What can a country do to get birth rates up? I'm sure there are analyses out there about why Japan's is low, but what can they (or other countries) do to pump birth rates up?
I wonder about a more global perspective on this, and whether it's actually truly a problem in the long run. I assume the unspoken assumption of many who worry about population decline in the developed countries is that it will cause the world to regress in some way (either via instability or without) as the rest pick over the bones and important infrastructure and knowledge get lost.
But must this happen? Can't the developed countries perhaps pass their developed traits on to other up-and-coming countries to also stabilize and then slow their growth, and eventually we arrive at a stable and peaked, or perhaps smaller global pop the planet can actually more easily sustain with a sensible energy mix?
Population decline often seems like a hopeful opportunity to me, if we'd stop obsessing about the fortune and minmax of single nations and start putting humanity first.
Not if you promise the productivity of people in future generations to the current generation, but then find out the productivity of people in future generations falls short (perhaps due to insufficient people).
I don't believe there's any examples of modern countries doing it. Providing lots of childcare benefits doesn't seem to help, though it does make the children you do get healthier.
I'm sure there is a positive correlation with "home ownership, and low debt" with children however.
Because that would make you feel secure about your future.
Unfortunately, at some point the benefits to not having a child at the individual level become costs at the societal level once enough opt out, and that becomes costs again at the individual level, on a sufficiently long timeline.
Of course, these net costs/benefits can flip from being costs at 10 years to benefits at 30 years and back to costs at 150 years. Maybe excess population leads to excess resource consumption and entropy generation. Maybe some of the excess population figures out how to mitigate excess consumption, and buys a little more time.
Who knows?
Two big issues are probably the cost of housing, and educational credential inflation. Young people these days spend four years in college, and concomitantly postpone establishing their real lives by four years, just to get the kind of office jobs prior generations got with a high school diploma.
So realistically, I think that what all this means is that an economy can’t have its cake and eat it too; its workforce can work itself to death or it can have kids at replacement rate, not both.
Polls have shown that young people are no less interested in starting families than they were in decades past. It’s simply not responsible to do so in the case of an increasing number of couples’ situations, and so they don’t. The only way to turn this trend around is to pay actual living wages and mandate a better work-life balance on a national scale.
Except Japan has made nearly all of this absolutely free. So the financial cost argument falls a bit flat.
If you are not able to assure that you'll have a comfortable retirement years with the appropriate social safety nets to try to assure that someone who worked will be able to maintain at least the basic necessities for life, then having kids who make it into adulthood is that safety net.
The "ok, 60+ years old, unable to do meaningful work, move in with a successful child" is a fairly standard approach. This requires that you have kids and preferably enough that one of them will be able to support you moving in with them and isn't otherwise alienated from you.
Note that this only works on a per family basis and if you outlive your children (war can do that), then a more nationalized social safety net is something that because useful to have. By providing that safety net for retired adults, there is less pressure to have kids to support their parents in retirement and less pressure for single people to marry and have a family to fulfill that role.
Economic hardship (increasing the pressure to not have kids) and that safety net (reducing pressure to have kids at all) in both would then have downward force on the fertility rate and also would suggest putting off having kids until later.
Census.gov has a lot of interesting data for the rate - https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/04/fertility-rat...
Also of interest - Multigenerational family structure in Japanese society: impacts on stress and health behaviors among women and men - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15087144/
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/ISR/israel/fertility-r...
https://www.jns.org/israeli-birth-rate-on-decline-government...
>The Jewish fertility rate surpassed the Arab rate for the first time in 2020, with Jews having three children on average compared to 2.99 in the Arab sector.
>At 6.64 children per woman, haredi women had the highest fertility rate among Israel’s Jewish population, compared to 1.96 among secular Jewish women.
Looks close enough to women not belonging to super religious groups in other developed countries.
I remember discussing a buggy application once with another engineer (I could reliably crash the server with a mis-configuration on the client), and I was taking a fairly apologetic stance that after all the workarounds I had to make it work, it worked OK. His response was, "yeah, if you take out all the parts that suck, then it doesn't suck". And now I can never unhear that.
>Become poorer, more religious, and get people to work less.
Which is what the causal factors seem to be in the fertility rate of Israel’s “modern” economy.
If you look the graph and focus only on purely secular women (split as Haredi > Religious > Traditional-Religious > Traditional-Not that religious > Not religious-Secular) you can see that since 1979 it has been hovering around 2, so it is hard to tell if anything real or recent is actually going on. Though if you also understand statistics you'll see that Israel is heading to its own kind of demographic disaster since the least productive population has been consistently increasing at a very high exponent... (That said, it might be better to have the problem of needing to increase the productivity of the least productive than the problem of having no one to work)
Source (in Hebrew) https://www.cbs.gov.il/he/mediarelease/DocLib/2022/062/01_22... (The graph I mention is on page 11, so with the above mentioned divisions + a line for all Jewish women that end right above 3 you should be able to parse it even without knowing Hebrew ;))
South Korea but they're pretty consumerist.
Individualism is a problem but the culture as a whole is not very individualistic.
Move further away from the center, and the cost drops dramatically. A house near a station that's 30 minutes from Shinjuku the same size above costs half the price (~350k).
[0] If you think about a 100 Japanese Yen as 1 "Japanese Dollar". It's not equivalent to 1 US dollar, but if you adjust for typical salaries and cost of living it comes out about the same, when you are considering the price of housing, etc.
Then late at night, scores of young men dressed in suits were playing arcade games.
I’ve also heard about those that just give up and live in a room in their parents house.
Japanese shops also have the weirdest assortment of products ever.
This might come off as ignorant as I’ve obviously not experienced the ‘real japan’ but I’m not sure this would be the case if what I mentioned would be a fundamental part of the culture.
Disclaimer: I really enjoyed my time there, espectially out of the big cities and was particularly impressed by the cleanliness and how nice the people were.
It is my perpetual guess that evolutionary pressure alone will be sufficient in the long run. Our society is now strongly selecting for parents who want kids. That choice has only been a choice for a few generations.
Ten generations from now, I think there will be a much larger fraction of the human population who strongly prioritize having kids.
I come from an extremely long line of organisms that had offspring. In fact, it goes back to the beginning of life forms that could sexually reproduce. Are you saying that many of my sentient ancestors who understood where babies came from didn't actually want kids? It's possible I suppose. But I think my reasons for not wanting kids are less to do with my DNA and more to do with experiences I had during my life.
Also, if you're taking about modern changes and their effects on human behavior, what traits do paid sperm donation / surrogacy select for?
Maybe the concept of having that choice is new, but lots of people technically have the choice but don't "know it". They follow cultural norms. All of their friends have babies, so they have babies. Has something happened to the DNA of all these Japanese people who don't want kids? Or is it a cultural shift? I'm betting on the latter.
It seems that many people today who never have kids do so for a good reason, such as unstable personal economy, not owning their home, not knowing as much as possible that their future children will have good lives.
The people that continue to have kids today are often the overly religious, the financially or generally irresponsible who lack self awareness, or just plain stupid people. These are not traits we want to evolutionarily select for. See the movie Idiocracy for an example.
If you truly want to raise the birth rate, at any cost, you would reduce education levels, make people poorer, raise religiosity, and ban contraception and abortive services for not just women but everyone. But your country's economy would suffer over and above the slowed birth rate you'd otherwise have.
In the future though, with artificial wombs, I'd imagine we'd go through a Brave New World type scenario where the government grows children themselves (and maybe has the bright idea to stratify the children's gender, race and intellectual capacity as well, but the latter is unlikely if we have AI and robots that do the jobs instead of needing perpetually content Street cleaners).
The important part of this is making sure women lose their agency over having children by both removing access to effective contraception and their financial independence.
Pay large sums of money to promising young intelligent couple to have kids. (and no, the govt should not do it)
Yes it has to be large (several millions), enough so that the couple never have to work again for their entire lives. I would add a whole bunch of other things, ( like delegating the bulk of childcare to somebody else, with a couple only overseen what care is being taken) but it's a good start.
My larger point is that this is not exactly the unsolvable really hard technical problem.
In terms of human assets intelligent people and their offspring are the most important assets that society can have. ( agreed this has negative connotations of eugenics, but the overall concept is sound IMHO)
I think it is simpler than that: abolish any state-sponsored retirement plans. People used to have a lot of children so that someone could take care of them in their old age. Now that you have retirement savings you have no need for kids anymore.
In large parts of Western Europe, at least, these systems were robbed and then slaughtered in the 90s.
it's just that most of the world is using archaic thorough/continuous model for pension system which is basically pyramid scheme everyone would avoid if it were used in any other area, but somehow is acceptable for pensions
if you really worry about pensions, you could start with children contributing to their parents pension and nobody contributing to childless people, that should solve declining population very fast, your can combine it with raising retirement age and raising fees everyone pays towards their own retirement
Investing internationally changes some things. Retirees bring in money from abroad, but that does not increase domestic production. Prices will go up, as there is more money competing for the same goods and services. The people doing productive work will want more money for their services. Imports will be relatively cheaper, but the economy suffers, because the exports will be less competitive due to higher wages.
Saving for retirement is rational for any individual if the demographic structure cannot support the pension system. But while anyone can do it successfully, it's not possible for everyone at the same time.
Those investments still need workers to work in the underlying companies, and that doesn't count products that don't usually get covered by pension income e.g. healthcare. Those investments _will_ go into terminal decline if the labour and demand provided by the non-retired starts collapsing.
Pension is a privilege I doubt I’ll get to enjoy, but that’s ok. I’m glad my parents, and maybe my children will.
excuse me? pensions need a robust young population to work. otherwise who is going to be providing all those goods and services the pensioners want to pay for?
pensions don't need young population at all, you can save your own money for retirement without anyone's contribution towards your pension
If so, then yes, getting rid of that societal agreement would solve the problem of decreasing productivity.
your kids can help you voluntarily without any system involved
if you didn't work/save and don't have kids them you can get some basic support same as people in productive age get, but it's not really enough even to survive
No, that won't work. Money is only worth as much as the goods and services it will pay for, and those goods and services have to be provided by the labour of the working young. If there aren't enough young people to meet that demand for labour, prices will rise, and the purchasing power of those pensions will evaporate.
(This is why the "triple lock" and other such schemes are so evil; by pegging state pensions to inflation, they unfairly lock in the purchasing power of a lucky generation, in defiance of all economic logic.)
Why would you want to pump birth rates up?
So fixing that would be a good start.
Indeed, it’s doubtful to me that immigration is a fix even for Western Europe. Most European countries have failed to integrate their growing Muslim populations. They’ve imported an underclass, one that’s going to be increasingly furious that they’re stuck in socioeconomic ghettos. For whatever reason, European countries are starkly different from the United States, where immigrant groups have long enjoyed similar economic mobility to the native born (which continues to be true for the contemporary wave of Latin American immigrants).
More generally, it just outsources the problem to immigrants. You’re compensating for a culture that has become broken in a key respect by importing people from a culture that isn’t b
Muslim from London here - my father came here as an immigrant in the 80's, and stayed here. I would say that I'm integrated. Your outlook reeks of no only condescension and disdain for class struggle, but complete misunderstanding of how cultures develop and work. Come to London and tell me immigration is an outlandish idea - your barrista, your off-license shop keeper, your NHS keyworker and your TFL underground marshall will all laugh in your face.
I’m not talking about individual experiences, but aggregate statistics. In the UK, poor Muslims get more education than poor whites, but that doesn’t translate into better jobs: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/asian-muslims-and-black-p.... They have lower income mobility than similarly situated whites.
The statistics are much worse in continental Europe, where Muslim immigrants are stuck in inter-generational poverty. Turkish people started immigrating to Europe in significant numbers around 1970, around the same time Vietnamese people started immigrating to the US. Half a century later, Vietnamese Americans have fully caught up with British Americans in terms of income. But the situation for Turks in Europe has been starkly different: https://theconversation.com/many-turkish-people-who-migrated... (“By the third generation, around half (49%) of those living in Europe were still poor, compared with just over a quarter (27%) of those who remained behind… Migrants from three family generations residing in countries renowned for the generosity of their welfare states were among the most impoverished. Some of the highest poverty rates were observed in Belgium, Sweden and Denmark.”).
To an American those statistics are unbelievable. Germans, Italians, and Irish all came over a cheap labor and reached parity with British Americans within three generations. The Latin American immigrants coming to America today are on the same track: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353. Several groups of immigrants who came here as impoverished refugees, such as Koreans, Vietnamese, Lebanese, and Cubans, achieved parity even more quickly.
Your point about “class struggle” and the “barista, off-license shop keeper, [and] NHS keyworker” underscores my point. In Europe immigrants take those jobs, and then their kids take those jobs. That creates a politically and socially volatile situation. In America that doesn’t happen because immigrants have relatively high economic mobility. Irish and Italians did those jobs, and a lot worse, when they came here in the early 20th century. Today there is no meaningful class struggle centered around Irish or Italian identity because those groups fully integrated. In fact it’s a consistent struggle for US Democrats to build durable movements. Irish and Italians got FDR elected, but their kids and grandkids favored Reagan in a landslide.
I'm not Japanese, but in objectively thinking about what's best for Japan, "immigration" is not on the list. In fact it's on the list of things to never ever do. I don't mean it as in "do not accept foreigners". I mean do not adopt the policy of mass immigration to offset the shrinking population.
Don't get me wrong the standard of living in this country is very good, we have a great public health system, our education system is good and crime rate is generally low but it comes at a cost.
Cities like Sydney and Melbourne regularly rank highly as some of the most expensive places in the world to live. It is really not affordable to have children, especially at a young age. As a result most of my friends, work colleagues etc. have waited until their 30's to start a family.
Immigration has not done a lot to bring down the cost of things. Personally I think if they want people to have more children they need to make life in general more affordable.
Japan's population decline appears to be caused not by women giving birth to fewer children, but by an increase in the number of childless women. It appears that 1 in 3 women remain childless into their forties, compared to 1 in 20 in prior decades.
Women remain childless for several reasons, but my guess is they can't find a man who can support them financially and/or who they find themselves attracted to.
Edit to make it a more substantive point: me and my spouse are currently 35 and 36 years old and after much deliberation together (as well as observations of friends who did have children) we don't think our lives would be substantially improved by having children.
What would those decisions be?
Observing someone else’s family and deciding that you don’t enjoy their kids is the saddest way to decide not to have a family, and indicates a deep lack of parental empathy. Your kids are nothing like other kids, for all values of “your”.
If that is so, how can people like this exist today, after hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution? Could it be that biological evolution alone does not predetermine one's desire to procreate?
In any case, observing other couples was only one of many reasons we decided on this. We made the decision as well-informed adults and whether you think it "sad" or not is not all that important to us.
Do you also write reviews of restaurants you haven't been to?
All your posts seems to say is "we heard that kids are hard work in the short term so we decided not to have them".
That's not to say that everyone has the same expectations.
For most communities, normalizing childless will only come back to bite people in some form or another.
[1]: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34288933
By that logic you should evade your taxes and park in handicapped spots. Having kids isn’t an individual choice, it’s a social obligation like paying taxes.
And that’s not a moralistic point but a basic economic one. Any sustainable society needs people to have and raise 2.1 children on average. That’s self-evidently true in subsistence agricultural societies. But our society is still closer to those than to some hypothetical post-scarcity one where robots do all the work and replacement humans are created in artificial wombs. We can afford some people to be childless, but it can’t become a widespread thing.
You can paper over that temporarily with immigration, but you’re really just outsourcing a key social function to immigrants. Those immigrants then have to bear the burden of raising kids a toxically individualistic society that’s hostile to children.
I get what you mean, but fuck that idea into the flaming sun.
All we need now is the state and society to force us to have children, on a planet with 8 billion souls.
Fuck that idea. Do whatever you want with your life, but don't go forcing it on other people and saying it's "social obligation". When has individual choice become a radical, antisocial idea?
It’s not an “idea.” It’s like saying “paying taxes is a social obligation” or “having a job if you’re able bodied is a social obligation.” At bottom those assertions rest on factual observations about society and the economy. If everyone evaded taxes civilization as we know it would quickly collapse. If able bodied people dropped out of the work force en masse, the economy would collapse. If we found out that the last child had been born in America, your retirement funds would quickly tank. These are such fundamental facts that societies have added a moral or religious gloss to them, but the underlying facts don’t go away even if you strip away that gloss.
If you won’t do those things, someone else will have to pick up your slack. Unless your retirement plan consists of hoarding canned food and ammo, or perhaps drifting out to sea when you can no longer work, you’re going to be depending on the children of the people who did the work of raising kids. And until we have robots that can wipe old people’s asses, that’s going to be an inescapable fact of society.
> Do whatever you want with your life, but don't go forcing it on other people and saying it's "social obligation".
Now that’s an “idea.”
> When has individual choice become a radical, antisocial idea?
You’ve got it backward. Until five minutes ago, everyone agreed that everyone has a social obligation to carry out the various work necessary for society to function. “Do whatever you want with your life” is a blip in human cultural history. It’s a blip even in the history of western civilization. And to date every society to adopt that notion has essentially doomed itself to obsolescence.
All of these "outlandish" alternatives are seriously entertained by at least some members of the class of people who frequent HN.
Doesn't that then beg the question; if a society can't convince it's enough of it's members of the value of that obligation, does that society/culture really deserve to continue to exist as is?
What if the analysis turns out completely wrong? Did you weighted the downside as good as you did your analysis?
It is totally normal to expect children to care for you in your old age. The guarantee is that other people can and should ostracize people for not caring for their parents. When an acquaintance tells me they don't visit/call/care for their parents with pride, I make a mental note to not be friends with that person. If you can't keep the most basic relationships straight... that's not a great sign, realistically.
After that period things are great!
. . . until you've faced with a household full of teenagers rebelling against anything and everything in overly dramatic ways.
I understand many people do not "like" this kind of solution because it conflicts with modern people's sensibilities.
But consider what the future would look like if you don't increase the birth rate:
Already one third of the population is over 65. Japan has about 120 million people. When you normally hear this number you imagine a country full with lots of human resources, but the fact that a large portion of these people are retirees. This is already causing a alrge portion of young men to checkout of society because they see no economic prospect for themselves.
Can you imagine what the situation will be like when that portion reaches 50% percent? Perhaps in only a few decades. The trend will accelerate: even more people will checkout of the ecnonomy, making things worse for everyone.
Which in and of itself should be disqualifying. This would be so deeply unpopular and destabilizing that it's not even worth considering.
That men can participate in polygamy does nothing to encourage birthrates; what is the incentive of the wives to want children? What is the incentive for the man here to want children?
Unless it's implied in your idea that the purpose of marriage is to produce children, polygamy solves nothing here. If that is the presumption that the arrangement requires children, how does this counteract the very common reasons for not having children?
- It's extremely time consuming and life changing; you have to commit substantial time or resources (or both) to ensuring the child is cared for
- A person or persons simply don't want children
- There isn't a strong reason to have children outside of one's own desire to do so (there isn't incentive to maintain a lineage of successors, build out an army of loyal subjects, and so on for the grand majority of people anymore)
- Even within religions, the impetus for having children just isn't emphasized in many sects like it was in the past
- Social mobility, while nowhere near perfect, is far more achievable via other arrangements or even to a degree with personal effort; it won't be the peasant to noble move that existed previously, but it's more possible than it has been in the past (though social mobility is still ridiculously difficult and fraught with discrimination and exploitation, so understand I am not at all saying that it's in a good spot)
Your idea doesn't really address any of the actual reasons a lot of people hold off from having children, it just presents a suggestion to "legalize polygamy for rich men", implying that this somehow addresses the many reasons that people aren't having children.
Your follow-up comment here I think also misses a lot of points as to why people check out and undermines the idea that society can incentivize its way out of these problems. If the problem is a bleak economic future for people, trying to utilize childbirth as a pyramid scheme to overcome this economic uncertainty isn't really a great idea, as that means you need to somehow convince the children of the already checked-out persons that "no, really, it's a great system. Ignore why your parents are so miserable, it will be different for you for reasons."
I don't think you can just economically incentivize your way out of a declining population, not in any meaningful way aside from temporary trends which will fade. If the root cause of the issue is poor economic conditions and unstable comfortable living conditions, you need to first understand why those are happening in the first place. If it turns out that it's because only a select group have the economic stability to support a life that includes children and this select group is not a huge portion of the population, aside from mandating child birth, you haven't actually given incentive to make more children, you just have given special status to the already elite.
> But consider what the future would look like if you don't increase the birth rate:
I have, and I imagine we probably see more adoption of universal income and automation, and far more acceptance of such a system and interest in keeping such a system where you don't need to struggle for basic needs in place by investing time and effort into the system. There's a lot of this which of course is fantastical thoughts right now, but we're already seeing this in many nations, and the quality of life in these places is pretty good while birthrates are just "so-so".
Contrast to the current situation: if you work your ass off, the best you get is a wife who will treat you with resentment and disrespect in a couple years, expect you to do chores at home and help change children's diapers, etc. If you divorce she can take half your wealth, and has the power to prevent you from seeing your children (until they turn 18 and decide to go look for you themselves, if you manage to stay alive til then).
A large portion of young men around the world (not just in Japan) are opting out of society because they don't see a point. "The juice is not worth the squeeze".
> Your idea doesn't really address any of the actual reasons a lot of people hold off from having children, it just presents a suggestion to "legalize polygamy for rich men", implying that this somehow addresses the many reasons that people aren't having children.
People are not holding off from having children. What's happening is there are more people who are failing to pair bond in order to have children. More men check out of society because they don't find the offer interesting, and as a result more women are unable to find a suitable mate.
Legalizing and normalizing polygyny solves the probem for a lot of women: just because someone is "taken" doesn't mean he's out of reach for her anymore.
Controversial truth: women prefer sharing a high value man than having the full attention of a low vaue man. Of course, they would prefer having the full attention of a high value man, but failing that, they'd rather share him than downgrade to a lesser man.
This isn't mentioned enough in relation to the marriage/birth-rate subject. Men in developed countries (and it is typically developed countries with very pro-woman divorce laws/courts) are completely disincentivized to start families.
The traditional household arrangement is the man is at the office 24/7, the wife gets his paychecks and uses them to raise the children and occasionally go on vacations, and the man gets an allowance (but doesn't go on the vacations because he has to be at the office). Not much room for a harem there.
Either one would be an example of "things women don't actually enjoy".
Though Takehiro Sakurai and Aya Hirano both had career limiting scandals about dating 3+ people at the same time, so I guess some people try it.
It's traditionally pretty normal for a married couple to drift apart over the years. People marry for appearances, social status, and to raise a family. They then seek gratification elsewhere.
The men who engage in this aren't looking to knock up more women. They already have a mother to their children. They want gratifying sex and emotional connection.
Has there not also been an increase in the number of childless men? Or are men having as many children as they did decades ago, and it's only the women who are having fewer?
A child is not made by the equation (One Female Parent + One Male Parent) + Marriage = Child.
This is not the actual requirement. It just requires sperm + ovum + body to carry the organism to birth. I interpret your comments here as attempting to take a purely logical/fact based approach, but you tie yourself to an unnecessary old fashioned notion of one man and one woman in a contractual union.
A woman and two men can absolutely be parents by inseminating the woman's eggs with their sperm and having someone else carry it, or artificial/manual insemination involving other women. I don't think you take your idea of efficiency here anywhere near the much more natural and sensible conclusion of "for-hire birthers", which already happens. A person, regardless of how they identify, should be allowed to do this; for simplicity sake though, I don't see why you don't mention this in your model -- a rich woman, paying for successors, and having multiple male partners who meets her scrutiny/desires raising the children and passing on genes/knowledge/personality traits.
You can suggest that your ideas imply this possibility, but frankly speaking I don't accept this suggestion; if you meant it, you would just say as such and/or use neutral terms for identifying the progenitors in your examples.
Rich men already have offspring from multiple women if they want, without having to marry. I fail to see what the advantage would be.
https://www.esquire.com/lifestyle/health/news/a47476/dog-spe...
https://www.urologytimes.com/view/testosterone-levels-show-s...
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/18/health/sperm-counts-decline-d...
Take a zinc pill if you care.