Why the demographic transition is speeding up | Hacker News Reader

Why the demographic transition is speeding up

economist.com

70 pointssimonebrunozzi138 comments

‘I am not a robot’ puts me into a loop instead of getting to the content. Anyone else run into this?

I use ad blockers and vpn so I understand why I am asked to prove I’m not a robot but unsure why I can’t get through the test.

I find that "test" is sometimes broken by ad block. Which makes me worry what else is going on with that captcha.

Well this seems to be causing a lot of unnecessary worry. A fertility rate of 2.0 is fantastic news! It’s just below replacement rate, meaning a gradual decline in population size without a dramatic collapse. Gives economies time to adapt while avoiding the severe threat of exponential growth.

“But this trend means we will eventually go extinct!” you say? Only if you believe we can’t correct the trend when the population starts to dip low. But we are centuries away from that and the remediation plan is trivial - just have more babies.

We have no known way of increasing birth rate other than letting society collapse and letting whichever society survives to continue.

That or something horrible like abolishing woman's rights, decreasing rate of survival, etc.

There are belief systems that promote making children (Amish, Islam, etc.). Populations that practice these systems will eventually take over.

I would be curious to see how the birth rate in those populations would fare if the women in those populations had financial independence.

Probably just as well? That seems like a page from the usual Western feminist perspective that if a woman isn't pursuing STEM, wanting to be a corporate "girl-Boss", or a she-preneur; she's surely a victim of a barbaric sexist culture instead of an individual actor just avoiding pursuits that she doesn't find appealing.

I mean you're talking about religion here. It's almost a universal that religion takes some of the best and brightest people it has and then has them dedicate their lives to something that has no material rewards, much less "financial independence".

There is a vast difference in birth rates in cultures where women have 3+ kids as the norm and cultures where women have 1 or 2 kids as the norm.

I do not know any aunts or cousins that wanted to have more than 2 kids, maybe one or two that had 3. And almost all came from moms or grandmas that has 3+ kids, usually 4 or 5.

It has nothing to do with Western feminist or STEM or whatever political nonsense, it is simply a result of giving birth and breastfeeding being a very costly event with very real risks for almost all women.

> giving birth and breastfeeding being a very costly event with very real risks for almost all women.

Natural selection suggests that women who find giving birth and breastfeeding more difficult than average women, will die off over time and be replaced by the descendents of those women who found it easier than average women.

If you consider only the selection pressure from the mother’s side then yes that is the case.

However you must consider that the mother and the father are in an arms race with respect to the carrying capacity of the mother. The selection pressure from the father will always tend towards an offspring that is the maximum capacity at which the mother can bear.

If that's the case then women who have an easier time having kids than average will be more desirable mates and attract higher quality men than women who have a harder time having kids than average.

That's true only if the selection pressure on individual children favors largeness, right? On an island or without as much nutrition, it might be an advantage to be smaller, since you could get by on less food.

That's a prisoner's dilemma situation. As a group, smaller islanders are less likely to run out of food (the cooperation strategy). But as an individual, a bigger islander can beat up the smaller ones and take their food (the defection strategy).

Of course if everyone defects, the group as a whole is worse off.

I dunno. If they really were trapped in a Prisoner's Dilemma, then the equilibrium would be that they get big, I think (unless there's a "repeated games" angle here). Yet what we actually observe, of species that get isolated on islands, is that they do get small.

Natural selection does not work in timescales relevant to discussions about our civilizations.

It works faster on cultures than on genes, of course. That's called "memetic evolution".

Financial dependence makes massive difference in peoples lives and that includes non materialistic religious people. It is not about being the boss. It is about being able to make decisions for yourself. Decision not to marry, for example. Or, decision to leave the relationship without ending up poor.

It makes difference in terms of who gets to decide whether you have another kid or not. Or, whether you will be in couple in the first place. Religious people still have all the human issues and needs. They have disagreements or even power struggles within their families, they have mix of failing and working families. And when you and your kids completely depends on somebody else that someone else will by able to make quite a lot of decisions for you.

Also, regardless of religion, ability of women to be financially independent and make decisions for herself in fact does lower average birth rates pretty consistently.

That's so obvious that the writers of those religions gave women little to no financial independence.

First there was B.1, then there was delta, then there was omicron.

Christianity too. On the extreme side, quiverful or evangelicals.

There are a number of studies that show that the provision of cheap/free childcare can increase birth rate.

Yep, plus increasing/making benefits such as maternity/paternity leave, tax deductions for parents, investing in school districts so parents don’t have to move to a good school district, build more housing… I guess just making it a lot easier to be a parent. Because currently it’s not.

Instead the general trend seems to be that single/child-free people despise any privilege or help parents may recieve in the corporate world, or by the government (coming out of their taxes). Having children is now a "selfish" activity. Apparently, the correct response to the hopelessness of saving our civilization in the face of climate change and other challenges is to... not have children so that our civilization ends for sure, but at least on our terms?

The general trend afaik has been reactions to certain employers attempting to provide these benefits to parents while their other employees are being left out to dry. I do think it’s unfair for eg a company to provide generous leave to parents and then expect non-parents to pick up the slack; the correct approach here is making these benefits universal and fair by law, so that employers need to both provide these benefits to parents and hire enough workers to pick up slack when they’re away.

Also most of these benefits can’t be provided on a per employer basis, they need to be mandated across City/State/Country for it to have systemic effects on the society at large (eg building more housing or funding school districts better).

> I do think it’s unfair for eg a company to provide generous leave to parents and then expect non-parents to pick up the slack

I do think it's unfair, and untenable, to leave this to companies. My perspective is from Sweden where things mostly work as you describe. But whether companies or the government do it, the money will come out of everyone's pockets in the end. I don't see how it being government-led would make it any cheaper, but maybe you could clarify?

> Instead the general trend seems to be that single/child-free people despise any privilege or help parents may recieve in the corporate world, or by the government (coming out of their taxes).

i don't disbelieve this, but this is the first i'm hearing of it. the obvious counter-example i have at hand is Bernie Sanders and others on the left pushing for free college education (which is a benefit to all the parents out there who start college funds for their children). and didn't last year's stimmy checks/tax breaks give more benefits for parents with children than parents without children? i swear early revisions of Biden's infrastructure bill had stuff for childcare, too, though idk if that made it into the final revision.

i can believe that there's people who oppose these things, but is the trend really against providing benefits for child-raising parents, or is it just that the roll-out of these benefits is too slow for your taste?

> We have no known way of increasing birth rate

A blatant generalization, in the face that it wasn't much of a priority for now. Or is there any proof that it was much of a priority, for example in terms of media influence, % of budget, etc?

Is there any case, where country reversed sub replacement rate to above replacement rate?

I've heard of examples that increased it, but only like +0.2 on 1.7 replacement rate. Nothing substantial enough to actually reverse the trend.

Aside from Japan and (very recently) China I don’t know of many countries where it was a big enough deal to care. We’re working with very very tiny sample sizes here within a problem space where almost no sincere effort has been applied.

> Gives economies time to adapt while avoiding the severe threat of exponential growth.

What if economies had already borrowed from the future expecting exponential growth?

Some people will be left holding bad debt. That could be bad if it happened overnight, but a fertility rate of 2.0 is a very gentle off-ramp. Either way would be preferable to exponential population growth continuing.

It's not really, look at it like this: it takes people 65 years from birth to dependence. That means every generation has to deal with 47 years of fertility decline before getting a pension. Right now there's about 1 dependent per 1 working person in most of the western world. In 20 or so years that'll be 2 dependents per 1 working person, and it'll go over 5 in most of Europe before 2050, less than 40 years, and actually earlier in Eastern Europe. Even in the US it's definitely going to 2 dependents per 1 working person. For one thing that means the current level of tax pays for either the military OR pensions in 20 years, not both, and even 100% tax in the US won't pay for both.

https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...

And this isn't a "print your way out of this" situation. At minimum, every child and elderly person is going to have to do with half as many humans providing services like education or medical services to them. It's real humans that we are short on, not some made up quantity like money. You could print $100 trillion per year and spend it entirely on elderly care, and we'd still have to deal with the reduction of workers per elderly.

Anyone working today will not have people taking care of you when they retire at the current rates. Half as much time as today, probably a lot less.

We're actually close to the tipping point in Europe:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1251591/population-growt...

If someone's paying attention, Europe will need another Syria and Afghanistan soon. Perhaps in North Africa?

That's assuming a lot of people aren't currently working bullshit jobs or things that we can't automate though. I suspect that if we have a real worker shortage we'll find there's a lot we can do without or do more efficiently.

All this means is we’ve built something in the present that someone in the future doesn’t get paid for. We still have the thing we built so I’m not sure what the problem is so long as we’re building something useful (e.g. infrastructure, public services) and not something pointless (e.g. overpriced real estate and other economic rents).

Technically, yes, but politically, it does not work that way. If people are sold a certain quality of life, and then they do not get it, they will fight (or vote) for direct as much of society’s resources into accomplishing that quality of life as possible. Even diverting society’s resources from quality of life that were offered generations ago when they were younger. It manifests as reduced investment in infrastructure, higher taxes, lower funding for schools (see US universities getting less money from government and raising tuition).

> What if economies had already borrowed from the future expecting exponential growth?

They don't. They bother from other economies in the present. And if they borrow things they can repay, it's the lenders that lose out.

Stock valuations are basically just money borrowed from the future. We expect the future workers to slave away and pay those trillions. From that perspective the future generation got many trillions more debt last year.

> Stock valuations are basically just money borrowed from the future

Stock valuations aren't money at all, nor are they borrowed. Stock valuations are kind of consensus estimate of future value, but if you get money based on them (by selling or borrowing against stock), you aren't borrowing from the future, you are borrowing or being paid with it from someone in the present.

(Sure, if you borrow, you’ll have a future obligation to pay; that's not “borrowing from the future”, it's just borrowing.)

The issue is uneven distribution. While the world fertility rate is trending toward a moderate population decline starting mid century, this will be mostly driven by extreme declines in specific areas rather than a gradual decline everywhere. There are many developed countries are projected to lose more than half of their populations by 2100 using current estimates. That alone is a major problem for policymakers but what's worse, those estimates have been consistently underestimating the severity of the decline in number of births. In predicting future demographics, there have been longstanding assumptions that the birth rates of countries that fall significantly below replacement will eventually recover. This does not appear to be true, at least on timescales which would appear during any of our lifetimes. Instead, fewer kids reduces social pressure to have kids and results in fewer community resources available to parents (schools, playgrounds, etc). This further reduces the fertility rate. You can see this in countries like South Korea[1] which are seeing rapidly shrinking elementary school populations and have been closing lots of schools as a result.

South Korea, always the overachiever, is down to a total fertility rate of 0.82 this year with that expected to fall below 0.8 next year. To put that into perspective, in a country without significant immigration, if that rate were sustained you would come to a point where the country would lose ~85% of its population every two generations. That's an extreme example, almost to the point of absurdity, but even so it sort of illustrates the problem. To support the ever increasing number of old people, policy makers can either A) Accept much higher levels of immigration (unpopular) or B) Increase the tax burden on the fewer and fewer working young people (which will probably decrease fertility even further). Even if we assume option C exists (no immigration but replace all workers with robots) you're still looking at a situation in many countries where the actual human population of the country is reduced by >90% within one human lifetime. While countries like the U.S. won't be hit quite as hard by this, the trends are pretty clear. Younger generations are having a fraction of the number of kids older generations had[2] and this trend will continue to accelerate in the near term.

[1]https://www.insider.com/south-korea-birth-rate-abandoned-sch...

[2]https://i2.wp.com/www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2021/...

And the amount of people is just ridiculous, why 8 billion? When was this stablished to be the right amount? Why not -lets say- 1 billion and destroy the planet much much less?

I don’t want to live in a society where someone can establish an ideal population size.

Free humans making their decision one birth at a time establish population sizes.

There's a difference between deciding an ideal population size and enforcing it. Also, there are different ways of enforcing it, many involving little that we would term coercion: establishing child tax credits, for example; funding schools and healthcare via mechanisms which make raising children more or less burdensome. Free people can react to these incentives via their own free choice while society at large, acting as a collective of free people, decide what these incentives should be.

The incentives established by other people's choices are inevitable unless you want to go live like the Martian.

I don't want to live in a society that expands without limits and causes its own destruction in a few centuries instead of one that could live many millenniums if it figured out not to self-destroy by unbounded replication; but hey different strokes for different folks.

Because a combination of women not having the ability to say no to sex and people liking sex.

Women’s financial independence and IUD/vasectomies/birth control pills are relatively new, and still only available to a small portion of the population.

Surprisingly, about three condoms per year are made for every fertile male in the world.

I can’t speak for everyone in India etc. but for me, personally, I didn’t reproduce because I felt the world already had enough people for finite resources, and I didn’t think my descendants would get to experience as rich of a natural environment as the one I grew up in.

I don’t regret this decision.

Whilst I might have enjoyed being a parent, had things gone that way, there’s infinitely much to enjoy about being alive solo and free, and nothing to worry about in the aftermath.

Maybe what we need is more people that are educated and think as you do, not less. Did you ever consider that your decision is actually applying evolutionary pressure the wrong way around (wrong according to your beliefs)?

I note your observation that the outcome of this strategy is a world populated by people who don't share the strategy, but that doesn't worry me.

I don't want the world to be populated by people who think like me. I just appreciate it for what it is.

It's a big old interesting world, and I'll only ever get to see bits of it.

There are so many people in the world, all of them different, each of them thinking different things and trying to get to different places. That's what I like about the world. It's an interesting, surprising place, full of variety, unexpected schema, and ways to do things that have never occurred to me.

What parents want for their kids is just the starting point for kids anyway. Where they end up and why, who knows?

> I don't want the world to be populated by people who think like me.

I didn’t want kids for the same reasons, and because I am highly anxious and the world seems pretty grim place.

Ended up marrying a girl who wanted kids, so now we have kids. I am happy to be parent but now that I am hanging out with other parents, there are no longer intellectual discussions. Everyone seems more focused on the money. And honestly it seems there is a relationship between number of kids and intelligence. These people are happier though.

Now I sort of hope my kids don’t think like me. Even if it means overpopulation.

Such ideas are not transferred through genes, but through knowledge exchange. So, although OP has not reproduced, it doesn't mean he cannot spread his knowledge and still influence a lot of people.

You have no idea if this is true. Of course the motivation to procreate could be heritable. In fact it is extremely likely this is true. Why wouldn't it be?

Clearly, the the decision not to reproduce is not going to be lost by following through on it. Anybody who decides not to reproduce is existence proof of the potential for the decision to emerge after countless generations of decisions to the contrary.

I think that very few interesting behavioral traits are so simple as to have a binary presence depending on one mutation. Instead, we inherit complex systems of behavioral tendencies which can be actively expressed or silently carried depending on circumstance. Similarly, epigenetics have been demonstrated to even carry some memory of circumstances requiring trait expression across generations. This further "smears" adaptation over time. Also, these notions of adaptation and evolutionary pressure are statistical concepts applied whole populations, not some morality play embodied by individual actors who evolve or perish.

For nearly every situation where one can worry about valuable traits dying out due to non-reproduction, can we not just as easily imagine that it is expression of well-tested, adaptive traits already present in our broader gene pool? It is quite arbitrary to embrace evolutionary ideas and yet decide that one's impulses and inherited tendencies are somehow maladaptive and must be denied.

The impulses could be a refined adaptive trait which serves to protect the broader gene line of families and communities. Why should one level of meta-analysis be granted a higher value? Perhaps the pure impulse without meta-analysis is the real value. Or perhaps it is two levels: first considering to procreate in spite of the lack of desire, then realizing that this second guessing is unnecessary...

Well, most people tried to reproduce until very recently. What do you think what changed? The genes of the most people in one or two generations or our culture? I'm not saying genetics do not play a part at all, but the culture and knowledge can suppress it or express it. I recommend reading "The Meme Machine" which explains the concept in details.

I don’t believe this is true.

You are a draw from the pool of genes of your ancestors - with mutations.

Assuming a specific mutation didn’t give you an evolutionary advantage that you’d feel compelled to pass on, sometimes the optimum play is to optimize for the _pool of genes_ you came from and not your specific draw.

There is an counter-intuitive evolutionary advantage to altruistic behavior, in which an organism can most efficiently propagate its own genes by increasing the probability of the overall species/sub-species survival - even if that means self-sacrifice.

not reproducing != being alive solo and free

I share your sentiment, and I also decided not to reproduce.

It's important to balance this analysis with the fact that the human population of the Earth, in absolute terms, grew more during the last 60 years than at any other time in history.

Or consider, there were about 4 billion humans on the planet when I was born, there is almost 8 billion now.

There are situations where it is good to talk in percentages. There are other situations when it is good to talk about absolute numbers. Assuming the planet has some absolute environmental limits, then it is the absolute number of humans, rather than some percentage growth rate, that matters.

Why are people having less children? Surely part of it is because of the strain of having to absorb the historic population surge that we have just lived through. We can see this most clearly in the nations that have seen the biggest surges. Iran had 6 million people in 1915. It then suffered a famine that weakened everyone's immune system, so it was vulnerable when the 1918 "Spanish Flu" arrived. It had 5 million survivors by 1921. It now has 83 million people, an astounding increase of 1,660%. Before it can go any further, it will need to rethink all of its institutions, government, education, culture, and worklife. In the same way that a corporation needs to fundamentally re-think everything after a 10x shift, so too do nations.

I've studied Iran, but I have not studied Africa, but I believe in Africa you can find similar stories, such as what has happened in Nigeria.

I don't mean to suggest that population pressures are the only reasons why people might be wary to have children, I only mean this is something to keep in mind when we discuss this issue. The human population of the Earth has exploded over the last century and especially the last 60 years, in absolute terms.

Having to absorb a big population surge can leave any country a bit disorganized. Consider the USA. The biggest generation ever, the Baby Boom, came of age between 1965 and 1987. Given the big surge of the working population, you might think these would have been years of exceptional economic growth. Instead, the opposite happened, these were the years of "The Great Stagnation" with falling wages and falling productivity. No doubt the Great Stagnation was a complex, multi-factor event, but it is interesting that it happened when a naive model might have predicted a big surge.

> No doubt the Great Stagnation was a complex, multi-factor event, but it is interesting that it happened when a naive model might have predicted a big surge.

But there are a lot of different naive models making different predictions.

At one time I thought, along with the orthodoxy, that falling population rates would be a big problem in the future.

But now, it's just a way for humanity to rebalance itself.

30 years ago as we approached 7 billion humans on the planet, everyone was worrying about how we would feed ourselves and what would happen if the rate of growth kept going the same way. (Yes, I'm that old that I remember the news stories).

Now as we slowly decline, everyone wants us to make more babies.

These things go in cycles.

I think that as we get more advanced and men and particularly women, see participating and reaping the rewards of modern economies in pretty much every country -- more important than having children, it will drop even more.

But as covid shows, events will happen that cause people to rethink that from time to time. In a way, its "life" that re-balances itself without even our intervention.

It's a pendulum, and right now, it's swinging one way. It will swing back.

>Now as we slowly decline, everyone wants us to make more babies.

It's irrelevant how much they want us to make babies (Western Europe), as unless real estate prices plummet to levels affordable to young couples without rich parents, you won't see birthrates in the west go up without heavy immigration from developing nations.

They can't expect to have rising birthrates that would sustain the pyramid scheme of the welfare state while at the same time treating real estate as an investment vehicle that goes up faster than wages, squeezing the younger generations out.

Either the welfare state in the west will collapse or the real estate market will. You can't have both going up at the same time.

> unless real estate prices plummet to levels affordable to young couples without rich parents, you won't see birthrates in the west go up without heavy immigration from developing nations.

Ironically heavy immigration itself pushes up housing prices by increasing demand, and lowers wages by increasing supply:

https://www.independent.ie/business/jobs/not-enough-migrants...

Right, maybe it's like an oscillating system where high real estate prices depress family formation, a generation or two passes, real estate becomes cheaper because a third of the population is gone, people can afford homes again, then they have more children, and so on. Obviously heavy immigration breaks this natural cycle. Financializing your country’s real estate and selling it all to foreigners and investors probably exacerbates the problem, assuming anyone who made these policies actually considers this a problem.

Well that was my point exactly, but unfortunately, it's impossible to argue in European politics about the negative consequences of uncontrolled immigration without being branded right wing, or racist or a Nazi, so such debates aren't even discussed publicly in the first place.

This still surprises me. It’s clearly one of the reasons for the rise of the right. People aren’t oblivious to the fact that every decision has positives and negatives, and that on balance people try to choose what they think will be most positive. By ignoring or refusing to discuss the negatives, you intuitively grow resentment somewhere…

And yet Brexit happened anyway.

As unrelated as it may seem I consider this statement to be true. It's terrible that society is not creating a tax system that prevents real estate from being an investment vehicle. If real estate would be cheaper I would have probably settled down already several years ago. Now I am just thinking why should I work 40h+ just to afford an ugly, old & noisy 2-bed-room condo in suburbia if instead I can use that extra money to live like a king in an emerging economy, affording everything I desire from restaurants to cleaning services & at the same time afford the luxury to work less. Also many of my friends gave up on buying real estate & opt for working less/ more leisure instead. It feels like the boomer middle class society is breaking apart & I believe that to be a good thing because as more people change their views real estate will become affordable again. In the meantime I believe there are better investment opportunities anyways compared to current real estate prices in Western Europe.

both will

If the welfare state is a pyramid scheme, then so are all economic structures. Perhaps you're heard that productivity of individual workers increases over time...

What does an individual's productivity have to do with this?

And also, the individual productivity has stagnated over the last decade.

There's a limit to how many divs a front end dev can insert per hour and how many toilets a plumber can install per hour and this hasn't gone up lately.

Also, wages have not kept up with an individual's increase in productivity as all the gains have been skimmed by the top shareholders, not the workers.

So, please don't confuse the rise in stock prices of the bull run in US in the last decade with the rise in wages as a lot of workers haven't felt it.

> Also, wages have not kept up with an individual's increase in productivity as all the gains have been skimmed by the top shareholders, not the workers.

Much of the gains have also been skimmed by land, many of whom happen to be workers.

I think that's part of the reason there hasn't been a strong push to for systemic change. You really have three main classes: capital, labour who happens to own some land (through homeownership), and labour without land. The second group is majority [0], and they've done mostly okay (at the expense of the third).

[0] - Or, if they're not the majority, they're still more active and involved in politics, which makes sense, as they've made a very large investment, and would like to see it grow (or at the very least, not lose its value).

> What does an individual's productivity have to do with this?

In regards to your comment about the welfare state being a pyrid scheme, everything. It's why a shrinking population can keep a welfare state solvent.

> how many toilets a plumber can install per hour and this hasn't gone up lately.

Not true. Modern installation systems like are now universal in new buildings in Europe mean toilet install rates have indeed gone up.

> please don't confuse the rise in stock prices of the bull run in US in the last decade with the rise in wages as a lot of workers

Who's doing that?

There’s no straightforward way to convert div-inserts-per-hour to value-added-per-hour.

The value a plumber creates by installing a toilet depends on the context of the installation.

If wages kept up with productivity increases, there would be more than enough tax money to fund national pensions. Thanks for the insight, I’d never thought about it that way

Looking at only the amounts of money will not capture the problem. You can fund retirements all you want, but you cannot spin up labor to change bed pans and catheters and build infrastructure.

Automation helps increase productivity per person and reduce the necessary working population to non working population ratio, but there is no natural law that automation can progress as quickly as it would need to in order to meet the expected quality of life in the face of declining proportions of working age populations.

> productivity of individual workers increases over time

So do house prices and taxes. Actually house prices have gone up way more than wages, eg https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2021/05/how-uk-house-p...

they are, except crypto

As someone who grew up hearing the world was headed for certain and total disaster by overpopulation, it’s very hard for me to get upset by projections of a gradual and gentle move the other way for awhile.

Populations that stop reproducing is a problem that solves itself. Probably cultures and individuals that are more likely to desire babies will push forward.

unlikely. historically the most important cultures were a small minority of human population

That's a bold claim, can you unpack? Also, important for who?

the whole constellation of western cultures that dominated the world came from small populations.

Important for , let's say, technology, since technology gave them military advantage

Dominated the world for the tiniest sliver of human civilization. Asia is coming back strong again.

Nonsense. For 95% of recorded human history the Chinese and Indians were the richest and most productive civilizations and you can’t call those populations small. It’s like you’re living in your own narrative.

The "demographic contagion" is explained in the article as a spread of cultural mores towards smaller families.

There could also be an economic explanation. Traditionally large families were favored because they provided old-age security to parents. If an immigrant from a developing country is able to support their parents with remittances from a developed country, then there is less of a need for large families in the developing country.

> Traditionally large families were favored because they provided old-age security to parents.

Were they? If we asked old women why they had 3, 4, 5+ kids, would they say it was so they would have old age security or were they having them because they did not have a choice to not have them?

When people don't want to have kids it's not very hard not to. You may end up with one or two children that way due to fallibility of naive contraception, but it's hard to imagine how a couple will end up with 4 children despite wanting none.

There's a reason why Pushkin had 4 children by the time he got shot, the man was no fool to do that accidentally.

The subtext of my comment is that the woman in the relationship may not have had a choice in wanting or not wanting children. It does not even have to be outright rape, just the implications of women being dependent on men or older family members and other societal expectations.

Why would you expect men to want children more than women do, and force that choice upon them? That's not what men strive to, usually, in our experience.

Societal pressure may exist but, since society consists of men and women, you still need to explain their motivation. To me, it is a mystery-ish.

In previous generations in currently developed countries, the cost of child rearing was not borne by men. 2 or 4 or 6 kids, it did not make much difference. I know both of my grandfathers did not really even touch their kids until they were walking and talking.

It is not that the men wanted or did not want kids, they could not have cared less. Or they could have wanted them as assets, at least the boys. Either way, I doubt too many were sufficiently fussed about the woman’s sacrifices, especially if it meant they had to completely give up sex.

Why would they need to give up sex? Coitus interrups is not a Roman legion commander aftre all.

Because they did not have access to convenient contraception and/or using condoms was not acceptable to them?

We went from it being common to see women having 5 kids to it being rare within 1 to 2 generations. I would bet on it being due to women gaining true independence.

The article does mention economic factors - e.g. the desire for families to educate their children, which for a family with many children is prohibitively expensive.

Female literacy is very strongly associated with falling birth rates. The Taliban probably knew why they wanted to keep Afghan girls illiterate (or Boko Haram in Nigeria) - more young warriors in the future.

Edit: just to be clear, I am not condoning that. Only thinking about possible motivations.

This kind of demographic transitions is not new, something similar happened among the elite in big cities during antiquity (Rome and Greece)

Scholars and rulers were not happy with the situation.

It forced them to offer citizenship to immigrants and slaves on as large scale.

It also probably inspired religions that were created at the time to put a strong emphasis on family values and large families.

I think we should both rejoice and try to better understand this self-regulating phenomenon.

> On November 24th India’s government declared that the country’s fertility rate had dropped to 2.0 children per woman.

the writer (who appears to be anonymous?) shamelessly omits citing or linking to any source for this, and i can't find it. there's a WaPo article [1] claiming a similar thing, where their assertion is backed up by a broken link. when i search "India fertility rate" the most relevant thing i can find suggests this to be 2.18 as of this year [2]. this source's numbers match the St Louis Fed's numbers [3] up to the point that the fed lacks data (2019).

help me out here. the claim that fertility rates are falling faster than predicted -- and that replacement rate has already been reached -- is central to this article. so on the surface, this article seems entirely untrustworthy.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/11/25/india-birth-...

[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/IND/india/fertility-ra...

[3] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPDYNTFRTININD

The increase in population growth peaked in 1968.

The economist are 50 years late on this one.

In my self-interested opinion, this is why we need to increase immigration now, not later. We don't get a choice about the genetic makeup of Western countries a century from now, but we do get a choice as to whether our culture is preserved. Bring in the people with high reproduction rates now when they and their children will be maximally immersed in our culture and carry it forward. Don't wait until there aren't enough of us left to matter.

Why not make it attractive for young couples in the west to start families instead of increasing immigration from developing countries?

Believe it or not, the lack of babies in the west is not some fancy fashion choice started by the Millennials, but a consequence of the broken housing market formed by government economic and banking policies of the last couple of decades that turned real estate into an investment vehicle for the haves in the detriment of the have-nots who also suffered wage stagnation, effectively pricing out young couples out of decent homes, so instead of hanging a heavy bank loan around their necks for a shoebox for the next 30 years, they choose not to bother with kids or stay debt free and single.

So how about we solve the housing market first, instead of throwing more gasoline on the fire via uncontrolled immigration in an already broken housing and jobs market?

Sure, but there's no reason we can't do both.

but a consequence of the broken housing market

You sure about that? Birth rate is inversely correlated with income. Why are people who can't afford houses still having more children?

https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...

>Birth rate is inversely correlated with income.

That's a useless metric on its own if the rise in housing costs, education and childcare far exceed the rise in wages.

Also, more immigration means more demand for housing that's already expensive and scarce for the local population. How does adding more immigration help with the housing crisis?

Not saying we shouldn't have immigration, I'm saying it should be regulated to highly skilled professions that suffer demonstrated shortages (doctors, nurses, engineers, etc).

We have enough food delivery bicycle couriers and wage slaves that juggle between the unemployment office and seasonal gigs that pay piss poor and are open to exploitation by crappy business owners who thrive on exploiting desperate immigrants who can't defend themselves and bring down the wages for everyone because we keep pushing for more uncontrolled immigration.

How does adding more immigration help with the housing crisis?

Well, more people to build the houses, for a start. The housing crisis has nothing to do with population. It's an entirely self-inflicted problem because it's impossible for a natural market to be both too expensive to purchase and not profitable enough to supply at the same time. Find the brakes and take them off. Rent control for new construction, pointless urban parking requirements, and NIMBYs are the culprits, not fresh immigrants.

>Well, more people to build the houses, for a start.

How so? Do you only let builders, contractors and handy-men immigrate in the country?

>The housing crisis has nothing to do with population.

How so? Housing prices are a function of supply vs demand, and more population equals more demand, unless you expect the immigrant population to be homeless.

The houses are not missing due to missing builders. There are no houses due to zoning restrictions, regulations that prevent apartments and force houses with yards.

Birth rates are lowest among higher income couples. The low birth rates in the west are the product of a culture that devalues marriage and decouples it from procreation.

And the low birth rates found in countries not in the west?

Overshoot from population-control mentality adopted by Asia, with the encouragement of the West, during the 20th century. I'm from Bangladesh and my dad works in international development--my parents were actually a bit put off by my wife and I having three kids. It's socialized that educated, westernized people have only 1-2 kids, and poor religious people having more is a problem to be solved.

Huh, interesting. I haven’t heard that theory before. I’ll think about that / try to read about it.

Immigration is a bandaid on an internal injury. It makes you think you’ve helped the problem for now, but you’ve really done nothing.

Most of the countries that act as sources of immigrants are beginning their own population decline. Very soon there’ll be a slim number of countries with enough population to maintain their numbers while having enough to send abroad. Within about 50 years or so, that number will be approximately zero. When immigrants come to a country and adapt, their birth rates drop off pretty quickly as well. It’s a one, maybe two generation patch that slightly sustains numbers and that’s it.

Figuring out how to get people currently living in your country wanting to have kids is the real solution. At that point you can recruit skilled immigrants and not just play a numbers game to try to stay afloat. You also don’t need to think you’re entitled to the population of other countries to solve your own demographic crisis, like so many western countries do.

Some young people see immigration as a barrier to them having children as they have less career prospects and housing costs more.

This reminds of a passage from Dune (context: the planet the book is set on is a desert with a very limited amount of water):

> "There were water riots when it was learned how many people the Duke was adding to the population," she said. "They stopped only when the people learned we were installing new windtraps and condensers to take care of the load."

> "There is only so much water to support human life here," he said. "The people know if more come to drink a limited amount of water, the price goes up and the very poor die. But the Duke has solved this. It doesn’t follow that the riots mean permanent hostility toward him."

Dune is made up. While arguing with history makes some sense, arguing what might happen make some sense, arguing by "fiction had this story in it" does not make sense.

I'm not really sure what your criticism is, to be honest. I'll just microanalyze my comment and hope it ends up responding to your point.

The passage I posted is basically just, "X is limited, adding more people will lead to X shortages, let's find a way to use X more efficiently", with X replied with water. The implication of me saying this is that you can also replace X with land.

Obviously, I could have just said "let's just build more housing, then immigration won't lead to housing shortages", but I think that's a less interesting comment. By instead using the passage, I've done 2 things: pointed out that other people have thought about this issue (in another domain), and encouraged a few people to look up Dune, and maybe read it.

Would your criticism apply if my comment instead said "let's just build more housing, then immigration won't lead to housing shortages"? Because I think that form has equivalent content (in terms of the underlying message), so if it doesn't apply that form, I don't think it applies to the current form either.

Fiction is a tool for elaborate analogies. People learn well through analogy, and it can be a lot more persuasive than an economics textbook, because people might actually read it.

The above quote was not elaborate.

I was referring to the world of Dune :)

Dune is “made up” just as much as economists making predictions about future world populations are made up. They are both toy models that can be useful to inform real life.

> They are both toy models

Dune is not a model, toy or otherwise, it is a narrative with no independent variables.

The illusion that there is a model involved is art, just as the illusion of (say) spaceships in the film version.

They are not comparable at all. And economic models are taken with massive e caution too.

There is difference between fiction and reality. Dune is fiction.

I'm genuinely impressed that you seem to have come up with a pro-immigration spin on the Great Replacement conspiracy theory[1].

Culture changes constantly with or without immigration. Do you really think everything we have now is good enough that it should be encased in amber for the next 100+ years? Personally I'm more interested in what evolves out of it.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Replacement

I mean, there are plenty of pro-immigration people that believe in the Great Replacement, that's why they post on twitter or have signs in protests that say "we're going to replace you." I don't even know why it's described as a white nationalist thing, oh well actually I do know why.

It's hard to argue how illegal immigrants who are often abused and confined to bad, irregular jobs (and sometimes turn to criminals due to these conditions) would improve the culture.

There are better cultures and worse ones (such as, prison culture or Khmer Rouge), and we're talking about degradation here.

With educated immigrants, the story may be different. But it's not the kind that most people worry about.

As one of those immigrants—that isn’t much of a sales pitch, man. My oldest (of 3) is 9, and I’m seriously questioning why I’d want to socialize my kids into this culture. I’m 37 and of my college and law school school friends didn’t have kids until my wife and I had been parents for 6-7 years. We’re by far the youngest parents in our oldest’s class. Maybe tFor a Bangladeshi it’s been such a lonely experience. I don’t want to be like these American parents hoping I get one or two grand kids. :-/

It's not a sales pitch, it's a trade negotiation. The immigrant gets better economic opportunities, more safety, different individual rights, the opportunity to influence the culture of their new homeland from within, and any other things that make them want to come. In exchange, their descendants will be Americans first, and whatever ethno-cultural identity their parents belonged to second.

“Come here and you’ll be comfortable for a generation, but you’ll be lonely in your old age and there’s a decent chance your family line will die out!” Like, being able to afford a lot of cheap Chinese crap is pretty tempting, but…

Like, being able to afford a lot of cheap Chinese crap is pretty tempting, but…

But what? But it isn't worth it? If that's what you mean, are you planning to move back or did you decide it's worth it after all?

i think we need to calm down with demographic determinism

Not even one mention of climate change in the article. Isn't this exactly what we wanted? This is fantastic news. I thought the whole shift in agenda towards female education and feminism in the developing world was precisely to create this demographic shift, i.e. to reduce global birth rates to almost nothing. We should be celebrating.

At the very end they do have this:

> Slower population growth could make the challenge of cutting carbon emissions less daunting.

Nice video about the subject of world population, in french:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DxHwUt87izg

In my field it’s interesting to consider all the technology that wouldn’t exist if there were far fewer humans, because we rely on the billions of people wanting a $0.01 improvements to their lives to make investing in these super expensive machines viable.

That, plus the fact that so few seem prone to understanding mathematics, probably plays a part in the technology innovation boon that aligned with the global population boon the last century,

I've alway wondered the following: Since, in rich countries, nearly everyone who wants kids can have kids and if we assume a genetic factor in being drawn towards kids, then there would be evolutionary pressure towards wanting kids. If this is possible, could we already detect this? If one would assume such an hypothesis and model population growth, when could changes be detected?

Pity there isnt one such country in sub-saharan africa to help reverse overpopulation, the only low fertility rate seems to be Mauritius.

Division reducing chance of Multiplication.

https://pad.yohdah.com/827/why-the-blacksmith-needs-the-drui...

There are many factors in the play here. Regular people can't afford good upbringing for a kid and even if money isn't a problem dystopian vision of the future clearly prevent from making that choice.

TL;DR: "The fashion for fewer births was probably rooted both in changes in outlook associated with secularism and the Enlightenment and in the spread of information about family planning"

This is the vehicle of demographic decline. The reason for driving it is relative poverty[1], and insecurity in one's future, both of which are prevalent in many modern societies.

1. this one is hard to define in a comment.

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