The Birth-Rate Crisis Isn't as Bad as You've Heard–It's Worse
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
This is why immigration is so important to the economy of a developed nation. You bring in families from around the world, give them amazing opportunities, then hire them to take care of the elderly and keep the lights on. Instead, our nation is trying to shut the door like a lone hoarder living in a pile of rotting trash.
https://www.gapminder.org/answers/how-did-babies-per-woman-c...
Americans should know this intuitively by dint of most of us never having been "officially" IQ tested. Somehow, the notion of reliable national IQ statistics persists.
I was tested by the public school system of the second-largest city in Massachusetts and have no reason to believe that my experience was atypical.
About the same time as I was being tested, in Diana v. State Board of Education (1970) a court ruled that a school could not place students in a class for mild mental retardation because of a low score on the Stanford Benet IQ test, which of course implies that she was tested by her school.
There were other lawsuits like this in other US states.
There is no such thing as "national IQ". That's all I came here to say. I didn't raise my hand and ask to litigate whether anybody on HN had ever taken an "official" IQ test. I'm sure several people have. Most of us: no.
The point of this thread isn't that IQ testing doesn't exist. It's that reliable (or even plausible) comparative national IQ metrics exist. That has to be true for the claim made upthread to make any sense. And: it isn't true.
farm owners don't give a fuck what color the cattle is.
>You bring in families from around the world
and if/when they integrate into the host society, their children will have as few children as the natives
>give them amazing opportunities, then hire them to take care of the elderly
yeah, sure. changing adult diapers. such an amazing opportunity
>This is why immigration is so important to the economy of a developed nation.
exploiting the resources of the undeveloped nations is bread and butter of the developed nations, yeah.
Nursing and elder care is a field that anyone can respect. Why do you spit on their contribution to society?
Of course that doesn't take away from anyone's enjoyment of that line of work, it is truly important, but it's not something that the vast majority of people see as an "amazing opportunity".
>> Caregiving is an amazing opportunity. It is life-changing for the person receiving the care. It is fulfilling and soul-affirming for the person delivering the care.
That the market doesn't pay well for the work is immaterial to its value.
If you're agreeing to everything they said, and only disagreeing that it pays well: yes.
People don't leave their home countries and entire lives behind because they're looking for the "opportunity" of nursing a foreigner for a pittance. They do it because they want to make good money and provide for their families.
Unfortunately, we also scorn the people who would want to do them. We set very low immigration limits, and we pay the people who do those jobs (even native ones) very poorly.
So these jobs are simultaneously "amazing opportunities" and "abusive".
"kids these days don't want to work!" -- then why aren't you showing them how?
> yeah, sure. changing adult diapers. such an amazing opportunity
You seem to have inadvertently discounted the experiences of people like my dad’s African-born eye doc, who came to this county for the opportunity of medical training which he now uses to make injections into my elderly dad’s eyes every few months.
(Either that or you’re an idiot).
The person didn't say anything that contradicts what they're saying other than that you're unhappy with the status quo that is offered to migrant workers. And you're absolutely right. But a more constructive dialogue would be "let's improve the conditions for those people."
The fallacy here is that the article does not consider the possibility of rising worker productivity. If productivity rises quickly enough, the ever fewer workers could face a future of lower taxes, lower debt, and earlier retirement.
It's also interesting that the Atlantics of the world have gone from "global fertility is rising and we're all doomed" to "global fertility is falling and we're all doomed". I wonder if in between there was ever an Atlantic article stating that global fertility was optimal and we are not, for the next couple weeks or so, all doomed.
Probably not. Doomers gotta doom.
One looks at the size of the population, which is projected to keep growing for a while. It keeps growing because people live for a long time.
The second looks at the age distribution of the population. What comes after the population peak.
Both are valid problems.
The question is - how can be free up a higher percentage of people who are able to propel humanity forward from the drudgery of wage slavery in a sustainable manner?
And you need to effectively allocate cognitively proficient people to this as well, not just anyone.
1. Rapid change of any kind is bad in any ecosystem. Growing the population too fast creates one set of problems, shrinking the population too fast creates a different set of problems.
2. modern humans have the ability to expand consumption to use all available resources. 10 million jet-setting billionaires have a far worse impact on the environment than 1 billion poor people. Adjusting the environmental impact per human is going to have a far greater effect on the environment, and more quickly, than population changes.
And you are right - but poor people _want_ to have material luxuries, by and large, so we should consider what we want our equilibrium state to look like.
Personally, I'm hoping for "8-10 billion people eating low meat diets, living in well insulated homes powered by renewable electricity, in places where they can walk, bike, or take public transport for almost all of their daily needs, and working a 20 hour (or less) week, with the remainder of their time filled with their friends, families, creative passions, and any other joys not yet comprehended"
but it doesn't seem like that's where we're headed.
I’m not the original commenter, but I assume that the reference is that this/your group fairly reliably across most cultures does not maintain the 2.1 children per woman birth rate / replacement rate needed to sustain a population.
At a minimum, this seems to be true for this particular socioeconomic class in most parts of Europe, East Asia, and US/Canada. Not sure about South Asia.
We are not on track for equilibrium or a slow decrease over centuries. We are on track for a demographic cliff.
But given that the statistics have wide error bars, and there are so many other intervening factors, "a bit more than two" is just as good a way to calculate it.
From individual families' perspectives, you can only have a whole number of kids anyway, so 2.1 vs. 2.04 isn't a meaningful difference.
I like people! I have two kids myself and love them. But it's not like life was horrible when Earth had 5 billion people.
(Note - I am NOT saying that people in poor countries, who tend to use a minute fraction of the resources of rich people, having lots of kids, is necessarily an issue. But if we want to make a higher standard of living possible for everyone in the world it will be easier to do, ecologically speaking, with 9 billion people than with 15 billion)
You won't have many brilliant people in a small natural population.
Without them it's «not with a bang, but with a whimper»
There's very little to worry about here. Humans are amazingly adaptable, and will find ways to thrive without increasing the population by billions. There are all kinds of benefits to a population that isn't expanding exponentially.
If you are doing projection in just one dimension you can be assured to be wrong.
Here's another angle: In poor countries where farming is the main occupation, birth rates tend to be high. But as farming becomes automated, birth rates drop. Following this pattern, AI could push people out of service jobs and potentially impact birth rates in a similar way.
Of course this is just my mind making stuff up. Who know how it'll turn up.
This is a thread about the lack of people to work, not the excess. The jobs that are going to disappear will do so together with the retired/deceased workers.
(paid) hours worked per family are massively up over time despite exponential progress. We have stuff but no time nor security.
The countries with the most dire birth rates are the ones with a workaholic culture.
The depressing reality is rather than giving people back their time, even more of it will be pushed for in the future, to sustain the ageing population.
Previous:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44423897 - June 2025 (22 comments)
For my part, I'm not convinced the issues will be insurmountable and terrible.
In other words, is it perhaps ("only") a two-generation pain-span the world is going to have to endure?
No! Read the article. Birth rates can go extremely low (<0.5), and a society with fertility <2 goes gets exponentially smaller with each generation.
I hang out in these pronatal communities, mostly on Twitter. It's a very interesting mix. There's far right wing Nazis and far left wing Communists, atheists and deeply conservative Christians and Muslims. All groping for any clue about how to get people to have more kids. No one knows what recipe of key thing will make people have more.
It reminds me of Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Chase" (Season 6, Episode 20). It's the one where Picard and crew follow a trail of genetic clues left by an ancient humanoid species, eventually discovering that most major humanoid species in the Alpha Quadrant, including Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, and Humans, share a common ancestry. Once they figure it out, they all start shooting again and race for the prize.
I imagine the pronatal community will do the same thing if a recipe is discovered.
The other thing is that I do a lot of worldbuilding with mega large societies, like 1 trillion people. It's a weird thing, but fun for me.
In looking at all the data we have on nations and the fun story building aspects, one thing pops out over and over: population. I'd you want to model a city or a province or a state, you need to know the population more than anything else. That'll be the best guide to the number of subway stops, patents per capital, gasoline station placement, average talking and walking speed, etc. it's the key.
And you find that countries/cities/states with higher raw population are generally better places to live. It seems that the more people there are in an arbitrary area, the better things are in gestalt.
So, when we complain that we've got too many people, I think that's wrong. I think we're not taking care of people we'll enough. But in my ramblings through government datasets, it seems that more people is generally just an objectively good thing.
This won't happen though. Instead we'll combine neural-link and AI and will effectively become bionic beings. You'll be forced to join as to not become an obsolete sub-creature.
My sister got three kids, but she got them after 30.
My mom and my grandma got their first child with 20.
Normalizing women as equals in the workforce is great from a rights perspective, but as incomes have started to equalize (and actually start to tip the other direction in younger generations), the pool of prospective mates has shrunk because a large majority of women won't date men that cannot out-earn them. Additionally, there is the problem that a woman taking maternity leave suffers a long-lasting (if not permanent) dip in her earnings from then on. Equivalent paternity leave could help to balance things out, but in the US at least, there are virtually no employers who offer it.
Another hallmark of the women's rights movement which is largely negative has been the demonization of housewives as lessers and treating raising kids as a form of servitude. That in itself discourages having children. However, as stay at home dads are still largely considered unacceptable, having kids now increasingly relies upon extremely expensive day care, significantly increasing their economic burden. If a dual-income household made significantly more than their single-income household counterparts of prior generations (adjusted for inflation), this may be a non-issue, but if anything, dual-income is often required just to get by nowadays.
Your anecdote suggests pushing out the population but not causing it to decline.
A woman who waits until 30 to start a family is likely to not have one. It's a deeply unfortunate dilemma, because her male partner suffers much less decline.
I just thought, maybe the decline is just temporary.
This is morally fine and correct from a fairness principle but it misses the point entirely. Dual income workism is the least likely to produce family sizes large enough to not go extinct. The model may be fair but at the same time its suicidal.
Similarly, seeing a work break to take care of children as an "opportunity cost" suggest that the optimum life path is a 4-5 decades long maximalist devotion to some corporate.
Obviously, each individual and couple is free to pursuit whatever they want, but collectively these models and norms will end us.
I have read various articles over the years stating the US economy is/was outdoing the rest of the Tier 1 Countries due to its immigration, even broken as it is. Now we have these racists in charge and they have no idea how much long term economic harm they are doing to the economy.
Again, I am still surprised how Wall Street is letting this happen. Now that they got their Tax Cut for the Rich, maybe the will push back against Trump.
* please disregard the data that shows that it doesn't help at all.
[1]: https://data.census.gov/table/ACSDP5Y2023.DP04?t=Housing+Uni...
would they be doing that if they didn't have a guarantee that importation of millions of people will continue?
>Do you really think someone who makes less than you do, without any credit history, is purchasing a home that's out of your price range?
there are millions of Chinese and Indians who can buy those homes with cash.
Nevermind the fact that it was pulling teeth to get an Irish builder to show up.
Depends on the builder, but like many, many constrained services in Ireland you'll do better if you (or someone you know) have a pre-existing relationship with them.
Maybe it's a place thing also? I do know that we've never had any issues getting plumbers/electricians/roofers/general handypeople to show up, but we're in Dublin.
Yeah fair enough that really sucks. I don't disagree that the Latvians were better, but note that there's a selection bias here. The good and responsive Irish builders are probably much more booked up, so you may end up dealing with the flaky ones while the Latvians may have less of an orderbook to work through.
Additionally Ireland (all the non-Dublin parts, at least) lost many, many building professionals after the bust so there may just not be enough people there.
We're also currently devoting an absurd amount of resources developing technology aimed at replacing as much human labor as possible. All this while Western culture continues to indoctrinate us with the belief that our lives are meaningless without the jobs they are also trying to eliminate.
Currently we have here a social system with a positive feedback loop which will eventually rip itself apart.
When that birth is far below replacement, you get a collapse that cannot be stopped once it gets going.
the economy will collapse if everyone stops having children
really makes you think