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Comment by nashashmi | Hacker News Reader

It feels a lot like some portion of policy makers are happy at this news. After all, they have been pandering for low birth rates for a long time.

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It is impressive that we seem conditioned into attaching good sentiment to low birth rates in our considerations, while in reality it's going to make us suffer later in life.

Life in a society with high dependency ratio will be necessarily harsh, unless some truly fantastical technological force multipliers will be there in time to take the load. This latter part is usually implied when discussing the demographic change, but it fails even under moderate intellectual scrutiny.

I would very much like to have a serious discussion about the demography and dependency ratio trends with people across opinion spectrum.

> pandering for low birth rates

I'm having trouble understanding what this means. Supporting policies that lower birth rates?

Take the 3 million square miles of USA supporting 330 million people, and add 1 billion more people to it. That's India. They have a population crisis which their land area can't support.

USA has the kinds of land that cannot support so many people. This is not the issue with India. Their land is abundant in food and shelter resources, the only elements required for thriving societies.

The USA (including Alaska) has about 3 times the land area of India, so India has about 4 times the population on 1/3 the land, or 12 times the population density, but I don’t think even that implies India cannot support its own population.

Their GDP per capita is about 1/30th of that of the USA, or about 2/5 of that of the USA per km², and I think that’s a better way to approximate land needed than raw population size.

Nobody includes Alaska in these calculations because 80% of it us uninhabitable. I was only talking about the lower-48.

Even that part is about twice the area of India.

Except India is ~1.3M square miles...

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