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Comment by zdragnar | Hacker News Reader

The majority of people being old is a relatively modern problem. One could even argue that it is a problem specific to cultures that favor low or negative birthrates.

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The list of countries with no low or negative birthrates is very short (mostly heavily underdeveloped countries). That's why the Gerontocracy applies nearly everywhere. I doubt it was favoured, but it's result is the shift of incentives from long term (young people) to short term (old people). Democracy fails here.

Why would old people vote for other old _people_? I understand they’d want to get ideas favorable to them to be applied, but that may as well come from any _not old_ person.

They tend to because typically people in the same stage of life tend to have similar interests to defend but like you say, it could theoretically come from politicians of any age. Younger cohorts are much more diverse and less likely to espouse these ideas, seeing them as extractive. This is where the stereotype of getting more conservative with age comes from - it's defensive wealth preservation.

I think this is changed by the Internet in the same way as WWW forces globalization. In a generation or two when Internet-illiteral generation dies out we will have cross age homogenized.

No cultures directly favor low or negative birthrates.

But we've known since the 1800s that it follows from female education (and this seems independent of culture, it was first observed in France, but you can see the same trend in any African country, or even Iran), which is favored.

France went through a demographic transition 100+ years earlier than all other European countries and then had a population boom in the 50s and 60s. I doubt an average French women was less educated in 1960 than in the mid 1800s.

I don’t think it’s that straightforward, material conditions in combination with massively lower mortality in all age groups and a shift in social values must be playing a significant part

It’s simply that for the first time in human history women have alternative options that don’t suck. That’s literally it. Birth rates will remain high only in socially conservative highly religious countries. Liberal democracies? No chance.

It would be interesting to see to what extent exactly this is accurate (of course to a certain extent it is) if the majority of the population in liberal democracies had the option of having more than 1-2 children without massively compromising their material wellbeing (or the future of their offspring due to the lack of resources).

There's a few confounding factors:

- larger percentage of population living in urban centers without the room for larger families

- full time employment for both spouses becomes necessary as cost of living increases

- delayed marriage and delayed age of first child means fewer children can be safely carried to birth

The "highly liberal democracies" is just pleasant coding for "consumerized".

China's (now defunct) one child policy begs to differ.

Low birthrates are a constant in every industrialized country independently of culture.

You say independently of culture, but doesn't industrialization change the culture in a certain way that is similar everywhere?

It's another way of seeing it, yes, but I don't think most people would abandon industrialization.

Every country is moving in that direction

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