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Comment by andrewmcwatters | Hacker News Reader

Governments around the world are asleep while young people are struggling everywhere on every major developed country in the world to do simple things like find a place to live and have children.

I wonder what type of BS the G7 talk about instead of this. What could be more pressing?

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It's a sign of wealth and abundance if fertility rates are falling. See Africa and it's still very high rates and every single historic trend line as evidence.

Strongest causation factors are urbanization and female education/employment.

East Asia urbanized faster then the US, also has little to no immigration ... hence populations will shrink quite drastically. China will halve in what, the next 5 decades?

The one child policy played a big role as well

Between countries, fertility is associated with poverty. But within countries, it’s the opposite. Higher fertility comes along with wealth and well-being. So if the rich, educated people in your advanced society are not reproducing, that’s a bad indication.

> But within countries, it’s the opposite. Higher fertility comes along with wealth and well-being

[citation needed]

Lot's of people get that backwards. Because people have money and could afford a lot of children, doesn't meant they want a lot of children. Once they have become used to a certain lifestyle, the money can be freedom, in terms of having less responsibilities and living carefree. Having children can negate the free time or lifestyle they want to live.

If it's a sign of wealth and abundance that fertility rates are falling, how do you explain that fertility rates are falling in the poorest areas of Africa, too?[1]

[1]. https://www.afd.fr/en/actualites/dramatic-drop-fertility-acr...

Even the poorest areas of Africa are considerably wealthier than they were 30 years ago. While the West, and the U.S. in particular, was immersed in post-Cold War glow, then 9/11, Iraq, 2008 crisis, ISIS, etc, the erstwhile non-industrialized world was wholly transformed.

France was still pretty poor in the 18th century with a falling fertility rate...

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/frances-baby-bust#:~:text=U....

> historic trend line as evidence

What history? The last 50 years or so? That's barely a recollection of yesterday's meal by anthropic standards.

You're confusing westernization for wealth. The two are correlated by coincidence.

Yeah when it falls from 10 kids per couple to 2-3. But not when it falls below 1, which is what happened in South Korea:

"Kim, a product designer and art instructor, calls her hopes of one day having children "just a fantasy" — especially now, when housing costs are soaring, the job market is oversaturated and marriage rates are plummeting."

Doesn't sound like wealth and abundance to me.

Kim would not have been literate and utterly dependent on marriage to survive not that long ago. Now she is a web designer and has choices .. in dating, housing, etc.

Complaints are not desperation.

From 1960 to 2021 the population of South Korea increased from 25 million to 52 million people ... 107% in 61 years!

Over 80% percent of Koreans live in larger cities now, just mind-boggling urbanization.

Below a certain amount of wealth, you need kids to take care of you when you are older. Within a certain range (and better safety nets for elderly than for children), you can take care of yourself but not kids. Above that range, you can have kids aplenty.

https://www.palomar.edu/users/bthompson/Hypothesis%20Contrar...

The former situation is better for everyone involved.

Does Kim have her own job? Does she get to choose her own dating partners? Does she have to settle for some drunk guy who beats her? Does she worry about going hungry?

Kim has wealth and abundance. She just refuses to make the sacrifices necessary to have children like people did in the old days, where women didn't work and were basically property of their husbands.

The "problem" these days is that women want to be treated as equals and have a nice life and be able to control the direction of their lives, instead of just marrying whatever shitty guy they can get just so they can survive. The byproduct of that is that the birthrate is much, much lower.

Said sacrifices were made by a whole lot of servants, not wives if they could help it. (Almost slaves.) Even poorest used to have help, and parents on hand to help with raising the kids too.

And in Korea in particular, the villages were partly communal. Cities are hyper individualistic. People who moved to cities do not have access to their parents or other villagers for help.

State cannot fully cover this problem without extra manpower or even more advanced tech solutions that do not exist. Especially when people who have the most problem are the poorest.

Putting it onto one woman is extremely miserable and unfair. Changing the structure of a society to not have this problem is hard too. Money cannot patch a problem of massive lack of manpower and said manpower being expensive. Not quickly and not cheaply, anyway.

Well we can't go back to living in villages unless we want to regress to a Medieval standard of living or worse. People have been living in cities for many centuries; remember Rome? And there's nothing forcing peoples' parents from living in cities, and in many older cities you'll see plenty of elderly people, since it's the best place for them to live since it has easy access to medical care.

While aspects of what you are saying is true, arguably, South Korea's problems are deeper than that. Choices are also limited by tremendous amounts of nationalism, racism, and xenophobia. This goes way deeper than people know. South Koreans are not really free to socially associate, date, or marry who they want. They can be ostracized or shunned for doing so, and this can have very restrictive barriers and limitations. Few have the personality or character to overcome this. What's acceptable can create such a narrow range of choices, on top of just female hypergamy or materialism, that few can ever attain this.

And for nationalist (to be polite), it can be very acceptable that their "race" dwindles to the very few, as long as it's "pure". For those not familiar with that brand of nationalism (to be polite), this can include other Asians who are not Korean or don't "look" Korean.

> Strongest causation factors are urbanization and female education/employment.

There's a general trend, yes, but the details are important. The total fertility rate for native-born American women was near replacement as recently as 2008.

That's great, we should all stop having children so everyone can be richer. Maybe the last person on earth would reconsider if they want to split their wealth with anyone or if they want to die as the richest of all time.

The elites have decided they don’t need a middle class anymore.

This makes me wonder about science fiction stories. As automation in labor force increases, there is less demand for labor. Governments will also be able survive with fewer tax payers.

Eventually, reproducing without license and training will be illegal. Then completely banned. And then there will be more machines and fewer humans.

And primitive societies will continue to reproduce but eventually be conquered.

And then machines will slowly gain enough intelligence and self awareness that they will overthrow human masters.

And eventually it will be just machines debating meaning of life.

> And eventually it will be just machines debating meaning of life.

That's the plot of Yoko Taro's Nier Automata. Here is a summary if anyone is interested and doesn't want to play the game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63PzQIbTrM8

> And primitive societies will continue to reproduce but eventually be conquered. > And then machines will slowly gain enough intelligence and self awareness that they will overthrow human masters.

Hopefully they will develop a sense of morality and free the conquered humans.

As much as we can blame elites for a lot of these issues - Sheer physical depletion of energy and resource per-capita is one of the big driving forces behind a lot of these things nowadays.

Don't get me wrong, the elites are definitely making things a LOT worse but it is not entirely on them.

If everyone in this world lived like the middle classes, we would strip the planet bare in no time. The middle class is probably going to be remembered as just a weird moment in time thanks to the great blow off of the petroleum age.

The best thing those in power can do is try to organise for a society that doesn't require as much consumption.

Just reduce population, the framing that falling population is a bad thing is a fallacy and possibly the most important one to debunk in our time.

Absolutely we need to reduce our population, how we do this in a smart and effective way.. I don't know. But by hook or by crook it is going to happen - I suspect entirely by crook.

A good example would be the 'Limits to growth' study. I know they are just models but they are useful tools for thinking with.

The last 6 models were all of ways to steady the population but most of them showed that the action needed had to be taken in the 1970 til 2000 to have nay hope. As Dennis Meadows said himself, he made the mistake of living long enough to see this study start to come true.

> I wonder what type of BS the G7 talk about instead of this. What could be more pressing?

They talk about GDP and growth - which can only come from squeezing each worker more and more.

In America, I don't see any legislation for paid maternity and paternity leave. People are expected to lose their jobs, drop their careers and pay more for insurance when they are dropped from their jobs.

Without security of income but with constantly rising expenses, people are spending their entire lives precariously, just to increase some bullshit GDP number. How the fuck is a woman supposed to carry another human, safely, in her body for 9 months and raise it for another 2 months at least?

Not to be snarky, but how did humans ever do this in the past without all of those things? I think paternity leave and maternity leave are great ideas, but they’re a bandaid.

The real problem is that society has changed to be hostile to healthy human existence. You need a car to live in most of the USA. Extended families and support are spread out across the nation. Rather than cooking together in your kitchen and playing together on a whim, everything has to be planned around commutes and— often— long distance travel. Societal expectations are that families are small. Nothing is built for large families. The list goes on and on, but over all, I think it’s a long list of things— with economics being one— that underpins this.

There are many things society and government can do to improve this situation. We aren't getting rid of cars easily. We aren't getting rid of distant suburbia easily. We aren't getting rid of employers who WANT to see people in office.

Maternity and paternity are the easiest of them all. If there was ever to be an UBI, it would be for maternity and paternity. For 2 years, the government (or employer) covers you. Go get pregnant.

Families are already struggling when only the father is working. Work is hard for the father, and raising kids is even harder for the mother.

Now both father and mother must have a job - and that's just to barely survive.

And the government expect us to have kids? Fucking idiotic pricks.

Unless the government start doing something to ensure that all of those shiny GDPs are trickling down, instead of ever continuously pooled up, the situation will only get worse.

The real reason is not this. The real reason is that in the past, religion meant that people saw earthly sacrifices as leading to redemption in the afterlife, which meant that having kids was a worthwhile sacrifice (as preached by the church). To this day, people that are more religious tend to have more kids, even when income-matched to non-religious groups.

The decline in religion & rise in secularization tends to map pretty well to lower fertility, and it happens to be correlated with rising wealth (which is why we confuse the two all of the time):

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/frances-baby-bust#:~:text=U....

Big benefits for having kids certainly helps, and you can have baby booms without strong religion (i.e. under Communism), but the perceived payoff has to be there for the parents to make the necessary sacrifices.

> and raise it for another 2 months at least

most of us get raised for about two decades, right? I mean acknowledging that 240 months is at least 2 months in the most literal sense but even if we think that it's reasonable for the mother of a 2-month old infant to be working full time surely there's still almost 2 full decades of potential precarity around food, housing, healthcare, general wellness...

> In America, I don't see any legislation for paid maternity and paternity leave.

Democrats led west coast and northeast coast states, and Colorado and Illinois, have 18 to 20 weeks of paid maternity leave and 12 weeks of paid paternity leave (or leave for taking care of anyone in general).

On the federal level, it was most recently proposed by Democrats in the Build Back Better bill at the end of 2021, but it did not pass.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...

Why would they talk about this? The solution is obvious, and the US has practiced the solution for a very long time now: immigration at a sufficient rate to make up for the decline in population.

This is really mostly a problem for Japan and Korea where they don't play sufficiently well with immigrants.

That's only a solution if you view populations as replaceable, that culture and shared history doesn't matter, and that nations are just arbitrary grouppings of people that can be changed at will.

Which works for the US, because it's a country of immigrants from all over the place anyway, colonized quite recently in historical terms (there are nations and cultures with 10x and 20x the longevity and far more continuity). If you start with a country with shared history and a cohesive culture, people are not seen as equally replaceable.

Immigration is a fundamentally incomplete answer that is designed to placate people who don't want to think to deeply about the actual issues.

What happens to the countries they are emigrating from? Especially if we do as politicians say and "only accept the best", what does that imply happens to the emigrating nation? Are those countries stable then? And are they also now or in the future experiencing population decline? If population growth is due to being poor, is the strategy to keep them poor?

This argument seems to have an unsavory consequence. There’s nothing wrong with excluding and persecuting minority groups because they’re not part of the nation. With a country like China, where the now-majority Han culture colonized the minority Wu, Canton, Hokkien, and various small western cultures in the last 100(ish, it was going on before the PRC as well) years, and a narrative of national unity and shared history was fabricated by the government, can we defend anti-immigration policies on the same grounds?

The parent comment amounted to ethnically cleansing the Korean population. It might not involve guns and it might take a 3-4 generations but that is what happens when immigration doors are opened at the behest of corporation lobbied governments with no consideration for the local population.

It's only 'unsavory' if you're ignorant of the history and reality of Korea. Korea is a small, culturally and racially homogenous nation that, within living memory, was colonized by a power that attempted to wipe out its ethnic identity. It has no native racial minority groups. The ethnic and cultural unity of the nation is a source of pride for Koreans. You can't expect a nation like this to import millions of immigrants from other cultures.

>This argument seems to have an unsavory consequence. There’s nothing wrong with excluding and persecuting minority groups because they’re not part of the nation.

Minority groups have been part of different nations for millenia. So saying "they're not part of the nation" is not a given. They're just not be part of the majority group of a nation. Some nations might not even have such a majority group, but be composed of two or more different groups of roughly equal size. Nations aren't monolithic things. But that doesn't meant they're "anything goes", either.

Nor does "a nation of people is more than just replecable individuals" has "it's OK to exclude and persecute minority groups" as any kind of necessary consequence, anymore so than "this person doesn't belong to my family" means we can mistreat it.

It does however mean that "just bring foreigners in huge numbers to increase the local population" is not exactly a great solution. It might even amount to ethnic cleansing, and this has happened in the past too.

Historical immigration was often part of such power plays and land grabs (like against Aboriginals or Southern Africans), or "population engineering" (those in power bringing in populations to divide and conquer, and to replace and suppress local populations). In fact one of the common targets that was yielded against was exactly minority groups local to a nation or part of an empire.

What do you mean by "don't play sufficiently well with immigrants"?

Japan is very easy to emigrate to if you have skills (for many visas defined as an undergrad degree). There is no requirement to hire locally first, the process is streamlined based on a points system it's only a several weeks to get a visa and as little as 1 year to get permanent residency.

It's also easy to go to university there and stay, or emigrate as a low-level blue collar worker. There's a language barrier but for things like immigration, taxes, help in daily life, most cities offer support in 5+ languages. It is missing the lottery system of the US however.

It's true that Japan has a very permissive immigration system for high-skill immigrants, because it wants more people like that to help the economy. Japan has a shortage of technical workers, particularly in IT. And I agree, it's done a really good job of providing support for foreigners, better than what I saw in America which is supposedly immigrant-friendly (but not really).

However, if this shortage didn't exist and the economy was humming along just fine without any immigration, these lax immigration laws would not be there. Japan used to be very hard to immigrate to prior to this century.

People aren't breeding because it takes much longer to complete an education and save up for a home. Immigration doesn't address this.

Immigration at a large scale replaces the culture and race of the locals so what you're suggesting is that Korean people and Korean culture are worth nothing. Let's just make every place on earth a globalist culture with the same people, same language, same brands etc etc. No.

Kids in cages Master Policy

At least as far as the US is concerned the government is beholden to the ultra wealthy, who need no change because they are thriving. The government will make small adjustments along the edges but won't truly threaten the status quo.

Wages are set by a baseline of the cost of living. Young single workers might tolerate having essentially no savings for a few years but eventually they will find a better job or a cheaper cost of living area.

This has a direct impact on what kinds of businesses can operate in high cost of living areas. Businesses need high enough volume or margin to pay the rent and wages of their workers. So far outsourcing has localized the negative impacts of failing low-margin businesses in wealthy nations. But that's also coming into question with national security concerns.

The problem is that governments keep pushing for population growth when this is the root cause of most of our environmental problems...

Low fertility rates at the moment are only an issue in that we need to adapt to them.

Adapting to them is one way of putting it. The main problem is that our socialist programs such as social security and Medicare can’t survive when the population isn’t growing the right way ie working adults must drastically outnumber retired seniors

An aging population is unavoidable just by the simple fact that population growth has to stop at some point. The huge population growth we've seen is unique in history and we'll go back to a more stable population (it's already starting) BUT with low birth rate/high life expectancy instead of high birth rate/low life expectancy as before.

Socialised (not necessarily socialist) systems are the best bet to cope but there must be an epiphany that this requires drastic changes, one of them being to go all in to maximise productivity.

> Socialised (not necessarily socialist) systems are the best bet to cope but there must be an epiphany that this requires drastic changes

The drastic change required is simple yet hard: end socialized retirement programs. Everyone needs to work.

Not everyone can work, or at least, not regular "full-time" work. However, more flexibility could get more productivity out of the aging populace: ending fixed retirement ages, for instance (some people are decrepit by 70, others are still quite vigorous and active), and also more part-time work, remote work, etc. could get more older people to be contributors to the economy again.

What matters more ... that our social pyramid schemes will fail (actually they won't because automation drop demand for human labor) or that we destroy our environment?

95% of all biomass is humans and their farm animals

5% is the rest of mammals... biodiversity is pretty much done on the planet

insects are plummeting, and they're pollinators and food for birds etc.

overfishing in many coastal areas

by 2050 there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean, and still people think that humanity can't make things on such a large scale... all the fish biomass will be outnumbered by our plastic

kelp forests, bleached corals ... ocean acidification...

rainforests are 90% gone

one third of arable land is now unable to grow much at all

and this is all in a few generations .. ANTHROPOCENE

the climate change is not the most pressing issue at all

us talking about "we can't afford to fix this" is like people playing a videogame and racking up points IN A HOUSE THAT'S ON FIRE -- saying sorry, I can't pause the game to put out the fire... yet the house is the only one we all have.

Put it in perspective ... the number of people on the planet is the input to all these functions. If we went back to having a billion people, and robots doing a lot of the work, we'd have everyone receiving a UBI and be richer and happier. What is this obsession with endless population growth? Humanity was doing just fine with under a billion people, no? We were able to fix child mortality, but now we have to learn about the exponential function...

> What is this obsession with endless population growth?

Because both socialism and capitalism require growth to function. We need a new economic system.

>us talking about "we can't afford to fix this" is like people playing a videogame and racking up points IN A HOUSE THAT'S ON FIRE -- saying sorry, I can't pause the game to put out the fire... yet the house is the only one we all have.

The problem is that we really can't put the fire out.

To extend your analogy, it's like people playing a videogame in a burning house, but the players are competing against each other. And this isn't a normal videogame: the players have implants, wirelessly connected to the machine, which will inject the loser with poison. Whoever loses, dies. So if anyone takes a break from the game to put out the fire, they die (and the fire rages on anyway). The only way to put out the fire is to get everyone to stop the game simultaneously and work together to put out the fire. But that's impossible for these people, because they're greedy and selfish and hate each other and any attempt at working together will be sabotaged somehow by at least one of them.

What can be done in a situation like this? Nothing; just let the fire burn and enjoy the game while it lasts. Hopefully, whoever inherits this planet after humans are gone will be a better species than we were.

While its true that biodiversity is a huge problem and many things you write are correct, your numbers aren't quite right. Humans and their farm animals is not 95% of all biomass. Molluscs, for example, make up as much biomass as humans + farm animals + mammals + birds.

I did say mammals...

Sure, if you count insects and plants it would be way more

You said "of all biomass". Counting all other animals is important to your point I think, because mammals, while interesting and very interesting to us, and important etc, have never represented all that much biomass or biodiversity.

Yeah, these can survive. Just tax the ultra wealthy.

If the population trends are correct, the housing problem will fix itself. The data in Japan supports that view.

The housing problem may be fixed but what about the care for the elderly?

Japan said a couple of decades ago "robots". I guess it has to work out, one century or other?

The housing problem in Japan's big cities did not fix itself with a shrinking population (they're growing) but instead with nationalization of land use laws.

  > nationalization of land use laws.

interesting, any good links about that?

The population is not “growing”. They are simply emptying out towns for the large metros.

It doesn’t matter where the urban population increase is coming from in this conversation.

I am unable to reply to a different comment, but this is a good reference to zoning law in Japan: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1hzbhGNMp-P7lnp2-VXRjJVjDOAm....

> If the population trends are correct, the housing problem will fix itself.

Only if climate change doesn't reach levels where lots of coastal properties are wrecked by rising seas. IIRC a large fraction of global population live close to the coast.

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