
The birthrate in the U.S. is the lowest it’s been in 30 years - pm24601
https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2018/5/31/17413356/low-birthrate-millennials-economy
======
salawat
There were a couple points in there that could, may, should have been left on
the cutting room floor.

Some good points were made however.

Social Security in its original Ponzi-Schemesque form will end up even worse
for wear with declining birthrates. (Not saying Social Security is bad in
concept, but it only works in times of sharp population growth, and even then,
banking on the youth to carry you just because seems squicky to many ).

The observation of millenials being reluctant to have children is also spot
on. Many that I have spoken to in the demographic are very much a "lost
generation". They've seen parent's and elder's life savings disappear.

They have a harder and harder time adjusting to a world that seems
specifically tuned to resist and feed off of them. See financial product/debt
product proliferation.

It's harder to find opportunity when one has an additional complication of
digital footprint to manage with a dearth of interest in anyone older than
them willing or interested in making sure the past engraved on the net doesn't
mark them for life.

The hamfisted "feminist" overtones aside, the article makes a chilling point.
Long cycle economic predation and the social pressures to avoid debt first and
foremost are an effective suicide switch at the population scale. An entire
generation has been shaped by these pressures, and with no relief in sight, a
drastic shift in values may be needed to avoid a grievous societal
destabilization.

Interesting times indeed.

~~~
kartan
> (Not saying Social Security is bad in concept, but it only works in times of
> sharp population growth, and even then, banking on the youth to carry you
> just because seems squicky to many ).

Social Security works with economic growth. It doesn't matter if you get 10
babies or 10 robots. Automation makes possible to keep proper living standards
without exponential population growth.

Social Security, as other services like education, stops working because it is
not shared.

Actually, with enough automation, it is easier to satisfy a smaller
population.

There are 3.5 million professional truck drivers in the United States. Self-
driving trucks mean that you need 3.5 million fewer babies to carry out that
task. Just 3 million if you actually need 500,000 people to maintain the
software.

So, I agree with you that in the past Social Security was depending on
population growth. That has been changing fast for the past 50 years. There is
no economical reason to not have Social Security in the future.

~~~
gardncl
When social security was started 159 people payed into it per recipient.
Nowadays it's about 3 people paying in for a single recipient.

It's absolutely tied to population.

~~~
ac29
That's a really disingenuous number, most people were not eligible for social
security the first few years it was in place, so the worker:beneficiary ratio
was very high. The ratio has been pretty stable for 50 years. Its about 3:1
now, it was about 3:1 in 1970 [0][1].

[0] [https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employed-
persons](https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/employed-persons)

[1]
[https://www.ssa.gov/history/briefhistory3.html](https://www.ssa.gov/history/briefhistory3.html)

------
seem_2211
I think it's cutting in at both ends of the economic spectrum as well. For
millennials the world over you have a choice in your early twenties - you can
get a degree, move to a big city and focus on your career. This means you
probably get married/start settling down closer to 30, and limit yourself at
1-2 children (if any). Or you can stay closer to where you grew up and focus
on your family at a younger age.

The American situation is increasingly sharp on both ends - if you're making
$40k as a household in rural America, you're financially screwed if anything
bad happens to you - in ways that aren't even relevant in other countries
(thank you no state healthcare / no maternity leave), but at the top end,
you're also pushed out - because you've graduated with $40k + in loans, and
can't buy a house for less than $500k+ (and what, $1m+ in the Bay Area).

Structurally things are very bad for millennials. But things will change -
it's never as bad as the news makes it out to be. In the next ten years the
voting power blocs will change, and politicians will be forced to change
policy in our favour. I only hope we don't screw the coming generations like
the boomers did for us with their lack of foresight.

~~~
anoncoward111
you could buy a reasonable home for about $229,000 in many areas with some
jobs, but even that is still a massive financial burden that is not easily
solved with "just get some tenants"

Back in the day, house prices were 1 year's salary. Now it's more like 6-7
years of salary, with a high tax assessment and no job security or pensions
too.

Sent from my car

------
nunez
Why would we have kids and suffer when we could _not_ have kids and enjoy life
to the fullest?

We make just enough to have a really good life without kids or have a really
stressful life with them. We don’t even have a house yet (and I mostly don’t
want one, but that’s another conversation). I ran the numbers, and I didn’t
like the outcome.

Everyone that I know that has kids is sleep deprived, unable to do much of
anything outside of the house and are in a lot of debt. Some people think that
kids make up for all of that. Not us.

~~~
baudehlo
I was totally the same.

Just had my first 9mo ago. I’m exhausted. I’m 44 years old (and not
financially stable yet due to divorce). It’s hard work at this age. But is it
worth it? Absolutely.

I had no affection for children at all before this. I don’t (even now) like
other people’s kids that much. But today I came home from a long day of filing
SR&ED paperwork (Canadian research tax benefit) and my daughter would just not
go to sleep - awful night. But I’m happy. The wonderful things about having
kids aren’t in the shitty crap you go through every day. They are in the look
that child gives you when you get home. That lasts forever.

~~~
rootusrootus
44 with a 9 month old? I feel for you :). I consider myself a late starter by
having my first kid seven and a half years ago (I am also 44 right now). Many
times I've considered that this would definitely be easier if I were twenty
years younger. Wouldn't be nearly so financially stable however, so that's a
trade off.

I'm totally with you on how awesome kids are. They are hard work, expensive,
and ... totally worth it. Wouldn't give up my boy & girl for anything.
Ambivalent about other people's kids, but I try to be polite.

------
5DFractalTetris
Man makes panda of man.

People are watching us constantly, everyone has more-or-less enough food,
there's a ton of shiny stuff and panda tasks in the enclosure, there's nasty
loud machines everywhere, and if you have some young they're like this tiny
very-vulnerable creature who will be shortly moved to a different enclosure to
be watched by different creatures.

May not be economic!!

------
8bitsrule
Isn't just economic, methinks: Millennials also tend to be more perceptive
about the costs of overpopulation and the approach of global warming. The
wisdom of _Small Is Beautiful_ is not so lost on them.

~~~
alf-pogz
Speak for yourself. I'm petrified by the prospect of lack of growth. It is
what our economy is built on, and a larger population could result in better
science. There is plenty of land in the United States. Even our cities in the
rust belt are underpopulated.

~~~
throw_this_one
The growth-based economic model is flawed. Countries should be rewarded
economically/politically by some sort of sustainability index where all of
their positive/negative externalities are accounted for.

We do not need more people on this planet. It will only increase the
likelihood of a major catastrophe like famine -> war -> nuclear war, which
will then put scientific research back decades if not centuries.

~~~
RhysU
> Countries should be rewarded economically/politically by some sort of
> sustainability index where all of their positive/negative externalities are
> accounted for.

From which growth-based economies will those rewards be taken? If not that
way, then how?

~~~
throw_this_one
The whole point is a paradigm shift where sustainability is rewarded instead
of uncontrolled growth. The reward can probably be political clout, to drive
the direction of things moving forward. Essentially that is what we reward
uncontrolled growth with currently.

The whole point is that I am assuming there isn't enough incentive on a large
scale to deal with environment problem BEFORE they occur. With global warming,
once we go past the point of no return, it won't be a quick fix. We will throw
the equilibrium out of whack. If we were to pragmatically balance things
now/going back a few decades, we could avoid the big swing that will occur.

So basically, the population may fall from 8 billion to 3 billion because of
famine/war, etc. Immensely painful things... Or we could just have pragmatic
restraint through rewarding sustainability, and it would naturally level out
to 5/6 billion or whatever that number is... but without the immense pain of
billion fighting/dying.

------
Ancalagon
I know how obvious this connection probably seems to everyone, but I find it
so fascinating that birthrates can be such a good indicator of economic
health. Hopefully Millenial birthrates are only delayed, not completely
reduced by the economic challenges they face.

------
sbinthree
As a 24 year old married man sitting in the nursery with my premature son, I
feel truly sad that more people cannot experience this. I don't have a house,
I rent my apartment, we share a car and we both (were) working. So what? Time
marches on.

So many people seem cynical about having kids or doing anything else involving
sacrificing happiness for meaning. And yet people complain of indulgence and a
lack of meaning? It confuses me. You can have difficult but meaningful if you
want: start a company and a family. You can also have happy and (likely) less
meaningful: go all in on hedonism.

People can't seem to cope with all the opportunity and optionality modern life
presents. Makes people anxious it seems. So much self loathing (don't have
kids for the environment?). If you don't want kids, don't have them. If you
do, have them. They will not starve and you won't either.

Life will never be easy, to expect it to be is somewhere in between whining
and delusion.

~~~
mikestew
_So many people seem cynical about having kids or doing anything else
involving sacrificing happiness for meaning._

Ah, the ol' "kids give my life meaning, how can anyone live a life without
meaning?" trope. Hey, more power to you, but spreading DNA around isn't the
only road to a meaningful life. Your false choice of "have kids, or live a
life of hedonism" strikes me as the argument of the religious zealot. Speaking
of religion, Jesus Christ didn't have kids, and he seemed to do okay on the
"meaningful" scale.

 _If you don 't want kids, don't have them._

And if you do have them, try to avoid attempting to convince the rest of the
world that yours is the only right, moral, and meaningful choice.

~~~
sbinthree
I tried to engage more deeply with this post, but your counter-argument
involves calling me a religious zealot and invoking Jesus as an example of
someone who proves my ignorance. Presumably if the point is that Jesus had a
meaningful life without having children, that I would relate to the Jesus
example. I am an atheist, no one told me to have kids, but I'm glad I did.
Jesus can do whatever he wants, I am pro personal freedom, and pro kid-having
(clearly).

In terms of being a zealot in general, there are few things harder to counter-
argue as adaptable than having children. Certainly it doesn't make sense for
the majority of people to have kids in the context they are in, but it's very
hard to against having kids period. It's an old thing because it is in many
cases true in practice. So it's hard to counter-argue on the basis that we are
monkeys on a rock who should know better, when we don't, and never will.
Because eventually, everyone exists because someone had kids, and so on.

There is a significant relativity to meaning. It's not that having kids is a
binary (meaning vs. no meaning). It's that for me, I feel, and others, it's
that having kids is a step function in what meaning is. The first time you
work and have that feeling of contributing, that's very meaningful. Having a
kid is like that times 100. So kids are impactful on meaning in a relative, as
opposed to binary sense. Very meaningful, relative to other meaningful things.
And certainly relative to meaningless things.

So I think almost all of history too much emphasis has been placed on kid
having. But among this community (Western Liberals?), kid having has a bad
rep, for mostly bad reasons, that will almost definitely turn out be a failed
social experiment (or else, this community as it exists will just stop
existing and be replaced by children of those who chose to have them, in
whatever form that takes, better or worse). The point isn't, everyone should
have kids, at all. The point is, it's meaningful, and you don't need a house,
two cars or two incomes to make it sustainable. That in fact, the struggle and
financial impact may be worth it in the end.

~~~
mikestew
_I tried to engage more deeply with this post, but your counter-argument
involves calling me a religious zealot_

I did no such thing, but I'll allow that perhaps English is a second language
for you and analogies might not come across as well as I'd like.

------
matte_black
There is a theory that the root cause of these problems is the continued
dismantling of traditional gender roles.

If women had not entered the workforce in massive numbers things could have
continued based on old trajectories. The male breadwinner/housewife lifestyle
was a formula that made it ideal for raising children cheaply, even if it
didn’t seem like the most equitable.

If I had a good job and settled with a wife straight out of college I’m sure
I’d be a father to two children by now. My income could easily support a non-
working spouse and some kids.

But many of the women around me were not the type to settle so early, so I
chased the money and ever more ambitious women. And with no family to support,
I had dangerous amounts of money to spend on ever increasing prices and
property.

And if I should marry a woman with equal earning power as me, we will be able
to spend even more on whatever inflated prices are set before us. If you’ve
ever been in a gay household with two men earning typical male salaries and no
children, one thing you notice is that they always have tons of purchasing
power. What do you think that does to the economy when it scales out?

~~~
kartan
> There is a theory that the root cause of these problems is the continued
> dismantling of traditional gender roles.

Except that Japan has kept traditional gender roles, where the woman leaves
her job when marries, and they have one of the lower fertility rates in the
world.

At the same time, Sweden with very strong gender equality has a higher
fertility rate than other European countries. Even that it is still low
compared with historical hights.

~~~
Tohhou
Western countries have lower rates than Japan when you exclude for native
birth rates. Western countries get a big boost in birth rate when you account
for non-natives having population booms.

~~~
beagle3
With the exception of Israel & Ireland, which are the only two western
countries to have a positive native birth rate (avg >2.2 births/woman -
supposedly 2.2 is the magic number that keeps a population size stable).

------
IkmoIkmo
I'm not sure I completely agree with the economic argument, particularly
because birth rates and wealthiness tend to move in opposite directions and
because a comparative analysis doesn't show that strong welfare states which
protect a person's income, income stability and alleviate all the costs of
being a parent, don't show strong birth rates either. It feels like getting
children is still very much a choice, but that our cultural norms about what a
'proper life' means has changed. No longer as a young person do I feel as
compelled to marry, get a home in a suburb with a yard and a dog not to be
cast out or judged. It's not because it's more difficult for me to afford kids
than my parents or their parents, who struggled financially more than I do and
had to work more hours, had less leisure time, fewer luxuries etc. I think
it's a bit too easy to say 'kids these days saw parent' savings disappear in
the financial crisis' as if their parents' parents didn't see their parents in
world war ii, and their grandparents in the great depression as a reason not
to have kids. Again, wealth and birth rates move in opposite directions. Kids
used to be a form of welfare system, too, you had no state or business to give
you a pension or pay for your care, but your kids did. Now we're rich enough
where kids aren't needed as an economic asset (working the land) or welfare
asset (caring for you in retirement). But to say they're less affordable than
before, I'm not so sure.

Most of the predictions about the welfare state are true, though. In that some
of its effects mimic a ponzi scheme.

I'd urge everyone and anyone to look up an age pyramid for their country from
1950 and onwards. It's absolutely telling. Preferably an animation.

e.g. Japan here:
[https://www.populationpyramid.net/japan/1950/](https://www.populationpyramid.net/japan/1950/)

You can click through every 5 years. It's like a snake with food passing
through it's body, starting with a big blob of young people who gradually move
into old age, without replacement. The proportion of young (suppose an
arbitrary <40 or >=40) to old completely flips over. In Japan it was 75% in
1950, but just 44.5% in 2010. If you take 65+ as a threshold, it was just 5%
in 1950, but 23% in 2010. That's 4x as many retirees to support on a dwindling
young (mostly) working population. 5% 65+ and 95 <65 is a 1:19 retiree to
young (often working) person. 23% vs 77% is less than 1:4.

And that matters a ton because there's a gigantic age asymmetry in terms of
expenditure by age group in certain fields. Take healthcare expenses by age:
[https://jamanetwork.com/data/Journals/JAMA/935941/joi160128f...](https://jamanetwork.com/data/Journals/JAMA/935941/joi160128f2.png)

You basically spend a ton at birth and as an old person. With low birth rates
and massive improvements to healthcare increasing life expectancy, we're
heading for a disaster. The tax base is rapidly depleting and the tax burden
is rapidly increasing.

~~~
MLR
In regards to your conclusion, I'm not sure this is really entirely true.

While Japan is a disaster right now, their situation (by my understanding) was
made massively worse through bad economic choices when their economy first
started slowing down.

Germany and South Korea are two examples of extremely robust economies that
have had terrifically low birth rates for a long time now, Germany has had
fairly high levels of immigration, but South Korea certainly hasn't.

There's also the fact that countries like the US and the UK don't have
particularly bad population pyramids but are still strangling the youth to
some extent, it's more a political problem than a fundamental outcome of low
birthrates and welfare states.

~~~
IkmoIkmo
I'm not so much referring to the economy right now necessarily. That will be
affected, but the population pyramid is just one of many other factors, it's
not a great proxy for the long-term sustainability of the welfare state and
the burdens on young and middle-aged people in 30 years from now.

Anyway, Japan and Korea really aren't comparable. Just look at their pyramids.

Starting with the 64+ population, grew in Japan from 5% to 26%. Further, it's
not just children (<14) who're a lower share than before, but also the working
population of 15-64 which is smaller than before (from 64% to 60%).

In short, old:working age went from 1:13 to 1:2 (rounded off).

[https://countryeconomy.com/demography/population-
structure/j...](https://countryeconomy.com/demography/population-
structure/japan)

South Korea is in a very different stage. Its 64+ population only went from 3%
to 13%. Meanwhile its working population from 15-64 didn't drop like in Japan
but went up from 53% to 73%. If anything, Korea is in an amazing position
right now and has been for some time. It's only now levelling off and going
the other direction.

[https://countryeconomy.com/demography/population-
structure/s...](https://countryeconomy.com/demography/population-
structure/south-korea)

In short, old:working age went from 1:18 to 1:6 (rounded off). For every old
person in Japan, Korea has 3 times as many working age people. And that puts a
lot of pressure on the tax base, even if the economy is doing well, a greater
share of production is redistributed away from young and working people to old
and not working people. In a country where one young person has to produce as
much wealth for himself and one old person, as another country where two young
people can share that burden, there's a difference in pressure and
sustainability of the welfare state.

Fact of the matter is that Japan is running a deficit on its social security
system. You either need to raise taxes or expect welfare state retrenchment
(which has happened in most developed countries over the past 30-40 years in
large parts anyway). You can only raise taxes so much (Laffer curve). It's
typically deemed as inevitable that Japan's welfare state will retrench unless
it accepts immigration or technology rapidly does away with humans. I don't
see either of these happening in the next few decades, so young people pay to
support a system today that they're likely not going to enjoy to the same
degree in the future.

------
ryanx435
It's not economic. People have been poor for hundreds and thousands and
millions of years, and yet they still had children.

~~~
wvenable
Children used to be a source of labor and providing generational wealth. Now
children are a source of financial cost, not benefit, and thus it doesn't make
sense for poor people to have them.

~~~
orangecat
_it doesn 't make sense for poor people to have them_

I would speculate that the disincentive is larger for wealthier people. A lot
of child-related expenses are for positional goods (house in a good school
district, saving for college) where the price is basically "all your spare
income". So if you're rich having kids means giving up awesome vacations and
the option of retiring before 50; if you're poor those things were never on
the table.

~~~
wvenable
Having a child is literally one more mouth to feed, I hardly think the
disincentive is larger for wealthy people. That's just a bizarre piece of
logic.

