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Comment by qball | Hacker News Reader

It was never going to work. You want to encourage family formation, you need to make it a viable life path, and without radical tax (as in, family can't lead to a drop in standard of living compared to DINKs) and education reform (not being economically established until your late 20s means you realistically only have 6 years to start a family rather than the historical 12) this won't happen.

Why bother getting married when you'll functionally never see your wife, and why bother having kids when you'll basically never see them? The Japanese aren't unique in not seeing the point, as this pattern is a constant all over the world.

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Haven’t seen any top down government interventions work at increasing TFR.

The only thing that seems to work is high religiosity.

USSR bred reasonably well up until its breakup without religion. You don't necessarily need religion in order to wish to continue yourself beyond your lifetime.

I believe the USSR had a fairly conservative stance on those issues, favouring families. It's not religion but it is still social pressure.

Nothing wrong with social pressure to do the right thing.

And I am not saying it is wrong, but it is a form of social conservatism.

Society very rarely knows what the right thing is. Hence why the USSR existed in the first place post Lenin.

Unless you have a good reason to believe otherwise, your ancestors did the right thing, for anything they did. USSR lasted that long because some people made themselves a very good repressive machine very early on.

That’s survivorship bias. My ancestors wanted a good life for themselves, and many of them suffered different despots and sultans. They would go to war to defend their country, but not when the enemy is the ruler himself.

My ancestors were wrongly conditioned to think life has to be rough, that one must suffer through. A great deal of those who opposed rulers profiting from this, were eliminated.

Mimicking what survivors did is a reasonable strategy. You don't know why but it works. Again, if you realise some of what they did didn't actually contribute to their survival it qualifies as a good reason not to do it.

The USSR's advantage was that everyone's life was guaranteed all the way from the start and without overwork. You went to your job at 15 min. walking distance (entire cities were planned that way) in the morning, worked from 9 to 5 without having to overwork, got back home in 15 min, at the same time your children came back home from state-funded schools as your wife got grocieries for the dinner at lowest cost. (until the economic war started by the US and its Gulf Allies in the 80s). You had paid vacations, paid maternity/paternity leave, reasonable working hours, reasonable retirement age, free social clubs, hobby clubs, everything.

And the most critical point: Your children were also entitled to ALL of that from birth. They were going to study in state schools, they would get a job somewhere, they would work under the same conditions, they would acquire their first car and their first flat around the same age, and if they married, not only the state would help them marry but also provide more incentives.

So there was absolutely no reason to hesitate from having children - you had the money, energy, resources, and on top of that the state guaranteed that your children would be well set from the moment they born.

Hence, population boomed.

The USSR is not unique in that aspect. In every period of society, when people's and their childrens' lives are guaranteed, population boomed. The sociopathic profiteering in capitalist societies crippling everything including birth rates seems more like a case of natural selection when seen in that light - these countries have all the money and power in the world to stop the population decline and reverse it, but they just dont want to do it for the sake of profit...

You could try peddling that to those who never lived in the USSR.

Nothing was guaranteed, everything had to be fought for, even food. You were at the mercy of the local party boss, one careless word could cost you your career, not just in one company but in the whole country (goes without saying that you couldn't move to another).

Paternity leave is something new, never have heard a lie that blatant.

Also anything "free" of course wasn't, The Soviet government was the ultimate capitalist, appropriating all fruits of all labour and keeping people at "just above rioting" living standard by design, and sometimes failing even at that.

> You could try peddling that to those who never lived in the USSR.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-russia-politics-sovietuni...

Those who lived there want it back.

I grew up in a country that imitated the Yugoslavian system, mixing Soviet system with social democracy. Until the country turned capitalist, directly declaring that 'free market was the best' and the objective was to become 'little America', everybody was happy. From food to education to housing, everything just worked out thanks to the state providing most of them. Including marrying and raising children. Then the 'free market' came and everything went down the same hellhole that Japan and other countries are going down into right now.

> You were at the mercy of the local party boss, one careless word could cost you your career

Wow that's so bad and its so more different than being at the mercy of your capitalist boss.

The discussion is at a 'people dont have food to eat next month and can go homeless at any time' level. Not 'my career' level. Yeah, you could lose you career and maybe get sent to somewhere in the middle of central Asia. And yet you would still have a job, house, your children would still go to school. Beats entire family working and not being able to feed their children like its in the US or outright going homeless.

> Paternity leave is something new, never have a lie that blatant.

It says 'maternity/paternity' leave in my comment. USSR had maternity leave.

...

> "Peddle"

How about you don't peddle the cold war propaganda that's 60 years old now? I grew up in a Soviet-like system, and despite I am doing FAR better at the top percentiles of my society, I would go back to that Soviet-like system in a blink so that millions would not have to suffer and go hungry and the society would not devolve into a hellhole.

Heres a frame of reference for you: Nobody is conducting economic war against the US. The US is not in an existential war. There is not global catastrophe that has been affecting the US. There is no alien invasion. No apocalypse. And yet this is the reality there:

https://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/13/americas-dirty-little-secret...

I'd much rather 'peddle' what i 'peddled' than smear what was better.

Mate I lived there (towards the end) and heard first-hand accounts about the glorious past, from my grandfather's as privileged as a school principal for example. For the great many it literally was about constantly worrying about putting the food in the table.

People who want USSR back actually want their youth back, youth, not the time when their extended family of five lived in a one bedroom flat.

> For the great many it literally was about constantly worrying about putting the food in the table.

It was at the end. After the US got its Gulf Allies to start waging economic war against the USSR in 1980s by playing with the price of oil, while blockading it from every other angle to prevent the USSR from trading with anyone outside.

If any other country did half of that to the US, it would end up in nuclear war. The fault of the USSR was allowing its hostile enemy to strangle it step by step by avoiding confrontation.

Otherwise during 1960s Kennedy administration thought that the USSR was developing too rapidly and others would start taking it as an example, causing a 'domino effect'. Which is the basis of the 'domino theory' and the Vietnam war was its resolution - 'making example of countries who attempt to follow that model'.

Even my country in the sidelines got an economic crisis and scarcity EVERY single time it went against a US foreign policy project or US-pushed 'economic reform'. From local wars to privatizations. When those were not enough to 'persuade' the governments to do what they were told, coups did the work. The last one hanged 10,000 and the government that it put into power started privatizing the living daylights of the country. The stock market started breaking records. Whereas a lot of people started eating less, some having to eat from garbage. Therefore:

> People who want USSR back actually want their youth back, youth, not the time when their extended family of five lived in a one bedroom flat.

No people just want their better, worry-free, non-overworked lives back. In the former USSR, in East Germany, and in every other country that got US backed 'free market'. If you aren't able to get into the top 10% in such a system, you are literally hosed. Those who made it into that segment think that 'everything is better' because now they are shielded from the poverty that plagues the rest of their society. Whereas for the troubled majority, there is no comparing guaranteed jobs, guaranteed housing, healthcare, childcare, education, retirement and all that to any 'freedom' that comes with the new system.

As I said, Im doing quite comfortably in this system. But, for the sake of the majority, I would happily go back to that system so that people wouldnt have to overwork and still not be able to feed their children without anyone waging an economic war or even an actual war against the country.

This is bullshit, plain and simple.

Calling the reality 'bullshit' does not make the reality go away. Here's some of that reality.

https://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/13/americas-dirty-little-secret...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/07/americans-he....

USSR was poor, we're talking about rich countries.

It was poor, but not that poor.

Maybe social structure of some sort is responsible ? I am not sure just looking at the patterns I see in developed countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax_on_childlessness

Childless people between 20-50, both men and women, paid an extra 6% in taxes to the state.

This is no different from getting taxes from everyone and paying child benefits.

Practically, yes - it's more-or-less equivalent.

Psychologically, I'm not so sure. Loss aversion is a much stronger than not getting a benefit (think about not getting your bonus versus taking a pay-cut at work; even if the amounts are the same, I doubt you would feel the same about it) - so I think the explicit tax on childlessness would be more influential because of that.

> Haven’t seen any top down government interventions work at increasing TFR.

I believe this is because you won't see any effect until having kids is paid just as well as working any other job.

If you can choose between a regular job paying 100%, and an incredibly hard and demanding job paying 50%, you're going to pick the first option every single time. Increasing the pay to 60% isn't going to help. You need to be around 100% or above. And like with anything else in our economy, if you're not getting enough people to take that essential job, you need to keep increasing pay until they do.

So no matter how much government intervention, you're still only getting the share of people who want to have kids as a kind of hobby. Not because government intervention doesn't work at all, but because you get very little effect until you cross that threshold where having kids is a job that pays fairly.

I think parts of Northern Europe is close to that threshold, but there's still some ways to go. Parental leave needs to be a few months longer (there's often a gap between parental leave ending and kindergarten starting), kindergarten must be free, and financial support for parents needs to be quite a bit higher.

Seems a bit extreme to have the government pay people to have kids on the level of a full time job when you consider that through most of human history people worked to support their kids / families and at much lower income levels.

Looking at Northern Europe seems their TFR is similar to the USA despite incentives.

That is until the children were able to work for the family, so having children was literally an investment: pay upfront to have income.

>Haven’t seen any top down government interventions work at increasing TFR.

Well, they've all been symbolic measures... but that's all they can realistically do.

In terms of education reform (the "give young men and women their twenties back" part), constituents of the education-managerial complex will fight hard to preserve their positions (making the education system more efficient would put many out of work), and are a significant enough cross-section of the population that threatening them will have electoral consequences that no sitting governments could survive.

And that's before you get into the tax hike/redistribution schemes (the "parents need to be compensated just as much as other economic value-creators" part), which will impact everyone else, and irrevocably screws the folks that are now too old to have kids (who, coincidentally, are approaching peak voting age).

For those reasons, proper reform is and will continue to be impossible for the forseeable future.

> Haven’t seen any top down government interventions work at increasing TFR

Top down government interventions to raise birth rates and population work pretty well in countries where the government provides vital services like healthcare, education at lowest cost and also social safety nets.

Was that sarcasm? Because the reality is exactly opposite to what you say when you look at TFRs of societies having the best welfare - Finland (1.37), Norway (1.48), Germany (1.53), Switzerland (1.46). Even Sweden and Denmark are around (1.66), the same as the US (1.64).

Those countries are not running interventions. They are merely providing aid to those who have children, and not much of it. Even with that, Germany had some success with it.

That is because governments attempts to raise birth rates are like fat people trying to lose weight: "We've tried nothing, and it didn't work!"

Just increase the tax burden X-times the default rate for those without Y kids. If you aren't willing to repopulate the nation then you should be subsidizing those who are.

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