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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> SK is committing demographic suicide though, so whatever you think of its success, it has a pretty fatal disease. It has the lowest birthrate in the world.

Its kind of amazing how often people make judgements based on extrapolating demographic trends over much longer terms than there is any reason to think that they will hold, and then as soon as they fail turn around and do the same thing based on the new demographic trend.

Encouraging births isn't hard if a government decides its important.

OTOH, most of the arguments I’ve seen for it actually being important (in the near term) are the kind where you scratch the surface and underneath is pure racism, so I’m not all that concerned.

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It is actually quite hard to raise the birth rate, Japan has been trying for years (see https://japantoday.com/category/features/lifestyle/Tokyo%E2%...). The real impediment is that it is now too costly to raise more than 1-2 children and also not enough time.

UN 2015 report on Japan's birth rate policy attempts: https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/population/events/pdf... To summarize, they've started policies and measures since 1992-1994 but UN reports and I quote: "Despite these efforts, Japan’s family policy so far appears to have been largely ineffective."

There are other news opinion articles from Japan: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2020/06/04/editorials/u...

> It is actually quite hard to raise the birth rate, Japan has been trying for years

Not...really.

> UN report on Japan's birth rate policy attempts:

And details defects in the specific policies (notably, these defects are, one who is familiar with policies of the type will notice, ways they fall short of the support policies in many European countries that aren't even specifically trying to boost birth rates.)

E.g., a paid family leave policy with low payments and lacking legal force, so many employers haven't actually implemented it.

This is a government making a pro forma show of “doing something” about a problem, not a serious policy effort.

> Encouraging births isn't hard if a government decides its important

Do you have any examples or even just any precedents how decades of declines and lowest birth rate in the world have been easily and successfully turned around, or this is all just hypothetically probably not hard?

As far as I can tell, there has yet to exist a condition under which the political will to really tackle this problem has been present, so you would not expect to see an example of a country successfully addressing it. This is pretty normal for humans -- waiting until a problem becomes catastrophic to do anything about it -- as we have seen in other areas recently. We will see how things are going in another few decades.

The examples are older and from authoritarian countries, but china and iran had state sponsored baby booms. China was started by mao, iran was also started by the revolutionaries shortly after the revolution.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2009/06/why-does-iran-ha...

Thank you for sharing, it was interesting to read. However, the article is not at all clear about the actual effect of those state measures. Wikipedia says that the steadily high total fertility rate in that country plummeted after 1985.

Hungary. They started about ten years ago, and I believe they have managed to turn the trend.

There's trying and then there's trying. Japan is doing the first kind, where you put some effort in, but it's kind of limp.

The other kind of trying is when you put vigorous effort into making it easier to have children. Dramatically ramp up childcare support. Strongly enforce anti-discrimination laws, particularly in the case of discrimination against mothers. Forbid employers from requiring more than 40h of work per week under certain (very high) compensation thresholds. Provide direct payments to parents that substantially offset the costs of additional children. Align housing policy with the need for larger dwellings for larger families, but still with decent commutes. Etc.

I think the real changes needed are also politically unpopular with a bunch of old people and other politically powerful classes. Making children more viable for the young will probably mean making real estate not a good investment for one example, making house spouse / the homer simpson lifestyle more viable, thus reducing the labor force and increasing the cost of labor and so on.

For now, it's easier to kick the can down the road.

This is right too. Although on some level one suspects parts of this problem are self correcting over a longer timescale. If the predicted population implosions begin to manifest, there will also be a corresponding decrease in the demand for housing, and a corresponding increase in wages paid to labor as it becomes more scarce. These trends will make having children easier. I know it's hard to picture that world but many times it has come to pass that we have arrived after twenty years at a world that would have been hard to predict.

> Dramatically ramp up childcare support. Strongly enforce anti-discrimination laws, particularly in the case of discrimination against mothers. Forbid employers from requiring more than 40h of work per week under certain (very high) compensation thresholds. Provide direct payments to parents that substantially offset the costs of additional children. Align housing policy with the need for larger dwellings for larger families, but still with decent commutes. Etc.

Where has this been shown to work?

By and large, the nations with more childcare support, more protections for pregnant women, etc have lower birthrates than those that don't.

For example, if we look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d..., then America seems to be the developed country with the highest birth rate despite having little of the social policies you mention.

In fact, based on that chart, it would seem the opposite is true. The less social safety net, the more kids. This makes intuitive sense since if government isn't taking care of you, you'll need children to.

I think it mostly has to do with access to convenient birth control, like IUDs and birth control pills.

Give poor women education and access to those, and even poorer countries will see similar declines in birth rate.

I think humanity’s growth was dependent on women not having a say in the matter. All the situations I see where women have gained the ability to easily choose whether or not to have kids lead to lower birth rates.

I remember seeing a study which followed the spread of TV across Brazil and the decline in birth rate. It was the soaps wot dun it.

Seeing new role models who had interesting lives, and especially learning that it was possible to withstand pressure from grandparents to have children seemed to be more important than mere availability of contraceptives or education.

IIRC there was a similar effect in Bangladesh, but it was harder to track since TV rolled out more quickly there.

For anyone curious, this seems to be the study: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/app.4.4.1

Yes, that was it. Thanks! I recall reading about it on an economics blog, which mentioned Bangladesh also. That (Bangladesh) must have been a different study.

Agree.

One wrinkle is the gap between how many children women say they want when surveyed (about 2.5 in most western countries) and how many they end up having on average (fewer).

It could be that the surveys are asking the wrong questions, or that for some people they just never get the circumstances they want.

As far as I know that gap has never been conclusively explained. Hypotheses abound, of course.

> By and large, the nations with more childcare support, more protections for pregnant women, etc have lower birthrates than those that don't.

That's because they also have more public poverty and old-age support; which reduce the incentive for large families as old age and disability “insurance”.

Which on its own is a good thing, but if you want to encourage births anyway, your public support for parenting has to offset the effect that has on incentives to have children, which is a very bif effect. Nations don't do that because they don't think its an important-enough public need to warrant that approach.

Correct. More elderly welfare programs discourage family formation. Anytime I mention this, people think I'm nuts, but you seem to have come to the conclusion on your own.

I imagine I am not the only one who would rather suicide rather than becoming dependent on others. I certainly do not want my kids to spend their time looking after me if I am chronically unable to take care of myself.

And this gets to the core of the nihilistic social rot at the core of so much wrong in society today.

We hesitate at being dependent on others or having others help us. In the us, no matter your political side, the idea of finding meaning only through service to others is not only in short supply it's actively demonized.

> OTOH, most of the arguments I’ve seen for it actually being important (in the near term) are the kind where you scratch the surface and underneath is pure racism, so I’m not all that concerned.

Can you go into more detail on that? In some respects "demographic suicide" solved with immigration has many (but not all) of the characteristics of colonization, and I think it's a reasonable speculation that colonized and diminished cultures would be unhappy with more than just the coercive aspects of their colonization, and that a non-racist person could have reasonable anxieties about their culture becoming diminished and dying out in the future. Though I suppose racists probably see an opportunity to exploit those anxieties to spread their racist ideology.

> Can you go into more detail on that?

A typical example is a two-step argument equating race/biological heritage with culture and/or ethnic identity coupled with appeals to an imperative to preserve culture and/ot ethnic identity.

Something like this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28051854

> Something like this:

Honestly that comment doesn't read "racist" to me. Maybe the disconnect is taking "culture" too literally, or using "culture" when one really means "people" (i.e. a combination of culture and ancestry/descent). Also even though an entire culture can technically be transmitted memetically, that's practically not the case except in cases of early childhood adoption. Immigrant populations may tend to take on certain cultural characteristics (e.g. economic and political ones) of the population they get socialized into, but those characteristics may not actually be the ones particular individual cares the most about preserving (e.g. culture in a narrower non-anthropological sense, like religion and and attachment to certain literature).

And even assuming a full memetic replication of a culture, I don't think the last member of a colonized people would be entirely happy that his people went extinct even if some of the colonizers fully took up his culture.

> even though an entire culture can technically be transmitted memetically, that's practically not the case except in cases of early childhood adoption.

The excellent blog ACOUP has just had a five-part series, "The Queen's Latin", in part describing mass cultural transmission from Rome to various ethnic groups in Europe. TLDR: it helps to have a culture that readily accommodates different religions and other regional variations.

Cultures are not fixed for all time; they change all the time.

The thing is, many countries have cultures based on opposition. There's a reason most national days are celebrations of an independence war.

So for many of these countries you're asking for a lobotomy.

It's long overdue for humanity to ditch the dangerous baggage that is Romantic nationalism.

Good luck with that!

We're also not great at scaling trust.

Well, it's a relatively recent invention, historically speaking, so I'm optimistic. And we already have some emerging polities that recognize its problems, e.g.:

"We the people of Rojava in Northern Syria: Kurds, Arabs, Assyrians, Turkmens, Armenians, Chechens, Circassians, among them Muslims, Christians, Yazidis and various other creeds and sects, declare that the nationalist State has placed Kurdistan, Mesopotamia and Syria at the heart of the chaos that is afflicting the Middle East and has brought acute crises and suffering upon the people. ... The Democratic Federation of Northern Syria is founded on a geographical concept"

(https://www.scribd.com/document/441234886/Social-Contract-of...)

And yes, trust doesn't really scale well, which is why centralized governance in general is a big problem. But there are known techniques to decentralize it in ways that can still scale, e.g. council democracy.

> Encouraging births isn't hard if a government decides its important.

Yes it is. The only first-world nation with replacement birth rates is Israel.

Caucescu famously tried to increase the birthrate and that backfired spectacularly. Sweden tried to do a lot of stuff, still doesn't work. Japan also tried.

Ceaușescu. And he did achieve it for quite a while, ergo "decrețeii":

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decree_770

Encouraging births isn't hard if a government decides its important.

Got an example of a successful encouragement of more births? Plenty of countries have tried.

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