The low fertility trap: An analysis of the great worldwide baby bust | Hacker News Reader

The low fertility trap: An analysis of the great worldwide baby bust

postliberal.substack.com

23 pointsbarry-cotter24 comments

I've done genealogy lately, and I've found out something that surprised me (but in retrospect, shouldn't have):

It works the other way too. It's not just wealthier people having less kids, it's families staying wealthier because they have few kids. Most of my ancestors were fairly poor, but it made a big difference whether they shared their inheritance with one sibling or with eight. It seems to have had a snowball effect too: it wasn't just that they inherited money, it was that they could use that money to get more money - and not necessarily even by working. There was plenty of rent-extraction in the 19th century which you didn't need to be a factory owner to do.

And maybe there we are at the heart of the fertility issue: when owning stuff makes a larger difference to your kids' wealth than their own ability to work, you are effectively hurting the kids you already have when you decide to have one more kid. And it starts long before they get an inheritance.

> Oh, I have 3 kids and no money. Why can't I have no kids and 3 money!?

- Homer Simpson

That all seems fairly apparent to me - perhaps people have just become more numerate/economically savvy.

Yes, when you focus on the costs of raising kids, which are high today. But they weren't always as high, especially not the marginal costs of one more kid.

Also, the key point is that when people's wealth are based mainly on work actually getting done, as on a farm with room to expand, then you get richer with more kids. It's when access to capital becomes more important - including as land becomes expensive - that you get poorer with more kids.

> as taxes to pay for health care and pensions for all those seniors eat into her salary

Of course "her" taxes will have to be high, because OBVIOUSLY Elon needs another trillion$!!

This argument is an analogue of the argument that: "it's not the 3 people that own as much as 1/2 of the US population, its THOSE people living 6 people in a van that are stealing your middle class prosperity"

If you're really worried about being "replaced", maybe you should worry about the wealth of 50M people being replaced by 1 person...

In the prosperity-eats-birth-rate scenario, the society is prosperous but individuals aren't having babies. Maybe fewer births aren't due to prosperity itself but the complexities it brings - including for those who aren't prosperous.

In the US, poor people are also having fewer babies. Like success, poverty consumes much time but it does so with far less hope. With that combo, the most fundamental resources of future-building (ex: consideration, dreaming) become scarce.

We don't need more people in the world, there's enough.

People like Elon that are raising some fake concerns about fertility always have something in common: are hysterical.

We need to bring rationality in this debate. Why the hell do we need humans in every corner in the earth, and possibly universe?

Procreation isn't a real need like food and water, nobody dies if they don't fuck.

Humans need to stop this need of controlling the fate of the universe, it's really sickening.

Mind your life and your own business, stop thinking that you need to save humanity.

I bet this "heroism" behaviour will be diagnosed as a disease in a few decades and are deeply rooted in child development issues or just genetics.

If you think falling birthrates are "fake issues" then you have no idea what you're talking about and haven't done a smidgen of research on the topic. The West relies on debt-fueled economies that require ever-increasing GDP. This is in direct opposition to shrinking prime-age workforces. I'm not going to go much more into this here as the information is trivially available to anyone online.

>We don't need more people in the world, there's enough.

True.

But beyond that, this has always been true at any point in the history and prehistory of mankind.

>The West relies on debt-fueled economies that require ever-increasing GDP.

Also equally true, but that only goes back as far as the history of the "West" alone.

Unless you also want to include all the other intervals and regions where debt-fueled economies have come & gone since before prehistory, but that still doesn't quite make it true at any point in history.

No big deal. Equally true.

But two true things do not have to make equal sense, or even make sense at all sometimes.

What about Japan? Aren't they doing ok? Sure there's issues with not enough people to look after the old folks but I haven't heard any rhetoric like we do in the Anglosphere. Demographic Apocalypse seems largely a scare tactic by neoliberal/neocons to distract from the real reason: Immigration is to suppress wage demands.

It is not “racist” to observe that if the inbound population is high and the native population isn’t reproducing that it is a replacement.

People need to stop allowing themselves to get shamed into not stating facts, personal observations, math and logic.

This author is non credible.

How is it not racist to think of shifting racial demographics as the end of civilization? We are a proud nation of immigrants. America is an idea not an ethnicity.

I think you answered your own question.

The issue is what replacement means, no? The racist tone of it comes from "replacement of white people" being an endeavour conspired by the State to dislodge white people, instead of a natural state of affairs where immigrants have a higher fertility rate than the native population. Characterising such state of affairs as "the end of civilisation" then becomes extremely racist.

Discourse does not exist in a vacuum, replacement has a semantic meaning in this discourse apart from the literal one...

Elon Musk is saying this openly on twitter. It’s not racist. It’s mainstream discussion.

> It’s not racist. It’s mainstream discussion.

Those are not opposites, it can be a racist mainstream discussion. What does Elon Musk have to do with the argument?

So we’ve entered the dark times where if Elon says something it’s validated as not racist and completely sane.

This is laughably bad faith. Tucker isn't "observing" that the (I will not use the word native as that's fucking ridiculous given US history) population is becoming less "white". Demographers are, and have been for decades. No Tucker, Musk and all these other racists are shouting that it's a problem and the end of civilization. They're shouting about rape and crime and all sorts of other crap. It's racist at its core and people like you trying to carry water for it and whitewash it as just an observation deserve strict scrutiny and derision.

> I will state my thesis baldly at the beginning: there is a large overlap between the things that underpin long-standing worldwide birth-rate declines and the things that underpin our prosperity.

Yes... well, that won't work forever, will it?

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