Vanishing People: The Population Crisis | Hacker News Reader

Vanishing People: The Population Crisis

piratewires.com

12 pointsfeross12 comments

I find it somewhat disingenuous that these pieces don't acknowledge what life is like for the majority of people (no social safety nets, tenuous healthcare/housing/work access, varying degrees of uncertainty of their economic future) and to demand more fuel for the machine “because of the economic pie.” Read the room. 64% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck [1] and you want them to have kids, or have more kids? 50% of children born into poverty remain in poverty for at least half their childhood, and a significant amount will remain in poverty for the next 30 years [2]. Do these people not consume available data?

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/08/as-prices-rise-64-percent-of...

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20210616133101/https://webarchiv...

I mean, fine, but these poor people will have no family and will be abandoned in their old age. So I don't think fatalistically accepting "no more kids" is the way forward either. Eventually, public health efforts will just sort of ignore them, and they'll be left to die. It will not help to have no family and nobody who cares about you.

I would agree about the underlying cause though:

> no social safety nets, tenuous healthcare/housing/work access, varying degrees of uncertainty of their economic future

Maybe it's useful for the rich to realize, in their language of GDP, that this is a problem.

> It will not help to have no family and nobody who cares about you.

Visit a retirement home in your community and ask how many folks with kids have them visit. Having family is no guarantee they will stay with you, take you in, or provide for you in old age.

EDIT: @bluefirebrand

> People are too busy to care for their children or their elders, really.

Ask children why they don't visit. I don't believe the data proves out it's because of a lack of time, but an unwillingness/desire to. I put forth that younger generations are more comfortable casting off societal norms (maintaining unhealthy relationships with substandard parents), and walking away from dysfunctional parental relationships versus historically.

https://news.osu.edu/study-examines-what-makes-adult-childre...

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2021/01/why-paren...

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190328-family-estrangem...

https://www.economist.com/united-states/2021/05/20/how-many-...

Arguably this is also related to the same problems.

People are too busy to care for their children or their elders, really.

It's leading to a very cold and detached society imo

im not sure its necessarily business either, but rather distraction. Lots of ways in which relationships were formed and maintained in the past are being replaced by technology

> Having family is no guarantee they will stay with you, take you in, or provide for you in old age.

We can look at this in terms of the individual family, or in terms of the larger society and its economic forces.

Individual relationships: Yes, having family increases the odds that someone will give a shit, but it is no guarantee -- and it is less of a guarantee, the less people care about their parents and relatives.

(Which is not going to be a good path to go down in an era of weaker states and nonexistent social services. The Family is going to have to step into that gap, as it does in many other societies, if people are going to have anything. And, (transnational) cultures in which people are able to organize in this way are going to do better than those that don't.)

Society and economics: If there is simply a general shortage of kids (regardless of whether they are your kids), that eventually shows up as rising prices for labor -- including the "caring labor" you pay for in an assisted living complex (or whatever). If that gets more expensive, then having grandma move in becomes comparatively more reasonable. But if grandma has no grandkids, then grandma definitely doesn't have that option.

writer here. I do mention housing costs specifically as being a probable large factor, as well attempts at financial pro-natalist policies in Europe. I recognize the data you share above, but it's not clear to me that that any solution can come from economic policies alone. After all, the places that have the most children today are very poor with far more uncertain futures.

That said, I'm certainly not an expert and this is a very complex issue. My main goal in writing this was to spark a conversation and get people thinking about this. Would love to hear your further thoughts.

Sure, I'm happy to oblige. I agree with your assessment that a solution won't come from economic policies alone, and will go so far as to put forth that there isn't a solution in an environment with free will (which will become evident later in this comment). With that said, economics are a critical component for successfully raising a healthy child to adulthood.

My research started when I had a fascination about population as a system, and how sub systems (each country and its ongoing demographics transition, Japan being the future of all developed countries, Israel being an outlier due to their ultra orthodox population) function within the system as a whole. During this research, I came across Hans Rosling's talks (mostly on TED, but other places as well) on population and growth, which led me to Our World In Data's extensive blogpost on the topic [1]. I will draw your attention to the section "What explains the change in the number of children women have?" [2]. What does this section tell us?

It tells us that when women have access to contraceptives/family planning services and are empowered economically and socially, they have children later in life, as well as less children than they otherwise would've had (or no children at all). You can also see this in data with regards to the growing childfree movement; the economics alone aren't a factor, these people simply do not want to be exposed to the opportunity cost or experience of having children [3] [4] [5], and there is some data that childfree unmarried women are the happiest demographic [6] [7]. Europe and Scandinavian countries that have much more robust pro-natalist polices than countries such as the US have close to parity or lower birth rates. Also, something to note is fathers having a lower fertility desire when parental leave is expanded to cover them at the same level of women [8]. In short, kids were an advantage when countries were developing, but in a developed world, they are a luxury good at best and a burden at worst.

Admittedly, my comment you replied to is only part of the problem: the fact that having a child in most of the world (outside parts of the developed world with broad positive economic outcomes for the middle class) is a poor economic choice. I didn't touch on the 400k existing children in foster care who have no permanent home in the US, the millions worldwide who live in institutional care, and so on. There are already large cohorts of children without a permanent loving home.

High level, I take issue with people advocating for a higher birth rate when we don't take care of the kids (and also adults, by way of social safety nets, affordable housing, healthcare) who exist today, and there’s substantial data that there are cohorts who just have no interest or desire in having kids regardless of what you throw at them. Fix existing socioeconomic systems and then calls for heroic measures to increase the fertility rate might not be so tone deaf.

Tangentially, the "out of touchness" I referred to isn't limited to just the wealthy and technolibertarians of course; the pope is equally culpable:

> Pope Francis decried the low birth rate in Western countries on Thursday, describing it as an urgent social emergency and a “new poverty.”

> “This is a new poverty that scares me,” the Pope commented. “It is the generative poverty of those who discount the desire for happiness in their hearts, of those who resign themselves to watering down their greatest aspirations, of those who settle for little and stop hoping big.” [9]

New poverty! We haven't even gotten past existing poverty and suffering. Maybe he should be scared of current state before arguing for more of the same.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rates/

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-...

[3] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/11/19/growing-sha...

[4] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

[5] https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-rise-of-childless-america

[6] https://www.businessinsider.com/unmarried-childless-women-ar...

[7] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/why-bad-looks-good/2...

[8] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/may/20/paid-paternity...

[9] https://www.ncregister.com/cna/pope-francis-low-birth-rate-i...

Not a whole lot to contribute on my end, but wanted to say: this is an excellent and well-factualized comment.

> "consider the difficulty of solving climate change if we are in a spiraling economic collapse"

This is not really a good argument. Economic collapse would more than likely solve climate change faster than any carbon-weening methods civilization purposefully did. COVID lockdowns (and the reduced footprint at the expense of economic activity) should be more than a good enough example of that.

It is a fool's errand to use logic against such ignorant nonsense.

Instead, I encourage everyone to be fruitful and multiply. The sooner we reach 20 billion, the sooner nature will correct this catastrophic mistake for us.

GDP doesn’t calculate economic or societal health, it calculates capitalist productivity and consumption. Why is it constantly touted as a marker that must grow in order for society to be happy? Women be shopping when they do not be happy.

Re: labor shortage I’d say the same thing. What do we want? No Jobs! When do we want them? Never!

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