Hacker News Reader

Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

My concern is that population will shrink after 2100 globally but it will already be shrinking in the rich countries long before that. And all indicators right now is that shrinkage will speed up.

There is something wrong with rich modern secular society here or anywhere (it happens to all societies right now whether they are European, Japanese, Chinese, etc) in that it currently leads to sub replacement reproduction. This is the next global issue as it will lead to instability in modern rich societies in that they are not sustainable.

Japan is the future of all other rich societies, rapid shrinkage if you exclude immigration.

And if you encourage immigration as the solution to shrinkage you end up with rising racism and other reactionary trends to these changing demographics.

Right now the only societies that are growing or even stable are either developing/poor or highly conservative/religious societies.

If we do not address this issue then the world's future is likely poor or highly religious (most likely both) as demographics is the future whether we like it or not.

Also societies with shrinking populations will tend to have horrid economies and probably negative growth as the pyramid is inverted. Probably again like Japan.

View on HN

>And if you encourage immigration as the solution to shrinkage you end up with rising racism and other reactionary trends to these changing demographics.

One of the worst things about using immigration as a solution is that it's merely a bandaid. The worst thing is that people who encourage mass immigration are (likely) unknowingly saying their country is more deserving of the temporary benefits of immigration, and the source country can go to hell.

Many countries that are currently sources of large numbers of immigrants are rapidly approaching sub-replacement levels (e.g. Mexico), if they haven't already reached that point (e.g., Vietnam, China). The idea behind mass immigration is that you have a constant supply of workers and tax payers to subsidize the welfare of the retiring natives of a country. The idea of having a class of people subsidize others is troublesome enough, but the real problem is those less wealthy countries that immigrants come from are now lacking in workers and losing their own future. For countries that are still only beginning to develop, such as Vietnam, their future is a hell of a lot more at risk than something like Canada.

First world countries relying on immigrants have infrastructure and various frameworks built up that'll last them for quite a while after populations begin to dip. Poor countries do not have that benefit. Shit will hit the fan and hard. Young people who struggle to meet basic daily needs are going to be pissed when they're working for dollars a day and expected to support the social nets given to 3 generations above them while being told there's nothing left for them.

Right now, the government is saying we should mass import Vietnamese people to change the diapers of our old and do dirty construction jobs. What's Vietnam going to do in 25 years when its population crisis catches up with it, and every country around it is going through the same problem? Nobody's changing their diapers and their streets are going to crumble from insufficient laborers.

Really I have seen the "unfair to the source country" arguement against immigration several times and it has never failed to look like a bizzare pretext because the true reasons would be unacceptable to say out loud. The source countries already fail to use their potential.

States are not people. They have no rights - rights are for people and they have no right to them.

I find your argument quite flawed. Have you asked yourself why people immigrate? It is often to have or provide a higher quality of life to the people they care about. It is not about where you were born.

People and countries often make choices, some choices allows them to prosper while others don't. Think of Venezuela for example, the people chose to vote for a populist government and the government's decisions destroyed their economy. The individual living there now has to make a decision to stay and whether the storm or to leave in search of a better life. Is it the fault of Colombia, Brazil, Canada, US, Mexico that Venezuelans are looking for a higher quality of life? Is it the fault of these Colombia,et al that they look to find a way to sell it to their people that they should accept migrants? Although this is an extreme case, it puts things into perspective since you can do the same exercise for famines, wars, etc at different scales and different times in history.

On another point, some countries and families are dependent on remittance (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remittance) to support their policies/themselves.

Being able to move where the jobs are... aren't really a bad thing. It helps all participants. The only downside is that you might have a bit of a brain drain. Which is not necessarily bad. Those with brains goes to another country where they can work and then being able to send money back home. Poor countries in Europe did this in the big emigration and populated America. Those countries are among the richest in the world now. Both America and Europe benefited by it.

They might not be able to find jobs in their home country which could be a burden on the country. If they move and start working in another country. They might get a job that is harder to recruit to and not only just fill that spot but also pay taxes.

Most studies I have seen claim that the more exposure one have to people of other cultures, the more acceptance it will have. So it is actually the opposite. The more immigrants, the more acceptance there should be.

Re: The idea behind mass immigration is that you have a constant supply of workers and tax payers to subsidize the welfare of the retiring natives of a country.

Politicians run up deficits and then cover their boo boo via immigration. I'm not making a value judgement on immigration here, but politicians have a bad habit of sacrificing the future for current benefits largely because their political career is a relatively small slice of time. It's why we have debt and pension problems. True, voters play a part by having short memories, voting for instant gratification.

I'm going to give my not so popular answer for this.

Western society is moving away from traditional families. When I ask my son what he wants to become when he's older, he says he wants to be a police officer.

When I ask my 2 girls, they both want to become a mom. My social engineered response to this was "maybe you should become a school teacher, that way you can work with kids and be home when your kids are home". Because let's face it, being only a mom as a girl is not socially acceptable. It's a weak position to be in. We are told to push them into engineering, STEM fields, becoming CEO's, world leaders, whatever. That's what we should do. But my girls, at this age, just want to become a mom.

Western society is trying to make boys out of girls, and girls out of boys. I have no problem with women working in tech fields, and I worked with many great ones. But the question needs to be asked is if our society will survive such a thing.

On one hand it's great that women have all these new rights, are getting more "equal" to men. But if your own culture is unable to produce enough children, and you have to import families and children from regions where womens rights are questionable, you need to ask how sustainable your democratic equal society is.

This is still a big question for myself, so any real discussion is welcome, because maybe I'm overlooking something (so please don't just downvote).

Maybe if we want our society to survive, we need to accept that although women are equal to men, they are very different. A family is made up of a man and a women, who support each other in their strengths and interests, and raise children together. Maybe our society should steer away from pushing women into a 'male' role that on one hands makes sense, but on the other hand is questionable. Maybe instead of pushing women into 'male' roles, we should support them better in how they benefit our society.

I know this comes across as really terrible, because history has shown that stay at home moms are in a really weak position. But on the other hand, modern society is unable to produce enough kids, and so import people from 'stay at home mom' cultures.

Any constructive discussion is welcome.

I don’t think we need to devalue women (again) to support “traditional” families (again). I got two weeks parental leave when my child was born. Civilized nations provide 6 months or more for both mother and father. My wife could take a couple years off of work, but then her career would be set back to square one. I elected to seriously downshift my own career just so I could see my kids on a daily basis. By that I mean not work so long that I literally don’t see my children M-F. Work culture is what is destroying families, not women’s rights. I remember sitting in the office of my boss once, she was sobbing over a mountain of paperwork to do, her kid had been injured at school and sent to the ER (ankle sprain or something). She couldn’t leave. She could, but then some “important” papers in some “important” case wouldn’t be filed on time. The whole squeezing of the middle (and upper-middle) class over the last 50 years is what’s making it really hard to have kids. And as more and more colleagues opt to be child-free, the 24/7 100% dedication to work becomes normalized and makes it even harder for working parents. I think the way forward is serious social investment in supporting families and enabling parents, both men and women, to have careers and aspirations but also be parents.

> I don’t think we need to devalue women (again) to support “traditional” families (again).

I don't understand how supporting families means devaluing women. What exactly do you mean by "devalue"? If motherhood is the stated goal of a woman, and she achieves it, how/why is she "devalued"? If it brings her meaning and fulfillment, isn't that something to be celebrated and respected?

I'm also bothered by your swipe against traditional families. Children who grow up in two parent homes are overwhelmingly biased towards success than children in single parent homes. Traditional families have been the norm for the entirety of human existence (until very recently). We discard them at our peril.

I agree with the thrust of your comment, I think I just didn’t frame it properly. The comment I was responding to seemed (to me) to suggest that we go back to the 1950s when a woman didn’t have a right as a matter of law or de facto to have a career and aspirations of her own. I read the comment as suggesting that women’s empowerment was a proximate cause to the degradation of the family. I think electing to be a parent is not “devaluing” (as I myself, as a father, have done so) but that removing the option and making the decision for all women is devaluing. Not sure I track the comment re: swipe against traditional families? If I suggested that then I was inarticulate or misinterpreted.

Edit: also to the gp comment, which suggests that women are ‘naturally’ better at parenting. Fuck all that, I’m a kickass dad, I’ll go toe to toe any day with any mother.

How does the GP comment suggest that?

It's not clear to me. It seemed to suggest that there are complementary roles that cannot be completely subsumed by either individually.

The undertone is that women are better at being parents than men. I don’t agree with that.

Can you elaborate and explain how this "undertone" is present?

How do you see the GP comparing two mutually exclusive roles in child rearing?

From a purely economic perspective, staying at home raising kids isn't going to generate you any income. We should perhaps value mothers in other ways, but money is the principal indicator of value in our current society.

Is our culture so blind as to see no distinction between moral value and economic value? This doesn't make sense on an intuitive human level, which is why people will often help out their fellow man without being motivated by profit. Similarly, a stay-at-home parent is (most often) working for the good of their children at the expense of creating economic value, and we as a society need to recognize the moral value of that.

Try to pay your mortgage with moral value. Or, as my grandfather was known to say: wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which one fills up first. No, the virulent strain of capitalism that has gripped the western world over the last century does not value anything but currency. Full stop.

Some of these comments from today might help brighten your worldview. Human beings do feel love and and act on it, regardless of how virulent your perception of capitalism.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19727156

Many countries with strong social support systems have a baby bonus program where people are literally paid to have kids.

In Canada, it's based on household income. In 2016, the max was $6,496 per child under age 6 and $5,481 per child age 6 through 17.

If you have two kids (2 years old and 10 years old) with a household income of $50k, that works out to roughly $10k per year. When you consider that you don't need to pay for childcare (which could be more than $20k per year for a 2-year old in Toronto) and the constant care and support those children will receive, that's actually pretty good. And once the kids get a bit older and can be trusted to care for themselves once they get home from school, the stay-at-home parent can easily start working full-time again.

"I don't understand how supporting families means devaluing women. What exactly do you mean by "devalue"? If motherhood is the stated goal of a woman, and she achieves it, how/why is she "devalued"? If it brings her meaning and fulfillment, isn't that something to be celebrated and respected?"

I believe the query here is to devalue women in order to support the idea of a nuclear family. Traditional nuclear families (as mother stays home to raise the children) have never been the norm. I'm Chinese and where I am from the is the grandparents that raise the children while both parents work! From what I understand stay-at-home-motherhood has only ever been possible within a single generation in "western" society.

I believe the devaluation comment is associated with the fact our society is capitalist, and one has to purchase basic living and education with money. Income and quality of life have a correlated effect which peters out well above median wage, and many fields that offer the flexibility required for motherhood are less high paying, which often means if one wishes to become a mother they may need to take a less well paying job and thus have a lower quality of life.

Of course, this also means a SAHM who does not bring income is culturally not valued because their work does not directly bring in income (even though attempting to outsource this work would be often equivalent to the salary of a single laborer!). I would argue this is not a problem specifically on the shoulders of women but the shoulders of society as a whole not putting in the framework to support parenting- this would include generous parental leave, flexible work hours, opportunity to WFH, lower medical expenses for children, etc.

I also agree with much of this. To the extent that there is a “devaluation” of full-time parenting it’s in the context of a capitalistic society. Again though, to the original response, I don’t find parenting to be low value myself, just the idea that as a society we should mandate that all people of one gender must be stay at home parents. I think that idea from a few generations ago reflects a sexist bias.

I'd be curious to hear more precisely what you'd propose here.

My impression that, unfortunately, many such attempts to (essentially) make life better for working mothers appear to have pushed us away from families-with-kids, and towards ever more singletons (including single mothers). They tend, I think, to move us from a system in which the family is the economic unit, to one in which its personal compromises are not necessary.

This is true especially regarding divorce. Biasing divorce renumerations overwhelmingly towards one gender has greatly weakened the shared financial incentive to keep families intact.

A lot of that is due to historical societal reasons. In a society where one gender makes money and the other takes care of kids, I don't know how it could have been any other way.

In today's society, what's fair is for the non-custody parent to help support the children by reimbursing the custody parent. Or in cases of joint custody, the one with higher income reimburses the one with lower income. Which I believe is the way it's done in my state.

Historically, you are wrong.

Custody of Infants Act 1839. Prior to this, men both "made the money" and received custody of the children.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Custody_of_Infants_Act_1839

FredW

Not sure where you’re going with this, but for starters I’d give new parents (both parents) like 5 years paid parental leave. Yeah, I suggested 5 years. With some sort of workforce reentry rights or support to facilitate getting back in the workforce. I’d start the discussions there.

Why do you say that is unfortunate?

Because I think nearly everyone involved in attempting to change how things work was sincere in their hope that this would only lead to improvement. Yet on some pretty important measures, like the proportion of lower-class kids who get to grow up with a father, we've done very badly indeed.

> A family is made up of a man and a women, who support each other in their strengths and interests, and raise children together. So why not focus on the "together" part instead of trying to force partners into segregated roles?

As you note yourself, stay at home mothers are in a precarious position (and, curiously, enthusiasm among males for traditional motherhood is NOT correlated with enthusiasm for lifelong alimony payments, or for generous government benefits for stay at home single mothers).

And as far as the children are concerned, I don't think even the most conservative advocate of traditional gender roles would argue that they are better off being raised almost exclusively by one parent, and having the other confine themselves to cutting checks.

So the solution, it seems to me, is to build a society that helps BOTH parents to spend time raising their children.

I agree, and I'd take it a step further. I just listened to an interview with Indra Nooyi (former CEO of PepsiCo). She attributed her success as CEO and ability to still be a mother due to extended family being involved with taking care of her kids.

In western society there is a lot of value in independence in general. But a lot could be gained/saved from grandparents being able to help take care of children, and be able to get by on their retirement pension/savings much easier. Perhaps this is one aspect of non western societies that could/should be adopted more in the west.

As a recent parent, view makes a lot of sense to me. Two weeks of parental leave is absolutely insufficient. There are probably a lot of other variables at play but Norway, which I’m sure encourages women to enter ‘male’ lines of work has a more sustainable population than Italy, which has a weaker social net.

https://www.populationpyramid.net/norway/2017/

https://www.populationpyramid.net/italy/2017/

> being raised almost exclusively by one parent, and having the other confine themselves to cutting checks.

If that's how you see the environment that a stay-at-home parent produces, with a full-time employed parent functioning only as a vending machine, then how could two working parents be an improvement?

Two part time working parents, BOTH engaged with domestic tasks.

That would be a good alternative if an unlikely series of conditions were met, e.g. availability of sufficiently-paying part-time jobs, sufficient wage similarity to not make the lower-earning partner's work a relative waste, affordability of insurance, etc.

>But on the other hand, modern society is unable to produce enough kids

This is a contentious claim, as there are different measures of “enough kids”. Some examples I can think of are:

Enough kids to support the economic 2% growth assumptions? Enough kids to reduce natural resource consumption to prolong the number of years the Earth is habitable? Enough kids to prevent another country or group of countries from walking in and taking over? Enough kids to take care of the older people and the rest of the country’s infrastructure and still make advancements?

I don’t know what all the answers are, but it’s super complicated. From what I can tell though in my peer group, the biggest thing stopping people from having kids is lack of funds, job security, lack of parental leave, and an inability to find what they consider suitable partners within child bearing ages.

How much of that is due to women entering the workforce versus other things such as declining real wages and job opportunities, I don’t know.

The big problem we have is social programs. They redistribute wealth from young people right now to old people right now, but they are sold to young people as though they are investing into their future. As the ratio of young people to old people shrinks our social programs end up in more and more trouble. The fiscal gap is a problem in most developed countries.

>> They redistribute wealth from young people right now to old people right now, but they are sold to young people as though they are investing into their future.

I want to say that's fiction in the US but it's worse than fiction. The social security system pays out about what a person puts in over their lifetime. It is not the young paying the old as you say. But that's not the whole story. The "fund" has been robbed by congress by "investing" the money in government bonds. In other words, other parts of the government "borrowed" the money and spent it. So it isn't spent on old retired people, it's spent on society at large. We're at a tipping point where the net flow of money into the fund should reverse - more paying out than going in - which means those bonds will have to be repaid without taking out new ones. Congress has gotten so used to treating it as a general revenue source that they act like SS is going to be insolvent, when the reality is they can't figure out how to pay it back - it's the government that's really on the edge here.

Politicians have tried to paint this many ways to avoid the truth. One even asked the federal reserve to verify that they don't really need to pay off those bonds and the response way basically "um yes you do".

> >> They redistribute wealth from young people right now to old people right now, but they are sold to young people as though they are investing into their future.

> I want to say that's fiction in the US but it's worse than fiction. The social security system pays out about what a person puts in over their lifetime.

Does that payout account for inflation? Why are we forced to give up a percentage of our wealth to let the government manage for us if it's a 1:1 distribution?

I think the reason is that many people won't do it otherwise. Once they reach retirement age some of them will complain and others will demand that the government do something about it.

Your question sounds like it is about the history of Social Security, and how it got to be the way it is. Some googling will put you on the right track.

Of course there are exceptions, but I'm talking about social programs in aggregate in developed countries. Most of them don't work like social security does in the US. For example, I'm not aware of healthcare working like that in any country.

This program is solvable, with something like Australia's mandatory superannuation or Singapore's Central Provident Fund, where people are forced to save a certain percentage of their income for retirement (and the money is actually saved, they're not just given IOUs for money that will be taken from future young people).

There is no way to actually save money. You perform work for others in exchange for IOUs that you hope to exchange for someone else's work later. If at a later point there are not enough people to do new work, you can't exchange your money(==IOUs) for goods anymore.

Why force it though? Shouldn't it be up to the people whether they want to save it or not? In Eastern Europe this is a concern because many people have lived through their savings evaporating. What's to say that something similar doesn't happen in the future?

Furthermore, how would you even implement it? Do young people right now have to pay for the upkeep of the old generation right now and will then have to additionally pay for their own retirement fund? It seems to me that somebody's going to get screwed here.

But the discipline to stick to such a solution is difficult. Bending the rules just a little more to spend more money this election cycle is always going to be extremely tempting.

In addition, the situation is a bit better in this regard for small countries, who can just invest elsewhere. If the whole world tried to do this, it's not clear what they could invest in, as what they want to withdraw in 30 years time is actually the services of cooks and nursing staff etc. who must be of working age at that time.

> This is a contentious claim, as there are different measures of “enough kids”.

I don’t agree with the comment you’re replying to, but I should add that while there are different measures, the range is extremely narrow. Most western countries are at fertility levels where without immigration they will cease to exist entirely in relatively short order.

... for values of "cease to exist entirely" measured in "populated by millions of people, but considerably fewer millions than before" and values of "relatively short order" measured in centuries.

> On one hand it's great that women have all these new rights. . .

Do you mind if I ask how old you are? The rights of women to freely choose careers, and to make their own reproductive decisions, are at least several decades old.

> Western society is trying to make boys out of girls, and girls out of boys. . .

Can you provide examples of this? Not to preempt your arguments, but this is an oft-repeated conservative platitude that is mostly code for, "I wish women would stay out of the workforce and bear children."

> Do you mind if I ask how old you are? The rights of women to freely choose careers, and to make their own reproductive decisions, are at least several decades old.

i think OP of this subthread means "new" in the context of human society "new". Several decades is still pretty "new" if you take into account human history.

> i think OP of this subthread means "new" in the context of human society "new". Several decades is still pretty "new" if you take into account human history.

The "woman stays at home taking care of the children and the man goes out and earns enough to feed the family" concept is also new if you take into account human history.

It got introduced for the most part during the 19th century. Before that you couldn't afford to not let the women work anyway. Actually, during the industrial revolution and the growing social disorder there, you also couldn't afford to not let women and children work but often you had to.

And if you look at the whole of human history, the most common model of raising children was by a whole community. From groups of 5-10 individuals to even larger communities, all were somewhat responsible for and watching the growing children.

The idea that everybody could raise a child with only two or even worse just one parent is laughable if it weren't so sad that it's a common view.

quite true, but I feel like the "mother at home" cultural artifact still feels older in modern (european/american) human's psyche. It wasn't the best system, but it feels like the system that most of our societal changes have been seeking to rectify.

Your point about the 19th century is also interesting as its (mother at home) origins in that time period may explain why it's so ingrained and also deemed the default. It arose during the time of the biggest jump in human technological advancement (industrial revolution). Most of the propaganda for it references this correlation and uses it as a justification.

I don't agree with this sort of connection, but it is interesting to note.

sorry about the repetition of your point. I recently hit my head.

codifying freedom is not the same as having it. ask black people about it.

I find it bizarre culturally that being a stay at home mom is so frowned upon in many circles. The idea that working 9-5 for some corporation is one’s highest calling seems silly. Perhaps one day we will respect mothers again.

I find it bizarre that you automatically assume that it should be the mother who stays home and takes care of the kids, rather than the father.

At what point were mothers respected in the western culture? (Respected == given as many resources as a corporate income would enable)

Much isn't said enough about modern fertility rates and how they are shrinking rapidly.

https://www.gapminder.org/tools/?from=world#$state$marker$ax...

As I see it, in the complexity of modern life a family would greatly benefit from a dedicated administrator. There is simply no time after work to keep a grip on all the developing situations regarding issues that greatly impact us like: health, finances, laws rules and regulations, family ties, housing, etc, etc. In practice we seem to sacrifice everything for work.

I made up my mind a long time ago about "more women in tech". It's the same as "teach everybody to code". It's big co looking to get supply higher than demand so they can cut costs.

You mean like your stereotypical 1950s head of household who receives information from all the other family members and decides on a course of action which is mostly non-negotiable?

Not everything old is bad and not everything new is good. Secondly I think that women are better at this thing, so no, not like 1950. And thirdly an administrator isn't even a boss, let alone a dictator. It's quite a hands on, pay attention to everything, balance opposites kind of thing. I am one professionally.

Cost disease is one possible explanation for this process. As everything gets more expensive the risk of not keeping up grows, this manifests in somewhat exotic ways such as the tent cities of Hawaii having full parking lots for people to drive to work.

Having children directly increases the risk of falling out of a financially stable position, as well as the negative effects of falling out such as raising a child in a tent City. Considering that most of our young population is either fighting against stagnant wages or student loan debt, it's not surprising that child birth rates have also fallen.

I find the Kibbutz experiments by the Israelis to be fascinating in that regard. Thats where they tried to create egalitarian "all are equal" mini-societies. But they really tried to think it through and make it work. For example care for the kids was sort-of-centralized, so that women would not feel burdened to perform more tasks than men, boys and girls were thought the exact same things throughout their lives, that kinda thing.

And it worked, kinda. People from those Kubbitz contribute disproportionately more to the economy, and those things are still going with several generations of people living in them.

However newer generations became much less strict about the egalitarian aspect, as a lot of women preferred just to take care of the kids and leave the men to go out and start companies. Leading to funny confrontations between girls and their grandmothers :)

Anyway I'm sure I'm grossing over a ton of stuff and its best to research on your own, but what I wanted to add is that different types of societies are possible, both free egalitarian capitalistic and even natural.

What are your ideas about more sustainable alternatives to our "democratic, equal" society? It seems to me a social movement that we cannot put the lid back on. It appeals ideologically (at its base level of "everyone is equal") and pragmatically to most people. Your points about sustainability are valid and we need to think about them, but what else can we do aside from progress towards a more egalitarian society with a more even distrubition of demographic groups throughout societal roles?

I only just thought about this, so it might be a crazy idea but:

States could pay parents caring after children. In fact this already happens in modern western societies with some resemblence of a social state.

But I think the problem is that a "family" gets the benefit. And the "family" shares the benefit. And then the mentality is: I spend all day at work, and if I lose my job, we will lose my income. But no one is seriously thinking: If a stay-at-home mom/dad stopped caring for their child, they would stop getting the state benefit.

Of course these benefits are usually comparatively small to the full-time salary of a working person. But we could adjust those values. And we could say: This money belongs to the stay-at-home parent. They contribute: by caring for the children. Society should value this equally.

It's a bit of social engineering, but it could work quite well. It's related to the idea of universal income, in some ways.

I think the main problem with continued population growth is our unwillingness to build cities, tearing down old buildings. This is a serious problem that is causing unsustainable hike in cost of living. We also build expensively, compared to the 50s (in some parts of the world).

VR and remote-working might counterbalance this somewhat. Maybe new cities will be build. It all needs really visionary leadership, and increased willingness to move forward, a-like to the pink-glassed 50s.

As a Canadian I already receive money for my kids. Single dad and kids see mom on weekend I get the child benefits as it is called around here as I have the kids more then 60% if the time. If the children are shared equally then we would split the child tax. The amount changes as kids age but for 3 kids I get something like 1370$ a months to help me support those kids. This has improved the quality of my life hugely. It is the difference between I wonder if I can afford rent or food to now that we have rent and food maybe we can afford to go to the local pool. But here is the kicker, in Canada, we have come a long way but, they are sexist towards men and the woman still have the slight advantage. As in the child benefits are automatically given to the mother of the child. It is up to them to use that money for the kids. When my wife and I split up they were paying her but I had the kids. They wanted me to prove I had the kids so I could get the benefits. Luckily my wife and I were cooperative during the divorce so she confirmed with them I have primary custody so the money was switched into my name. But had she not I would of had to go to court and it is a pain. Anyways I get paid for my kids each month. Plus a huge tax break at the end of the year and get most of my income tax back. Last 2 years that has been a 5k tax return. I don’t know what other countries are doing but feel supported here in Canada.

In the US there is some pushback to giving families any more government benefits from the childless. Now that I have children it's very clear to me why such benefits are a need. This seems even more important as corporations dominate our culture with ever-increasing competitive pressures.

Still, paying out benefits does mean a sacrifice from somewhere else--even if it'll be a long-term gain for all. Education and life experience changed my entrenched views, so perhaps it can do the same for others.

(Full disclosure: I've worked for employers with no parental leave whatsoever.)

This definition of a "family" is a problem.

It is how Americans define the term, and administer resources, but it has never in previous history been an meaningful description. It is a problem because it is a very fragile construct. The definition we evolved with is what is lately called the "extended family", stripped of significance in the modern US.

Its fragility is a consequence of the small number of roles and participants. One health problem is an instant crisis.

> Any constructive discussion is welcome.

I want to attack the premise that a shrinking population is inherently a problem. The only clearly stated problem that I've seen is how social security will likely crumble since the fewer younger people won't be able to support the large aging population.

But this ignores how productivity has been and will continue to rise thanks to machines. I think we can easily take care of an aging population if we make proper use of new technology.

In fact I think that reducing our numbers is necessary for our survival.

We live in a capitalist world, where constant growth is assumed and expected, but the earth is a relatively closed system and you know what happens with bacteria in closed systems? They reproduce until they exhaust the system's resources and then they all die.

> I want to attack the premise that a shrinking population is inherently a problem.

It's not really a problem, it survival. Not having kids is not really a problem, but the fact is that you genes will die along with you.

Same for culture. Your own culture dying might not be a problem, but it means that your values will die along with it.

Having equality between individuals is something to strive for (in my western opinion), but does this same value mean that your culture will die out, together with its values? Another culture might survive, because they have less 'favorable' values.

> you genes will die along with you

I get it, this is why I haven't already had a vasectomy, but your genes are nothing special, just a sample of the alleles in the population.

I'm much more concerned about producing ideas that will outlive me and spreading those. Newton died a virgin yet he profoundly influenced the world.

Similar with cultures, ancient greeks are long gone but their culture shaped the world.

Yes, I definitely agree. Genes are only 1 aspect of what can be passed on.

But the question here is: Will the value of "men and women should fulfill the same roles in society" survive or die out?

Firstly, I would phrase the value as "People should not be restricted in the roles they can fulfill in society" (I don't think anyone serious(ly) argues that everyone should do exactly the same).

And no I don't think that this value is under threat from other cultures just because they reproduce more.

The value didn't get established in society because the people who held it reproduced more. Also, those who oppose it won't necessarily continue to reproduce more forever.

Atheists have smaller fertility rates than any religion, yet atheism is spreading more and more

> But this ignores how productivity has been and will continue to rise thanks to machines.

While true for most of recorded, human history; that kind of assumption combined with hard limits like physics make your second point a more likely outcome. Unless you're suggesting humanity will re-engineer itself into a more sustainable form.

EDIT: forced typo

Maybe I should have said efficiency instead of productivity ?

That's a poor analogy, unlike bacteria we keep finding more and more efficient ways of using resources we have. And more importantly we can colonize deserts, ocean and nearby planets. So we have space for quite a few doublings before facing any real problems with population size.

Perhaps the convenience of modern life discourages having lots of kids. Since they're no longer needed to work the family farm, and are more likely to live past infancy, and will almost always function as a huge liability of time & money, why would a modern couple try to have more kids than are necessary for their own emotional fulfillment? That seems to be most people's unconscious driving factor in reproduction.

If it comes to it, we will have no problem adopting a Brave New World style procreation strategy. Creating humans out of other human's blood/cells/dna/etc is either already here or imminent.

http://discovermagazine.com/2007/jul/babies-from-bone-marrow

I don't think the problem is that people don't want to go through the mechanics of having kids, it's that they have other priorities that trump wanting to commit the massive amount of time and resources necessary to raise kids.

That's a much more complex problem. I'd be highly skeptical that we could scale an alternative development environment that even approximated the benefits of having a loving family that wanted to commit to your upbringing being their main focus in life.

I suggest you give Brave New World, which i mentioned in the previous comment, a look. Huxley solves this problem with communal child rearing. Basically it's public school, but from child birth without the nuclear family model. The idea that you need a mom and dad (or even 2 parents) to love and raise a child is becoming obsolete.

Creating babies is the least of our problems. It is what happens to them between baby-adult is the part that keeps them from being produced at the desirable rate.

Words fail me reading comments like this.

To say that "women" should be "women" and not do "men" things is an attitude that belongs in the dark ages. It's sexist. It's degrading. It treats women like mindless children who can't make their own choices about what work they want to do.

Nobody is forcing women to go into STEM. We are encouraging them because unfortunately they have to deal with toxic attitudes all the time and simply don't stick around.

And seriously to act like western society is forcing transgenderism is utterly ridiculous and ridicules the stressful and tough choices these people have to make.

We should support any woman that wants to work in STEM. We should NOT encourage anybody to work in STEM. Women are more likely to want to work with people, not sit in a chair looking at a screen, droning for the corporation 8 hours per day.

The "toxic environment" is just what the field is. Dehumanizing by definition. It's got nothing to do with patriarchy or whatever else trending buzzword corporations push promoting more people take a career path working for them.

> To say that "women" should be "women" and not do "men" things is an attitude that belongs in the dark ages

We need more women on construction sites, mines, fighting on the front line, fighting men in MMA, etc. If you say no you are soooo dark ages. /s

People should be free to do what interests them, and should be encouraged to follow careers that benefit society and themselves.

Maybe we need _fewer_ people - men and women - giving each other head injuries in combat sports. Fewer people fighting in senseless wars.

Maybe we need safer worksites, so that people - men and women - can work in construction or mining if it appeals to them.

> Maybe we need safer worksites, so that people - men and women - can work in construction or mining if it appeals to them.

Are you implying that construction site work is almost exclusively a male domain because it is relatively unsafe work?

I'm not saying that I'd disagree with that statement, not at all.

Which part is meant to be sarcasm? If all of it then can you rephrase it without?

I am confidant that just the last line is sarcastic. The rest of the comment is serious.

I know it comes across as very sexist, but let me try to explain my own problem a bit further.

You could say I have a split view on things. I grew up in the western world with all of it's values. I greatly appreciate individuals being equal, etc. I myself am a father very involved with my kids, I take parental leave, and my wife has a career.

I work in the tech field with the majority of men, but still a lot of great women. Some women I worked with preferred to be in an all male team (this is Europe, not US).

So yes, I greatly value women having the same chances, being able to do anything they want, etc.

But then there is this other side, where I see that our culture is dying. We have certain values, but are not producing enough kids. And now we import people that seem to have an "attitude that belongs in the dark ages", as you called it. But why do we import them? Because they have enough kids.

So maybe I expressed myself wrong, and the real question is: How can our western values survive, when we don't have enough kids to pass these values to?

May I ask what country you live in? And does your country have laws for sufficient maternity/paternity leave?

Belgium. Mother gets 3 months, father 10 days by default.

Then we have parental leave, which is 4 months for each (can be taken fulltime, or part-time for 8 months, or 4/5th for 20 months). Then we have yet another 4 years each if you really want to take those.

I have 3 kids, and took more of my parental leave than their mom. I also enjoy taking care of my kids. So in practice I don't really live the traditional role ;).

> To say that "women" should be "women" and not do "men" things is an attitude that belongs in the dark ages. It's sexist. It's degrading. It treats women like mindless children who can't make their own choices about what work they want to do.

The OP says nothing of the kind. It's quite scary that so many people try to shut down any proper discussion about gender roles these days, with comments like this.

Thank you. I was impressed of going backwards to the 60's reading nonsense like this. OP has unpopular opinion and knows it, but apparently still does not understand why it is sexist and degrading.

I most certainly know why it's sexist and degrading.

But the question still remains: The sexists and degrading cultures seem to produce a lot of kids. While the modern cultures do not produce enough kids. So which values will be passed on?

So what do we do? Is it intrinsic to these equality values, or can we keep these values and have another cultural change to make sure we produce enough kids to pass our values onto?

If all we encourage is for them to become mothers, then unfortunately in America some ethnic groups are judged for that choice and some aren’t. Source: Call in to any talk radio station in LA and listen

Maybe you should try to do ALL of the things your wife does in the house and your son will want to become a dad? (And your girls will want to be whatever your wife has now the time to achieve, like becoming CEO?) There is no such thing as girls becoming boys and boys becoming girls. It all starts in the house with sharing the childcare, housecare jobs and the mental load.

Haha, I know what you try to prove here, but you are 100% wrong. I'm the one who spends most of the time with the kids. Their mom has a serious career. So no, this doesn't influence their preference.

Actually my kids don't want to do the job their mom is doing, since she's away/abroad all the time.

Nice try, but you are talking to the wrong person for that argument.

Who is to say that a smaller world pop is necessarily a bad thing? Many of the ecological problems we face today would be smaller at least. And who is to say that the current trend of shrinking pop in the long term stays the same. Maybe, once we solved the biggest problems we face today and possibly expand beyond earth, people will have more kids again. I can tell you that the families around me who are well off already tend towards 3 kids. That may not be universally true, but I don't see it as black and white.

This is weird to read because I celebrate shrinking countries, they represent a path forward towards high quality of life and lower ecological impact.

Why would it be an issue, assuming we weren't fighting a way, for a country to shrink? There will of course be some economic hurdles to over come as constant and unsustainable growth is done away with, but after that what is the issue?

> There will of course be some economic hurdles to over come as constant and unsustainable growth is done away with

For a long time, I've been hoping to see better theories of "managed decline". (Or perhaps "managed contraction", to avoid nastier implications.)

There's room to bicker about what economics says will happen to per-capita income as population rises and falls - does lost comparative advantage outweigh decreased marginal costs of goods? But it's pretty obvious that none of this theoretical stuff is sufficient to drive what we actually see, where even modest shrinkage leads to economic and often social collapse.

The history of the American Rust Belt is a clear demonstration of why we need better approaches to infrastructure and administration in the absence of population growth. Depopulation there has been a scattershot process that creates empty houses and half-empty neighborhoods, so the tax base has fallen far faster than the cost of providing services like garbage collection and street repair. What's more, the emptying houses are often foreclosed or simply abandoned, leaving them the responsibility of the city. They go unmaintained, driving down property values, and eventually decay until they're uninhabitable liabilities. In places like Detroit, the abandonment rate grew so high that the city couldn't even afford to tear down unsafe properties, creating attractive nuisances and environmental problems. Worse still, many of those cities had debt-financed expansion based on projected population growth, so they immediately and inescapably went broke when it stopped. Very broadly, shrinking to a given population is far more expensive and damaging than rising to the same population.

That doesn't mean shrinkage is inherently bad, I don't think. But we're still terrible at accommodating it, and I haven't seen many good plans for how to do better. Most cities in the US are functionally insolvent with flat population and modest tax hikes, much less shrinking population. For a lot of first-world countries, putting together viable financial and logistical approaches to shrinking populations is going to be a key challenge for the next 50 years.

> ... they represent a path forward towards high quality of life and lower ecological impact.

Could you expand on "high quality of life"? I'm not sure how that follows from decreased population.

As someone living in a city that has over the last 20 years had a massive increase in population I believe the previous poster is referencing less competition for limited resources. In day to day life this could be less traffic jams or less competition to use shared resources such as parks or even just lower property prices.

Understood but lower population could also mean less people trading and that would impact quality of life quite badly. Steve Jobs living in a world of 10,000 would have been living in abject poverty no matter how good his entrepreneurial skills. A larger population can do more things, and with trading increase quality of life in important ways (medicine, technology, arts) that may be better off than ghost towns with cheap property. My point is your parent commenter is right to ask whether lower population really means higher quality of life, I don’t think it necessarily does.

I think it depends a on where you live. If you are living in a smaller city/town then you can benefit from the advantages that you mention without the externalities that I talk about.

My worry is that at some point rich countries will start increasing in population again.

In the past we thought that overpopulation is going to be a big global problem. It turned out that rich countries naturally ended up having fewer and fewer children. This stabilized their populations. And now we expect that this trend will continue.

But why? What's to say that some shift in society won't trigger another population growth in rich countries? Then what?

A shift in society that triggers higher population growth is actually more likely than you might think due to evolution. Groups that have cultural norms that increase fertility rates will steadily increase as a fraction of the population. As long as those groups can pass down their beliefs to their children with high probability, evolution will see those groups eventually become dominant.

A good example of this would be the Amish population, which has very good retention and fertility rates leading to quite high population growth.

Why is that a worry? Half of the land on earth is a desert, and 70% of earth is covered by ocean, most of which is also a desert. If we had enough people in rich countries who would want to spend their money on moving to new places, we would already have floating cities and many more desalination plants, and those places simply by growing food for themselves, changing their local climate to a nicer one, and by contributing to science, would solve the climate problems we are going to face.

A couple of years ago, i myself would downvote my comment above, as it is a complete heresy from a standpoint of someone who believes that people are ruining everything they are touching, and the world was so much nicer before technology, and i thought that simply having less people would solve climate change issues.

But unfortunately that's a very naive view. Even if all people were removed, arctic have already started melting, and it will continue releasing more and more CO2 and methane from it's huge deposits.

Having orders of magnitude less people have been tried already, and that didn't help mammoths and all the other animals that were driven to extinction by small groups of people.

Having no people at all have been tried too, and that was not particularly helpful for dinosaurs, that got killed by a meteorite, which can be stopped by a larger civilization than what we currently have.

In short I am lucky that i understood, that the belief that it is possible to have too many people, technology is harmful, and that we should go "back to nature", is a harmful and unfounded idea. But i'll be happy to listen to arguments supporting it if you have any:

I don’t see anyone else in this thread arguing that we should abandon technology and go back to nature. That seems to be an argument you’re having with yourself.

There will still be a huge unemployed cohort "moving through the snake" (the diagram in the article is not as clear as the usual "Christmas tree" diagram" that shows a snapshot in time) world wide which can be deployed to equilibrate the labor imbalance. And that doesn't inherently have to lead to racism. For example the US bracero program in the 40s and 50s didn't exacerbate these issues in through the 1970s, nor did the gastarbeiter program in West Germany though the 80s.

Automation and longer extent of healthy life will also mitigate many of these issues.

Japan may be the demographic future but need not be the cultural one. An economic system not based on an age-based pyramid scheme and a move away from zero-sum scarcity mindsets will make addressing these issues much simpler.

> An economic system not based on an age-based pyramid scheme and a move away from zero-sum scarcity mindsets will make addressing these issues much simpler.

I hope this is our future. But I am afraid that you are overestimating our society's capacity to change course without some supply shock. We'll keep doing what we're doing until something breaks and then there will be a very uncomfortable few decades and many will struggle to survive or die.

Things are breaking both in the OECD and developing world. The transition is messy but there's really little alternative.

If we do not address this issue then the world's future is likely poor

Can you show your work with regards to this statement? With respect to supply & demand, with fewer people around, wouldn't wages have to be higher? Land cheaper?

We don't live in a rich modern secular society. Perhaps 10% of the US population does, but much of it lives at a low-middle class level where having kids is more of a luxury than a choice.

> There is something wrong with rich modern secular society here or anywhere (it happens to all societies right now whether they are European, Japanese, Chinese, etc) in that it currently leads to sub replacement reproduction. This is the next global issue as it will lead to instability in modern rich societies in that they are not sustainable.

It turns out it's not very rational to live, and if you do choose to live, it's not very rational to have kids (and spend a huge chunk of your money on them) when you already have a retirement program to take care of you in your old age.

Immigration is the obvious solution to this problem. (not claiming its the best, mind you)

If the fertility rate is around 1.7, then the country should accept around 20% of their population in immigration over a generation to achieve a stable number. Assuming a generation is ~30 years, that's around 60 million new immigrants in the US.

Assuming the immigrants are from underdeveloped nations, it will lead to changes to entire demographics of nations over 2 generations or so.

If we are lucky a good solution to this problem could be significant increase in life expectancy and development of artificial womb that will allow people to have children later in life when they finally want to have children.

But if the technological solution doesn't come soon enough the world will have to go through a much harder transition, trying to develop new culture that would combine aspects of secular societies that allow development of science and commerce, with a reasonable desire of growth.

Isn’t a future secular society unlikely when the people that are having large numbers of children are highly religious? It would seem that as the secular world keeps having fewer children that eventually the vast majority of people will be highly religious.

Religiousness is not genetic, many children from highly religious families become atheists or are moderately religious people who can bend or ignore religious rules when needed.

True, but I know highly religious families that are having up to 13 children. If even 50% of those kids stay religious they are out birthing probably 3-4 secular families (who tend to have 0-2 children). And, of course, it also goes the other way, sometimes children of secular families become religious.

A shrinking population can be better than a growing population. Currently, we're experience a drop in material quality of life, due to limited resources, limited land, cities not having enough space for people, etc. A shrinking population can solve a lot of problems at once. Also, it's not particularly kind to expect future generations to carry all the burdens we've created.

It's going to be shrinking much sooner and probably much more in the developing world due to actual next (rather current) global issue: climate change.

>And if you encourage immigration as the solution to shrinkage you end up with rising racism and other reactionary trends to these changing demographics.

Not to mention the fact that you’re instantly lifting all those people from a third-world carbon footprint to a first-world one. I’m surprised more people in the “the world is overpopulated/global warming will kill us all” camp don’t seem to be too concerned about that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com