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Comment by CharlieDigital | Hacker News Reader

Taiwan not far behind, but with a smaller population to start with.

Domestic policy seems to be hard to fix since it requires a massive cultural shift that may take a generation and requires big changes in the economic structure (income, employment law, child care capacity, etc.) that are going to have push back from corporations.

Immigration is also a bit of a challenge as SK, Japan, and Taiwan are all a bit xenophobic to extents and of course, the languages are not easy to gain proficiency.

I also think that this generation of people just think differently on matters of child rearing and what it means in life. (East Asian elder millennial w/2 kids). Even if money were no issue, I wouldn't want more kids.

Will be an interesting couple of decades.

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Also unfortunate that SK seems to have gone overnight from a generational family unit to the western style nuclear family. All of those elderly living in poverty despite modern SK built on their backs.. I am sure they would love to contribute to raising the next generation of children.

There are so many cultural factors in SK that might take generations to reverse without being "forced" by the government (which is also wary to enforce). Of course, by then its too late per the video.

The nuclear family worked when you could easily have a single household provider, it doesn’t work anymore and the recent trend of having multi generational households seems to be completely driven by people not being able to afford to move out.

I always pondered if child baring should be done as a generational leap.

As in how would society look like if people have kids in their 20’s with the grandparents who are in their 40’s being the primary caretakers and rinse and repeat.

Seems that this combines the best outcomes in terms of biology and still being able pursue educational and career goals.

But this is a very major shift from where we are today. It’s going to be far more likely that more and more people will start having children in their late 30’s and even 40’s and 50’s. If we are going that way then freezing sprem and eggs at a young age should be much cheaper than it is now and people should really start considering it.

Presume that a majority of women of reproductive age per generation al cohort do not want children, and intend to exit those fertility years childfree. What then?

I see no crisis, only total fertility rates reaching a neutral rate based on women empowered to make the best choice for themselves.

https://www.axios.com/2024/07/25/adults-no-children-why-pew-...

https://www.dw.com/en/why-south-korean-women-arent-having-ba...

https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20240918-chile-birth-r...

Society will have to correct itself somehow, either through social change or technological advancement that or we will all go extinct…

I actually wonder why this isn’t a bigger talking point, we are probably not at the point of no return yet but many countries are getting there and people will be caught by surprise as whilst the effect is delayed human life expectancy isn’t that long and it doesn’t take more than a couple of generations like ours until we are going to be facing a major crisis.

I really don’t know where we went wrong, and I’m not sure it’s purely financial either (tho it is for many), at least from my anecdotal experience.

The population ballooned because women were not educated and empowered. Now that they are, and have robust access to family planning, TFR is coming down rapidly and population will eventually follow.

Where we went wrong? Women not being empowered in the first place. This is the fix, not a problem. This is a success story.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40982392

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41225389

I don’t know what’s right or wrong but can we agree that TFR below replacement isn’t sustainable in the long term?

Even if you don’t see shrinking population as a massive problem which it will be, if the TFR remains below ~2.1 humanity won’t be here for much longer.

I disagree. The world has ~8.2B people, and has blown past 6 out of 9 planetary boundaries while headed to 9-10B people by 2100 (due to population momentum). Humanity will successfully continue on with an order of magnitude reduction in that number 150-200 years from now, based on a median global TFR of ~0.5-1. TFR isn’t going to 0. We can plan accordingly, if we choose to. We are currently on the unsustainable path; a lower TFR puts us closer to sustainability.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458

https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/population

You can disagree all you want but if the TFR of the world becomes as low as the one of Chile we will get to below 1 billion people world wide within less than a century and go extinct within a millennia and the latter is based on that life expectancy won’t change and if there will be that big of a reduction in population life expectancy will plummet.

I’m also not sure how much empowerment anyone will have once we are forced back to living as agrarian subsistence farmers within a few generations.

So I don’t know if you are trolling at this point or not…

Not trolling at all. Actually bootstrapping a non profit to buy unwanted fertility from people who don’t want it, to sell into carbon markets to spin up a flywheel to help everyone who doesn’t want kids to be empowered to not have them. So perhaps we just see the future and individual agency and empowerment differently.

Gilead is already taken…

> I really don’t know where we went wrong, and I’m not sure it’s purely financial either (tho it is for many), at least from my anecdotal experience.

The problem is welly explained in the video: the society in East Asia (South Korea, Japan, China, Taiwan, etc.) is too toxic for the youth and it is too hard for them to live a decent life.

Young people there are constantly competing with others of their generation. Households are unaffordable for the majority of the population, and for the lucky ones, it takes approximately 30 to 50 years to buy one. Traditional culture encourages people to work extremely hard, to the extent that they don't even have time for social activities or to form relationships. Meanwhile, promotion is often difficult because management-level positions are occupied by older individuals.

People are stopping having children not only because they cannot afford it, both financially and in terms of time, but also because they do not want their children to suffer. It is expected that the situation will persist for generations to come.

So is most of Europe, TFT is below 2.1 across most countries, any and all population growth is essentially due to immigration.

The TFR in the UK right now for example is ~1.4.

Yep, and the trend is not in having kids, which is quite worrying as a nation.

Immigration seems to be the answer, but not so easy to pull off. Are there countries that have done this well? I would argue that for a long time, the US has done this quite well until maybe the last decade.

Unless you want to Balkanize yourself immigration is probably not the answer.

The US is also probably not the best example because it’s a very different situation. Even in the 19th and 18th centuries natural birth rates accounted for about half of the population growth in the US.

The current projection for the UK is that between 2021 and 2036 immigration will account for 92% of the population growth, and based on the previous 2-3 years this might actually be an underestimate.

Australia and New Zealand have 30% of population born in other countries. Housing growth seems to be keeping up in my city (Christchurch).

I'm unsure if immigration is a sustainable solution - immigrants also get old and retire. But perhaps it works out because immigrants have more kids than people that were born here?

I'd recommend Australia, for anyone considering moving, because it has better economics and a wider choice of locales and jobs.

Video about cause of demographic crisis in UK: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43744930

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