In Britain, childlessness seems likely to return to 1920s levels | Hacker News Reader

In Britain, childlessness seems likely to return to 1920s levels

economist.com

43 pointsjdkee86 comments

I don't get the argument against having less children. It would be different if the human race was really dying out. But it seems like most of our problems are caused by overpopulation.

If the future generations only have 3.5 billion people, 1 billion, 10 million, I don't see how we'd be worse off. Fields like production, retail, maintenance, etc. would have less workers, but also proportionally less demand. Fields like research and academia would also have less people, probably leading to less discoveries, but how much? and how much would it matter? We lose resistance to extinction if there's a deadly disease that kills almost 100% of the population, but we gain resistance from transmissible diseases.

And I know there are tons of people who still really want to have kids. And smart / talented / skeptical people who want to have kids.

>But it seems like most of our problems are caused by overpopulation.

That's too broad of a generalization and not true globally, some countries problems are exactly because of underpopulation. The problem isn't homogeneous throughout the world. It's highly dependent on what populations you're talking about and their circumstances.

>Fields like production, retail, maintenance, etc. would have less workers, but also proportionally less demand.

In some developed countries where recently the birthrates hover very slightly to sometimes below replacement rates can lead to a whole hosts of problems. For example take into account age proportionality as a result of extremely low birthrates in Japan, an ever increasing older and retired population does not have enough younger labor to produce good/services for basic societal function. There's also problems of gender imbalances like in India or China also causing massive issues in the coming generations.

>10 million

A world population that small certainly wouldn't sustain semiconductor manufacturing, even if you concentrated them in one region.

lol a world population that small probably couldn't sustain iron smelting. Have fun digging for grubs and shivering through the winter huddled around the campfire.

Iron mining has been done at small scale for thousands of years.

A population of 10 million is the population of England circa 1812. Machine tools, glass optics. Electricity should be possible. Powered flight, if you had hydrocarbons.

Oil would be a problem. All the easy deposits are tapped. A successor civilization would have a hard time progressing past steam power.

A lot depends on how we crash to 10 million. If all the wells are shut down cleanly, thoroughly documented, then the people blink out existence, then the 10 million could live quite a white just on today's reserves. If we end up at 10 million after decades or centuries of warfare, then there won't be any oil left. (Plus the sea would be a lot higher, and many oil deposits would be in places where summer temperatures would be fatal for humans) Liquid fuels can be made from steam cracking of coal hydrocarbons, but they're expensive.

No nuclear power, no turbines, none of the exotic metals that require electron-beam vacuum furnaces. No pharmaceuticals, no long supply lines, limited manufacturing specialization or economies of scale. Fasteners would be expensive again. Fabric would be expensive. Probably the number one most important thing to get working again is production of artificial fertilizers. Without that you're stuck with organic agriculture and 1 out of 2 people working in the fields.

And somehow I get ten sentences into this comment before remembering about a book I read that made the exact same point about fertilizer: https://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Rebuild-Civilization-Afterm...

as people get older, they become infirm and require support; not just directly (relatives or nursing homes looking after their basic needs) but financially. Society is a pyramid, and when a pyramid narrows at the base, it becomes unstable.

Also, our problems (presumably the myriad environmental ones) aren't caused by overpopulation, they're caused by rampant corporate polluting in service to individualistic consumer culture.

Agreed. Overpopulation is an outdated boogeyman. Climate change IMO is the more pressing concern.

What do you suppose is the root cause of global warming?

A build up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

What are you getting at?

If everything were electric and nuclear, green hydrogen, whatever, we wouldn’t have this particular problem, so it can’t be population alone.

You're correct so I'll explain what I was trying to get at.

At the moment, focusing on dwindling birth rates is nonsensical because the world population is projected to be 10B people by 2050. So the issue isn't lack of people, it's the inability of various nations to properly coordinate a response to an existential crisis (global warming and increasing volume of CO2 in the atmosphere: https://climate.nasa.gov/climate_resources/24/graphic-the-re...). Dwindling birth rates in Britain should be the last thing anyone is worried about if their real concern is not having enough people in the future. I mean if they're really concerned about lack of Brits then I guess it makes sense, but globally, on a planetary scale, worrying about local birth rates is not really something to be concerned about.

Of course it is a concern. No nation survives with an indefinite dwindling population. If nations turn to immigration as a way to bolster their population, it cones with its own set of problems.

Why would it be indefinite? People less likely to have kids exit the gene pool, and a smaller population of those more likely to have kids survive. In the smaller population land is cheaper, less crowded, there are more natural resources per person, and population grows again, from the lower level. Unless you try to short-circuit that adjustment process by keeping the human/land ratio where it is and importing people to keep land more expensive. And then you have to deal with all the costs of ethnic conflict.

China, with a population of 500 million, would be a much more pleasant place to live. China with a population of 500 million Han and 800 million-strong hodge-podge of other groups constantly resenting each other and together resenting the Han? Not so nice.

Things are never monotonically increasing or decreasing forever, and there is no reason to prevent population from adjusting up or down in order to reach better conditions for a given environment. Nor do we need to set public policy to focus solely on maximizing total GDP and real estate values.

My point is if you're concerned about an existential crisis then worrying about the birth rate in one specific country doesn't really make any logical sense. Global warming is a global problem and nationalistic thinking is not how this problem is going to get solved. Getting atmospheric CO2 concentration down to a safe level is going to require transnational cooperation and coordination. Countries with sensible immigration policies and support programs are going to fare better than the ones that lock up their borders (as is now being evidenced in Britain with their empty gas stations and store shelves because there aren't enough truck drivers to deliver fuel and food to all those gas stations and stores: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/after-brexit-thousands-fo...).

Prioritizing profit before planet and people.

That's definitely part of the problem.

Modern capitalism driven by profit that doesn't account for externalities.

A somewhat unstated reason why decreasing birth rates are considered alarming is because our entire economic system is built around growth that's only really possible if both the labor pool and/or the consumer pool grow. The only two ways that can happen are if we make new workers and consumers (birth, immigration) or we make people who weren't previously workers or consumers into those (this happened post-WWII when women entered the workforce in larger numbers and was probably part of why economic growth was so strong for so long after the war).

Fundamentally, if the number of people participating in the economy shrinks, the economy will shrink, and our late capitalist system is extremely ill equipped to deal with that.

Now there's also a powerful movement against immigration, that is also aggressively for increasing birth rates to fend off an imagined conspiracy to "replace" them, which makes this a particularly thorny problem for the political class.

There’s no reason our economic system requires population growth. There are certainly examples where shrinking populations corresponded with higher growth: Ireland had a shrinking population and growing economy from 1850 to 1960.

The issue is a population that has a massive number of elderly to care for while having few young people to do it.

Ireland had no problem having tons of kids who left the country upon reaching adulthood, even though the total population was shrinking.

Capitalism is a global system (at least at this point). Certainly you can have pockets that experience abnormal growth[1] because no country is a closed system. If businesses in one country have new markets open to them outside their borders that's just another way of adding to their economy.

And definitely an aging non-working population can be a downward drag on a capitalist economy as well. Even though they live longer, they are still to some extent "exiting the economy" since they usually live off fixed incomes and don't contribute to the labor pool.

In aggregate, though, you still need growth to make capital investment make sense. There may be other ways to achieve it than population growth overall, especially in small niches, but if you lose that source of growth it should have ramifications on the economy, even if they're counteracted.

[1] Do you have a source on the ireland thing? I'm not really finding anything. And which Ireland for that matter? There are effectively at least three polities called that in that period. All with very different access to markets, political situations, etc.

> I don't get the argument against having less children.

The [current] economic model presupposes infinite growth. You can't have infinite growth with a declining population.

You can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet, either.

colonize other planets then?

Technology for doing so does not exist. Before we can terraform other planets we'll have to learn how to terraform this one. Global warming is actually a great challenge and overcoming it would mean developing the technology that would help colonize other planets, e.g. https://www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/myco-architecture.

How would that help? If half the population of earth (randomly chosen) moved to an inhabitant planet in another solar system, wouldn’t the reduction in population shrink the economy?

Presumably there would be trade between the planets. Did european colonization of the americas shrink population in europe?

Parts of it. Ireland’s population shrunk consistently from 1800 to 1960, mostly due to expatriation. Economy mostly grew. The economics are complicated - they were part of then British Imperial economy, which good or bad depending on specifics (corn laws, famines, etc).

I hope we do eventually and specifically outside this solar system, which has a clock that’s shorter than the heat death master clock.

True. Even if we do find a solution to replace the current economic model, the transition would be messy with a high chance of violence.

Capitalism demands an ever increasing number of mouths to feed.

How does capitalism (ie. "private means of production") translate to "ever increasing number of mouths to feed"?

If we interpret "ever increasing number of mouths to feed" as "more people", we can imagine the following:

I sell a product. The more people buy my product, the more money I make. The more people there are, the more people will buy my product. The more people there are, the larger the labor pool I can choose from. The larger the labor pool I can choose from, the more the workers' wages get depressed, so my profit margins get bigger. So the more people there are, the more money I make.

Obviously this is highly reductionist. Also, I don't think saying capitalism "demands" increased population growth is quite right. We can certainly imagine individual businesses who would not like population growth (e.g. mom-and-pop stores who know that increased local population increases the likelihood of a Walmart being erected and putting them out of business). But on the whole, I think the presence of capitalism trends towards increasing population.

>The more people there are, the larger the labor pool I can choose from. The larger the labor pool I can choose from, the more the workers' wages get depressed, so my profit margins get bigger.

This this true? It presumes a bigger labor pool competing for the same amount of available jobs, which isn't true. As the economy grows, there are also more consumers who demand more products, which requires more workers/jobs.

Companies must grow, simple as that.

And one of the fastest ways to grow is accomplish more with fewer employees.

And where do the employees who get laid off work? That solution doesn’t scale.

Capitalism has almost universally correlated with lower population growth.

…taking advantage of growth elsewhere.

Why does an increase in GDP per person require more people?

If GDP per person is rising, even if the number of people is shrinking, why can’t the total GDP rise as the population shrinks?

Especially if the population decline is caused by people focusing on work and having fewer children?

Capitalism can be correlated with almost anything that happens because capitalism is pervasive.

Governments around the world need to make it easy to have kids. Not sure about Britan, but here in the USA it's prohibitively expensive to have a child let alone 2. Couples of have to make tough decisions like quitting their job as they can't afford child care. Public schools are on average bad and gentrification keeps pricing people out. College costs are out of control.

Isn't the correct response to high costs of living to have fewer or no children? And if one willingly has children knowing full well they cannot provide, isn't that wrong? With reports like these, I feel that it makes sense that population growth is slowing considering homelessness and the like are rampant. Genuinely curious about your point of view.

The high costs of living don't come from legitimate sources. High education prices, housing, etc are all assaults by the upper classes that now own the vast majority of the wealth of the country. The proper response to a biologically insufficient distribution of resources is to take from those that have more rather than make do with less.

> Isn't the correct response to high costs of living to have fewer or no children? And if one willingly has children knowing full well they cannot provide, isn't that wrong?

No one in a Western country is unable to afford children. What's happening is that they believe they can't afford children, but they are wrong.

Theres a good book called “Selfish Reasons to have more kids.” It relies on happiness studies and “regrets” survivors to argue that childlessness/few children is irrational.

People are happier and more content when they have more children. And the numbers, in terms of reported and assessed contentment are massive.

A lot of the “is it rational to have more kids” thinking relies on narrow versions of happiness and self-interest, rather than the broader definitions of happiness which people actually experience.

Regarding the issue of “whether you can provide” … it’s common for people to come to America from foreign countries with very large families. And they provide for their kids.

And the kids often do quite well.

> Isn't the correct response to high costs of living to have fewer or no children?

The rational response for an individual or a couple is to not have kids. That's why we're seeing so many articles about "omg the birthrate!". People aren't having kids, it's too hard.

From a nation perspective, however, you will die out as a people if you have negative population growth. Immigration can boost the numbers for a while, but not forever. Especially not if you're also trying to keep the immigrants out as many conservative policies are.

So what is there to do? Governments need to make having children easier, if they want more children. If they do not in fact want more children, then all is good.

However the current economic policy is based on infinite growth. How are you going to infinitely grow an economy if you aren't producing more consumers?

People can barely get the house to put the kid in. That’s the first milestone and if you can’t do that, you pretty much back off from all other shit.

Oh, and dating in the west is a complete game. The East usually go by family connections, but in the West it’s a game and the game got super harder with social media and unrealistic expectations.

So that’s a barrier too. I dunno, nothing feels normal anymore.

Personal anecdote - I want to do all these things, but holy shit did it get harder and weirder.

I did my dating before social media really took off, but my intuitive sense is that, for people who want to eventually settle down with a partner, the game will settle out on pretty close to “an ass for every saddle” just like it always has and that people complained it was hard N*10 years ago for every value of N. It’s hard because it takes a lot of your mental energy and feels very high-stakes.

In the worst of the pandemic, I’ll adopt that it probably got legitimately harder, but that’s easing quickly now.

> People can barely get the house to put the kid in. That’s the first milestone and if you can’t do that, you pretty much back off from all other shit.

If you think buying a house is a prerequisite to having children, you don't know much about any past or current society.

It's even harder in Europe in some ways. Housing is expensive there too and while you got free education and Healthcare, the salaries are much lower than the US. Source: look at the birth rates in Europe vs US.

I believe France has a higher birthrate than the us

Not according to this: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/FRA/france/birth-rate

Are you mental? Governments around the world need to make it extremely hard to have kids. It won't happen of course, because the entire capitalist system relies on increased consumption. So we, as a species, will just keep fucking until societal and species collapse. Go us.

I think what you mean is "I want to have kids and other US Tax Payers should pay for me to have them."

You get that college costs are out of control simply because there are too many people, right? There's too many people of college age. There's too many people for the jobs that don't need a degree, so now you need a degree, so now even more people need to go. And hey, the government passed a law so that you could borrow easily (so, hey, they are helping you out!), but that just means that more people can compete for places, driving prices up!

Or did you want the government to just help you and your kids out? Not sure what you're asking for here.

Make sure you die before old age so our kids don't have to work caring for old you

Lol, you think that's how it works? You think the USA takes care of its old people?

Or are you pointing out that social security, despite supposedly being a fund that I pay into to fund my retirement, is actually just a giant pyramid scheme.

And if you know its a giant ponzi scheme, then you are on the side of "everyone keep fucking to keep the ponzi rolling".

When the oil runs out, and the phosphate is gone, just remember that a few billion more kids and we'll be fine, right? Just keep fucking.

British millennials have a particularly bad combo of low wages and world beating house prices to contend with.

Older people will vote conservative, and block as many new housing projects as possible to ensure they keep "theirs".

I live near a city in the Midwest US which has well-defined borders due to being enclosed by major interstate highways and other townships. There is no room for the city to "spread out." The only way to add more housing is to knock down old buildings and 2-story houses homes to make way for multi-unit apartments and condos.

The city is overwhelmingly liberal across all age groups yet the population is pretty evenly divided into those who want more housing/development and those who believe the city is losing its character and charm with such rapid change. I've only been here a short while and many parts of the city look radically different now than they did a decade ago.

It’s very naive to think this problem has been caused by the conservatives alone. Why do you think we need to build hundreds of thousands of houses a year to keep up with demand given we have below replacement birth rates? You would think house prices would be crashing even if the supply of houses was kept steady.

This is both a supply and demand issue, although low interest rates and various help to buy schemes have also contributed.

As a home owner I’m far more frightened that people will get fed up of the costs of mass migration than labour attempting (and almost certainly failing) to keep up with our growing housing demand.

I don't think that it's caused by Conservatives alone... but I'm not sure I understand the point you are making with the sentence following? Millennials want to buy houses, regardless of parental status. Low interest rates and help to buy schemes (some of which have ended, some of which aren't that helpful) you'd think would help...

except that house prices have increased so severely (15% since before pandemic), and you have a generation particularly concerned by debt already due to student loans etc, not earning any more money than they were before, now suddenly faced with taking on a 95% mortage. Why on gods green earth would anyone want to add kids to that mess? If the baby boomer generation passed any lessons down, it's that stability in childhood is an absolute must. These are not conditions even remotely representing stability.

> Low interest rates and help to buy schemes (some of which have ended, some of which aren't that helpful) you'd think would help...

All these do is allow people to borrow more which increases the demand for housing, pushing prices up further. As a home owner you want the government to past more help to buy schemes because these schemes will always inadvertently raise the price of your home because of supply & demand dynamics.

> except that house prices have increased so severely (15% since before pandemic), and you have a generation particularly concerned by debt already due to student loans etc, not earning any more money than they were before, now suddenly faced with taking on a 95% mortage

The reason house prices are up is because the government have been helping people to buy while pumping money into the economy to ensure people and businesses don’t have to bare the economic consequences of the recession. This is while we had another 300,000 migrants arrive who also need to be homed. If you want house prices to fall you basically need to do the exact opposite. If governments didn’t intervene people wouldn’t be able to afford to pay more for housing and might instead be forced to sell their home like you would expect to see in a recession. And as I touched on before, if governments didn’t import people to prop up GDP growth, housing demand would crash. Btw, I’m not making a political judgement about whether this is good or bad. Recessions suck, but historically they have been good equalisers because those with nothing to lose, lose nothing, while those with homes and businesses lose greatly.

Also to your point on affordability, everyone with kids under the age of forty in my family live in social housing and those who own their own homes and have good jobs are the ones who are childless. I don’t think this is a coincident — these groups clearly have different priorities. This anecdote is also supported by evidence that educational achievement is negatively correlated with birth rates.

The Birth rate below Crude Death rate is a recent phenomenon. 2019 has 10.7 Live Birth per 1000 and 9.1 Death Rate per 1000.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...

> A new paper on America by Melissa Schettini Kearney and two other economists comes to similar conclusions. They think fertility is declining not because of economic pressures, but because people’s assumptions about life and families have changed. In particular, children are thought to require much more effort and attention than was the case in the past.

This mirrors my observations as well. Even in my cohort, most of my peers can afford to have children, but many are choosing not to. Or having fewer.

I think something underdiscussed is our generation's obsession with "uncompromise" - you see it in our media, what we demand from celebrities, our policy choices. Something in the way we live our lives publicly makes it easier for people to choose to do nothing rather than risk falling behind their peers.

And people have it in their mind that having a kid needs to be an enormous amount of work.

Its not culture. Its birth control. You'll have one sooner or later if you're not on it[1]. Once you do, the next few are easier to justify. Just my opinion.

1. My life.

Birth control is a choice influenced by the culture.

I agree, I actually posted a comment debating the merits of a possible rollback on birth control and I ended up getting flamed for it. I understand the concerns about telling people what to do with their bodies, but there also should be concerns about the survival of the human race

I once put a birth rate of 1.5 or so in one of these population simulators and IIRC even with that well below replacement fertility we still had more humans in 2200 than in 1900 or something like that, so I'm gonna be honest I don't think the survival of the species is on the table any time soon.

As long as there's tens of millions of humans we're probably good in that department

I think you can make an argument that 10 billion humans are more likely to wipe us all out than 10 million

People have been predicting a population disaster calamity since the 1960s. Having more people on our planet has actually made the human species much more efficient because of the combined brain power of all of us working together to solve problems. The people trying to shut down population growth have led to horrifying policies like China's one child policy that deeply hurt many parents.

So now you’re suggesting horrifying policies in the other direction? I live in a country where most birth control was banned til the 80s. It wasn’t pretty, and you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who wants to go back to that.

So instead of an authoritarian policy that you can't have more than one child, forcing a lot of people to not have kids they do want, you want an authoritarian policy that you can't go on birth control, forcing a lot of people to have kids they don't want.

Come on.

Forced population control - either preventing or requiring people to reproduce - is a terrible idea. The low birth rate has a huge number of external factors, not least of which is given the current housing and job market many people simply cannot afford to have a child, and much less give their child the attention required to raise a healthy, functioning human.

There's a lot of problems societally that happen when you go below replacement rate that are probably not being accounted for in that simulation. For example, the age proportionality can become massively fucked with populations that have a massive majority in retirement-aged people and people under working ages leading to extremely low working-age people. That type of collapse can also accelerate unpredictably since we don't have exact ideas on whether or not there is a "catastrophic threshold" that replacement rates can go under.

> I think you can make an argument that 10 billion humans are more likely to wipe us all out than 10 million

I think that argument is weak. Geopolitical instability is probably the main threat to us[1], and I think that would be much worse affected by a shrinking population in a world where every policy decision since WWII has been predicated on continued growth.

[1] Unless you think the main threat is unfriendly AI with short timelines, in which case population in 50 years matters much less than whether we can get our shit together in the next decade or so.

I think the biggest cause for geopolitical instability is some sort of ecological disaster or global nuclear war and I think that's if anything more likely on a planet with large, young populations rather than smaller, older ones due to intensified resource or territorial competition.

People have coined the term 'geriatric peace theory' for the effect that aging populations tend to be remarkably stable politically. Today if you think of who can wipe a few billion of the planet India and Pakistan come to mind, less so Germany or Japan.

Italy has more than 50% (could be wrong, but high number) of population considered old, but politically it hasn't been stable.

While writing I'm guessing you mean "externally", but the two things might be related

> but there also should be concerns about the survival of the human race

We’ve… some ways to go before we have to worry about extinction from not reproducing enough. This should probably not be in humanity’s top thousand or so worries.

I'm probably misreading the posts but... The worry is that too many humans may mean consuming too many resources which depletes/damages the earth too quickly.

A case could be made that if we were to somehow go back down to about, say, about 1 billion humans (it's a nice round number) we could both keep our knowledge, transmit it, make new discoveries, yet not pollute too much.

I'm not a big fan of the idea that "civilization" should be about packing as many humans as possible in as little space as possible ("because energy efficiency") with as little liberties as possible.

Have you looked at the environmental impact of low birth societies?

China, Japan, and the former USSR should be environmental paradises. Their combination of technical sophistication and low birth rate should result in something from Avatar.

Instead they are irradiated hellscapes (very broad and unfair generalization, but still).

The person I was responding to appeared to be worried we might run out of people. I was pointing out that this isn’t an immediate concern :)

Tell that to a hiring manager ;)

The human race isn't in danger, though. The population's actually going up year after year. There are some countries that aren't having enough kids to stay at their peak population without allowing immigration, which may be the actual cause of your concern, but that isn't necessarily a bad thing; encourage immigration, and the problem's solved.

Have you seen that movie Idiocracy? Our modern society is hollowing out the gene pool in the vast median of our cultural middle classes

I hate to break it to you, but Idiocracy wasn't a documentary.

Yeah, it was satire, and all good satire has a kernel of truth.

Correct, it is a warning

I wonder if a bimodal genealogy could be a long term outcome?

Essentially splitting the human races into two separate species.

- Homo Sapiens Alpha

- Homo Sapiens Beta

Seems farfetched but many species have diverged due to sexual selection so not totally ruled out.

I feel like if we try to increase the number, it will actually backfire.

There's no shortage of humans on this planet, currently, or by any forecast.

Let's revisit this non-problem once we figure out how the humans in those forecasts are going to sustainably live, first.

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