The Global Fertility Crisis Is Worse Than You Probably Think | Hacker News Reader

The Global Fertility Crisis Is Worse Than You Probably Think

derekthompson.org

36 pointsmomentmaker53 comments

This is "only" a crisis in the sense that our current economies break down if the influx of new consumers slows down. We'll adapt. Won't be painless, but it is not catastrophic, at least not in the same sense that climate change is catastrophic

> “Do you know how hard you need to abuse a mammal to make them not have children?” If you asked Leahy what the explanation was, “my answer is technology,” he said. “My answer is social media. My answer is AI.”

My answer may include that, especially for richer countries, but also includes, and at a mucher higher placing for all countries:

    * reduced child mortality risk, family planning
    * urbanization; reduction of child-as-farmhand-labor incentives
    * increasing distance to parent support networks, the disaggregation of clan/extended family households
    * economic uncertainty

Also, the global fertility crisis isn't too few births, it's too many. Pretty much all of the world's problems boil down to too many people competing for too few resources. Less humans competing for and consuming everything imaginable, less problems.

Even if you remove the economic interests, human society has always worked with the young taking care of the old. We're reaching the point where there is no more young. That's a problem.

A 20 year old was made 20 years ago.

except automation and technology multiplying labor, right? isnt the point of all this innovation to do more with less. are you saying that fewer people, with the assistance of robots, cant provide food, medicine, shelter, and water to the aging?

do you have any idea how much human labor elder care takes? caring for cognitively impaired but otherwise functioning human beings is a full time++ job, often for more than one person depending on the individual. there’s a reason they keep old folks loaded.

I think the real issue is not fertility. It is humans refusing to share wealth fairly, which then leads to low fertility.

A world with fewer humans, plus AI/robots doing the heavy work would be amazing, if we shared wealth fairly.

Unless we humans figure out a way to build institutions that share wealth rather than hoard it, then we are toast either way.

Headline should read “The global wealth hoarding crisis is worse than you think”

That doesn't really make sense considering low-income demographics have the highest birth rates

That’s not true, specially in highly developed nations.

https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-money-more-babies-whats-the-...

Communism seems to fail every time it's attempted. Probably not because it's a bad ideology per se, but because it doesn't take greed as a human base trait into consideration.

So yes, but until a new Homo species evolves (time scale: millions of years,) we're going to have to adapt to the base traits of Homo sapiens.

All democratic capitalist societies have had wealth redistribution, including the USA. Sharing wealth doesn't necessarily mean communism. It can be larger share of profits to workers, or post profit via taxes. It seems like a lot of places did this better from the 50s to the 80s and then wealth disparity soared as the rich started to asset more control on the political system again.

Fewer than 1,000 U.S. billionaires own more combined wealth than the bottom half of the entire American population.

Surely, this or communism cannot be the only 2 options humanity has. Between those 2 extremes there are so many options.

I tend to view this as purely an optimization problem.

Basically all aspects of traditional values, systems in place and the whole lifestyle, established mostly after the agricultural revolution; seems to be laser-focused on increasing surviving offspring.

I feel like it should be obvious that if you take a solution that optimizes almost exclusively for x (surviving offspring), and replace it partially, optimizing for a,b,c (industrial output, female participation to workforce, etc.); you necessarily get a lower x in exchange for higher a,b,c.

Now it looks to me like everyone is trying to increase x back again, but without decreasing a,b,c. It seems obvious to me that you cannot do this (unless you have been doing a terrible job at optimizing before). You have to trade some value off from the other side. But in our current society, I don't see how can this happen.

if you want a thing, pay for it.

the economics of childrearing aren't workable for most people without a huge cut to standard of living.

The countries that do pay for it don’t have significantly higher fertility rates.

I’d say there’s an elephant in the room: Childbirth sucks. If you want women to willingly subject themselves to that, you need either a culture that virtually requires it-

And I want to take a moment to emphasise that I don’t like nor want this solution, and would fight anyone who tries for it.

-or you need to pay them well above the actual economic cost of rearing a child, because the process itself is strongly negative. Yes, having a child itself can be great. Eventually, several years in, when they start to become a person.

That’s true, but if you ask any of the women I know, they’ll tell you they’re perfectly happy to keep it at one.

That’s in Norway, by the way, so not one of those countries where you get zero support.

There are no countries that come close to actually paying for it. There are countries that pay for 5% of it, and in those, indeed they don't have significantly higher fertility rates.

What countries are actually paying any significant amount? 200€ per month would not cover costs of rising a kid.

Then disappear into the night, others still value having descendants above economic calculus.

please point out the country which pays for adequate housing and other necessities for a family with 4 children, adequate childcare support (or pays one parent to stay at home fulltime), and sufficient guaranteed sick leave.

What I find interesting is that, it really seems that the opposite is true.

My great-grandparents (and their entire ancestry that I can trace, all the way back to 1807) were punishingly, desperately: poor.

Yet, it seems they averaged a heck of a lot more children than me, or my contemporaries. And their children largely lived to be adults with only a few minor exceptions.

The adults themselves didn't seem to live long though, most records of marriages I have are for 17-18 year olds who were already orphans.

> Yet, it seems they averaged a heck of a lot more children than me

Not by choice, I assume.

fuck. fair point.

I totally forgot that the 60s gave us effective contraceptives.

meth and automatic firearms didn’t exist back then, for starters.

knives and opiods did though.

My family were Scottish and Scotland does not have so much automatic firearms tbh.

This has always been true. We have talked about the costs of raising children forever.

What is different now, is twofold: 1. Bigger financial impact of having a child, both through less government support, and because more women are working. This combined means that to have a child, often, one of the parents needs to stop working, which severely impacts SoL. 2. Less social impact of not having a child. It is far more common to not have children than it used to be, and so it becomes much more of a choice as to whether to make that SoL sacrifice or not.

I think it also becomes a sort of social contagion - in that you are much less likely to have a kid if you don't know anyone that recently had a kid, it feels like a much bigger leap into the unknown.

Are they paying for it in the countries with high birth rates? I don't think so...

Yes. Societies have been using their women's children as a positive externality for generations, but now the logic of capitalism and societal freedom has caught up, and now societies would rather collapse than support women and families economically for the work of childrearing.

I think Derek Thompson is a hack. Based on his media appearances from the Abundance tour, he seems to be very libertarian but in a (neo-)liberal space that pays his bills.

What if - evolutionarily we just haven't evolved for birth control?

What if - given a choice, women just don't want to have 2.1 children on average?

No one wants to touch this topic, because it's super offensive and probably political, but it seems like the most plausible to me.

And clearly we're not going back. No one is going to ban birth control, and they probably shouldn't. But then where do we go from here? Basically all genes of non enthusiastic parents will die out over the next 100-200 years, and we will get more enthusiastic parent genes succeeding, and population grows again? Or we literally just die out...

We’re certainly not dying out. At minimum, eventually civilisation would crack badly enough that we can no longer make contraceptives, nor other entertainment to distract from sex.

Which I’m fairly sure is part of the picture. Evolution didn’t build us to want sex; it built us to crave stimulation, which is more generally useful, then made reproduction into fallback entertainment.

Depends on what you mean by "we". Humanity? Yeah, impossible to die out by fertility crisis merely due to lifestyle. The fewer babies are born, the more unoccupied space there is, making it more and more attractive to have kids. But if you mean "Americans" or "ethnic population", it's very much possible to die out. It happened to native Americans, it can happen to your group. If birth control collapses in your country, you can still be supplied by another one from across the globe who secretly or openly cheers for your collapse. Same goes for shipping you drugs, see history. As for space becoming available from your low fertility, alas that doesn't work when you're being invaded and your land settled in by a more fertile country.

> “Only two things are important right now in life: fertility and deep learning,” the University of Pennsylvania economist Jesús Fernández-Villaverde said at the conclusion of a recent lecture. “Everything else is noise. Once you start thinking about these, it’s hard to start thinking about anything else.”

Not sure if I agree but that's quite a memorable quote

It's also a useless quote. Fertility requires a whole supply chain pyramid: food, housing, infrastructure, medical industry, alcohol... the same goes for the needs of deep learning: energy, rare earths, nuclear science,... together they cover almost all of the economy anyway, with the exception of luxury goods, but then again you need those to make yourself attractive. So yes, we need hoverboards to procreate and coffee and cape-shit to keep scientists entertained.

Maybe humanity will have more babies when AI takes over, capitalism implodes and we’re all farming and crafting things from scratch, since we’re forced out of the “economy”.

The house always… wins?

Sure, Darwin always has the last laugh.

"Mother Nature always bats last, and she always bats 1.000"

Kind of reminded me of the prelude to Handmaid's Tale

Madness. “The only things that matter are my hobby and my favourite right-wing trope”

And the climate crisis. Why does it seem like everyone has forgotten about the climate crisis recently? AI isn't going to fix it.

> “Do you know how hard you need to abuse a mammal to make them not have children?”

I've worked with mammals from gerbils to dogs fro research. And, yeah, it is really hard to get a mammal to not to want to reproduce (you can go snip-snip, of course). Humans are not like other mammals, of course, we have 'reason' and the like, but still.

I think that little quote is really doing a lot of load bearing in the fertility crisis debates.

Humans, as I am sure we are all aware, really really like reproducing. The other things that come with it are, of course, the issue that stop us from completing the 'job'. But, even things like access to contraception do nothing to the falling birthrate. It's not the prophylactics, it's the participants.

We talk here about the cost of a kid, and rebuttals about Norway abound. The cultural conditions, and then someone mentions Mongolia or Israel. The support afterwards, and then you talk about Sweden. This structure, that structure, this exception, that exception. How we need a recipe not a single policy to fix the birthrate. And still nothing works.

Suffice to say: We are being really badly abused.

Want to fix the birthrate? It's a whole-ass thing where you have to change the whole-ass culture so much that people actually want to just have kids. I know that seems tautological, but like, it's just true. We just have gotta stop hurting each other.

> I've worked with mammals from gerbils to dogs fro research. And, yeah, it is really hard to get a mammal to not to want to reproduce

I think you are confusing mating with reproduction.

The latter comes in the natural world as a consequence of the first.

There is zero drive to reproduce in animals, only to mate.

I have one kid, who is my favourite thing in the world even though he is still a toddler, but I'm not sure if we will have more. We certainly wouldn't have more than two, so we'd still be slightly below replacement rate.

I'd rather focus all my time and resources on one or two children and here in Catalunya it's hard to even buy a single family home (most people live in apartments which are very small by American standards) so if I want each kid to be able to have their own room then I'm pretty much limited to one, at most two, unless I win the lottery or something.

Furthermore, it's very difficult for women as the birth and recovery is very hard. There is a lot of pressure on women to breastfeed nowadays too, not just from social media, but even from medical staff. Personally, I was always formula fed as a child so I didn't care if my child was breastfed or not - but nonetheless I could tell the pressure took a big toll on my wife. I ended up in a serious argument with a nurse over it at one point.

I doubt this trend of declining fertility will reverse so we really ought to think about how we will adapt to these changes. I wonder how many people will regret not having kids, or having more kids, though. I waited until 33 to have my kid and I think one of my biggest regrets in life is not having done it sooner.

It was funny reading through the article, as I actually live in Catalunya and I am improving my Catalan precisely to be able to go and live with my kid in one of those small villages in the mountains :)

Derek Thompson keeps banging his neoliberal drum in the face of (what he sees as) literal extinction. We need GDP, growth, yada yada. Just another 1% of GDP growth bro, it’ll fix everything. It’s funny how we’re unwilling to move a single iota on our socio-politico-economic system and actually fix what people are SAYING the problem is. Actually free childcare, education, cheaper housing, more future security, etc. Yes, most of us grew up in a world where none of that was present, but we now understand how suboptimal it was on our psyches and want to break the cycle.

I think this guy is on to something. It's also interesting that India, which has arranged marriages, has such a high population and much better demographic situation than most of the West.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4apGtiz42Qk

All the Indian people I know in the US have one anchor baby and no more. This is my experience with a significant number of H1-B visa workers in tech.

Any reason this was flagged? Is it LLM-generated? Is it flawed in some way? I just need to know whether I can trust the article or it was flagged just because HN doesn't like it.

https://archive.is/57Raz

Human progress is to blame for low fertility through a multitude of mechanisms but the most important is the status of the female: it seems her advanced role outside of the home depresses her maternal instinct. Instincts are vulnerable to environment and don't survive in certain occasions.

I will never understand this forum's fixation over human fertility

I'm sure there's a factual error in the title.

This should read: The Global Fertility Windfall Is Better Than You Probably Think

What you need to know™:

- What kind of fantasy thinking could possibly conclude that a reduction in global population is a bad thing?

- How much more of a poster child do we need, to demonstrate that modern capitalism is a ponzi scheme?

- Just another example that what trends in "journalism" is just the perspective of ownership.

- If this is a true theory, why isn't africa booming economically? (this dismissal and lack of concern for Africa should really be reason #1, but the truth is, most white people couldn't give a shit less what happens to Africans)

Personally, I see no reason to be alarmed. Humanity has been growing at an absolutely batshit crazy rate for the past hundred years, even the doomsday Thanos-level event that halves the population of the planet overnight would just bring us to the level of mere 50 years ago (the main reason I never understood the logic behind the whole Thanos idea). This growth must stop at some point and maybe even correct itself, it's perfectly ok. Our current economic system along with some countries may not survive it in their current form, but it's definitely not a humanity-level crisis.

The crisis isn’t one of total population, but one of having too many unproductive old people.

There are solutions to that. One or more of them will eventually manifest, assuming we don’t outrun it by way of AI. Personally I’m betting on the AI, so I’m not too worried right now.

I would agree, but that perspective overlooks many different secondary effects. Essentially it’s a matter of that we have the tiger by the tail and your perspective basically just says, “hey, just let go of the tail. It was fine when we didn’t have the tiger by the tail and most of our lives we have not held the tiger by the tail, so it can’t really be all that bad of we just let go.”

If you prefer, adapt the “deal with the devil” metaphor. Same difference.

It ignores that there are massive dependencies once you commit to bad ideas. It is an inherent and possibly catastrophic oversight of all the “globalism” that has been pushed so far and for so long now, i.e., centralization and brittleness rather than decentralization and resilience.

People here hopefully can appreciate that when you create an extremely vulnerable and brittle monolithic system, it tends to fail in catastrophic ways rather than contained and manageable, when your concerns are separated and functionality is modular.

Ironically somewhat, even and especially in the tech industry and this kind of world domination VC swamp YC/HN is a part of has built exactly the opposite, a huge basket into which they want to put all the eggs they’ve accumulated, but because they are convinced of their superiority, they believe THEY are the ones who have figured everything out… If only people will slow them to control everything.

It’s not really any different than all the other impulses throughout history of narcissistic maniacs to centralize power and control around them. Things have been relatively not catastrophic in the world for around 90 years now, it looks that the same sick, supremacist, megalomaniac, psychopathic, narcissistic types of people are gaining the upper hand again and will in fact start something that may very well be called WWIII by anyone that survives.

I’m sure it will be fine and work out splendidly this time though, the super superior people are in control now. We have nothing to worry about.

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