Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

> Eventually, in 1994, the economist Lant Pritchett discovered the most powerful national fertility predictor ever detected. That decisive factor turned out to be simple: what women want. Because survey data conventionally focus on female fertility preferences, not those of their husbands or partners, scholars know much more about women’s desire for children than men’s. Pritchett determined that there is an almost one-to-one correspondence around the world between national fertility levels and the number of babies women say they want to have. This finding underscored the central role of volition—of human agency—in fertility patterns.

I want to draw attention to this specific quote, because it gets to the root cause of the depopulation situation. Fertility rates are aligning to desired fertility of women, and while this perspective might seem dated based on the 1994 date in the quote, I believe there is substantial evidence that this thesis still holds true today (citations provided in my comments in the subthread below).

If this is indeed the case, and population decline is truly caused by aggregate intentional choice with regards to reduced/lower fertility, it is unlikely this (if one considers it a challenge) can be solved for by increasing fertility rates via policy. Therefore, humanity should attempt to forecast the future, and plan mitigations and contingencies around the fact there there will be less humans and labor in the future.

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Pick up a copy of Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson; ISBN13: 9781984823229. Contains interviews with women indicating what I quoted from various cultures. Women want less children than men and society want them to have (TLDR).

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/545397/empty-planet... (“Once a woman receives enough information and autonomy to make an informed and self-directed choice about when to have children, and how many to have, she immediately has fewer of them, and has them later.”)

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... | https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30677-2 ("Our findings suggest that continued trends in female educational attainment and access to contraception will hasten declines in fertility and slow population growth. A sustained TFR lower than the replacement level in many countries, including China and India, would have economic, social, environmental, and geopolitical consequences. Policy options to adapt to continued low fertility, while sustaining and enhancing female reproductive health, will be crucial in the years to come.")

https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate#what-explains-the-... ("Our World in Data: What explains the declining fertility rate?")

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/07/25/the-exp... ("Pew Research: 57% of adults under 50 who say they’re unlikely to ever have kids say a major reason is they just don’t want to; 31% of those ages 50 and older without kids cite this as a reason they never had them")

https://www.axios.com/2024/07/25/adults-no-children-why-pew-... ("64% of young women say they just don't want children, compared to 50% of men.")

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-68402139 ("Why South Korean women aren't having babies: The reason women are not having children now is because they have the courage to talk about it.")

> Pick up a copy of Empty Planet

Haven't read this, thanks for the recommendation.

> Once a woman receives enough information and autonomy to make an informed and self-directed choice about when to have children, and how many to have, she immediately has fewer of them, and has them later.

I do not agree with this premise.

> adults under 50 who say they’re unlikely to ever have kids say a major reason is they just don’t want to

This is like asking the anorexic why they don't eat and believing them when they tell you that they're "just not hungry".

Reality stands on its own without belief in it. Even in countries with robust (ie expensive) pro natalist fiscal policy, it does not materially improve the fertility rate.

I ask, out of curiosity, what you do believe the culprit is and what your data to back the assertion is (if the cause is not empowered women making fertility choices).

https://reason.com/2023/05/02/storks-dont-take-orders-from-t... ("South Korea spent more than $200 billion subsidizing child care and parental leave over the past 16 years, President Yoon Suk Yeol said last fall. Yet the fertility rate fell from 1.1 in 2006 to 0.81 in 2021. The amount of money required to trigger even these small effects is enormous. In "The Economic Consequences of Family Policies," published in the Journal of Economic Perspectives in 2017, researchers found "one extra percentage point of GDP spending" on early childhood education and child care programs was "associated with 0.2 extra children per woman." In the U.S., where the 2022 GDP was $25.46 trillion, that would mean spending more than $250 billion.")

https://www.nber.org/papers/w23051 ("The Economic Consequences of Family Policies: Lessons from a Century of Legislation in High-Income Countries")

Kinda wonder if/how we could/should turn having (and caring for!) children into its own serious career. As in: Have 8 well-tended children and you're top 10% of disposable income (someone needs to work out the math on this).

> Reality stands on its own without belief in it.

What data?

> Even in countries with robust (ie expensive) pro natalist fiscal policy, it does not materially improve the fertility rate.

I'm aware of this. I even understand why... it's not that difficult. While it probably remains true that you can bribe someone to raise a child, the monetary amount required isn't a few thousand bucks. But if a government needs 100,000 babies to be born, they also can't afford to pay $1 billion each. So they cheapskate out, and we get bribes far too small to make any difference. (One might also wonder what "product quality" one would get in such circumstances.)

> I ask, out of curiosity, what you do believe the culprit is

A contagious mental illness. We know some mental illnesses to be contagious (teenage suicide, for instance). This is why the surveys are so useless. Psychology has already hinted that people often do not know why they make the decisions that they make and instead invent post hoc rationalizations after the fact. Asking them "why did you have no children" isn't going to elicit any useful information at all, any more than asking the 15 yr old why they attempted suicide after 3 other teens did so in nearby towns.

> researchers found "one extra percentage point of GDP spending" on early childhood education and child care programs was "associated with 0.2 extra children per woman."

The education itself isn't what causes this. But the public schools are the place where the contagion is endemic, and so that's where they're exposed to it. You'd find all sorts of strange differences if you knew where to look, I think. Girls who "graduated" illiterate without an education to speak of would have fertility rates just as low as high achievers, because they're still exposed to the contagion. I doubt that elite private schools are safe either, because though it would appear that those schools are disconnected from the system at large, they're still staffed by the same sorts of teachers and administrators moving back and forth between public and private schools as their career progresses.

I should also point out that dissolving the public education system (even if that were feasible from a political standpoint) is unlikely to change things substantially. New vectors are arising, ready to take over. I don't think we can policy our way out of this.

>Even in countries with robust (ie expensive) pro natalist fiscal policy

Nit: This patently does not exist. Zero countries pay or provide anywhere close to the actual cost of raising a child, let alone the lost opportunity of choosing to raise children vs living a life dedicated to yourself.

That actual cost is horrifically high, but I promise you if it was offered, people would have more children. We WILL have to have that discussion eventually, unless we somehow return to a society where women are property and don't have rights, or unless we just outsource the whole baby making process to the places of the world that DO work like that, but people hate immigrants, especially when they are poor (for some fucking reason).

I strongly agree, and that is a material component of this story: global depopulation is underway. Why? Because women can affirm their reproductive decisions now. We've built entire systems upon historical fertility assumptions, assumptions that did not assume women having agency at scale would lead to a rapid decline in fertility rates. Those systems are now in objective peril. Does the will exist to pay the "horrifically high" costs you mention? Based on all available evidence, that does not appear to be the case. There is enough will to loudly complain, but nothing can be done about it, nor would the costs ever be accepted as necessary by anyone with the power to accept said costs and institute said costly policy.

That's the story, in my humble opinion. Not that depopulation is underway, but that nothing can be done about it, and any policy put forth to try to do something about it would be so expensive as to be deemed impossible.

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