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Comment by astrange | Hacker News Reader

Become poorer, more religious, and get people to work less.

I don't believe there's any examples of modern countries doing it. Providing lots of childcare benefits doesn't seem to help, though it does make the children you do get healthier.

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More religious yes, but not necessarily meaningfully “poorer” (at least not if the goal is a sustainable TFR). France and the US had birth rates around 2 as recently as the early aughts.

Two big issues are probably the cost of housing, and educational credential inflation. Young people these days spend four years in college, and concomitantly postpone establishing their real lives by four years, just to get the kind of office jobs prior generations got with a high school diploma.

I would say it’s not just the cost of housing, but cost of (good) childcare in general. Children are massively financially costly… daycare, clothing, food, medical care, education, etc. They’re expensive in terms of time too, and parents are practically always short on time due to needing dual incomes to be able to pay the bills without constantly sitting on the edge.

So realistically, I think that what all this means is that an economy can’t have its cake and eat it too; its workforce can work itself to death or it can have kids at replacement rate, not both.

Polls have shown that young people are no less interested in starting families than they were in decades past. It’s simply not responsible to do so in the case of an increasing number of couples’ situations, and so they don’t. The only way to turn this trend around is to pay actual living wages and mandate a better work-life balance on a national scale.

> Children are massively financially costly… daycare, clothing, food, medical care, education, etc.

Except Japan has made nearly all of this absolutely free. So the financial cost argument falls a bit flat.

Huh? Where did you get this idea? Daycare, clothing, food, medicine, and education are not free in Japan. They're mostly not as horrifically expensive as in America, but definitely not free.

> but not necessarily meaningfully “poorer”

If you are not able to assure that you'll have a comfortable retirement years with the appropriate social safety nets to try to assure that someone who worked will be able to maintain at least the basic necessities for life, then having kids who make it into adulthood is that safety net.

The "ok, 60+ years old, unable to do meaningful work, move in with a successful child" is a fairly standard approach. This requires that you have kids and preferably enough that one of them will be able to support you moving in with them and isn't otherwise alienated from you.

Note that this only works on a per family basis and if you outlive your children (war can do that), then a more nationalized social safety net is something that because useful to have. By providing that safety net for retired adults, there is less pressure to have kids to support their parents in retirement and less pressure for single people to marry and have a family to fulfill that role.

Economic hardship (increasing the pressure to not have kids) and that safety net (reducing pressure to have kids at all) in both would then have downward force on the fertility rate and also would suggest putting off having kids until later.

Census.gov has a lot of interesting data for the rate - https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/04/fertility-rat...

Also of interest - Multigenerational family structure in Japanese society: impacts on stress and health behaviors among women and men - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15087144/

Childcare benefits don't work for the same reason steep prison sentences don't work. Nobody does a cost benefit analysis of "years lost"/"benefit of murdering someone".

I'm sure there is a positive correlation with "home ownership, and low debt" with children however.

Because that would make you feel secure about your future.

Maybe not true for criminals, but many people don't have kids precisely because they did a cost benefit analysis on having them and decided it was too expensive to do so.

That correlation is due to people doing the cost benefit analysis. Do I want to deal with the costs of raising a child in an apartment? Do I want my child to bear the costs of having to change schools? Do I want my child and I to bear the costs of losing income while still paying lots of education/auto/home debt?

Unfortunately, at some point the benefits to not having a child at the individual level become costs at the societal level once enough opt out, and that becomes costs again at the individual level, on a sufficiently long timeline.

Of course, these net costs/benefits can flip from being costs at 10 years to benefits at 30 years and back to costs at 150 years. Maybe excess population leads to excess resource consumption and entropy generation. Maybe some of the excess population figures out how to mitigate excess consumption, and buys a little more time.

Who knows?

Incidentally what Afghanistan has done, with the claim that it will raise the birth rate. Women are banned from universities.

I believe Israel is generally held up as an example of one modern country that has raised its birthrate.

more like kept it from sliding in the last few decades, but yes, still pretty high, and it's an achievement. They were also helped by having a very young population to begin with (just look at that perfect age pyramid), and the whole country currently has population of Nagoya metro area, Japan is much bigger and harder to change.

Does not look like a meaningful increase, and I wonder what the stats look like without the fertility rate of the Haredi group.

https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/ISR/israel/fertility-r...

https://www.jns.org/israeli-birth-rate-on-decline-government...

>The Jewish fertility rate surpassed the Arab rate for the first time in 2020, with Jews having three children on average compared to 2.99 in the Arab sector.

>At 6.64 children per woman, haredi women had the highest fertility rate among Israel’s Jewish population, compared to 1.96 among secular Jewish women.

Looks close enough to women not belonging to super religious groups in other developed countries.

I've never understood statements to the effect of, "if you take out the group causing the effect, then the effect is no longer present".

I remember discussing a buggy application once with another engineer (I could reliably crash the server with a mis-configuration on the client), and I was taking a fairly apologetic stance that after all the workarounds I had to make it work, it worked OK. His response was, "yeah, if you take out all the parts that suck, then it doesn't suck". And now I can never unhear that.

astrange wrote:

>Become poorer, more religious, and get people to work less.

Which is what the causal factors seem to be in the fertility rate of Israel’s “modern” economy.

My experience suggests that there's a more or less fixed amount of religiosity in any person and it's on a normal distribution in any given population. That's the hardware/firmware so to speak, but what they apply that religiosity to can be quite varied. Just my observation from working in tech companies where C levels are treated like visionary leaders who provide the mission from on high - I could be mistaken, but the dynamics don't really feel terribly different from my religious education.

In the context of this discussion, I think astrange (and I) are using “religious” to mean a culture or tribe that encourages women to have many children and/or restricts women from being able to not have children. In my experience, these groups are typically associated with or offshoots of Christianity/Judaism/Islam, and usually described as “more religious” than the vast majority of people claiming to adhere to those belief systems.

If you look at the underlying data behind that report you'll indeed also see that a woman living in a top 10 percentile social-economic location is expected to have 1.95 children vs. bottom 10 percentile expecting 5.36 (though good luck separating religion from social-economic status).

If you look the graph and focus only on purely secular women (split as Haredi > Religious > Traditional-Religious > Traditional-Not that religious > Not religious-Secular) you can see that since 1979 it has been hovering around 2, so it is hard to tell if anything real or recent is actually going on. Though if you also understand statistics you'll see that Israel is heading to its own kind of demographic disaster since the least productive population has been consistently increasing at a very high exponent... (That said, it might be better to have the problem of needing to increase the productivity of the least productive than the problem of having no one to work)

Source (in Hebrew) https://www.cbs.gov.il/he/mediarelease/DocLib/2022/062/01_22... (The graph I mention is on page 11, so with the above mentioned divisions + a line for all Jewish women that end right above 3 you should be able to parse it even without knowing Hebrew ;))

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