The Toxic Reality of a Post-Familial Society | Hacker News Reader

The Toxic Reality of a Post-Familial Society

aaronrenn.substack.com

45 pointsdinoleif60 comments

The article makes an interesting case for the possibility that South Korea's military dictatorship intentionally created low-fertility policies that can't be reversed. But reading the description of what's going on, I can't help be reminded of John B. Calhoun's work on the "behavioral sink" [1], where he basically created a utopia where rats had everything they needed for survival, they multiplied exponentially, but once they reached a certain critical population density, they ceased to be interested in reproduction and instead exhibited a bunch of socially pathological behaviors. Within 3 generations, no further rats were born.

South Korea is a densely populated country, as is Japan (another country often cited as having an aging, low-fertility population). And people tend to move out of dense metropolises like Manhattan or SF to have children. Maybe there's something inborn to humans that causes us to seek space and resources, and if those are not available, to not have kids?

[1] https://vocal.media/geeks/the-true-history-behind-the-secret...

Lack a source but for many this will be the first generation in a long time where today's new parents will be unable to provide an equal or better quality of life to their children - especially in big urban centers which have seen the full effects of stratification. Space and resources are big weights in a "QoL" function.

It's nutty.

I make more than my dad did when he retired, yet, if I were to have kids today I could not provide the lifestyle to them that I had as a kid. And he certainly didn't make what he did at retirement when I was a child. If I had a dual income household, there would be the money to do it, but the kids would lose out on something that I considered a crucial part of my upbringing - a full time parent.

But, the perspective here is that I (and many of the people on this site) work in one of the few remaining well paying professions, whereas my dad was in a "well paying" but not "top paying" field.

It just can't be sustainable...

I don’t believe its density as much as costs and impact on lifestyle.

Make daycare, child health services and great schools universally available and cheap/free. Make it feasible and safe to get kids around dense cities quickly (excellent transit options). I suspect under these circumstances more people would be open to the idea of children.

As it stands today, having children places an unbearably high social and financial strain on people. Suburbs have been just one solution to the problem but there are others.

> Make daycare, child health services and great schools universally available and cheap/free.

That is probably a good idea but there are places where daycare is free and there's no evidence it makes a difference.

The childcare is free, but what about the rent?

This might be affecting the number of children a couple has (probably is, in fact), but I doubt people factor it in to their decision to have a kid or not. I had absolutely no idea what day care or diapers cost before I had a kid. It's hard for me to picture a young couple approaching it that way.

> As it stands today, having children places an unbearably high social and financial strain on people. Suburbs have been just one solution to the problem but there are others.

Yet Suburbs are the only ones I see that work. If you are thinking about having kids in the US move to the suburbs soon. Cities are not setup for you. Schools in the city are considered bad for a reason. Even if you can afford private schools, the parks are more sculpre gardens instead of swing sets. Everyone talks about the theator scene in the cities, but most of the shows wouldn't interest a child (most are not X rated). Many cities lack cheap places to eat - $40/person isn't too bad for one person, but when you have a few kids with you that price is not affordable often. How many places don't allow kids at all - not many in the suburbs, but somewhat common in the city. In the suburb you just buy a bigger car and everyone gets around - the big car won't fit in the city well, and your other options is paying a lot more on public transit because odds are there isn't a family pass, so the big car is probably cheaper.

The above is US specific (probably Canada too). I know there are a number of people from not US reading this who will tell me how it works in their city. I hope city residents read those replies and make changes before they need them.

> the big car won't fit in the city well, and your other options is paying a lot more on public transit because odds are there isn't a family pass, so the big car is probably cheaper.

The TCO for a car is thousands of dollars per year. Granted the US only has three or four cities that come close to facilitating carless society, but in those cities, I doubt public transit costs $5000 a year or more.

If you are buying a new car every 3 years the $5000year price for a car is reasonable, but cars last for 15 years and so the total lifetime costs average out to less, and if you buy a used car you costs are much less. My cars are down to more like $2000/year now.

$100/month 12 month (2 parents + 3 kids). Of course it depends on where you live, but $100/month per person is a normal price for a monthly pass. If the kids are younger and riding with a parent the price is lower, but kids have places to go (particularity as teens!) without parents (which should be advantage of the city). When you consider the convenience of the car being ready to go when and where you want to go - unlike transit systems - it isn't hard to justify paying more (Read this as a rant about how useless most transit systems are in the US)

North American style suburbs are artificially subsidized by cities and not sustainable for society. A series of policy decisions at all levels of government have artificially made the suburban lifestyle cheaper than it otherwise would be, but sooner or later, something has gotta give.

This is a good starting point on the subject, with many sources for more in-depth reading if one chooses: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/7/24/busting-4-comm...

Strongtowns is cooking the math. Suburbs have existed for more than 100 years, and most do not fall for issues they claim.

Suburbs 100 years ago did not have roads to maintain, communal sewers, and other amenities that we expect today. Suburbs 100 years ago were more like the dachas/summer houses people have in Russia - no running water, no electricity, outhouse instead of a plumbed bathroom, no fire/medical services... etc.

Sure, under that model they are definitely sustainable.

Over the last 100 years those suburbs have added all of your list, plus parks (which were not common 100 years ago), internet, cable tv, phone.

Which just goes road prove they are sustaining themselves.

That doesn't prove anything.

I could buy many things for myself by putting them on my credit card - that doesn't make my spending habits sustainable.

The whole point of strong towns is that the Government financed the projects but not the maintenance, and that the suburbs can't afford the maintenance bills (at least some of them) under the current tax regime.

Find a city that has above replacement levels of fertility, then define whether population sustainability is suitable for society. Thinking deeply about this may change opinions.

Calhoun's rat paradise experiment doesn't replicate, as Gwern helpfully discovered for us:

https://www.gwern.net/Mouse-Utopia

Stop quoting behavioral sink, it has been thoroughly debunked. https://gwern.net/mouse-utopia

Whew, boy. There's a ton of loaded phrases in this piece . . which, well, I'll let others do the googling. Anyway. Ideologies (Evangelicals, Feminists, Transsexuals, Insert-Your-Evil-Genius-Here) don't shunt people's life decisions around willy nilly like this. Money does. People don't have kids in industrialized countries because children rapidly transform from a net investment to a net burden. Thus, ideal industrialized states have political policy to skim improved industrial productivity into incentives for childbirth[1]. This typically doesn't happen, so kids don't happen either.

This isn't a new phenomenon; urban areas eat birthrates, and you can see it in records from as long ago as the 14th century. Industrialization turns urbanization up to 11.

[1] Or a rational immigration / naturalization policy, but that's another subject, and it's not really tenable for some cultures.

Yep, people's behavior respond to incentives, and in most developed economies, each kid represents a major sacrifice instead of the 'investment' they used to be.

If you want more kids, you have to make the cost of having them lower. This means building more housing, subsidizing childcare like france and sweden, but stronger, and making higher ed affordable.

Now all that costs a lot of money. To do that, we'd need to cut spending on other things, and raise taxes. I don't buy the assertion from Zeihan and others that it's impossible though.

It's also highly correlated to declines in religiosity (though that might itself correlate with urbanization / increased wealth). Fertility rates were dropping in France in the 18th century because of a secularization push (observed by counting the frequency of religious references in people's wills correlated to family size).

I think it's obvious where this goes. The cited "war" between childless and people who start families is creating a tradcon counterculture in the youth, of people who want lots of kids, to raise them themselves instead of delegating to the state, and thus will be able to instill deeply from an early age the importance of family. They will necessarily win in a couple of generations. The shift back to a stable society centered around the family will return, and it will not be as easy as the shift to childless consumerism for short term economic paper gains. It's simple, ideology is passed to future generations when people raise their own kids, and those with the opposing ideology have removed themselves from the gene pool.

Off topic question, I've been using a different HN aggregation tool that isn't the front page, and I've found that some of the more interesting topics get flagged, why is that?

If you mention hot button topics it usually gets flagged.

The hostility towards children is a real thing you can see today. I saw it first hand in Japan; parks had signs with dozens of prohibitions, while news stories about this phenomena inevitably had an 80 year old complaining that there were children outside at 8 and politicans saying that it was a "complex problem". These are not new parks mind you; just there are silver-haired "main character syndrome" types who consider public spaces as public spaces for their own personal pursuits.

As the proportion of the elderly (and mentally ill elderly) increase, creating age restrictions on elderly voting may be necessary if we want to prevent these selfish behaviors from damaging the long-term viability of our own democracies.

And age restrictions on running for public office and term limits for all elected officials.

This is a take from a gender-essentialist who ardently believes fixed roles for men and women are established by the bible. Their other publication: https://americanreformer.org/

In light of this fact, I'd guess "their" preferred pronouns are he/him/his.

https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?cat=27

I try not to partake in tinfoil hattery, but this getting the upvotes that it did, in the time that it did, given the content, and compared to the demographic of the platform, might alarm some folks who care about the integrity of submissions on HN.

Maybe that's nobody, maybe I'm paranoid, maybe I'm not following HN guidelines. IDK.

No tinfoil hat needed to see that certain users attract a larger share of upvotes for a given statement while other users attract a larger share of downvotes for other given statements. The same is true for certain subjects but that is just a reflection of the ideological makeup of the site's population.

It is also noticeable that downvotes often come in clusters where a given post suddenly gets downvoted several times within a short time frame where there otherwise has not been any activity around that post. Whether this is caused by a bunch of ideologically-aligned users having some downtime - Compiling - or something more nefarious like sock-puppet accounts being used as ideology amplifiers is not clear and can only be investigated by Dang et al.

The up/downvoting system is one of the less successful aspects of HN, especially where it concerns downvotes. A meta-moderation system like the one used by Slashdot of old could be of help here but I suspect the site owners prefer the simplicity of the current system over one which, while more 'fair' does have the tendency to keep growing with the meta-moderators being moderated by meta-meta-moderators until it is moderators all the way down.

I guess the question is, can you objectively evaluate the ideas of someone you disagree with?

So?, does that invalidate the article because he isnt the typical SF leftist?

Peter Zeihan's take is that urbanization leads to less children because there's less space, you don't need the free labor kids provides on the farm, and children are very expensive in the city.

This is coupled with the speed of urbanization for countries that industrialized after the second world war- the later you industrialize, the faster that industrialization happens, the more stark the transition to a childless economy.

As mentioned in the article, there is a demographic boon for that industrialized generation. Less money needed for schools, etc, more time your prime working age adults can contribute to the economy.

Except all those countries industrialized around the same generation. That generation is aging out of the workforce and there's nothing to replace them.

Zeihan posits this leads to demographic collapse, and that these countries just simply "go away" because there isn't enough children to keep the country functioning. I'm not sure how much I believe that, but I do know that nobody has a clue how to fix it. Japan has been front and center for this problem and still haven't found a way to reverse the trend.

Zeihan is a smart guy, but he tends to take his limited expertise and expand it into areas where he doesn't have a strong foundation. I think his ideas on demographics are a bit too deterministic. Demographics don't enter a state where they 'can't' recover. Behavior responds to incentives. The reason why birth rates are plummeting in the developed world is that costs to have kids are soaring. If there was real investment in child care (think, what france and sweden have done, but on steroids), and if higher ed and other costs were mostly covered, people would feel able to have more kids.

Now how do we pay for all that? Dunno. That question is above my pay grade, but I think we'd undoubtedly have to cut spending on other priorities and raise taxes. I think that'd probably be worth it to claw out of a demographic decline.

>there isn't enough children to keep the country functioning

I wonder if some kind of mandatory civil service will become necessary. I feel in the US that many people are disengaged from the rest of their communities for numerous reasons, and it would be both a direct public service and a benefit to societal cohesion for all people to experience being a servant to their cities via public works.

How do you get from the resurrection of corveé labor to an increased birth rate? I don't see the connection. If anything, I would imagine that taxing people's time as well as their money would only make the burden of parenthood feel heavier.

It wasn't directly about increasing birthrate, it was about dealing with decreasing birthrate.

If we have fewer people to operate society, we may need to conscript ourselves into being useful to the rest of our community.

South Korea has another problem: shunning the elderly, elder poverty, and elder suicide.

EDIT: I recall a documentary about certain bridges requiring security cameras due to elderly people jumping from them.

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

Perhaps the issue is related to the devaluation of "non-productive" aspects of the family associated with late Western-style capitalism.

Exactly, family warmth isnt very profitable yet very important, and I suspect its a big part of the "mental health epidemic".

Ban Netflix, Steam, and Instagram. People will be forced to go outside and socialize. Problem solved. ;-)

Any hope that we can replace the traditional family-based society with some sort of urban community thing has been dashed already by the ultra partisan libs versus cons divide and conquer tactics of the elites and their tools in the media

I'm surprised the article doesn't mention North Korea more. The DPRK is probably the most collectivist (least individualistic) large society on the planet, so much so that it terrifies bona fide liberals. I'm sure the intense political polarization of the divided Peninsula has contributed to hyper-charging individualism in the South. You don't want to be like the enemy.

FWIW, DPRK birth rate is about 1.9, still below replacement but more than double the ROK, and much higher than PRC or Japan.

Just for future readers being "liberal" does not necessarily mean that one is "collectivist".

The OP, like many others, confuses governmental, economic, and philosophical ideals so that they can make a political point - one that does not contain much in the way of substance.

In the way of examples, neoliberalism [1] comes to mind.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberalism

I mean philosophically liberal in the original meaning of the term. In that sense, it is tightly linked with individualism.

This has nothing to do with current American politics.

Then this comment doesn't make any sense

> > The DPRK is probably the most collectivist (least individualistic) large society on the planet, so much so that it terrifies bleeding heart liberals.

I'll break it down for you.

Liberals are individualists. It's at the foundation of their worldview and philosophy. This is basic stuff.

DPRK is highly illiberal, un-individualistic. Engaging with DPRK culture in good faith means questioning the universality of the Western, liberal worldview. For most people, this is a non-starter (just look at this thread).

> so much so that it terrifies bleeding heart liberals

Can you break this term down for me then?

"bleeding heart" wasn't the best choice of adjective there, I meant "passionate".

Yeah, not the best choice, then. "Bleeding heart" has been used as a slur by (US political) conservatives[1] to attack (US political) liberals. It implied that the liberals suffer from an excess of empathy to the point that it clouds their judgment, or something. Nowadays it's just a slur.

You're using "liberal" in a way that differs from standard US political usage, which is all right, especially since you clearly defined what you meant by the term. But "bleeding heart" sounds very US-politics, and seems really weird with your not using liberal in the US politics sense.

[1] These "conservatives" would count as liberals by your definition - they still believe in individual rights.

Frankly, I have only heard liberals self-identify as "bleeding heart", and misunderstood its definition. Then again, I don't consume US conservative media.

> These "conservatives" would count as liberals by your definition - they still believe in individual rights.

Of course. Virtually every faction of US politics is philosophically liberal.

>Virtually every faction of US politics is philosophically liberal.

Based US politics :sunglasses:

Sure, but you have to be careful with the terms you use! :)

AnimalMuppet gave a good explanation there IMO.

To add to this, liberalism and neo liberalism aren't on the left of the political spectrum. These political ideologies are fairly solidly right or centre-right

I gave up when I saw people on this site using “neoliberal” as a slur for current US progressives.

Yeah.. I know the term has been basically meaningless for a while, but still.

It just shows how powerful propaganda is, it's redefining terms

The Progressive Caucus is clearly a wing of the Democratic Party, which is neoliberal. They occasionally challenge the party line, but never successfully. That's what primaries are for.

That said, there are many American progressive movements that are not neoliberal. Just not in power.

Bleeding heart liberals, all the other kinds of liberals, people who don't want to be executed by anti-aircraft cannon for having the wrong last name, people bothered by concentration camps, people concerned about nuclear prolifertion, all those kinds of people.

I think the part that terrifies "bleeding heart liberals" is the abject poverty, brutally oppressive quasi-militaristic (I say quasi given its profound ineptitude) regime, and mass starvation.

I would imaging birth rates don't really make it to the top 10 list of problems in N. Korea.

Curious that this was flagged.

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