumptions.

I don't know, but whenever someone tells me to check mine I cordially remind them it is an overt act of supremacy, if you will, to assign more importance to one person's adversity than another's.

We all have a metaphorical bowl of sh#t to work through in life. Everybody's is different, but we all have to get through it somehow. I'm not getting or letting anyone else get held over a barrel because one person doesn't like the specifics of their own or another's tribulations.

Remember folks, kindly leave your sh#tbowl yardsticks at home, and just enjoy the company of other people.

After entering the premises, you make your way to the checkroom, hand over the items you're not supposed to wear inside, and proceed to the venue proper.

But it's the worst possible time to have a baby. Healthcare is all round degraded, hospitals are risky places to be, new parent services are degraded, socialising with other parents is limited. Why would you risk doing it now rather than waiting if you had a choice? Most people have a choice, so are choosing to wait.

Sadly, that all really depends on where you live.

It is a reasonable expectation. There have been studies linking high birth rates to blizzards. "blizzard babies" But of course, this was not a blizzard. Increased anxiety and depression can be a libido crusher.

Having a kid in western society is massively more difficult/taxing on parents compared to the past, when folks managed to have 10-15 kids and they somehow survived and developed themselves with their siblings (and some died but that's another story). We all know that. Kids are more difficult to manage in age of ubiquitous screens and distractions.

Now you have to put your kids to hobbies, take care of their development, folks often live very far from helping family like parents, you need to have massive income surplus if you want your kid to go to higher education (which is true everywhere, in US particularly dialed to 12).

Many folks are depressed, even without realizing it. Dating trimmed to bare minimum. Places where people would meet are mostly closed, which means almost 0 chance for random encounters.

I could go on for a long time what is worse/properly bad. If I didn't have family on my own, being single during past year would be pretty miserable place to be, probably combated with consumption of copious amounts of weed (not a solution, but I know it would help, even though its just a temporary funny escape).

> If I didn't have family on my own, being single during past year would be pretty miserable place to be

I feel super lucky to have had my first son born right before the covid outbreak in the US. The restrictions have basically forced me to spend every waking second with him (and my wife), and it’s been (mostly) great. I have thoroughly enjoyed getting to know my son, and am happy to have been able to support my wife as much as I have. Like you, I couldn’t imagine doing this last year as a single guy- it would’ve been very difficult for me. My brother, for example, who is in his 20s and single, has had a fairly rough time this past year. Most of the mechanisms he used to combat depression are gone.

> since I'm massively underestimating the impact the s/pandemic/lockdown has had on a large part of the population

Not having money or a stable income causes people to not have kids.

> there home without much entertainment

They were pumped to the brim with entertainment. Passive, internet-based entertainment.

I never thought that. The uncertainty was too great. The economy isn’t doing well either.

I wonder if there's a good way to model the cost of children over the last 100 years? My guess is fewer people are having children due to the financial costs rising considerably.

I don't know that isolating the cost of raising kids is necessary when you can see the drop in overall wealth by generation. Millenials (who are the prime "kid having" generation right now) own far less wealth than any generation that came before them. Is it really in any way surprising that fewer are having kids?

The rent really is too damn high: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/09/24/do-millennials-have-a-fut...

Don't poorer people have more kids on average?

because historicaly wealth was correlated with levels of education, but in this case people are more educated so they nope out of it.

Much more of the decrease in the past century is due to increased access to education and full time employment for women, increased availability of contraception, and decreasing child mortality.

That is tied to the changing of jobs as well. Jeremy Diamond has a lot to say bout this in Guns,Germs,and Steel. My grandfather was raised on a farm, where at the age of 16-18 he was fully employed without a college education or debt. Today, parents plan their families with a view toward paying for college. Corporations own the housing stock and get between people and equity, pushing up the cost of housing. It's so many things, I sure hope to hit that stability and start a family. No one makes plans to struggle economically.

It's Jared, not Jeremy.

Ah thanks, touche!

I wonder when will the hostile immigration policies kick in and accentuate that.

What part of the world are you from? Hostile immigration policies seem to be alive and well in most of North America and Europe and have been for a while now.

Yes, I agree with you. People are overall better off because of technological improvement, but making a living is harder (wages didn't grow with prices, modern life has more costs attached to it).

Also families are much more unstable nowadays, with divorces being common. Children growing up in stable families do better in several parameters, therefore instability has a ripple effect on society.

Divorces aren't rare, but they also hit a 50-year low last year. This wasn't a COVID outlier, it's the continuation of a trend. Lots of reasons for this that don't necessarily undercut your argument though (e.g., fewer people getting married in the first place).

https://ourworldindata.org/marriages-and-divorces

Did you scroll down to "Share of children who were born outside of marriage" on your link? Because it's way up.

Is it really better that divorces are down when people aren't even bothering to get married before having kids?

> Is it really better that divorces are down when people aren't even bothering to get married before having kids

The value of stability in marriage is not just stability for kids, so yes.

That being said, the import of people having kids before getting married when is hard to assess without data on both the single vs. cohabiting parenting split (which the source has some reference to) and on the stability among unmarried cohabiting parental couples.

My first kid was just born last week. The hospital billed my insurance company $45k. This is for an uncomplicated, straight-forward vaginal birth.

is it really $45k in US? Or just the company told you they are billed 45k but they "negotiate" it down to 10k. In my country a birth in private hospital cost $3k...

I'm sure there are all sorts of negotiations and esoteric adjustments going on behind the scenes - $45k was the total of the itemized invoice sent to my insurance company. I'm unsure exactly of how much it will cost me out-of-pocket, but I'm expecting $3-4k.

There are certainly tallies of the expenses. I don’t know about over time, but Googling immediately got me the number $233k in 2015 from the USDA. https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2017/01/13/cost-raising-chil... I’ve seen many other such lists over several decades, so charting the average costs over time should be possible.

It might be worth checking out the countries that have implemented child bonuses to check the hypothesis that costs are the reason. https://money.com/government-pays-have-a-baby-low-birth-rate... (Not to mention what others nearby have called out: look at birthrates tallied by socioeconomic status. If birthrates go down with increasing income, maybe costs aren't a major factor in birthrate declines, perhaps increasing income is the reason?)

What this kind of thing doesn’t tell us is anything about the alternative choice that is much more difficult to model: what is the cost of not having children. There are cities in the US and countries in the world whose economies are collapsing due to population loss. And I’ve watched people in my life go through breakdowns due to angst over not having kids. I’ve lost at least one very close friend in part because I chose to have kids and he chose not to.

The costs also don’t really help evaluate the goals or the choice to have kids or not. The reason to have them usually isn’t primarily financial, and for most people the reason not to have them also isn’t primarily financial, even if there’s a secondary influence like costs.

The clearest impact is has is on accounting for our social safety nets. For example the Social Security program is solvent to 2035, and that will probably come down quite a bit in the short term even with increased immigration.

https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v70n3/v70n3p111.html

Housing and Education are probably the biggest costs. Maybe healthcare too.

Childcare can easily run over $1000/mo per child. More for infants. When my 2nd child was born, it cost us over $500/week.

This really does depend where you live; we paid €250/month for daycare for our child from the age of 1 upwards.

Even having a baby is very expensive in the USA, in terms of costs for the delivery, and the very very short maternity leave available to the majority of women. By contrast we had almost a year of paid leave, and paid something like €250 for a birth - which was mostly based around the cost of the room we had for a week after the delivery.

How does the total fertility rate in your country compare to the US (1.78 in 2020), considering your country's pro-natalism policies?

We're at $1800/month for an infant and toddler in daycare. Wife and I both work. Thankfully the company I work for has an HSA for childcare.

Expanding low cost or free daycare is probably the best way that the state can incentivize people having children. I've also read that it serves as an effective anti-poverty measure as well.

$1000/mo per child plus needing to spend at least half a million in the desirable parts of the USA for a house are the real reasons.

Got shipped because IMO this is just a bit too much money to spend.

I would argue that it's also due to kids having "more" rights via the culture perpetuating entitled rights. So a mild spanking could be consider by many as straight up child abuse. People scoff if you let your kid just poke the world around without asking who, what, where, why. Kids needs to grow into their own and the current culture doesn't allow that.

Sorry you can’t beat your children as you’d like

I love this comment because it can be interpreted in two ways - "sorry, you can't beat your children", telling them what they can't do. Or sarcastically empathising like "sorry you can't use violence to coerce your child".

While the demographics are interesting, the forecasts of doom are overwrought. These authors should be celebrating a future of increased prosperity with lower resource contention.

Population, especially in a country like the US, can easily be augmented through immigration, as it has been in the past. If that even matters.

But does it? A top heavy aging population does need an improved “GDP production” base (the article calls it “tax base” as most policy people think of it, but retirees are supported by a combination of tax funds, retirement funds, family support, and other sources). But working against this requirement is a long term secular decline in commodity and goods prices due to increased automation, increased productivity, increased resource efficiency (e.g. see the decreasing energy intensity in GDP), shift of energy production from op ex to cap ex, et al.

And there’s clear economic ignorance in the article’s claim that “a smaller work force… portends lower economic productivity”. The very definition of productivity is the same or greater economic output per unit labor.

The next wave of automation boom is like the computing boom of the 80s and 90s, which was famously “visible everywhere but the statistics.”

At some point we will have to confront the fact that younger generations supporting older ones is the ultimate ponzi scheme.

At some point we will have to understand what debt is.

We’ve always understood it, the challenge is empowering those who would otherwise be encumbered with it against their will.

https://archive.is/jVKmU

Anecdotally, my experience within my immediate geography in a southern state are opposite from the hypothesis in the article. My wife and I had a child in late 2020, and with my social circle I can name a dozen more newborns last year that were conceived after we became aware of the pandemic. Just last week two friends announced they were expecting.

This could be regional, as the economy where I live hasn't taken as big a hit. I wonder if the state's lax policies amidst the pandemic, which have and are sure to continue to draw strong emotional responses, are responsible for a different outlook amidst the turmoil.

Also had a child last year, the staff at the hospital said they are busier than usual.

Sorry for letting you down, everyone. Three is our limit!

Most middle class homes in our suburbs only have 3 bedrooms so that sort of caps kids to 2 or less.

While we have a public schooling system if you want you kid into the "better" schools you need to pay extra for additional teachers to reduce the classroom ratio and facilities.

When you factor in taxes, the math can change. Sometimes 12 years of private school is cheaper than municipal income and property taxes

>Most middle class homes in our suburbs only have 3 bedrooms so that sort of caps kids to 2 or less.

I grew up in a family of 5 with 3 bedrooms. My brother and I shared a room (as did my parents). Bunk bed setup. I wouldn't consider myself poor growing up, it's a normal thing here.

In places like Hong Kong I think it gets quite a bit more extreme than this.

Most rooms can hold 3 bunk beds. If the bunk beds are only 2-level and you put two kids in the lower part, that comes to 9 kids per room. Babies can stay with you.

That's a 10x density increase. You can have 20 kids now. Since the kids leave home at about age 20, you can have 1 kid per year without ever stopping.

> Most middle class homes in our suburbs only have 3 bedrooms so that sort of caps kids to 2 or less.

No, it doesn't.

Heck, my wife’s parents had an urban studio apartment and two kids when she was growing up, so I don't think three more bedrooms than that provides a hard cap of two kids.

In fact, I lived in a suburban middle class home with three bedrooms and three kids, so I know it doesn't.

Three!? I got the.. ahem... boys taken care of immediately after the second. haha

This is going to have a huge impact on colleges and universities in ~18 years. Imagine an 8% decrease in high school graduates in one year, on top of the already projected drop in high school graduates over the next 10 years. The decline in high school graduates over the next 10 years is largely due to the drop in birthrate during the 2008/9 economic crash and recession.

There are so many pregnant couples between our friends. We mostly expect baby boom in our country. In news they say that we have biggest mortality in world due to covid. Well... People are probably not scared that much as agenda says.

Your observations of your own peer cohort are not informative. People get older, their friends get older, they all have babies at the same time. It appears to you like a baby boom but demographically it isn't data.

We already have enough vital statistics data to know that 2020 has clobbered the birth rate in the US.

I'm not from US. I just share my personal view.

Where are you from?

Czechia.

Birth rates have a much larger effect on society than I think people realize. I recently read Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth? by Eric Kaufmann. It makes a pretty strong argument that contrary to the widespread assumption that everyone will just become an atheist, the world will actually become more religious, almost entirely because of birth rates.

In this 2010 book, Kaufmann argued that the answer to the question raised in the title is in the affirmative because demographic realities pose real challenges to the assumption of the inevitability of secular and liberal progress. He observed that devout factions tend to have a significant fertility advantage over their more moderate counterparts and the non-religious. For instance, white Catholic women in France have on average half a child more than their white secular counterparts while the Amish in the United States have three to four times more children than their fellow Christians on average. Highly religious groups tend to isolate themselves from the secularizing effects of modern mainstream Western society, making it more likely that the children will retain their parents' faiths. At the same time, secular people generally have rather low fertility rates by comparison for a variety of reasons, such as materialism, individualism, the preference for the here and now, feminism, environmentalism, or general pessimism. Kaufmann projected that secularism will have a mixed future in Europe. It will remain strong in most Catholic countries, notably Ireland and Spain, but has essentially ground to a halt in Protestant Europe and in France, and will falter in Northwestern Europe by mid-century. He told Mercator Net that the only way to buckle the trend involves "a creed that touches the emotional registers", which "can lure away the children of fundamentalists" and "a repudiation of multiculturalism." He suggested that "secular nationalism" and moderate religion associated with the nation-state could be part of the mix, but these traditions have been losing support at a considerable rate.

He observed that moderate faith of the Abrahamic variety is under pressure from both secularists and fundamentalists as they find themselves living in the secularizing societies of the West.[13] If it were only true that the religious were having more children than secular people, Kaufmann argues that the effects of the incoming demographic transformation would only be national, but because those who are having the most children tend to be intensely religious, he predicted that there would also be ramifications for international relations. However, Kaufmann rejected the increasingly popular notion that Islam will become the dominant religion in Europe by the end of the twenty-first century. Rather, Muslims would stabilize at around a fifth of the European population by 2100.

There was an article I read in the Econonmist[0] (paywall, sorry) a couple months ago, that talks about a paper [1] (read the abstract) how raising the age that children are required to stay in car seats, 8 yo in the US, causes birth rates to decline. The reasoning is that cars have room for two, but not three, children in car seats. Thus the cost of the third child includes upgrading to a larger sized car or van. Very interesting unintended consequence of a safety measure. Also this doesn't deal with the pandemic results, but when I read about it I thought it was interesting and that if this is a thread about birth rates, others might want to read about it too.

[0] https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2020/11/26/...

[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3665046

Two in-laws and ourselves are expecting pandemic babies in the next 6 months.

In our part of the country it seems like a baby boom (midwest), so I’m curious to see how this plays out demographically.

Oh well... I was expecting there would be a baby boom, considering all the folks that are 'working' from home, and was thinking that they would get 'busy'...

How much of that loss in birth rate will be taken up by immigration or is that even a consideration?

Deviation, up or down, from the mean will cause inefficiencies and extra costs to our society. Still, 300k less births, however, is less than 10% of total number, and is not significant enough to be of big concern. 10% is going from 1:16 teacher to student ratio to 1:14.

The reason people have sex at the end of the adventure movie is because the heroes just went through a harrowing experience together, possibly almost dying.

Sex falls under “life affirming activities”. It’s not a movie trope, it’s a human trope.

This last year has been a shit show. You get people vaccinated and employed and people will hear their biological clocks again. There will be a rebound effect, and there will come a time when 5th grade teachers are temporarily working as 4th or 3rd grade teachers because there are few 5th graders this year but a bumper crop coming up behind them.

I would not be surprised if there’s a "roaring 20’s" effect after the pandemic is done (in a number of ways).

the force that keeps humans bound to earth won’t be gravity, but demographics.

This article brought to you by the Branch Covidian's Ministry of Propaganda and public enlightenment.

great

What a wonderful “problem” to have. That means less UBI, more advances in automation and more impulse to productivity.

No one wants to live in an overpopulated hellhole (aka India).

This should be lauded!

New York Times needs to be banned on HN.

It is pure nazi propaganda and has nothing to do with startups or code.

Why is New York Times allowed on HN?

This site is about anything that's intellectually stimulating, and isn't limited to startups or code(though such topics are always welcome).

This is a good thing. The carrying capacity of the planet is finite, and our large global population is largely responsible for the destruction of the environment and climate change. Further, the high standard of living of Americans places a significant burden on the resources used to sustain this lifestyle. 300k fewer Americans will have a much greater impact on the environment than 300k fewer people of any other country.

There's also the fact that the global population has to decrease at some point, à la Japan.

I highly recommend David Attenborough's 2020 Netflix documentary "A Life on Our Planet."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Attenborough:_A_Life_on_...

https://www.netflix.com/title/80216393

It is his "witness statement" on how he has personally observed enormous environmental damage over his ~70 year career documenting wildlife throughout the world.

He argues that the solution is to reduce our population growth worldwide.

on the other hand our planet has seen 5 mass extinction events.

at the same time, 56 millions years ago the planet was extremely hot: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hotte...

and, to top it off, all we're doing is prolonging the inevitable warming of the planet.

things aren't so clear as that documentary makes it unfortunately.

There were no humans 56 millions years ago. I'd like the planet to remain in a state that is good for humans for at least a few more millennia.

“a few more millennia” is basically nothing in terms of the planet’s history.

What has this got to do with anything?

The planet used to be hotter, agreed. But the species alive then were completely different, adapted to living in those conditions. The species alive now (including us!) can thrive in current climatic conditions. A drastic change in a short span of time will lead to a mass extinction.

Unless you think a mass extinction event is ok because it happened millions of years before humans existed? It happened to the dinosaurs so it's no big deal if it happens to most living creatures alive today?

> things aren't so clear as that documentary makes it unfortunately.

I’ve been wondering lately what happened to the documentary genre. When was the turning point where they started becoming political in nature, driving an ideology based off FUD and pseudo-science? Or have they always been this way and I’m just realizing it now?

I suppose the turning point was when we stopped living in a shared reality where scientific consensus was worth something.

I grew up with “documentaries” about aliens and ghosts, so I think the problem has been here for ages.

It's really odd to me. 200 years ago, the population was about one billion. Now it approaches eight billion. If the trend really is lower over the next 100 years and it drops... don't we think it would eventually reverse again? Why do we want the population to be stable or always growing? Why would it be bad for it to be going down for a while?

Because our economy is somewhat of a Ponzi scheme, in which everything needs to keep growing forever. We are perpetually borrowing from the future, with the assumption that everything will be growing forever.

As people get older, they start getting more expensive. If you don't have a larger generation coming from behind to provide for that ever-increasing older generation, then the costs have to be spread among fewer people.

Many parts of our economy assume perpetual growth. The easiest way to ensure growth is to increase the number of humans. Look at countries with shrinking birth rates for a glimpse of the problems an aging population can cause.

Perpetual growth based on an ever-increasing population is a recipe for eventual disaster.

The earth's resources are not infinite. We may not be able to say precisely what its carrying capacity for humans is (and the answer would depend to some extent on the conditions in which the humans are prepared to live), but I am entirely confident that there is a limit.

It would not reverse if woman have universal access to contraceptives and are empowered and educated. It’s a one way ratchet.

https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-...

That's an assumption though, based on the current conditions and population. You can't extrapolate that same assumption to a future modernized world that has returned to one or two billion humans. Perhaps in that world, women happily choose to have more children than they are having now, for a variety of unforeseen reasons. Perhaps the world is just so great for everyone that women choose to bring additional children into the world, knowing just how much joy that children will experience. Perhaps children become a new popular hobby or some entertainment scheme we would find abhorrent in today's world.

I don't believe there's anyway to know today that it's a one way ratchet forever.

Many places have less than replacement now. Spain is very much less. Nearly every country on earth is headed asymptotically toward that. We've just taken a jump ahead by several years on that path.

It's a good thing, but I expect politicians to just use this as another excuse for more mass immigration. They've been using this narrative for decades now after all.

It is very hard to understand why your comment was downvoted this badly.

I thought everyone understands that the planet is overpopulated as it is and that bringing as many children into the world as possible is not a net positive.

it's not overpopulated.

this is a myth that has been going on since the 1970s:

https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/12/12/16766872/overpop...

The author Lyman Stone writes mainly for IFS Institute for Family Studies, which is moderately to strong biased to the right according to https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/institute-for-family-studies/

He also writes for The Federalist, another biased publication: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-federalist/

If you look at the destruction of natural resources world-wide, you don't have to be an expert to see that the current resource usage is unsustainable. At the same time the rich countries are unwilling to give up their status. The trend is going in the wrong direction.

This is a super-anthropocentric perspective. If we could talk to the non-human inhabitants of the planet, they'd have much to say about the encroachment of humanity into every corner of their world and its unremittingly negative impact upon them.

700 million people in the world face food scarcity at any one time. The world is overpopulated and its resources strained by the existing 7.4 billion humans (CO2 budget, natural resources reserves, etc).

Practically speaking, we make enough food for all the humans on this planet, and we'll likely be able to until at least 10 billion people exist.

The reason that folks face food scarcity is a distribution problem, not a production problem. We don't do a good job at making sure people don't go hungry, even in the US.

It seems like that’s artificially constrained food supply though. There’s plenty of land to grow crops on the planet. It’s not like there’s not enough seeds or dirt to grow food.

those are two unrelated ideas.

again, overpopulation is a myth. a convenient and lazy one. but still a myth.

there are too many resources on the web explaining this.

More people than that are overweight. The total amount of food might be enough, but simply ill-distributed.

> it's not overpopulated.

I'm sorry, but this is just a ridiculous statement to make, except maybe if our opinions on what overpopulation means are vastly different.

The earth is not overpopulated in the same sense that Covid is just a flu: people argue their position with anecdata instead of statistical trends.

My impression is that most people who talk about overpopulation are basing it on old trends before population growth rates dropped off so much.

It is a fact that we're currently using a large number of resources much faster than they replenish. That seems like a good criterion for calling the planet overpopulated.

One can of course argue that sufficient technology can curb our resource consumption without reducing the number of humans, but I find it a bit odd to use hypothetical technology deployment as an argument against the planet being beyond its sustainable carrying capacity today.

I think a lot of the disagreement in the comments here comes down to different ideas wrt the definition of overpopulation. When I talk about overpopulation, I talk about a human population that reaches the point where it's detrimental to quality of life for all beings on earth. Sure, we can sustain population growth for a long time by continuing to destroy more and more of our natural resources and wantonly disregarding the existence of all other life on this planet (and ultimately, our own), but can anyone who cares about the whole of the planet really look at that and consider it a net positive? In my mind, an anthropocentric perspective is as misguided as a purely misanthropic one, and is certainly more evidently virulent.

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