Someone flagged what I thought was a good comment so I couldn’t respond to it unfortunately.
I honestly struggled to think of what would be a valuable way to have this discussion and it seems like there’s no way to avoid a flamewar.
The only thing I would add is that the English anthropologist Chris Knight wrote extensively about “sex strikes” (which goes beyond the simple act of sex of course, into the entire structural notion of child rearing as a social function) being the driver of cultural peace throughout human history in his critical 1991 book “blood relations”
Seems fairly obvious that’s what’s happening and mirrors historical birth rate crashes aligning with general breakup of long running social expectations
Polybius wrote as such in 200BC:
“ In our time all Greece was visited by a dearth of children and generally a decay of population, owing to which the cities were denuded of inhabitants, and a failure of productiveness resulted, though there were no long-continued wars or serious pestilences among us.”
Birth rates crashe when people generally feel like there is no future for the current type of society or future societies that their current societies are headed towards.
If you are talking about pjc50, I thought it was interesting as well, but also came off like a canned response or AI text.
With respect to Knight and polybius, I agree that is an interesting perspective. It can also be viewed through the lens of the evolution of memes. Just like biological evolution, some species are dead ends, go extinct, or form unstable fits between organism and environment.
It stands that we would expect the same to be true for memes. It seems reasonable that some memes, either individually or in combination can be detrimental in a way terminal to the individual or society.
Evolutionary pressures being what they are, ideas that promote continuity will prevail unless there is a cataclysm. That said, changes can be abrupt and painful, like the bubonic plague killing half of Europe
I’m curious, are you using meme in the original Dawkins sense because if that is the case then I would fully and passionately agree with that to the extent where that is precisely what it seems like is happening
I suppose I just don’t know what that meme is at this point
so how would you define the previous memetic position that led to children as a regular part of life?
Further, what is the new memetic position on children that is being implemented?
I think this is an interesting topic, so I've been posting all over the thread with some of my thoughts.
I'll start with increasing memes that I think are contributors to childrearing. I think risk aversion is a leading one. You see this in terms of teenage sex, drug use, and other risky behavior. The next increasing meme would be viewing the world through a materialistic and increasingly utilitarian economic lens. Think this comes at the cost of more sentimental for romantic view of existence. just looking at this threads, nearly every comment is materialist in nature: opportunity costs for leaving the workforce, social economic implications, ect. Conspicuously absent is discussion of experiential and emotional implications. What about people missing out on watching their child take their first steps or the joys and pains of the creative process that is nurturing a human into a functional adult.
I think this also plays into the idea that work is intrinsically something to be minimized or avoided, opposed to something powering that can be directed. I acknowledge that I'm presenting these all as unsubstantiated personal opinion, but I think they have Merit and would be worthy of further scrutiny.
Im not religious myself, but cant help but acknowledge the decline of religion it as an elephant in the room. Less so due to any specific religious doctrine, but the attention brings to non-material topics.
>> so how would you define the previous memetic position that led to children as a regular part of life?
>> Further, what is the new memetic position on children that is being implemented?
I'm not who you were asking, but I think "having children" may be an activity that is transitioning from being a larger part non-memetic to a larger part memetic, due to birth control technology. So the previous "non-memetic" position was if you like to have sex, that sex will lead to kids eventually. Now with birth control, you can like to have sex and not have kids, unless personal psychology and/or memes drive you to have kids.
> just looking at this threads, nearly every comment is materialist in nature: opportunity costs for leaving the workforce, social economic implications, ect. Conspicuously absent is discussion of experiential and emotional implications.
Your observation might be true, but I wouldn't really use a HN thread as support. This community, and the wider software engineer/technology community of which it is part, has a very skewed perspective and misunderstands quite a lot due to its poorly acknowledged limitations and biases. What I quoted from you hits one of those directly: a preference for and comfort with the mechanical over the emotional and interpersonal.
I will only react to the last paragraph, but imho, the decline of religions has no causal relationship to the decline in birth. I do think they might be correlated, but my example is that France is way less religious than Italy or Turkey, and kept their fertility rates above 2.1 longer. Also, recently France had a small increase in religiosity, while its birthrate declined.
I wonder if that holds up when you look at demographics within each country.
I don't know about the ones you mentioned, but I know that I the US, our national fertility rate is heavily increased by first generation immigrants, who are also more religious.
A fun meme to launch would be that the Scott Alexander's, Richard Dawkins, Jordan Peterson's etc of the world should have to take at least some responsibility for the risk their memetic viruses introduce into the system.
Edit: I may be thinking of the other materialism, but they are closely related.
I'm actually a pretty big fan of Scott Alexander and the other rationalists, although I don't always agree with their conclusions.
Most rationalist philosophy is underpinned by happiness utilitarianism, which I think is fundamentally flawed. First, I don't think happiness on an individual or Global level is the most important metric to optimize for. I think there are other objectives that can stand on their own merits, and even in contrast to happiness such as virtue, progress, and integrity. Secondly, I don't believe in the fungibility of happiness utils. Utilitarianism assumes and even requires that different forms of Happiness can be made equivalent without loss of information included in their qualia.
That said, I still think rationalists are ahead of the pack simply because they are interested in introspection, trying to examine life with open eyes, and trying to increase their individual agency to achieve their goals.
Not much disagreement (and a huge fan of Scott himself), I'm more so thinking they could do so much more with the raw cognitive horsepower in the community. They'd be better without their ideology and methods imho.
I think the most important community outreach that anyone can be doing these days is encouraging people to think critically and take agency over there lives.
With that in mind, I think they are building an important foundation. This enables people to make up their own minds.
I have to admit that dialogue with rationalist or rationalist forums help me greatly and coming up with my own ideas, despite them being contrary to theirs. Simply Having forums to talk and think deeply is a rare and valuable service
Well, it is deployed regularly by people with a broad spectrum of "capabilities"...so what could it mean? Would the meaning (as it is used, and perceived) not also be a broad spectrum, that perhaps does not nicely intersect with a rigorous and comprehensive definition (that itself doesn't rely on numerous other complex compound terms, each of which suffers from the same problem, and others), which to my knowledge doesn't exist?
In simple terms, I just think it is just making effort to present the most robust and accurate case you can.
This involves questioning your work/thoughts before presenting/embracing them.
It involves being able put yourself in a skeptical position to it, and generate your own constructive feedback.
In some ways, it reminds me of the HN guidelines "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
> Someone flagged what I thought was a good comment so I couldn’t respond to it unfortunately.
The best and the worst comments tend to be flagged. Not sure why we aren't allowed to continue the discussion within 'flagged' comments. Just hide it for those who don't want to see flagged threads and let the rest of us continue on.
> Birth rates crashe when people generally feel like there is no future for the current type of society or future societies that their current societies are headed towards.
Perhaps in certain instances in the past, but I doubt it. The current birth rate decline is a result of intentional policies of the elites. Starting with Europe and the US in the 60s and 70s and then these policies eventually got exported to or forced upon our 'allies' or major trading partners. The implementation of these policies varied from pushing '2 is enough' style propaganda to encourage couples to limit the amount of children, propaganda programming to encourage females to put off child bearing to work and of course enacting drastic policies like the 1 child policy ( the 1 child policy wasn't a chinese policy but one of american/european demands for opening trade and attaining foreign investment ). You can see it with bangladesh, india, etc. They are being forced to adopt 'child planning' policies by the US and Europe in exchange for investment. No doubt africa will get the same demands in the near future.
The birth rate decline isn't some natural quirk of society. It is a result of a planned systematic state policy. Everything from education to propaganda encourages men and women to have less children. What's laughable is that the same propagandists are scratching their heads wondering why fertility is declining all the while pushing propaganda to decrease fertility.
I don’t necessarily disagree, but I’ve yet to see a comprehensive elucidation of the kind of propaganda that you’re talking about in any kind of coherent or coordinated sense
There are certainly anti-natalist groups out there, but I wouldn’t consider those some kind of elite. In fact they’re usually fairly heterodox.
Similarly, the only people I see pushing natalism at this point are far right wing people
> I don’t necessarily disagree, but I’ve yet to see a comprehensive elucidation of the kind of propaganda that you’re talking about in any kind of coherent or coordinated sense
What? Every major global institution and nation is backing 'family planning', encouraging women to work, etc.
> Similarly, the only people I see pushing natalism at this point are far right wing people
And what 'far right' people are in charge of any major nation or global institution? None.
You'd have to be blind or driven by agenda to not see it. For the past few decades, from hollywood to the UN to education, we've been getting a certain messaging. As an american, I don't remember a single time where we were encouraged to have lots of children. All the messaging, in school, on tv, in movies, etc were all discouraging you from having children early and having lots of them.
Now whether it is a good thing or a bad thing it's up for debate. But it's silly to deny it. In modern times, birth rates are determined by the state. Prior to the current decline, many countries, such as china, iran, etc actually encouraged high birth rates and hence experienced population booms. We had a baby boom generation prior to the elites deciding to lower it.
So if the elites really wanted a population boom, they can switch the messaging and get the propaganda going. The masses follow where the propaganda leads them.
> I honestly struggled to think of what would be a valuable way to have this discussion and it seems like there’s no way to avoid a flamewar.
High quality communication is not the goal of any current social media platform. Some platforms are ideologically opposed to it.
From another comment:
>> Not sure why we aren't allowed to continue the discussion within 'flagged' comments.
The official reason: that "is not what HN is for".
Such a thing could be built, but whether it could be monetized (it would be extremely unpopular), or whether there is any wealthy human in existence who would fund it for the good of humanity, seems highly unlikely.
It stands to reason that when a population delays family formation and childrearing, starting years or even decades later than in the past (say... 30+ compared to late teens), there will be dramatically fewer children born. In the case of some couples, no children at all (even if some are desired).
If you live in Europe then the population of your country 30 years from now will most likely not look much like you, and the prevailing culture, institutions, and religions will look more like those of newcomers who have higher birth rates, at least for the first couple of generations, and less like those of yours/your-parents.
Singaporeans work the longest hours in the world, are the most sleep deprived and have the highest rates of depression in Asia. On top of that, an authoritarian regime, a lack of civil liberties, high cost of living and inequality. Maybe the kind of conditions to make people not want to have children?
In the aggregate is the "baby bust" a real problem? Even a halving of current world population, which isn't close to happening in the next 100 years, would only take us back to the population level of 1975. If it's really true that productivity has gone up since 1975, we should be able to maintain the same standard of living as now.
As a corollary, if people are having fewer children with more thought and deliberation, then those children are probably better cared-for. I can't see that as a bad thing.
> If it's really true that productivity has gone up since 1975, we should be able to maintain the same standard of living as now.
I don't think thats going to be accurate. A population of purely 20-40yr olds is going to be way more productive than a population of 60-80yr olds. This is typically the concern people bring up with the baby bust stats.
We achieved a lot of productivity by having a "young" demographic where there wasn't a lot of 60yr olds to each say 50- yr olds. There's going to be a productivity drop off as people voluntary retire or become too injured to work their original jobs. Additionally, older people require more supportive care so more old people means less young people in more productive (according to GDP) positions.
Take a look at Russia's demographics [1]. That bulge around 40yrs old is going to become a bulge at 60yrs old in 20 years while a lot of them will die so it'll be a smaller bulge at 60yrs old the 20yr old bulge will remain quite a bit smaller. Sure, Russia as a country won't disappear because of this; but they will be less competitive on the global scale and a lot of menial jobs will go unfilled because there just aren't bodies.
It's bad timing for Russia now. If it were to happen to some other country 20 years from now, it would be less bad. For starters, we'd have 20 years of additional advances in robotics, healthcare, eldercare, or artificial intelligence.
Perhaps GenAI will wipe out a lot of white collar work in that time. This frees up people to do physical labor.
Maybe it supercharges robotics or drones by letting them understand the physical world better. Think robotic orderlies changing bedpans, or robots picking fruit. Then we need fewer people for labor.
For those who have no idea what "double-barrelled race" is:
"Couples of inter-ethnic marriages now have the additional option to reflect both their races for their child as a double-barrelled race. This is on top of the existing options of choosing only one of the two different races – either that of the father or the mother – for their child." [1]
The article cites the cost of living first and foremost, with the second item being that women disproportionately bear the cost of child-rearing. I wonder how many countries these would also be the two primary drivers. Or, to phrase the question more in line with what I suspect is the case, I wonder how many countries those two aren't the primary drivers in? I suspect not many.
I wonder how much longer those in power are going to stare this type of data in the face before realizing we need to make some fundamental systemic changes or this whole party is gonna come to a really nasty end. The first thing that goes in an animal population experiencing stress at scale is reproduction.
Isnt women's share of child rearing at an all-time low in most of the western world? I cant help but wonder if the causality runs the other direction.
That is to say, as motherhood becomes less central to the concept of womanhood, fewer women build self models that include it.
That said, I think a more influential cause than either factor is the increasing risk aversion and increasing expectations across the board, and especially when it comes to partnering, life choices, and having kids. Simply put, people arent taking as many risks, and marriage and children are increasingly viewed as risks.
Women's share of child rearing might be at an all time low, but homemaking used to be many women's only job. Maybe men are helping more now, but women are also keeping full time careers going and juggling child rearing at the same time. That it's somewhat less child rearing isn't exactly a big comfort in these new circumstances.
This is absolutely a story about risk, you're right on that. But I truly feel like you'd have to be willfully blinding yourself to not recognize that the risks are way worse than ever. The full grind of capitalism in a global economy has chewed up humanity & left us deeply powerless & exploited. The demands for housing health care, and help have shot to exceptional unaffordability. I don't think risk aversion has necessarily changed: it's just a fact that trying to raise a family is far riskier & much harder than it has been. Those willing to have a family have had to go against ever more abysmal ods.
>That it's somewhat less child rearing isn't exactly a big comfort in these new circumstances.
Absolutely agree. My my main goal was to highlight the proportion of rearing duties may not be causal, or at least a root cause. Im not sure that equal division of labor would even help with two working parents.
>The full grind of capitalism in a global economy has chewed up humanity & left us deeply powerless & exploited.
Im not sure that I lay this all on capitalism, but think that at a minimum, the two are tied. Parallel desires for risk mitigation and consumption feed directly into trained helplessness.
Housing and healthcare are prime examples of this.
I dont think that raising a family is intrinsically any riskier or harder, it is just harder to do in parallel with fulfilling other desires. People want family + X, and the expectations and cost for X grow ever higher.
It is obviously easier to have a family with a 500sqft trailer in the country than a 2000sqft house in the city.
I dont disagree, but Im also how you are tying this to my statement.
What is changing over time in the US or Singapore? Is the opportunity cost getting higher? That could be an interesting idea.
I suppose it is as salaries and material compensation increases, so does the opportunity cost. A homemaker has less opportunity cost than a female professional making 250k per year.
It could be the case that the opportunity cost people are willing to pay for children is not perfectly elastic, and does not scale with income.
One thing to note about the opportunity cost is it's not just your current position.
If you're gunning for a promotion it's not a great move to go on leave for 3+ months because of a kid. Say what you want, but uh people really do put off having kids until they're at a title they like.
If you look at China, it appears that young men there need to make exceptionally large and expensive sacrifices, like borrowing money and buying an expensive apartment, just to be allowed into the dating pool. Does that equalise the total investment into conceiving a baby? Is China better off with birth rates as the result?
"women disproportionately bear the cost of child-rearing" is very difficult to measure objectively.
> "women disproportionately bear the cost of child-rearing" is very difficult to measure objectively.
Not really, they've got the equipment for it (e.g. uteri and mammary glands). I think it would be impossible to "equalize" the cost without doing some extreme and bizarre things (e.g. have some kind of arbitrary Weregild-type thing to "equalize" the cost).
A significant part of the problem seems to be one of ideology colliding with reality.
I think they were making a more general point that the article may be taking a overly simplistic view of the "costs of child-rearing".
If a mother feeds and cares for children, that can be viewed as a cost of children to her. If a man works to feed and house those same children, surely that is a cost of children to me.
I suspect part of the problem is a generation of people raised with just enough economics knowledge to be dangerous, with life viewed through lenses of cost, profit and risk instead of joy, experience, and sentimentalism.
> I suspect part of the problem is a generation of people raised with just enough economics knowledge to be dangerous, with life viewed through lenses of cost, profit and risk instead of joy, experience, and sentimentalism.
IMHO, I think that's part of the problem, but I feel that it's more than "just enough economics knowledge to be dangerous." That knowledge definitely interferes with the ability to analyze the problem, but I don't think it's the main or only thing going on. You could probably add something like "individualism" to the left hand side and something like "duty" to the right to get closer.
Both of these comments are only reacting to the financial and physical costs of child rearing. Obviously humans with penises cannot bear children and it's unreasonable to suggest they should be made to. Similarly, the fact that those men in China are expected to attain so much debt simply to enter the dating pool is also a legitimate problem that needs addressing. However neither of those things reflect the costs of motherhood, which are a lot more expansive:
* Mothers are still by and large the "default" entity for all child care, with it being notable for men to take on that role. Men are regularly praised for "babysitting the kids for mom" even though if you think about that for like, 30 seconds, you realize how insane it is. Of course dad watches the kids too, in any kind of equitable household, that would be expected.
* Mothers are also by default responsible for almost all child-adjacent logistics. School, activities, medical appointments, friend visits, school trips, sports, immunization scheduling.... Like, think about all the annoying logistical bullshit in life that you have to get done just for you, and then imagine that you have to do it all twice, for yourself, and for a secondary third party who oftentimes doesn't appreciate it either.
>> A significant part of the problem seems to be one of ideology colliding with reality.
I think you should read that a little more expansively that the things I explicitly commented on.
Some examples of ideology: "children should be parented with high intensity", "men and women should be doing the exact same things in a family in exactly equal proportions with no specialization", "a family should consist of two capitalism-participting income-earners," etc.
I suspect fixing the issues you outlined with the fixes you're implying wouldn't actually do anything to increase birthrates.
Something that might be worth pondering is: When was that ever not the case? Are we seriously saying that in the 1800s those poor desperate people who had 12 kids and put most of them (the ones that even survived!) to work in mines and farms, were in a better situation?
The discussion around cost is a red herring. If it really was about cost, we'd be seeing the upper middle class having children by the ton. Most of us here on HN would have 10 children each, because cost definitely isn't an issue for any well-paid software engineer or startup founder.
I definitely think that you are right - this is definitely going to be a major crisis in the next few decades, and there needs to be a serious course correction, and -major- incentives for having kids.
But I don't think it comes down to cost, for the most part. I think there are a number of other factors, but cost just ends up being a nice easy scapegoat because it sounds completely reasonable. Nobody can argue with it, not even oneself.
> Are we seriously saying that in the 1800s those poor desperate people who had 12 kids and put most of them (the ones that even survived!)
This is the origin story of the contraceptive movement: either your population growth rate is contraception-limited, or it's death-limited. The latter is pretty horrific.
> If it really was about cost, we'd be seeing the upper middle class having children by the ton
The cost issue is even worse for everyone who isn't a rentier, because children need time, and the opportunity cost of that is higher the more you could be earning otherwise.
(hmm: "7 points by pjc50 18 minutes ago [flagged]" I see it's going to be one of those days)
In unindustrialized agriculture having a lot of children is a sound strategy. The first couple years they cost you food and time, but after that they are cheaper than employing workers, and they will even take care of you when you are too old to work the fields.
And without modern healthcare a lot of them will die. If you want to make sure one of them inherits the farm (and provides for you if you manage to become old) you need to have enough children to achieve this at an acceptable level of risk.
I tend to agree that costs aren't the only factor. Poor people have always had kids, usually more than wealthier more secure families. I think the bigger question is why security is increasingly becoming an pre-requisite.
I think it may have more to do with increasing cultural expectations we put on mothers and parents.
There was a times were it seemed like these expectations were much lower than today. To hear it from friends born in the 40's to 60's, the typical duties of parents basically ended at providing a roof and two meals a day.
This ignores the lower marginal utility of money as wealth increases (and increased marginal tax burden), and probably greater marginal "utility" of having children at higher levels of wealth (as you have more ability to spend time with them/don't need to be preoccupied with economic worries. e.g. my wife is a stay-at-home mom and I can work from home, so we get to spend a lot of time with our kids).
> Something that might be worth pondering is: When was that ever not the case? Are we seriously saying that in the 1800s those poor desperate people who had 12 kids and put most of them (the ones that even survived!) to work in mines and farms, were in a better situation?
I mean... the answer to that is, it's complicated. If you're talking the peasantry bound to the land owned by a Lord in ye olden days, I would say they were certainly stressed out and barely getting by, but they were different stressors. If they didn't grow enough food to pay their owed amount to the person who effectively owned them, they would obviously be in a really bad situation. But at the same time, that's something they could work on and reasonably plan ahead for: it's an actionable stressor, if you will. It's certainly a problem but it's a problem you can actually do something about.
In contrast, if you work in an industry that chronically underpays people, are saddled with various obligations, and are subject to extremely high costs of living, like, in theory you can try and get a better job maybe? But that's not nearly as actionable in general, and there's no guarantee that the better job is even out there, nor how many people you'd be competing with to get that better paying job. Sure, you have air conditioning, you have modern medical treatments, you have a whole host of things at your fingertips should you need them that those peasants wouldn't even dream of. But you also have a ton of stressors that are far more disconnected from your ability to solve them, that are down to systemic failures in our societies.
> The discussion around cost is a red herring. If it really was about cost, we'd be seeing the upper middle class having children by the ton.
That presumes that the upper middle class aren't also drowning in debt. I can't speak for everyone, but I assure you, I have the really nice house, relatively new vehicles, people would probably call me quite wealthy by the standards of the area I live in, and make no mistake, we're doing better than a lot of our neighbors, but I'm still like, three bad months from homelessness and that's definitely, along with the general trajectory of the world, one of the reasons why we're childfree.
I know tons of people my age who are doing much worse than me, who also have decided against children, even if temporarily because they are so damned expensive and there's basically no support here for parents save for a tax credit.
Not to be obnoxiously judgemental here (and this is partly meant to be advice to any younger reader and not just address you specifically), but if you are upper middle class and the expense of buying fancy things limits you from having children, why not not do that? I've got two kids, we might still have more, and we live in a median (for the US) house and drive a basic 2017 Subaru that we bought used. We're saving to buy that really nice house in an upper class area, and our existing mortgage is already fully covered by our assets (not paying it off because of the interest rate). If I lost my job, it means we'd stop making progress toward upgrading, but we are always secure in our current position. Pretty much the first thing we did while younger and still renting was to establish a year of runway, and we've only grown that over time.
We save like 2/3 of my income. Taxes are probably over half of our expenses. I realize it's annoying and preachy and privileged and all that, but if you're high income, the comfort and confidence you get from never overextending yourself is priceless, and you can still be quite comfortable.
Germany might be a counter-example. Cost of living has steadily risen 2008-2021 (and dropped a bit since then), but Germany's birth rate has increased over that period, while birth rates in France and the US have fallen. Germany's birth rate is generally slowly rising ever since a low in 1995.
If you zoom out a bit more Germany's birth rate cratered in the 1960s/70s, generally attributed to the wider availability of oral contraceptives. Similarly in its peers. Though that's only the enabling technology, the lower desire for babies is almost certainly driven by other factors (urbanization, better health care, etc)
> Though that's only the enabling technology, the lower desire for babies is almost certainly driven by other factors (urbanization, better health care, etc)
I'm not so sure about that. There's no law that says desire has to be aligned with needed action. For instance: up to the availability of oral contraceptives, it was very hard to avoid having kids even if you didn't want them. Kids would happen automatically if you desired a different thing: sex.
It's sort of like exercise: it used to not matter if someone desired to "exercise" or not, because they were forced to do lots of physical activity if they wanted to live (e.g. physical work on a farm, walk to the market, etc.). Now technology has enabled a previously impossible level of sedentary life for the common person, moving exercise from a necessity to a desire, we have huge and increasing levels of health problems in society because the desire for the needed thing itself isn't there.
I predict, after some period of time, "childfree" psychology will breed itself out of society, and the people who are left will have a lot more explicit desire for children.
Being able to trust that my employer would bring me back part-time in a comparable role (at the same hourly rate of pay) after a year of maternity leave and then decide if I wanted to continue working part-time up to my kid's 8th birthday sure made this whole thing less scary.
That's one of the big differences between having a kid in Germany and the US.
(the sub-500 EUR/mo daycare is another one - and that was for a 1.5 engineer income couple)
What are you talking about? Maybe I don't understand what you are getting at but Germany's Population Pyramid has them completely collapsing by 2100 whereas the US and France are actually the stars of population stability (in the west anyway)
I'm purely talking about the change in birth rate and how that relates to outside pressures. The German birth rate is rising, but it's also true that it's very low. It has been below that of the US since about the 1920s, and the two are only now approaching each other with the German birth rate sharply rising (probably attributable to immigration) and the US birth rate falling.
And of course population pyramids are affected by both births/deaths and migration. Migration is a pretty big factor that is very different between the three countries (and that changed significantly over time as well)
They aren't making a dent. The country is on track for population collapse. Although the last person left that will turn off the lights might not be the typical German that you think of.
What you describe is true in the US though. They have been able to 'cheat' by getting the cream of the crop via immigration to bolster their numbers(although its now fraying post Trump). Without that immigration, they would probably be mirroring German numbers.
I think the population curve on the right is a little misleading because the y axis isnt zero justified. Germany is looking at a 10% reduction over the next 50 years. They have a large cohort of current 60 year-olds, but their pyramid is far from catastrophic, and unlike China for example.
Maybe it won't go to zero like that chart shows but if there isn't enough young people to at least maintain the population then as the old people die, it will lead to the overall population to decrease, then you also have to consider accelerated deaths due to lack of resources in senior care caused by an increasing lack of young people. 10% reduction seems absurdly low given you can literally see the large difference between the young (0-18) vs the aging workforce 55-59
What's up with your racism and hate? Literally No one is colonizing you
1- Foreigners account to only 17% of the population (and 70% of them are from Europe) [1]
2- If we look at countries with the highest proportion of immigrants, Germany is no. 18 on the list [2]
If you've an issue with people from outside Germany moving there, change your policy. If there are problems, fix your system. That's how every country work.
Ew? Does this vulgarity represent 'the culture' you're proud of? Judging by your manners, one can tell that you have a very rich culture. I'm kind of jealous. Feel free to expose yourself more.
Colonizers vs migrants:
Let me help you understand the difference, Who appointed the chancellor? Who is passing laws and enacting mandates? Who control the police and military?
I see, it's not only your manners that's lacking, even your education is lower class. It feels like you only read the table of contents when studying history.
You're just living in full paranoia, asking other people to erase their identity because they're different. I advise you to travel abroad more and make friends with people from different cultures. Every country in the world, except maybe North Korea, has people from different backgrounds who are proud and attached to their heritage, religion, language, and culture.
There are many german diaspora abroad who are attached to their culture and don't let go of their identity, they even establish their own political parties and organizations, by your logic the germans are colonizing other countries, right? You're delusional
If you want to repeat Brexit, go ahead. The world would be thankful for a new laughing stock.
In countries with the fastest growth rates women have an even greater child-rearing burden so that's not it.
That said, it's a tiny island, do they really need more people as a society? Or is this mainly looking at is a country wanting continuous neverending economic growth?
I think they'd be ecstatic with a constant population level. They've got a birth rate < 1 per woman where a replacement rate is 2.1. So that means a halving of population size every generation.
> Or is this mainly looking at is a country wanting continuous neverending economic growth?
I mean, yes almost assuredly. But that doesn't mean shrinking populations are without their own issues, outside economic ones, elder care being the most obvious. And, shrinking populations can quite easily contribute to large-scale cultural demise, which is always something worth considering. That said, fewer humans overall is undeniably better for our environmental outlook.
I guess the implication I'm making is can we at some point say, we've achieved a pretty good standard of living, let's enjoy our national patrimony and not perpetuate the rat race?
I mean if you're asking me? I'd say we're already there. If you're asking the MBA-brain-worms-having grindset number-go-up crazy people who run our society? Never.
Not just Singapore, but there is a curious discrepancy in that the cost of children are felt at the family level but the benefits only at the state level. The other issue is that many educated people (including Elon Musk) realize they can have more impact in their careers, maybe even as managers, than in their children’s lives. Maybe the authoritarians of Singapore need to train their citizens to run and extract value from their charges’ lives more effectively. Other extreme ideas which may work for liberal societies include legalizing child employment for family businesses, collective childrearing, organized homeschooling, family intellectual property, and so forth.
I'm so tired of hearing this. Declining birthrates is NOT a crisis. It's a good thing populations are declining. We live in a world of finite resources. There's only so much to go around. A larger population simply means we're less prosperous as individuals.
It's only a crisis to economists who depend on an ever growing population to drive infinite growth.
This misses a bigger issue with a baby bust: population composition. When birth rates decline sharply all at once, as is happening here, populations skew older and older. More elderly people being supported by fewer young people is also not a recipe for sustainability, in fact it is quite the opposite. The people who will be burdened with caring for the elderly are also the people who will need to have children in order to stabilize the population. This isn't an easy leveling-off of a population, its the beginning of a collapse.
There's plenty of young people to care for the elderly. There's this strange assumption that it takes one young person to care for one elderly person, I've seen it in news articles, and I've seen people say it, either implicitly or explicitly.
Here's the shocker: one young person can care for more than one elderly person. Not every elderly person needs a young person exclusively devoted to them.
Also not all elderly people need caretakers. Not all elderly people are helpless without young people. My dad is well into his 70s now, and he may be retired, but is still helping family and friends, fixes up their homes, helps care for his grandchildren, and holds his own.
Society won't fall apart. You just need to adjust your expectations and things will work out in the end.
Singapore, as well as South Korea and in part China and Japan have a few things in common. A work yourself to death culture, paired with the expectation to forever take care of your parents/in-laws.
Not exactly a fertile ground to start a family on. And that doesn't even go into gender expectations.
My take on this is that the current performance culture we've been living since the 80s where we worship the economy over anything else is biting us in the ass. We value work over family and children. We even dare to call them an "opportunity cost".
We should return to a single income society. A modern version of it that is not gendered. A single full-time income should be enough to run the basics of a family. Fail to deliver this and there will be no families. In general we should work less and enjoy life more. Otherwise, what is the point?
The point of technical progress should be less labor needed. But this progress is never paid out because we keep using that room to make up new bullshit jobs to produce garbage products we don't need.
A dutch economist once calculated that about 40-50% of the world economy is bullshit. Busy-keep, non-essential, a replacement for boredom.
Anyway, a system that advocates for dual incomes, job insecurity and high retirement ages that sees children as a distraction to optimal performance will cease to exist. Children are the most valuable "product" in society, yet we care about it the least.
The key misconception here is that people want a single-income household and to have kids, and they've been Shanghaied out of this idyllic state of affairs by The Economy.
No. It's revealed preference, reflected worldwide. People think being single-income sucks. People think having kids sucks. They'll tell you they want to have kids and this and that if only it were "affordable", even when it's more affordable than it ever was for their parents. What their parent really had was a lack of contraception and other options; otherwise, they wouldn't've had kids and blamed it on something else the way you'd explain why you don't go to the gym more often. The way the world used to work has been a Ponzi scheme, and we've only now unlocked the ability to change the channel.
So no. There is no going back. And, even if there was, we'd only roll forward again since the fate of that lifestyle is to be defeated by your Bullshit Economy. It's a dead end. The only way is forward: growing posthumans in pods. We're only like 100 or 200 years away from that, and we'll make it there easily under a widening demographic pyramid.
Well, if you put it that way, what is the point of humans anyway?
The human part of any hybrid would be the weak part as it comes to performance. And since we don't care about typical human things, like family, why bother with a human part at all?
I honestly struggled to think of what would be a valuable way to have this discussion and it seems like there’s no way to avoid a flamewar.
The only thing I would add is that the English anthropologist Chris Knight wrote extensively about “sex strikes” (which goes beyond the simple act of sex of course, into the entire structural notion of child rearing as a social function) being the driver of cultural peace throughout human history in his critical 1991 book “blood relations”
Relevant chapter: http://www.chrisknight.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/Sex-...
Seems fairly obvious that’s what’s happening and mirrors historical birth rate crashes aligning with general breakup of long running social expectations
Polybius wrote as such in 200BC:
“ In our time all Greece was visited by a dearth of children and generally a decay of population, owing to which the cities were denuded of inhabitants, and a failure of productiveness resulted, though there were no long-continued wars or serious pestilences among us.”
Birth rates crashe when people generally feel like there is no future for the current type of society or future societies that their current societies are headed towards.
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...
https://fabiusmaximus.com/2008/06/11/polybius/amp/