
Americans Are Having Fewer Babies - chmaynard
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/upshot/americans-are-having-fewer-babies-they-told-us-why.html
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orev
People might consciously site economic or other reasons for this, but I think
the real reason is that education about birth control has sufficiently
permeated the country that people are simply making the choice. I suspect that
an overwhelmingly large number of past pregnancies were unplanned, while now
more of them are planned. We’re just seeing the natural number that would
occur when people actually make the choice as opposed to leaving it up to
chance as was done in most of history.

The concept of asking people why they are making the choice presupposes that
they have the option of making the choice to begin with.

~~~
VelNZ
I agree. I could list dozens of reasons that I think having children is a bad
idea but ultimately, I know that if I actually wanted them, none of those
reasons would matter. We are all quite adept at rationalising our wants.

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scop
Our finances are not in great condition. We have little solid support from
extended family. I was recently diagnosed with a very serious illness where
death is a non-zero possibility.

But you know what? We have three kids and they are our treasures. Life is
hard, sacrifice is required, and more days than not I find myself struggling
to find the motivation to get out of bed. That is, until my children come and
say good morning...then there is joy (not necessarily happiness, but
definitely joy).

Our children may not have all of the “necessities” in life, but they will have
love and, more importantly, the responsibility to love others: their ailing
parents, their struggling siblings, society at large.

~~~
esturk
Its good to hear your children gives you joy. Although, I would like to ask,
what's the difference between happiness and joy to you?

~~~
mooreds
This book, "All Joy and No Fun", covers, as you might imagine, the difference
between fun and joy (not exactly what you asked, but close).

[https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/books/review/all-joy-
and-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/02/books/review/all-joy-and-no-fun-
by-jennifer-senior.html)

Well worth the read for parent and non parent alike.

Basically, as I recall the book, kids are a huge amount of work for 20 years
that may or may not result in another human being who you like. But if you do
get that result, it's a profound payback; without equal among human
relationships.

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anoncoward111
I can barely afford to provide for my own long-term survival, let alone a poor
little defenseless child.

Maybe if cronyism wasn't driving the price of everything higher in the USA,
then I could afford to properly care for a child. But gone are the days where
raising a child meant "another mouth to feed". These days, food is just 1/20th
of the overall bill

~~~
drb91
Ehh, the economic positive to children is sometimes hard to work in. But I
can’t look at family businesses with six children “employed” as a
straightforward calculation. That was once the norm, and is no longer
commonplace in the US. I imagine you’d have to take this into account to do a
proper comparison with decently contrasting cultures.

~~~
anoncoward111
I get where you are coming from. Children were an easy source of labor back in
the day.

But now, children are purely a cost center, and not a predictable/inexpensive
one either. They get sick, they need schooling. Food + a crib are the least of
a parent's worries.

~~~
mooreds
To be blunt, this is a tragedy of the commons scenario. The costs are
primarily on the parents, and then society gets the benefits (in the short
term, of the spending by the parents, in the long term by the productivity and
spending of the grown child). This is why smart policy makes it easier to have
children--because overall some level of population growth causes economic
growth which makes everyone's lives better.

However, I don't know of any country in the world that has cracked the nut of
encouraging people to have children. It seems that personal freedom (of not
having kids) is only counterbalanced by either lack of birth control
(developing countries) or societal pressure (I'm thinking of various religious
groups in the USA which tend to have many children per parenting couple).

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40acres
Americans in general are having less babies. Last year more non-white babies
were born than white babies, and due to the opiod crisis the white life
expectancy went down while it's rising for other groups. America is in the
early stages of a really interesting demographic shift. It will be interesting
to look back on how the politics of this era shape out.

~~~
adventured
According to the Census Bureau in 2015 the US white population contracted
(more white people dying than being born + immigrating) for the first time in
US history outside of war (that decline continued for 2016 as well). The
average non-hispanic white person is now 43 years old. The decline was slight,
0.02%, basically the opioid overdoses are the difference between expansion and
contraction for white people.

Demographically, there are 198m non-hispanic whites, 59m hispanics, 47m
blacks, 22m asians. The average hispanic age is 29, and the median overall age
in the US is 38. The youngest state at the median is Utah at 31; the oldest is
Maine at 45 (!).

~~~
lord_ring_111
Would be interesting to see birth rate/death rate by race/religion. I think
over next 50+ years there will be significant shifts in demographics.

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jeffrey_t_b
Having children has always been a choice, e.g. historical birthrates are
closely coupled to harvest success. So people are choosing to have fewer
children now, and most of that has to do with opportunity costs.

Caplan's "Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids" ([https://www.amazon.com/Selfish-
Reasons-Have-More-Kids/dp/046...](https://www.amazon.com/Selfish-Reasons-Have-
More-Kids/dp/0465028616)) has some data showing that parents are putting more
and more time into children. (And his argument is that it is mostly
unnecessary, i.e. it doesn't correspond to improved outcomes for children,
given a relatively normal stable family.) I wonder how much of this is just
changed social expectations (e.g. call Police / Child Services if you see a
kid walking home along from school), how much is social signaling, how much is
reduced family support.

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thr0w__4w4y
If I read the list correctly, 6 of the 8 top reasons pertain to money /
finances.

3 of the 5 people here with me attributed this to essentially selfishness /
unwillingness to sacrifice for others (future generations)

2 of the 5 said that the respondents have strong social consciences and are
being responsible for not bringing children into the world that they weren't
sure they could support.

It doesn't really matter to me either way [happy father of two teenage
daughters who push boundaries but kick ass in academics and sports]. It's just
good to realize / understand / remember that rational, intelligent people can
form different conclusions from the same information.

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angmarsbane
My partner and I would like 3, maybe 4. In my culture, you don't have kids
until you're married and have secured a house/home (a 2-3 bdrm apt or condo
would do). We're spending our fertile years trying to move up the ladder and
save as much as we can so that we can secure a home. By the time we get the
house, we won't the fertility to have 3-4 we'll be lucky if we can get 2.

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AFNobody
Unsurprisingly, when the financial incentive is don't do X people prefer not
to do X.

The truth is, we need to socialize the cost of child care and having children.
Or we need immigration.

The latter has always been the cheaper (for society) option but given all the
resentment that has built up in the US, we are probably better off going with
the former.

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zzzzzzzza
imo having a kid now is like buying a horse (or maybe 2 horses). By the time a
baby born today would have graduated college, there's a good chance we'll have
achieved artificial general intelligence. Pretty much impossible to say what
exactly would happen at that point, but, in the past kids were a pretty
immediate roi, they could work on the farm, more recently arguably the roi is
possibly negative but, for instance, one of my uncles takes care of my aging
grandparents; but if we are anywhere near to agi a kid wouldn't even be useful
for that. I mean I like kids but we're talking easily 250k+ dollars for a
single one. In practice for me it would be a lot more than that since the cost
of my lifestyle would go up dramatically. (source: am 25 year old american
male)

~~~
daxorid
I love this comment. It was _precisely_ my attitude eighteen years ago.

I was supremely confident that Moore's Law and work by AGI researchers would
usher in the Singularity well within my lifetime, and that my offspring would
either be incorporeal AIs or corporeal AIs in robotic shells. I would be
uploaded into a giant virtual connectome powered by a Dyson sphere and live a
thousand subjective lifetimes in a real year. My life insurance policy named
Alcor as the sole beneficiary and I wore a bracelet with pre-vitrification
instructions on it.

Now I have two human biological children, and Moore's Law has given us
duckface selfies on Instagram celebrities and consumerist bliss via StitchFix.
All the AGI researchers of that time have given up and gone into human bias
control and polyamorous relationships in intentional communes with other
futurists or disappeared into sketchy Chinese universities. Kurzweil will die
ignominiously.

The exaflops of global processing power that the AGI researchers of 2001 _wish
they had_ is here, and is being harnessed to the valiant purpose of ensuring
you can watch double anal videos in high definition in your Uber ride en route
to the gastropub recommended by Yelp.

Mark my words today. Give it a decade or two. Humans don't want to ascend.
They want to consume. Every technological advancement we make will go into
facilitating this.

And being a parent is actually pretty cool.

~~~
zzzzzzzza
I think the path to ai is a little bit clearer today than it was back then.

Also, Kurzweill is currently a head of engineering at google, not that I'm a
rabid fanboy.

I agree technological developments can play out unexpectedly, in some ways I
am more "amish" than my peers (e.g. no cellphone (I use google voice on my
laptop), I have a whitelist of websites I allow to display images, I use
adblock to block out portions of certain websites e.g. suggestions on
youtube/stack overflow).

But on the other hand, the year of the linux desktop is finally here, and with
new os's like nix or guix, you can have a much more fine tuned and deep
control over your operating system. Technology also gives us tools to take
back control from some of it's more dystopian society level side effects.

Even if my expectations about AI completely dissapointed me, I still think it
would be a good idea to wait 15 years to have kids anyway just for reliable
genetic engineering.

Also for the record I think it will be a dyson swarm, and I am unsure if our
machine overlords will bother "uploading" us, I would suspect they'll keep us
around as a museum piece lol. Maybe earth will become like a modern day native
american reservation where some equivalent to gambling is allowed and we all
get handouts from the machines while what's left of our culture that's not
amish amuses itself with our various "soma" (brave new world) equivalents.

Perhaps my imagined future world really isn't that different from yours XD.

