Hacker News Reader

Comment by esafak | Hacker News Reader

How I hate the title's framing. Greece has no population problem; it has an economic problem. Greeks have not given up on sex; they are simply responding to economic incentives, the same as people everywhere. The interviewed economist, Nikos Vettas, said as much; they just need to increase the country's productivity. If the economy grew at a respectable rate 5̶-̶1̶0̶%̶/̶y̶e̶a̶r̶ instead of flatlining since 2008, they would have no problem.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.KD.ZG?locat...

View on HN

The respectable growth number is doing a ridiculous amount of lifting in this comment. For context, the GDP growth in the US has been above 5% year over year only a few select quarters in the last ten years [0], or alternatively only one year out of the last ten years if you measure by year [1]. It's a bit of a stretch to say that Greece needs to "just" beat what the US is doing, and then some.

[0] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/gdp-growth-annual

[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/full-year-gdp-gro...

And usually only when coming off a recession, when it's relatively easy to achieve high growth rates simply by putting people back to work. The last time the U.S. grew more than 5.5% YoY and it wasn't a recession recovery was 1978. More typical averages have been 2-3%.

It's almost unheard of for a developed economy to consistently grow at 5%+. To get those sort of growth rates you need robust productivity increases fueled by technology and innovation, and productivity increases have been hard to come by recently.

Afghanistan, Sudan, Syria all have fertility rates well above replacement. Yet their economies have been in freefall for at least decades.

You can find many countries for each of the permutations of fertility/gdp growth.

Fertility rate is downstream of culture, not economics.

People don't want to admit it's due to social change instead of economics.

Religious people even in the US have kids at a younger age and more of them. Even poor / middle class ones.

I think it's because we want a solution to our problems. You can usually find a solution to economic problems.

Cultural problems are nigh impossible to solve- especially by the government.

This is an interesting perspective on the left/right split. People on the left see economic problems (thus government can help), people on the right see cultural problems (thus government will not help).

Generalizing of course.

Cultural problems are solvable by government, in the form of propaganda or otherwise. Consider the actions taken by the government against smoking.

By "Otherwise", I will give the example of China and its social credit system that got people to stop spitting in the street by deducting social credit points.

The Chinese government has been pushing propaganda to increase birth rates yet the birth rate keeps declining. If you look at Chinese social media you'll see that modern Chinese young people are making fun of the government propaganda.

Social credit system is not likely to work for as long as the opportunity costs of having kids outweighs whatever punishments the government hands out for not having kids. And in a modern market economy the opportunity cost of having a child is huge indeed.

Cultural change is hard. It is very hard. If it was easy, the USSR would have succeeded in creating the New Soviet Man instead of generations of super cynical people.

People stopped smoking because it's kinda gross, not because of propaganda. Look how much more government propaganda has gone toward eliminating alcohol, weed, and other drugs. People STILL use those drugs, and in some respects they are more popular than ever.

A social credit score only works in an authoritarian regime where you can be hauled off for even slightly criticizing the government. We certainly don't want to resort to anything like that for any problem, as the "solution" is worse.

Alcohol consumption has been falling amongst the young and cigarettes were once considered very fashionable, not at all gross. It was the public health campaigns around lung cancer that changed things.

Economics describes culture. Basically all economic policy recommendations are about "hey, how 'bout a little culture shift toward denser housing, more free trade, less xenophobia when renting out, hiring"

"wanna get a bit more aggregate supply, how about letting women work, maybe even drive!?"

High fertility rates in low income countries are due to factors such as high infant mortality, the participation of children in the labor force, and provision of support for the elderly. Greece's situation, as a middle/high income country, is different.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-fertil...

That chart disproves your original point

I believe it doesn't because that chart depicts the full range of economies, whereas we are discussing only the middle/high income bracket.

True, the main reason is the current/recent economic conditions but there are also other factors for our demographic problem. Life expectancy has increased, the traditional family is changing, work/life balance has dramatically changed, relationships are different, life goals are changing, infant mortality has decreased compared to decades ago, not so many people work on the fields anymore… and many more. Hey, at least we’re not the only ones with this problem, see Japan for example.

The title does not mention sex. Poor people all over the world have more kids than we do in advanced economies. Decades of propaganda have convinced people that having a kid is dangerous, expensive, annoying, environmentally irresponsible, contributing to "overpopulation", and a task beneath the average woman. That influence was exerted without regard for societal stability and long-term viability. Now we are practically doomed to suffer from a shortage of young people as we beg them to have kids again.

Even if you were right about the cause of the problem, it is still a problem and the title just states the problem. You don't have to diagnose the cause to know that a population crash is a problem.

I've personally wanted to have kids for at least 15 years, but it seems like culturally I am on an island. It is very difficult to find a partner who is willing and able to have kids and also a good partner otherwise. I live in the US but I think all Western countries are basically like this now.

You also have to make sure that some meaningful fraction of the rewards for those productivity gains actually go to the general population — rather than being captured by a tiny fraction at the top of the socioeconomic ladder. Otherwise you get Elon Musk with 11 kids but a broad-based demographic decline.

Greece has no qualms about redistributing wealth. Their sin is going too far in the other direction and not supporting business-friendly policies.

But according to the OCED, the gini coefficient actually dropped slightly from 2010, indicating that it's actually gotten more equal.

https://data-explorer.oecd.org/vis?df[ds]=DisseminateFinalDM...

It would surprise me if Elon didn't have 11 kids even if he wasn't rich. Sperm private sperm donors are a thing and many hit double digits.

> Greeks have not given up on sex; they are simply responding to economic incentives,

There are places in the world with far more horrible economies than Greece that have no fertility rate problems. There are places elsewhere that have much better economies, and similar fertility rate problems. It's not economics, not even a little.

When you teach your youngest generation to not want to have children, not only do they take the lesson to heart, they teach it to whatever children they do end up having by accident or apathy. Instead of going away or even just lingering, it is self-reinforcing.

"It's not economics, not even a little."

I don't think you understand the economic and quality of life decline experienced the generation that is now 30-40yo.

There may be places where worst economies, but the rate of changes counts as well. The middle and lower class were at least 3-4x better off 20 years ago than what they are today.

You're wrong, it has to do with culture. Very little is effected by economics.

It reminds me a lot like hobbies people associate with rich people, like traveling.

If traveling is a real hobby for you, you will find a way to do it even if you're poor like I did when I was young. For me it was through mistake airfare scanners and hostels, but some very poor 3rd world people literally just walk / bike around the world. Sleep in tents, and pan handle / or do some odd jobs for food money.

If there's a will, there's a way.

Then you'd see higher fertility among the upper class, who have it about as well as the middle class had back then. You don't though.

It's just the excuse you use for something you don't understand about yourself. Go talk to the r/childfree crowd, ask them if they'd ever do it for any amount of money. They won't, and neither would you. They at least understand themselves a little.

I agree that it is not economics, or at least that their argument about economics does not suffice.

This is not a challenge and I am genuinely curious to hear your perspective: in what way does Greece teach their youngest generation to not want to have children?

Dozens of different ways, I should think, but foremost among them is by example. If you mother only had the one child, or maybe two... you don't grow up to have seven yourself. But then they send young children to school where many or most of the teachers are childless women. Their television programming will portray most women as childless, and those without children as being the happiest, and so on. I don't know anything about Greek comedy entertainment, but if it's anything like that of the rest of the western world, there will be all those groaner jokes about how horrible having a family is.

There are other childless cultures where these aren't the major factors in childlessness, but Greece doesn't strike me as one of those.

That's 5-10% growth a year for over 15 years. That's a huge compounding problem.

Planning for stability is something that we as a species need to adapt to socially. Unless there's new room for growth like expanding robot mining to the asteroids or to solar panels in space. Eternal Growth just isn't sustainable.

there's no need for jousting at infinities.

as long as there are houses to insulate, jobs to specialize in, unread overnment papers to stop printing, inefficiencies to solve, there's economic growth possible.

the problem is that Greece is a poster child for the EU's problems (and of "developed economies")

it's the state/regional version of the middle-income trap, no one wants to do big projects, because relatively everything is expensive in developed economies (Baumol, permitting is hard, money goes into many inefficient small and important things)

there's no need for asteroid mining, there's need for investing in things that improve productivity, and that's basically cheaper inputs (energy, logistics, other cost of living things like housing!), or improve output (education, competitiveness, better access to markets, decreasing language barriers, making bureaucracy easier and smarter, etc)

> overnment papers to stop printing, inefficiencies to solve, there's economic growth possible.

You’ve got it backwards!

If everyone is very efficient, houses are perfectly insulated and everyone replaces SUVs with bicycles, and has huge savings in the bank

GDP of the country actually goes DOWN in that scenario

Anyhow, the main point stands - if Growth is Zero, economy should be stable, not collapsing. The system should not behave like a drug addict

If growth is zero then you literally end up with a zero sum game where each person can only grow his pie by taking from someone else.

depends on prices!

if a community values bikes more than SUVs GDP can still go up.

also it depends on the SUV, are people ditching a 20 year old thing for electric bikes or ...?

hedonistic adjustments are notoriously difficult in these calculations, but also necessary.

It seems like say Kansas in the US (I am no expert on Kansas, so correct me if I am wrong), where educated ambitious young people move somewhere else. People with fewer options, or older people, stay. Greece is in the EU and there citizens have access to the EU job market. It's natural for cities and regions to concentrate opportunity. The prosperous regions can subsidize the rural parts, like they do in the US.

I looked at the population pyramid for Greece, just guessing but it looks like there are 10% fewer women in their 20s than men.

Sometimes that sort of thing is because men come to work. Sometimes it's because young women up and leave.

This article discusses educated women leaving Greece.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13607804211023521

5-10% is only realistic in economies playing catch-up. Fully developed economies grow closer to 2%.

> If the economy grew a respectable 5-10%/year instead of flatlining since 2008, they would have no problem

This real problem would not be a problem if this imaginary and impossible thing has happened as well

Hungary is trying to raise the total fertility rate by... Removing personal income tax, for life, for any woman who had four or more children. It's too early to know if it'll work or not but Hungary is not "Japan bad" or "Greece bad" from the fertility standpoint.

But it's not just economical: the west worked very hard to destroy the notion of the family and worked even harder to convince women they didn't need neither any men nor any kid, while at the same time creating shitload of inflation and raising taxes like mad. Which woman wants a kid in a world where an heterosexual man is considered evil incarnate and where, anyway, there's not enough money to properly raise kids?

I'm not even starting on what is actually taught to kids these days in public schools in the west: there are parents that actually need to opt-out their fifth-graders (aka 9 to 10 years old kid) from classes teaching them to masturbate at home while making sure their parents aren't aware of it (but of course they can discuss that with the teachers)... No, I'm not making this shit up.

You want kids in today's world? Who's living in, say, the UK atm and thinking "What a great environment to raise a kid!". Who's living in, say, Springfield Ohio and actually thinking about having kids?

It's much more than just an economical failure: the west is crashing.

The population growth rate is one of the major factors of the economic growth rate. For an economy to repeatedly grow 5-10% a year, which is economic miracle territory, you almost have to be cresting the demographic transition when a large generation starts to have smaller families. That happened generations ago in Greece. To have growth like that in the face of population decline would require a resource windfall like discovering huge deposits of oil, or the discovery of some epochal technologies to boost productivity.

I agree that economic incentives can depress the birthrate, but a low birthrate depresses economic growth as well. It's a vicious cycle compounded by politics wherein the diminishing surplus generated by a shrinking workforce is used to pay for pensions and other elder benefits that don't increase productivity.

No one has figured out how to break out of this cycle once it becomes established.

> No one has figured out how to break out of this cycle once it becomes established.

I don't think that's true. Usually the way you break out of the cycle is to have a major war, pandemic, famine, or genocide, and then the survivors naturally start having more babies once it's clear that they are the survivors and all of their competition for resources has been eliminated.

The Dark Ages were followed by significant population growth in the High Middle Ages, Black Death was followed by population growth of the Rennaissance, population stagnation in Europe became population growth in the United States as the Native American genocide was completed, and WW2 was followed by the Baby Boom.

It is misleading to say that WWII was followed by the Baby Boom as people tend to infer from that that WWII caused the Baby Boom which does not really fit with the historical facts.

WWI was not followed by a Baby Boom - in fact US birth rates declined from 1909 until the middle of the Great Depression in 1935. Then birth rates started rising from before 1939 which is before WW2 even started.

How History Works made a good YouTube video on this, I'd recommend it: https://youtu.be/Ts1ZFHA4cCw

Reply on news.ycombinator.com