US Birth-to-Death Ratio Nearing One | Hacker News Reader

US Birth-to-Death Ratio Nearing One

thesoundingline.com

25 pointscinquemb36 comments

Good. Hopefully humanity as a whole would soon reach this phase of zero population growth (through lowered birth rate, not increase death rate).

This is absolutely the only way to be long term sustainable on a single planet.

Easy solution for this "problem" - allow and encourage more immigration!

Absolutely. One of the best things about the US is that we have a culture which is adept at integrating immigrants. The US will stave off demographic collapse because of this.

The solution is to look at our culture and systems of governance and employment and understand what can be done to enable and encourage more people having children.

Bringing in more people is just a lazy fix and does nothing to fix the underlying problems.

Why is population growth via reproduction a thing that governments should encourage?

If there are problems with society, we should fix them for their own sake.

Counterpoint: The world has enough people (7.5B on track for 11B by end of century). Stop subsidizing children with pro natal policies, and pay people who choose not to have children (the three most impactful actions you can take to mitigate climate change is drive an EV or no car, eat less meat or no meat, and have less kids or no kids).

Population growth cannot continue forever, nor population stability at an unsustainable aggregate consumption level.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/our_overcrowded_planet_a_fail...

Frankly, there is a larger understanding among young people that it’s irresponsible to have a child unless you’re financially stable with a good space for a home. Turns out that _most_ young people (outside of the software biz, of course!) don’t make enough money to support themselves plus a kid, plus a home with space good for raising kids. And they don’t feel outward pressure from their parents or religion to have a kid nearly as much as they used to.

And beyond that, poor mental health and knowledge of what kids can be like also means young people just don’t feel ready to raise a kid for quite a while.

These factors won’t go away without serious changes in how our economic system works.

I would also ask if it really matters that the birth to death ratio is more than one. One seems like a good baseline to maintain.

People have silly cultural expectations about what is necessary to support children. I just saw a documentary about a Congolese truck driver with five kids. He made $120/month, and his goal in life was to keep them fed -- literally. If I were willing to take the expectations surrounding that man, and adopt them for myself, I could easily support two dozen children.

Yeah that’s not how you build functional adult in modern society, but might be a successful formula for a army of child soldiers

http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_arith.htm

> Yeah that’s not how you build functional adult in modern society,

I'm not quite sure anyone has a monopoly on a definition of what this could be, and very much subjective to various forms of "cultural hangups" that might be prevalent around the world at any given time.

It turns out rent in the west costs more than $120/month no matter how resourceful you are or how hard you work.

And yet nobody leaves. Seems like a failure of imagination, to me.

Not necessarily if the result is a large boom of people who do not integrate.

I'm generally pro immigration but:

1) If not handled well that can make a huge mess. see Germany 5 years ago for example

2) If the people immigrating aren't well educated or capable of communicating with the rest of the people but are allowed to vote then malicious politicians can use that to distort the democracy which is pretty dangerous.

3) There are some pretty nasty cultures there. I'm not about to go preaching that we have it totally right but some of the stuff going on in Asia and Africa is totally unacceptable.

The point of such declining population articles is not one of taking sides on increasing vs decreasing population.

The point of such articles to examine what kind of society we are building. Are people feeling comfortable to produce the next generation? What challenges exist in production and raising of children? And finally, how many producers (young) to consumers (old) exist in society.

These are interesting questions, one that a lot of millennials associate with. E.g. Society appears to be designed such that marriages are obsolete for millennials, producing a child is a burden and the future appears bleaker for individual humans.

That said, a declining population is good for the planet, so long as we are not stuck in a death spiral. Immigration is America's life saver. Other countries are not so lucky.

Other countries: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/birth-rate-vs-death-rate

Affordable healthcare and housing would help increase the ratio.

I'm pretty sure the US has the most affordable housing of any developed country.

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