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Comment by bboygravity | Hacker News Reader

Except that that future of a big powerful China doesn't exist. Their birth-rate is 1.

Game-over.

China will probably be the only country that solves this.

..Any country can solve it, just incentivise families. Simple things like ensuring young people have access to affordable housing and daycare. If I was at the start of my career ladder in a major urban area now, having a family would be close to the bottom of my priority list. Its not rocket science.

This isn't true and has been tried in the Nordic countries.

This is an outstanding article on the subject: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/03/03/the-population...

> .Any country can solve it, just incentivise families.

In the US, parenting time is up 20-fold, from a few hours per week to 24/7 adulting.

Companion to that is that free-range land has shrunk from many sq/mi to a few sq/yds. Car culture and trespassing culture has eliminated the irreplaceable environments where adult-free, peer time nurtured mental health and abilities.

As near as I can tell, parenting and childhood is irreparably broken in the US.

We certainly seem incapable of recalling what sustainable parenting once looked like.

On rare occasion someone will recall that kids once roamed all over. Maybe that gets connected to less mental health issues. Either way it's all forgotten moments later.

I agree it's broken, just in the other direction. Just stick an ipad in front of the kid and ignore it for hours

From before written history until a few generations ago, kids spent hours/day in adult-free, peer time making mistakes in everything from social interaction to physically risky play - and learning from those mistakes.

Today kids live entirely in adult curated, adult populated boxes. I'm not inclined to blame ipads for that.

Daycare is some weird shit with such abundance of [lonely] old people.

Unless they are friends or family regulations will never allow. But you are right there is an abundance of old lonely people who would do this for nothing and it would benefit everyone.

> Any country can solve it, just incentivise families

The point of OP and what people don't get is that it's far easier to shift policies to brace for tough situations when you have a uniparty system and you're willing to make sacrifices. No 4 year administration is in any way incentivised to enact policies that only become effective after the next election. Note that I'm not saying that undemocratic systems are the solution.

> Any country can solve it

Most wealthy countries have already solved it: immigration.

Considering their moves in Africa, I wouldn't be surprised if they bring the slave trade back.

The USA is also below replacement levels.

Not with immigration.

Immigration will take a nosedive under Trump.

That's not necessarily a good thing. Do the New Americans want the same things as the pre-existing ones? Are they as capable? Not just "in a few generations" but here and now? Are they even likely to be as capable "in a few generations"?

If the statistics aren't very wrong, it doesn't seem like a solution.

Indian Americans make the most money in America, I’m sure immigrants can be capable

“Making the most money” isn’t the same as building a society people want to live in

by all statistics, it is Americans that make the life in the USA insufferable: corrupt politicians, oligarchs, lobbyists, party leaders, and criminals (the ones that sell drugs and shoot people).

go to any county/state jail and try to find a single H-1B visa holder there... its all home grown foundational Americans, raised on McDonalds and Coke

Don't worry, Republicans are hard at work making the USA a pariah state and turning away the educated migrants who've been behind most of the innovation and research of past decades.

What, non-migrant Americans are not up to it?

The US has benefited quite a bit by being a magnet for some of the most educated and driven people from around the world. This is not a controversial take.

Now, legal resident noncitizens are being deported for having political views that oppose the ruling executive party. This is not normal in the US.

Immigration is a double edge sword. Sure, it brings highly educated people on the top end, but also less educated at the bottom curve.

and on balance it changes demographics dramatically, that also shapes US policy in the future. It will be harder for USA to continue to be bloody warmongering machine with Military industrial complex dictating the policy and bombing countries and blowing up civilians around the world.

Immigration isn’t risk free

You get your birth rates up, but you also risk alienating your native born population and electing far right morons into office

Jury’s out on whether a tfr of 1.0 of native born people is better than a tfr of 1.4 with immigrants

US birthrate is 1.6, really bad, but by far less disasterous and permanent as China's 1.

I Googled: china fertility rate 2024

A couple of reliable sources say: 1.7 births per woman

Where did you get 1?

No credible source says 1.7, the source that says this must be based on some kinda UN projection of 2010. Real TFR is probably around 1.0, in some parts of china it's below 0.7 (in the northeast it's around this number, in Macao it's 0.4). A lot of other countries are completely fucked as well and google pushes up UN projections from years ago (Like colombia UN projects the fertility rate to be higher in 2100 than it is according to the official numbers right now).

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