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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

The system has effectively failed most everywhere on the West. The post-WWII generations are numerous and have a long life expectancy, apparently longer than the pension systems planned for. Generations that came after them are less numerous, and, in a way, somehow less prosperous. They cannot pay enough to keep the pension systems afloat.

The Japanese faced this earlier and harder than Europe, with about 30% of their population being past the retirement age. They increased their productivity very significantly, but it's still not enough, and a lot of older folks in Japan keep working well past the retirement age, sometimes even re-hired by the companies from which they had retired.

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Do you have a sense of how you see it playing out?

It'll keep getting worse, as more and more people concentrate into large cities. And large cities are family-hostile. The birth rate in cities is strongly anti-correlated with the city size. People just don't feel content and happy to have children in dense cities.

Japan is very illustrative in this regard. Young people are forced into unaffordable cities, where they often live in cramped shoebox-sized apartments. While beautiful spacious traditional homes are decaying just 2 hours away by car.

What can help? Promote smaller cities, by focusing on making smaller cities more attractive for employers. This is already happening with the remote work, and it helps: https://eig.org/families-exodus/

How to make smaller cities more attractive? Put a stop to densification of larger cities, and tax (or cap-and-trade) the office space in dense areas.

> The birth rate in cities is strongly anti-correlated with the city size.

This might be true, but could be for many reasons. There's not enough info in that to promote a specific response.

Everything in social sciences has plenty of reasons and exceptions.

The thing is, there is not much you can change in peoples' behavior. So your only option is to stimulate the behaviors that you want.

Do you envision we will see any forced egalitarian land/wealth distribution?

Why? The land for habitation is not scarce. The entire US urban footprint is around 2% of the land area.

The unaffordable housing cost is entirely an artifact of urbanism gone wrong.

Well in my country all the land is owned, either by the crown or by land owners, so at least in my country, the government would have to just...give away land? (Canada, The West)

You can buy an area in Canada the size of a European country for less than a condo in Manhattan.

If you go outside of big cities, land price is not an issue. At all.

To build a house and live sustainably it needs to be somewhat near other community surly? For access to grocery, education and health care, and then also modern opportunities. Barrie is probably the most reasonable area outside of Toronto and land out there is still very expensive. How do you see it working for someone who just graduated from college and has $200k in student debt? I know a lot of people who are stuck, I don't know the solution. If I was them and society wanted me to have a kid for the good of society, I'd say sure, give me a house and $3MM, other wise, why bother...?? Nobody wants to continue this miserable cycle.

Of course, building a new community from scratch is hard and is probably not worth it. But there are plenty of small cities that can act as "seeds".

Barrie is still in the general Toronto area, so it's expensive. Sudbury further north that is definitely not a part of Toronto anymore, has very reasonable houses for ~$400k, or 5 years of average household income in Ontario. This is well within the normal "affordable" range, so a 20-years mortgage will be around 30% of income.

The problem is, people _can't_ live in Sudbury because there are no jobs there!

My plan at some point is to do a big tech start-up in Winnipeg. Bit of other stuff still to do first, but I have an eye on Winnipeg (good flight times!!)

Hah. When I was working at Amazon, my team acquired a startup in Winnipeg. Apparently, there are quite a few software companies out there

This is a very sensible comment. One thing that could explain why I see (subjectively) a lot more bigger families in Switzerland where I live compared to other places in Europe is that cities‘ size is „just right“, so having a family to start with is much easier than in large, urban areas.

> The birth rate in cities is strongly anti-correlated with the city size. People just don't feel content and happy to have children in dense cities.

Or people in big cities have plenty of opportunities and interests than just to have children.

People often want to live in big cities due to social reasons, not just due to employment opportunities.

Wait, but NotJustBikes keeps telling us that density is good.

Dense is good. You'll notice that the drop in fertility matches up with the generation that grew up in the suburbs.

Not quite. Baby boomers are mostly explained by delayed births due to the Great Depression, and then by greatly improved living condition in the newly settled suburbs: https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/the-baby-boom-saw-a...

But the current drop below the replacement rate is all due to increased density. If you look at the stats, the urbanization percent stayed flat. However, more and more people are moving into a smaller and smaller set of large cities.

That's why suburbs are (relatively) full of kids, but dense urban areas look like vasectomy sanctuaries.

> People just don't feel content and happy to have children in dense cities.

Correlation is not causation. People happily raised children in dense cities for centuries. It was only when the postwar regime of making new housing illegal took hold, and housing prices inevitably spiralled out of control, that they stopped.

> Young people are forced into unaffordable cities, where they often live in cramped shoebox-sized apartments. While beautiful spacious traditional homes are decaying just 2 hours away by car.

Those old houses look great in instagram photos but they're not very fun to actually live in. Young people are rightly prioritising places that are good to live instead of the boomer square feet fetish.

> Put a stop to densification of larger cities, and tax (or cap-and-trade) the office space in dense areas.

Killing the most economically productive parts of the country is not going to magically make other parts more productive, it's just going to destroy the whole country's economy.

The causes of the population decline are a) women marrying later, or not marrying at all, because they have the option of a career and prefer that b) families that want to give their children a good future having few children, mainly because of the cost of education. Those are the things you need to address if you want to change it.

> Correlation is not causation. People happily raised children in dense cities for centuries.

London is an example of such a city. Its population in 1750 was 750000 people. It was not a "large city" at all by current standards.

> Those old houses look great in instagram photos but they're not very fun to actually live in.

Oh, I agree. However, for the price of an apartment in Tokyo, you can build a _new_ home with all the modern amenities.

> Young people are rightly prioritising places that are good to live instead of the boomer square feet fetish.

Yeah, like "microapartments" where you can cook food while sitting on a toilet. Very well suited for hikikomori, great for raising 3 children!

> Killing the most economically productive parts of the country is not going to magically make other parts more productive, it's just going to destroy the whole country's economy.

It won't kill anything, it will just move jobs out of large cities. We've already had a "dry run" of this during the pandemic.

> amilies that want to give their children a good future having few children, mainly because of the cost of education.

Europe has free (or cheap) education. Yet birth rates are even lower than in the US.

> Those are the things you need to address if you want to change it.

Then why people moving out of cities have a greater fertility rate?

> London is an example of such a city. Its population in 1750 was 750000 people

And its population in the 1930s, with a healthy fertility rate, was 11 million.

> for the price of an apartment in Tokyo, you can build a _new_ home with all the modern amenities.

Maybe - bear in mind that building costs are much higher out in the country. But assuming you build a big house, what would you do with it? I guess all the cleaning will help make life less boring.

> It won't kill anything, it will just move jobs out of large cities. We've already had a "dry run" of this during the pandemic.

The pandemic did a lot of economic damage, and many jobs stayed in the cities or are rushing to return there now.

> Europe has free (or cheap) education.

But much stronger womens' rights and correspondingly low marriage rates.

> Then why people moving out of cities have a greater fertility rate?

In Japan? Maybe because of all the cash subsidies for moving out with children.

> Those old houses look great in instagram photos but they're not very fun to actually live in. Young people are rightly prioritising places that are good to live instead of the boomer square feet fetish.

How practical is raising kids in a 20m2 studio? Especially if you've got multiple. I'd bet not nearly as practical as in a house. Plus the recent trend of building lots of smaller apartments instead of a bit bigger and way more practical ones.

20 is maybe going too far, but a bigger space is often just harder to keep clean, especially with kids. Of course if you're raising kids in a city apartment you'll want them spending a lot of time out of the house (whether that's parks, community centers, just shopping, ...) but that's a good healthy practice anyway.

How do you know that this is separated from other factors, like woman being more educated and have more access to birth control in urban area ? How can we be sure that housing size is the single deciding factor as you said ?

You can't know that for certain, but you can look at evidence: the household size increases when people move away from dense cities.

The other way around is more difficult to quantify, and a lot of demographic studies look at immigrants from poor countries.

To tell you the truth I only ever see poor people (immigrants, mostly) that carry around like 3-4 kids in cities (I am in SF) while everyone else either has 1 or no kids.

They don’t speak English and I’m not sure if they will assimilate well. I already see street vendors, trash everywhere, and other 3rd world behavior in some parts of SF.

I’m an immigrant from 3rd world. It’s pretty sad to see here.

I feel, generally, with an aging population + rising unemployment due to AI, we'll reach a crunch point that puts governments under immense pressure to increase taxes (probably on megacorps & the wealthy) more in order to fund welfare. The most optimistic, utopian, solution would be UBI and an artisan economy, but I think we all know that capitalism isn't kind enough for that to play out so we'll probably end up with something much more dystopian.

> we'll reach a crunch point that puts governments under immense pressure to increase taxes (probably on megacorps & the wealthy) more in order to fund welfare.

I don't see how even that helps. What you need to fund basic welfare is a large supply of basic goods (shelter, food, medical care). The basic problem with retirement of a lager generation than subsequent generations is a lack of labor/productivity. Those basic goods don't really respond well to just throwing money from tech companies/rich people at the problem, you need people to work to provide those goods and services.

The only way taxes help is if they discourage "unproductive" economic activity (SWEs and financial planners) so much that those people start working as nurses and construction workers instead.

Generations after the boomers create more, with less energy, but the boomers rigged the system and captured the increases.

The spend like crazy on nothing, cruises, trinkets and inflated healthcare. All that spending yields nothing of substance except for experienced and critical doctors.

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