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Comment by jl6 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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