Comment by pcbro141 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pcbro141 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Yeah, low birth rates aren't all about money even though that's important. A lot of it is about culture, which affects women's age at first child which affects how many children a woman will ultimately have.

Even with all the incentives (subsidize childcare etc.) you'd still have to modify the harder to modify cultural reasons like people valuing independence, "casual dating"/FWB relationships for years that go nowhere is more common instead of dating with intent to marry, hustle culture/emphasis on career progress, less social pressure/shaming from parents ("why don't you have a husband/wife/kids yet?!"), freedom to "find yourself/travel" or "get sexually experienced/have a ho phase before settling" for years after college, etc.

Most people don't want to go from college to marriage and kids right away these days, and a few years of this type of casual dating/exploration after college eats up a lot of prime reproductive years. But these cultural factors are very hard to change especially with the absence of religion/strong communities these days.

First it needs to be shown why higher fertility rates are a good thing.

A lot of our economic machinery more or less bakes in some big assumptions about the size of the workforce not declining, and we have lots of examples from other countries of what happens when birth rates fall too low (Japan's Lost Decade becoming plural as the birth rate fell and the population aged).

For detractors...

Social Security in the US is one example. It literally depends on having a larger input base than the output.

The expectation of GDP growth is another, but without population growth, it's unlikely to be realized perpetually. I'm fine with that, but our over-leveraged financial system isn't.

Your idea that Japan's lost decade was caused or extended by a low birth rate doesn't sound right to me... and the first two results in a search engine don't support your claims. It would also not appear to be provable or disprovable. The lost decade certainly wasn't caused by demographics, and there's no alternative universe Japan that encountered those same economic conditions but many more babies were made.

1. There are a lot of goods where supply is naturally limited. Nice holiday destinations, for example. Good housing in desirable locations is another. Space on public roads. This implies that there is some population size where some notion of real wealth per capita is maximized. That population size may be much lower than 7 billion.

2. Economic growth can be driven by increases in productivity. Automation can massively boost productivity. But at a certain amount of supply of labour, it is cheaper to employ a human than automate the task, even though the automation technology for that task is within reach. So a reduction in supply of manual labour can actually make the economy more automated and efficient.

> A lot of our economic machinery more or less bakes in some big assumptions about the size of the workforce not declining

Do it like software: if the implementation doesn't match reality, fixing the implementation is easier than trying to fix reality to match the broken assumptions

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

Good quote.

But if you believe it is reasonable or desirable to engineer social changes to increase the birth rate to be able to create and support economic growth, I think your priorities ordering is not right

Exponential growth isn't going to be sustainable forever. The economic models need to be updated to match reality, instead of the tail wagging the dog.

The universe is vast. If we are to conquer it we need a lot of humans.

We actually just need a few more smart and bold ones

Reply on news.ycombinator.com