Britain is running out of babies | Hacker News Reader

Britain is running out of babies

edwest.co.uk

26 pointsjseliger36 comments

> ... falling birth rates present a crisis which needs to be addressed by urgent cultural change.

Not this ** again. Ignore the doomsayers, there is no crisis. Falling birthrates is a good thing. Living in a world of dwindling finite resources is, in fact, a huge problem. We can only engineer our way out of problems for so long. Feeding 8 bullion people? Because we enrich the soul with nitrogen and phosphorus, but we can't keep that up forever. Eventually soil erosion will limit it food supply. What happens when the oil runs out? Wind and solar aren't replacing it quickly enough. Whether the author likes it or not, climate change is still getting worse and we're not doing enough to stop global warming.

There's not enough young people to care for the elderly? How about we take some of the millions of young people working bullshit jobs, and put them to work taking care of the elderly? Or fixing our crippling infrastructure? Or providing a quality education to the children we do have? Can we really not spare some of the young people working in sales and advertising? No, clearly it's far more important to have our young people working in the new Starbucks. Sorry if no one is around when your grandma falls over and breaks her hip, but I really need my pumpkin spice latte.

There is no birthrate crisis, only horribly misaligned economic incentives.

Oh look, another smoke shop. It sure is great we're getting the most out of our young people.

Elder care jobs exist alongside starbucks jobs today. People pay for starbucks which lets them hire more employees. Governments have to pay for elder care by taxing starbucks and other companies that make money from voluntary sales. Most elderly will not be able to pay out of pocket for someone to care for them.

Depopulate by people's choice, or depopulate by massive war over resources at some point. Choose wisely. Can't run the Ponzi scheme forever. It sounds like no children are immigrating either? Maybe understand what's keeping newcomers away.

People who can afford as many children as they want with arbitrary safety do so at higher than the replacement rate [1].

After decades of explosive growth in the economic security and prosperity for the middle class in the post war period the trend reversed at some point. People debate when, 2008 is one plausible line to draw.

Like practically every problem in the modern would, the causal chain ends up at vast, unchecked, accelerating wealth inequality facilitated by capture and nepotism and corruption and decaying institutions.

1. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-03-12/the-ri...

And yet African countries have some of the highest birth rates while also having "vast, unchecked, accelerating wealth inequality facilitated by capture and nepotism and corruption and decaying institutions"

Birth rates are driven by the hope for a better future, not current conditions.

That seems an odd assertion. Birth rates are driven by sex without functioning birth control

The financial calculus for starting a family in such a society and family to the QOL they expect their children to have is very different compared to developed countries.

War over what resources? Oil usage is going down, desalinating water is a lot cheaper than war.

I think parent meant food and living space. Though I would like to point out that water being cheaper than war seems more true on a societal level. For at individual not having water and not going to war isn't preferable to having water and going to war. If I don't have water, I will die, if I go to war, I may die (with a 99.999% chance, but it's still better than 100%).

We're not short of food or living space, either. If we replaced all of our farmland with greenhouses, we'd produce ~1000X as much food. If we replaced all of our farmland with moderately dense city, we'd have enough space for ~100X as many people. Mix and match as needed.

Of course we don't need to do either, since the world population has basically stopped growing. We just need to increase food production enough to offset losses of production due to global warming. We can do that by building greenhouses, but there are other, cheaper options, all of which are cheaper than a war.

They made a movie about it already Set in 2027

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children_of_Men

Superb and haunting movie.

The adage about South Korea is striking. What is the purpose of intense competition if the result is oblivion? Its difficult to imagine that a South Korea with 8 million people will still be South Korea.

As a last resort they can reunify with North Korea.

My pet theory for why fertility is falling is more sophisticated than the likely incorrect theories that the economy is bad or people are struggling economically.

My guess is that humans want to have children who belong to the same socioeconomic class as themselves or higher. Mate preferences in humans is strongly driven by socioeconomics, so I think this is plausible. In the world we live in today, it is extremely difficult for anyone to guarantee this for their children. In today's world, across countries, there is so much flux - many children are at a higher income percentile than their parents, and an equal number are at a lower income percentile. There is so much risk in having children.

So people choose to have the one child who they put all their resources in. Or no child at all, because they think they will create a child who is at a lower income percentile.

This theory sidesteps counterargument that we are better than the past in the absolute sense. It's a relative theory. Humans want their progeny to be relatively better than themselves.

I would love to see data on this.

As someone with kids, while I certainly worry about the world they will live in and their prospects in it, I absolutely don't think I can predict what it will look like in 20 years when it matters. The idea that they might be less prosperous than me when they're grown never entered my mind when deciding to have children. Whether or not I could afford to raise them absolutely did.

Much of these primal decisions like mate selection or desire for children happens in the unconscious part of our brains. Hard to check validity for theories like this without good statistical data.

I have a different pet theory. I think people, women in particular, don't want to have kids as much as was believed by any kind of biological drive. People want sex of course. So once the choice is there to not have kids, a lot more people will avoid having them. My parents generation could make that choice, but there was quite a lot of social pressure to start a family. As that social pressure has eased, people are making different choices. I think the arguments made about economic factors by people putting it off are actually just a rationalisation to explain away why they aren't conforming to expectations.

This would also explain why people who do have kids aren't really having much trouble with it, they just want them, or still fell for social pressure. Or were careless.

That's a cultural explanation. You are saying that across a wide variety of countries, cultures are all evolving in the same direction. Even isolated North Korea is now below replacement [1].

Well, if different cultures are evolving in the same direction, then there must be another underlying explanation.

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

Yes! It's not just a cultural explanation, it's the idea that the medical situation of being able to choose is the driver, cultural change is the follower. So it can affect different cultures, even partially cut off ones.

You can express all that in a shorter form: "Hope for a better future".

There's only a shortage if you assume the current economic model which requires growth.

The environment would certainly be better off with fewer people.

The need for growth is fundamentally human, no growth only works if everyone is comfortable where they are - which is rarely the case.

People have a need, or hope, for improvement; of themselves, their station in life, their freedoms and affordances, etc.

It doesn't need to be actual growth, as in population, mountains of 'goods' (which are getting less and less good these days), profits, etc.

You have to have economic growth since inflation exists. If you were making $100,000 a year a decade ago it is not worth anywhere that now. If you are not have growth you are going to have issues unless inflation vanishes

Where does inflation come from?

It is in fact the deliberate increase in the money supply in order to match the growth in economic activity. The purpose is to keep prices from spiraling out of control (same money, more things to spend it on, prices would go up).

Any discussion embedded in the current economic system is moot, IMHO. We need to radically change the system to meet our future needs. Growth (involving materials/energy, etc) cannot go on forever, it's a mathematical impossibility, but the current financial/economic system requires that it does.

Maybe, I'm just irredeemably liberal, but thinking of "ethnic continuity" as something worth preserving gives me the ick.

Britain is such a stark case of a nation going from proudly being top of the world, to an absolutely determined self-destruction.

I've no doubt that countries like China have people in government who are thoroughly studying them, to make sure they avoid it happening to them.

china is on a similar path, maybe even worse. hard to make people have more children, even harder if you have a history of actively stopping people from having children

Funny thing is, it wasn't even effective. Most of the decline was before the introduction of the one-child policy, and other countries, like South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong (which is a country for these purposes; it has a different government, it's a country) managed to make it fall lower, without such legal barriers. It was a failure on multiple levels.

See https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate.

Meanwhile Britain is busy trying to deport people.

Maybe paying lip service to deportations, but for a dose of reality check the immigration graphs for the last 10-20 years. The government is allowing masses of people in in some sort of desperate attempt to juice GDP, or something

Reply on news.ycombinator.com