[HN Gopher] Basement Fertility
___________________________________________________________________
Basement Fertility
Author : jseliger
Score : 54 points
Date : 2022-06-27 18:27 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (betonit.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (betonit.substack.com)
| VictorPath wrote:
| After World War II a lot of public housing projects popped up,
| which were nice communities for working class families. Nowadays
| this is almost forgotten as public housing has been starved for
| decades, and is only thought of in most communities as synonymous
| with poverty and crime. This is the direction the United States
| went in but not all countries. Public housing funded as it was in
| the New Deal era can solve this problem as well.
| DFHippie wrote:
| It went this way in the US because the unique racial politics
| here. I've been listening to a podcast which touches on this:
| https://www.npr.org/2022/04/29/1095625161/coming-soon-code-s...
| terminalcommand wrote:
| Public housing using new construction technologies, I think
| this is the answer. Let's build cheap high-rise buildings. We
| can expand vertically why not use it.
| tony_cannistra wrote:
| It feels like there's an implicit "More Kids Good" tone that
| pervades this. What's the "right" value for TFR? Why does it have
| to be higher? Why is it bad that it is lower in some places?
|
| The ecosystem we exist in / that sustains us surely has a
| carrying capacity.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| 2.1 is the right value. That's replacement rate. Anything above
| is subject to healthy debate.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Replacement rate and "right" are not necessarily congruous.
|
| If you have the opinion that there are insufficient resources
| in the world to live the lifestyle you want for yourself or
| those you care about, you may think a lower fertility rate is
| more "right". And if you think your tribe is in a competition
| for resources with all the other tribes, then you may want a
| higher fertility rate for your tribe and a lower one for the
| others.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Any less than 2.1 and you have to have an uncomfortable
| conversation about which nation is going to be the
| sacrifice. Any more and you have to worry about
| overpopulation.
|
| That said, I'm of the opinion that we'll never really need
| to have any tough conversations about birth rates because
| they've fallen so drastically across the board. It seems
| that it will be enough to universally encourage higher
| birth rates in every nation for the foreseeable future
| (with the expected outcome being that most will still
| struggle to hit 2.1).
| blep_ wrote:
| > Any less than 2.1 and you have to have an uncomfortable
| conversation about which nation is going to be the
| sacrifice.
|
| Only if you're the sort of person who cares about such
| things. I don't see any moral imperative to make sure any
| particular ethnicity or culture continues.
|
| Before someone calls me the usual assortment of bad
| things, please take a moment to consider (1) the
| difference between treating existing people well and
| making new people, and (2) that I mean this literally and
| not in the "all the cultures besides the US should go
| away" sense, and would still take this position even in
| the blatantly racist "but that means you'd be a minority"
| situation you're about to try to catch me with.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I think there will be some interesting conversations,
| namely around women's civil rights.
|
| Incentivizing a woman to have a baby is extremely
| expensive, and I do not think any country has come up
| with an offer so attractive such that it causes birth
| rates to go up.
|
| Which brings up 2 questions: how much does a society have
| to offer women, and would that society continue to be
| competitive on a global playing field relative to other
| countries that might go a different way, such as
| restricting women's rights and getting birth rates up by
| removing women's agency.
| causasui wrote:
| If you trace this thread backwards to its root (by essentially
| responding to every answer with "so what?"), you end up with
| the question "would it a 'bad thing' if humanity were to become
| extinct?"
|
| Anecdotally, the vast majority of people I've met - from all
| walks of life and religious/political leanings - will answer
| this question with an unthinking "yes, of course that's bad".
|
| I've been curious lately why this is. From the standpoint of
| Christianity, isn't the end goal rapture followed by total
| extinction anyway? From the standpoint of agnosticism/atheism,
| wouldn't an extinction mean the end of human suffering?
|
| Why are we as a species so afraid of not being able to sustain
| ourselves through a constant churning of new births? Is it just
| our monkey brain ultimately calling the shots?
| finiteseries wrote:
| China will depopulate >50% by 2100 (conservatively) and we're
| still worrying about mid 20th century concepts like carrying
| capacities as if we aren't a highly advanced (and depopulating)
| tool making species entirely capable of _creating_ ecosystems
| wholesale and affecting said capacities.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution
| tony_cannistra wrote:
| Okay, and it's bad that china will depopulate? Won't every
| nation, eventually? Are you making like a "suffering / loss
| of life is bad" argument? It's hard to disagree with that, if
| you are. (I certainly don't.)
|
| I think you're deriding my use of "Carrying capacity" as an
| archaic concept, but your retort is that we're "creating
| ecosystems."
|
| But, every organism within an ecosystem "creates" it just by
| existing as part of it, so I'm assuming you mean "heavily
| modifying it to suit our species' need for insatiable
| growth."
|
| Taking this from that perspective, the 20th century
| agricultural explosion (that you link to ) is a prime example
| of how we've hijacked systems far beyond their natural
| limits, to largely deleterious effect.
|
| That wikipedia article even enumerates some of these:
| biodiversity loss, GHG emissions, etc. There are many
| examples elsewhere [0].
|
| Sure, there's a lot more food, and that's good for population
| health and well-being. But that "good" assumes that we've
| decided that large, consistent growth rates are "good."
|
| [0]:https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C48&q=
| imp...
| User23 wrote:
| Subsaharan Africa is going to keep human population growth
| going to at least ten billion persons by 2100[1], even with
| China[2] and the rest of the world's reduced population
| growth[3].
|
| [1] https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TO
| T/9...
|
| [2] https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TO
| T/1...
|
| [1] https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TO
| T/9...
| finiteseries wrote:
| That isn't the measure of growth people are worried about,
| tap _Growth Rate_ on each of [1], [2], and [3].
|
| Subsaharan Africa was completely bypassed by the Green
| Revolution and largely lacks access to basic infrastructure
| like eg consistent electricity (outside portable fuel
| powered generators) on the typical small, family, partly
| subsistence based farm.
|
| It's not a solved problem with all the geographical and
| political issues, but it's quite literally the world's last
| frontier for trade.
| screye wrote:
| "More Kids (than 1st world countries are having is) Good" is
| generally true.
|
| Social security relies of the young bearing the burden of the
| old. Don't even get me started on the intangible energy of
| having little kids around. Not everyone wants kids, but most
| people like being a cool uncle/aunt.
|
| > What's the "right" value for TFR?
|
| Difficult problems exist in Grays. But even the most fervent
| believers on either side agree that the 'right number' is
| likely between and 1.5-2.5. With western TFR plummeting under
| 1.5, we can safely say the the call for 'more kids' is
| effectively a call for a slower decline in population; not
| 'more kids'.
|
| > carrying capacity
|
| Yep, that ecosystem is called the economy and the carry
| capacity is a lower bound, not an upper bound. Too few young
| people is the death knell of a civilization.
|
| Also, population explosion is presently led by Africa in rates,
| and South Asia in sheer numbers. A few dozen more/less
| westerners (who're we kidding? mostly white people) isn't going
| to change the numbers by much.
| mordae wrote:
| As was said by rossdavidh in the comments, "eyeballing the maps,
| I don't see a great correlation".
|
| I suspect this might have something to do with perception of
| supportive community rather than actual numbers. When to-be
| parents feel like they are on their own and neither $jobPeople,
| $friendlyPeople nor $familyPeople are actually going to help,
| they might be inclined to postpone.
|
| Living with parents in a sane multi-generational arrangement
| might translate to more support and thus more children. Living
| with parents out of sheer necessity where parents look down on
| their offspring for not proving themselves in the world probably
| would not.
|
| But that does not really explain scandinavia either.
| terminalcommand wrote:
| I want to add a personal anecdote. I recently moved out at 26.
| Before moving out I couldn't imagine bringing a girl home. You
| need space and privacy to mate.
|
| I certainly want to live closer to my parents but the multi-
| generational arrangement needs to provide space to live in, I
| can't share the same flat my parents are living in, come on
| it's too small.
|
| The problem is having a private space, not living with parents.
| If parents can provide a flat with a seperate entry, even that
| would work.
| foogazi wrote:
| > If parents can provide a flat
|
| Woah, why can't you, or you + 1, chip in here?
| Jolter wrote:
| GP states they have no ability to get a +1 while living
| with parents.
|
| I assume that if GP had a well paid job, they would move
| out to separate flat, rather than move parents into bigger
| flat. Wouldn't you?
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| > Living with parents out of sheer necessity where parents look
| down on their offspring for not proving themselves in the world
| probably would not.
|
| Not that I condone such practices, but how does that not affect
| birth rate in India?
| [deleted]
| Jolter wrote:
| There are so many additional factors affecting fertility that
| it's not even funny.
|
| How about making a map of countries with free/subsidized
| childcare and comparing it to that fertility map? I'm pretty sure
| you'd find nearly the same correlation as with "not living with
| your parents".
| fleddr wrote:
| On Twitter, Elon Musk has been posting a lot about how people
| should have more children. I'm mentioning it not because of him,
| instead because it offers insight into a common misconception.
|
| Those threads show thousands and thousands of replies by young
| people about how they can barely take care of themselves. High
| cost of living, no access to housing, unaffordable healthcare,
| etc.
|
| What is not intuitive is that this reasoning, even though it
| feels so right and just, is entirely wrong. If you were to be
| wealthier, you'd not have more children. Add even more wealth and
| you'd have even fewer, not more. The wealthier people are, the
| less children they have on average.
|
| The other insight you'll get is the gloomy image people have of
| the future. This really needs work. As humanity we need to have a
| better story than "it's all downhill from here".
| Jolter wrote:
| These two maps, taken in conjunction, do not provide a good
| argument for housing deregulation. Even if we accept that the
| maps correlate quite well (and ignore whether there is any causal
| link), there is an assumption that the author is not stating
| plainly: that housing deregulation leads to young people being
| able to move out of their parent's basement.
|
| Look at the Scandinavian, very deep green countries at the top of
| the map. They all have strictly regulated construction processes,
| with political involvement in city planning. It takes many long
| years of project planning before you can put a spade in the
| ground in Stockholm. What's more, there is government meddling in
| rent setting - they are not free markets. Still, they seem to do
| OK?
|
| I don't know what the author has against housing regulations but
| this argument is missing some part.
| dybber wrote:
| Exactly living with your parents has more to do about culture
| and local customs.
| dorchadas wrote:
| This might be highly dependent on where you're at. I know
| many in Dublin who still live with their parents because
| there's _nowhere_ available (everything 's gone to short-term
| lets) at anything reasonably resembling a decent price.
| foogazi wrote:
| > Perusing this map, Richard Hanania remarks
|
| Record-scratch: I associate that name with dumb twitter takes
| rossdavidh wrote:
| It would have been good to see an x-y plot of living with parents
| vs. fertility. Eyeballing the maps he showed, I don't see a great
| correlation. Scandinavia has mediocre fertility compared to the
| rest of Europe, but the lowest percentage living with their
| parents. Other nations like Greece do satisfy his hypothesis, but
| a real test would be to plot those two percentages on an x-y plot
| and see how well they correlate (or calculate an R-squared, or
| both).
| _armchair wrote:
| I took down the data manually and got a correlation coefficient
| of -0.28. I'm not sure whether it's even reasonable to expect
| the relationship to be linear but IIRC that level of
| correlation is about as high as you get in the social sciences.
| sjburt wrote:
| https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vRhDMqe8boEY...
|
| I don't see any correlation at all.
| mikkergp wrote:
| Is there a version of economic thought that doesn't necessitate
| constant population growth? Why is low fertility rate seen as a
| bad thing? Often engineering is argued in terms of tradeoffs or
| meeting certain requirements. Rather than follow economic
| theories that depend on growth, can we develop economic theories
| that adapt to the trends of the population rather than the other
| way around(Musks' need for cheap labor not withstanding). Is
| there a version of the world where we have less people with a
| collective higher quality of life, particularly as technology
| improves individual productivity? What about the vintage-futurism
| economic dream of 10 hour workweeks?
| olegious wrote:
| Less people isn't a bad thing as long as the demographic
| distribution within the smaller population is healthy- meaning
| it is shaped like a pyramid, a wide base of young and working
| age people and smaller numbers of old people non-working people
| on the top.
|
| The problem for many first world countries today is that their
| populations are shaped like upside down pyramids- many old
| people and people nearing retirement age and much fewer young
| and working age people. Why is this a problem? The working age
| population represents the tax and production base that supports
| the non-working and non-tax contributing older population, the
| non-working young people represent the replacement for the
| working age people that will eventually retire.
| mikkergp wrote:
| Part of my question would be how to deal with the pyramid.
| The pyramid should get less pronounced as time goes on as
| birth rates normalize. Basic human needs industries like
| clothing, food and shelter should't need that many people to
| support the retired. Health care may need some intervention.
|
| I guess part of the problem is maybe some of this is too much
| like socialism and/or being able to give non-working persons
| actual dollars.
| fleddr wrote:
| The wide base of young people in the healthy pyramid will
| eventually grow old. Since it was wide, it means to keep the
| pyramid healthy, multiples of young people would need to be
| added. Whom will also grow old, needing even more young
| people.
| notriddle wrote:
| Or most people need to die before they get old.
| fleddr wrote:
| Maybe we can rephrase it as "visiting the metaverse".
| ozim wrote:
| Problem is that our whole economic system is basically a Ponzi
| scheme. You get your payoff when you are selling stocks on your
| retirement to "next fool in chain" so 20-30 year olds.
|
| Land, houses will not go up in value if there would be not
| enough people to buy them. While yes people migrate to the
| cities or to areas like Randstad and while yes there is housing
| shortage in such areas but if immigration from rural areas
| drops a lot there is going to be drop in housing prices.
|
| More people have more diverse needs which creates demand - more
| people more demand - easier to have higher quality of life if
| it is easier to find 100 customers to come to your shop than 10
| customers.
|
| People are not starting new grocery shops in rural areas
| because it is good investment - mostly it is that they already
| live there and have possibility to make additional income on
| property they own.
|
| People are starting new grocery shops in big cities even if
| they have to lease property to do so, because they still can
| profit on top of that.
| ozim wrote:
| To complete comment I have to add one more thought.
|
| Infinite growth is also required for high quality of life
| unfortunately.
|
| Once there is no promise of future earnings by spending now -
| we start going into zero sum game. Living in a society where
| every day you have to worry about not loosing piece of pie is
| really a bad life to live.
|
| Less people means lower pressure to find new ways of getting
| resources - if there is enough people on earth we might have
| enough money to get resources from astro-mining if needed.
| vanviegen wrote:
| I don't buy that line of thinking.
|
| People can still (on average) have career growth by taking
| an ever larger piece of the pie. And then they retire/die,
| leaving more pie for the young ones.
|
| Also, we have the tech to make this pie comfortably big.
| BirAdam wrote:
| It's not just a Ponzi scheme due to population growth
| pressure and the old cashing out. It's also a Ponzi scheme
| because younger folks are literally paying for the older
| folks through taxation. Low interest rates also
| disincentivize saving while subsidizing the accumulation of
| debt, and spurring more investment into asset classes (land
| and stocks mostly). This creates a Ponzi like effect where in
| as long as people keep responding to the incentives, number
| goes up.
|
| A population drop implodes all of it. Of course, presently,
| it may already be collapsing. When it does, I don't think
| that the Fed is going to respond by tightening and letting
| things correct to a healthier slow growth sustainable economy
| funded through real savings and value production. They will
| most likely immediately attempt to reinflate the bubbles with
| negative rates (0.00% FOMC, < 10% reserve requirement, and
| purchase operations on the open market).
| missedthecue wrote:
| Capitalism doesn't require for constant population growth. But
| public pension schemes do. And there are geopolitical
| advantages to being bigger than your foes.
|
| Look at Japan. Japan's population has been on the decline for
| about 1.5 generations. They still get as much food, shelter,
| and entertainment as any other developed economy. They have
| hobbies, travel, discretionary income... The worries there
| aren't about capitalism failing.
|
| Demographic collapse just has a lot of nasty social
| consequences in general. An inverted pyramid spells pain for
| future generations.
| cs137 wrote:
| Public pensions are pretty much gone these days, for better
| or worse.
|
| I don't think an inverted pyramid is as bad as it sounds.
| It's a check against ageism and falling wages (there's no
| longer a horde of hungry young people who want the jobs) and,
| given how little of the work people do is actually necessary
| --white-collar jobs are 85% sending passive-aggressive emails
| --I think society can afford it. It might be the only thing
| that provides enough value of labor to keep conditions
| relatively humane.
| missedthecue wrote:
| By public pension, I mean what we in the US call Social
| Security. Most developed economies have an equivalent.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > Public pensions are pretty much gone these days, for
| better or worse.
|
| Taxpayer funded (which is what "public" generally means)
| pensions are basically the only defined benefit pensions
| left in the US. I do not know of a single city, county,
| state, or federal government that has gotten rid of them,
| especially not for cops.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| "public pensions" usually refers to schemes like social
| security in the US.
|
| "public _employee_ pensions" are a different thing.
|
| (But neither is gone, in general or in the US, though
| more and more government employee positions in the US are
| relying more on defined contribution retirement plans and
| less on defined benefit pensions.)
| bell-cot wrote:
| If the inverted pyramid is in an "old-fashioned" economy
| and society, where the great majority of adults generally
| work hard until the last few years of their lives, and
| families mostly do their own service work, then the
| inverted pyramid might not be a serious problem.
|
| But if you're hoping for something closer to the modern,
| Western ideal - education until age ~25, work until age
| ~60, retirement until age ~90 - then the inverted pyramid
| is going to need at least one of:
|
| (1) Armies of imported service workers - to staff all the
| nursing homes, retirement homes, cruise ships, restaurants,
| etc. that the huge "top" of that pyramid need / want.
|
| (2) Armies of robots so advanced that they can fill the
| great majority of those jobs. WithOUT requiring an extra
| army of humans to build, pay for, maintain, run, etc. those
| service worker robots.
|
| (3) Huge changes in medical technology and social
| expectations, so that most of those service workers are
| never needed.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Defined benefit pension schemes only require constant
| population growth because the decision makers want to use the
| assumption that there will be constant economic growth, in
| order to make the obligations seem like they cost less.
|
| They could easily assume 0% expected return on investment,
| but that would make it so the cash expenses today would
| explode, to the same level that they would if they simply
| paid employees the cash. Which is why politicians like to run
| on campaigns promising lower taxes, and in order to achieve
| that, they assume future economic growth so that instead of
| paying someone $10 today, the government can pay $1, and rely
| on economic growth to provide the other $9 (assuming
| purchasing power of the currency remains the same, which it
| will not).
| bombcar wrote:
| Defined benefit would work fine if the benefit defined was
| "comfortable living space, slop kitchen, basic healthcare,
| and a golf course" - as those can be provided at some
| fraction of the requirements for a defined _money_ benefit
| pension.
| 015a wrote:
| The US, and similarly many other western countries, hasn't been
| at the replacement fertility rate since ~1970 [1]. Relative to
| the years previous, its been pretty stable, but still not at
| the replacement rate: around 1.8, versus 2.1-2.2.
|
| That's 50 years; a decent chunk of time.
|
| By the way; its important to note that the replacement
| fertility rate changes over time. Today, in the US, infant
| mortality rates are half that in 1970 and prior, in basically
| every category. Ideally, obviously, the replacement rate will
| approach 2.0.
|
| Is there a version of economic thought that doesn't necessitate
| constant population growth? How about the one we're living? You
| can make the argument that the world is falling apart, or the
| economy, or we're at the end of a totally normal 80-100 year
| economic cycle, or maybe everything is fine, that's all
| supposition. What's real is; we're still going.
|
| The short answer to your question is: historically: No. Empires
| fall when population growth stalls. When empires fall, a LOT of
| people die, and a lot more suffer. The dream of "isolated
| sustainable communes" doesn't work at scale. If your argument
| is some variation of: the human population shouldn't be at
| scale; then feel free to remove yourself from the equation as a
| start down that path, but realistically, we're all here, we
| have the system we have.
|
| However, I tend to believe that the better argument is: we
| found that version of economic thought which _can_ work in the
| face of stagnating population growth. Its the one we have; it
| does work, not perfectly, in fact quite poorly, but we 'll
| never know how bad the alternate realities are. In effect, MMT.
|
| Its extremely and critically important to recognize that
| technology has jumped more in the last thirty years than in the
| thousands of years prior. Our relationship to it, as
| individuals and as a society, is still evolving, and that
| evolution is happening in the face of declining western
| populations. Technology amplifies individual productivity; so
| why are we all still working 40 hour weeks? Momentum primarily,
| but more specifically: our population only recently started
| plateauing. We needed technology to keep up; its the only way.
| But as population plateaus, technology will naturally take over
| more. Its not just "fewer people can do more"; it goes from
| "fewer people can do more for more people" to "fewer people can
| do more for fewer people", which naturally means they have to
| do less.
|
| MMT plays into that because: technology is expensive. If we're
| entering a world where our options are: build a $50B water
| barrier around Miami or let the city drown, we can't afford to
| worry about the status of our gold reserves, or whether the
| blockchain is up today. We wouldn't have the money; we'd chose
| not to build it; billions of dollars in infrastructure, land,
| and people would be destroyed; and the economy would be worse
| off, not better, than if we had just said "blank check do it"
| and then dealt with the ramifications of that decision
| tomorrow.
|
| That doesn't mean there won't be ramifications. There always
| are in complex systems. But people get so focused on the
| reality we're living, to say "if only we'd have stuck to the
| way we used to do it", without recognizing that its just as
| possible you, and all your friends, and all your friends'
| friends, would not be alive if we had stuck to that old system.
|
| Here's the biggest kink though; generally, well-implemented MMT
| (which much like well-implemented communism, hasn't been done,
| but has been written about to great lengths) requires close
| coordination between monetary and legislative policy; something
| our government is engineered to not do. We're seeing the
| impacts of this miscoordination now; there's a strong argument
| that the biggest source of inflation today has less to with
| money printing or interest rates, and more to do with core
| productivity in the sectors experiencing that inflation
| (energy: oil processing, housing: home building, public transit
| construction, etc). Core productivity (more factories, more
| construction, automation, etc) can oftentimes be solved with
| cheap, targeted money; but the Fed is currently engaged in a
| show of raising interest rates. Its the one lever they have;
| every problem is a screw, they have their directive: a hammer.
| I don't feel this is doom and gloom, today; a lot of the issues
| we're experiencing are, truly, just the delayed echoes of COVID
| which will die out, raising interest rates will legitimately
| help some sources of inflation, and the legislature has
| demonstrated interest in providing cheap money for productivity
| improvements (build back better). But, its still how the Fed
| operates; they have their doctrine and their lever, and its
| easy to imagine a future where more coordination is necessary
| to push through massive spending in response to major issues
| like the climate crisis, declining water supplies, etc, without
| either succumbing to the crisis, or creating a new economic
| crisis.
|
| [1] https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
| thefz wrote:
| Because we need to rely on new people financing the economy
| with money we don't have yet because it is all gone up in
| smoke.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| _Why is low fertility rate seen as a bad thing?_
|
| It's mostly seen as a bad thing in the lens of ethnic
| nationalist ideology that low fertility rates will change the
| demographics of a country (see Great Replacement [0]).
|
| After all, if Musk (and other capitalists) needed, they can get
| labor from other countries south of America's borders, but
| there is a push to not make these workers Americans! This isn't
| an issue only in America either.
|
| 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Replacement
| [deleted]
| antiverse wrote:
| >https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Replacement
|
| >[...] is a white nationalist far-right conspiracy theory
| [...]
|
| Native Americans would disagree.
| cgrealy wrote:
| The "Great Replacement" theory originated in the 2010s and
| is specifically about white people being replaced (in case
| anyone was in any doubt, it's racist bullshit).
|
| It's a (bullshit paranoid) predictive theory about the
| modern day that has nothing to do with the historical
| genocide of Native Americans by white people.
| antiverse wrote:
| There's nothing really inherently racist about it, or
| bullshit. Mass immigration is a serious subject matter,
| one that deserves scrutiny and ruthless questioning.
| Avoiding the questions by calling it racist doesn't make
| it go away.
|
| It's been around for a lot longer than 2010. It has been
| a popular subject matter in Europe for decades [1]. I
| guess someone just decided to finally put a more
| official, catchy title to it and publish books. Does this
| particular author have a racist tone? Perhaps they do.
| But ask an average European citizen back in late 80s, 90s
| and they'd tell you what's up without skipping a beat.
| It's something you can see from a mile away. Pleading
| ignorance won't help.
|
| [1] Your media won't tell you this, so don't be
| surprised. Talk to a handful of locals to get a sample
| for how people really feel about things. It's a much
| better barometer than getting your news from something
| like Voice of America.
| darkarmani wrote:
| > There's nothing really inherently racist about it, or
| bullshit.
|
| It's the same argument wielded to discriminate against
| immigrants. It was used against the Irish, Italians, and
| Polish in NY City to name a few. Each group was "ruining
| America". It takes 3 generations to assimilate, but
| everyone anti-immigration wants them to "speak American"
| in one generation.
| cgrealy wrote:
| "mass immigration" != "great replacement"
|
| The "Great Replacement" specifically talks about this as
| being a deliberate plan by "wealthy elites", and again,
| is racist paranoid bullshit.
|
| If you're going to talk about a specific thing, you can't
| just generalise it to every concern around immigration.
|
| And while there are genuine concerns around immigration,
| like housing capacity, how to help migrants settle in,
| etc., most "people on the street" are just complaining
| about lazy immigrants who are simultaneously "stealing
| our jobs" and going on benefit.
| bombcar wrote:
| Importing workers fails for the world as a whole, and the
| number of countries that easy importation works for is _also_
| declining.
| moonchrome wrote:
| >Why is low fertility rate seen as a bad thing?
|
| Because you'll live way past your productive years and the
| things you will consume (services, goods, medical, etc.) still
| need to be produced/done by someone.
|
| The automation aspect in economy has been way overestimated -
| truck drivers were supposed to be automated 5 years ago,
| meanwhile we are facing real world issues because of truck
| driver shortages.
|
| Even jobs that were considered trivial to automate like cashers
| are still performed by humans - after decades of self checkout
| tech.
|
| Unless your retirement plan is a shotgun barrell - you need the
| next generation to both live their lives comfortably and
| provide for you.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > The automation aspect in economy has been way overestimated
| - truck drivers were supposed to be automated 5 years ago,
| meanwhile we are facing real world issues because of truck
| driver shortages.
|
| I wonder how much of that shortage is due to over-hyped
| predictions about future automation? The predictions don't
| pan out but succeed at discouraging people from joining the
| profession.
|
| > Even jobs that were considered trivial to automate like
| cashers are still performed by humans - after decades of self
| checkout tech.
|
| Self-checkout is not actually automation. It's just
| outsourcing the job of cashier to a customer who then works
| for free.
| rndmize wrote:
| > meanwhile we are facing real world issues because of truck
| driver shortages.
|
| Not really. It feels like every few months we get another
| piece decrying the lack of truck drivers, only for it to
| gloss over issues of pay. There is no shortage of truck
| drivers; there's a shortage of places that don't try to
| exploit them.
| entropi wrote:
| Ok, but you realize this requires indefinite exponential
| growth, right?
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Ok, but you realize this requires indefinite exponential
| growth, right?
|
| No, it probably just means population declines need be very
| slow and graceful (e.g. very close to steady-state) in
| order to not create big labor shortages simultaneous with
| large retiree populations.
| moonchrome wrote:
| Why ? You're not living forever - and nobody is arguing for
| high fertility rates. Having 2-3 kids per generation sounds
| perfectly sustainable. 0 or 1 does not.
| entropi wrote:
| So, imagine x couples, each of whom has 3 kids in their
| lifetimes. In 80 years, there are now 3x/2 couples. In
| 160, there are 9x/4. There are now 11 billion people.
| Every 150 or so years, having 3 kids roughly doubles the
| population. (A better model would be a birth/death
| process with a #kids distribution with a mean 3 and death
| age with a mean 80, but not necessary to make my point, I
| think.)
|
| This is exponantial growth.
| moonchrome wrote:
| Not everyone survives or has children - which is why I
| said 2-3 - it has to be above 2 for replacement, it's not
| a new concept - lookup replacement fertility rate
| vanviegen wrote:
| > Even jobs that were considered trivial to automate like
| cashers are still performed by humans - after decades of self
| checkout tech.
|
| That's no longer true in my part of the world. In the
| supermarkets I frequent, I'm pretty sure that well over 2/3
| of revenue is self-scanned.
|
| Change often takes multiple decades. That doesn't mean it's
| not happening.
| xnx wrote:
| I'd love an economic system that championed efficiency over
| growth.
| bombcar wrote:
| I've seen arguments that almost _all_ of the economic growth
| over the last 100+ years is directly attributable to
| population growth and very little else.
| gruez wrote:
| Source? That would imply total factor productivity didn't
| grow at all "over the last 100+ years", which seems
| doubtful given all the innovations brought about during
| that time period.
| mellavora wrote:
| I don't have a source, nor do I fully believe the
| original poster, but do consider:
|
| 7x population growth, shift from 80% rural to 90% urban.
| Where "rural" is low economic engagement and "urban" is a
| job-holder. shift from single-earning families to dual-
| earner, where again a stay-at-home mom does not increase
| the size of the economy while a working one does (and
| please, I know this is unfair and the tremendous value a
| full time Mom provides).
|
| Multiple these three shifts and you get a pretty big
| increase in the economy, with zero increase in
| productivity.
| bombcar wrote:
| That's the basic argument, which I don't have at hand,
| but there have been some very specific "improvement in
| output" moments in history but those are in the long past
| and most of what we have now over time is basically the
| same as growth of population _in the US_.
| w______roy wrote:
| So many things wrong with this. First, making all your policy
| decisions around maximizing reproduction seems really myopic.
| Many places are overpopulated and straining global
| infrastructure. And regulations keep people safe--what does it
| matter if I have four kids if two of them die from lead
| poisoning?
| hunglee2 wrote:
| I believe OP is making the general case that our commitment to
| nuclear family living raises the cost of raising a family as
| there are no economies of scale compared to multi-generational
| living. A moments thought about it, and he's clearly correct
| divbzero wrote:
| I think OP is focusing on a different core thesis -- that
| moving in with parents is not conducive to having babies.
|
| But what you describe definitely rings true. Many of my friends
| grew up with two working parents in a nuclear family and didn't
| realize how incredibly tough that is until they started having
| kids themselves.
| hunglee2 wrote:
| yes you might be right, I may have rushed to a conclusion.
| Multi-generational is clearly our natural state, our evolved
| state. Only last hundred years since we atomised the family,
| begins to make sense why we are dying out
| cs137 wrote:
| Cities have always been population reducers: below
| replacement fertility, with migrants from the countryside
| increasing the population. This was true 2000 years ago and
| it's true now. It's hard to say for sure why this is, but
| I'd imagine it's that urban people have more awareness of
| economic inequality. Rural people suffer from it, but they
| don't see it on a daily basis, so they aren't constantly
| reminded of the disadvantages that 99% of them will inherit
| in the way urban people are.
|
| These days, not only is the world population more urban,
| but people are also more consistently aware of the
| inequality problem. People are realizing they have no hope
| of providing the best opportunities for their children, and
| are deciding not to have them. I don't see that as a bad
| thing. Voluntary population decline might be the best
| outcome for humanity at this point, at least until we get
| our political, economic, and ecological shit together. We
| don't need 10 billion humans to be on the planet; we need
| to get through this era of war and capitalism without
| making ourselves extinct.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| What is an evolved state? I assume almost all people live
| in multi generational households because they cannot afford
| not to.
|
| My ideal is grandparents a few houses down, within a couple
| minutes walking distance.
| hunglee2 wrote:
| Evolved as in the true meaning of the term - Darwinian
| evolution. Homo Sapiens have live and grow and die in
| extended kinship groups, this has been the case for 99.9%
| of the time we have been around - and if we go further
| back to pre-human times, we likely lived in those kinship
| groups too. We only collapsed this structure since
| industrialisation / urbanisation - last hundred, maybe
| two hundred years
| mattgreenrocks wrote:
| I'll go further and say the nuclear family as a default is
| harmful. A few years into raising my kid (who has no health
| issues) convinced me of this. It can be quite isolating and
| lonely. I cannot imagine what it is like for parents of
| children who have more significant needs to both work and try
| to run a nuclear family.
| corrral wrote:
| There's a lot of tension between an economic environment
| that rewards high levels of mobility, and desire to live
| near/in a strong local web of friends and relatives who can
| help support you.
| ayngg wrote:
| I'm not sure if it is the case that there is a commitment to
| nuclear family structure as it seems things are trending even
| further towards the atomized scale with more single parent
| households and many people delaying marriage and a family or
| even going child free.
|
| I can't speak for elsewhere, but American society seems to
| incentivize against the factors that allow for high fertility.
| I think it is also apparent in Asia with the Sampo/ Satori
| generation phenomenon in Korea and Japan respectively.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I think a big component of rising opportunity cost for raising
| families is simply the fact that women now have opportunities.
|
| A lot of societies are about to find out the burden women were
| implicitly carrying simply because they had no choice, either
| due to lack of financial independence, birth control, or civil
| rights.
| hunglee2 wrote:
| yes, this is absolutely true. Hans Rosling did one his most
| well know presentations on the the impact of female education
| to the eradication of poverty via two mechanism - female
| entry into the market economy + reduction in the number of
| births. That said though, all developed economies are now so
| far down this road that we are below the replacement rate and
| will die out in a few generations without a course correction
| Jolter wrote:
| Yet populations across Europe are not shrinking. Birth
| rates may go up and down but people still want to move
| there. Seems to work, so far.
|
| To use the phrase "die out" stinks 30's Germany to me, and
| I think you could stand to think twice before using such
| verbiage.
| yoyohello13 wrote:
| What is that course correction going to be? Unfortunately,
| it seems like the US is choosing to reduce opportunities
| for women, rather that reducing the economic burden of
| raising a family.
| hunglee2 wrote:
| no idea, there have been no examples of any country
| successfully reversing declining fertility rate. In fact,
| it seems only massive unplanned societal disruption -
| famine, war, invasion - increases the rate. Iraq for
| instance has had a population boom since the two US led
| invasions, 50% of its population are now under the age of
| 15.
| Jolter wrote:
| Wait - it almost seems like you think having a higher
| birth rate would be _good_ for America? How so?
| watwut wrote:
| Iraq is country where women don't get to say how many
| children they have. Husband decides that and has power to
| force what he wants.
| ismail wrote:
| A Typical WEIRD (western, educated, industrialised, rich,
| democratic) finding. For much of human history children have been
| raised in multi-generational homes. Just being raised by parents
| is relatively new. I recall reading in a book [0] that proposes
| this as one of the reasons we have such an issue with mental
| health etc. with our children. This also seriously hampers
| learning as wisdom is not passed down.
|
| [0] free to play
| xyzzyz wrote:
| In fact, Caplan discovered the so-called Hajnal line, and when
| it was first suggested by Hajnal, being to its south and east
| was associated with _high_ fertility, not low, like today.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hajnal_line
|
| There is a lot of evidence that high rates of living with
| parents south of Hajnal line is largely about sociocultural
| practices instead of economic conditions, and it goes back
| centuries, see eg. Individualism and the Western Liberal
| Tradition: Evolutionary Origins, History, and Prospects for the
| Future, by Kevin MacDonald.
| fleddr wrote:
| What is striking in this development is the destruction of our
| social fabric.
|
| From African village model to the nuclear family is a massive
| step, made possible by the nation state. Arguably this
| impoverishes community/extended family life. The most extreme
| form can regularly be read in the news: somebody found dead in
| their home, undetected for weeks or months.
|
| But not even that is enough. Even within the scope of the
| nuclear family are we further individualizing. Each partner in
| the couple is to be fully economically independent from the
| other. Note that I'm not suggesting any traditional angle here,
| I'm purely talking about individualism in general. Even within
| our very own family, we no longer dare to rely on each other,
| to be dependent on each other.
|
| If I were to pick a cliche busy urban family, they have very
| few shared moments. They may not even eat together. They relax
| on their own individual device, often in separate rooms. And we
| outsource care for both our young and the old.
|
| We drifted far from our roots.
| bombcar wrote:
| A huge difference is even a few generations ago, the "growing
| family" would be the one owning the house, and grandparents
| (their parents) would move in _with them_ - now it 's inverted;
| only the grandparents have a house or can afford one, and so the
| "growing" or potentially growing family is living with them.
|
| It doesn't seem as much a difference but it is a really big one.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| If I were a woman, there is no way I would entertain the idea
| of having kids without my name on the title or lease of the
| house.
| [deleted]
| antisthenes wrote:
| And if I were a man, there's no way I would just let a house
| become marital property if I owned it outright before the
| marriage, especially considering how family courts screw men
| over.
|
| That's a surefire way to homelessness, unless you are very
| (SV engineer or doctor) rich.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| That is an issue for each couple to work through
| themselves, but I was more alluding to inhabiting a home
| belonging to your partner's parents, not to your partner.
| watwut wrote:
| The property acquired before marriage is yours after
| divorce. The split part are properties acquired during
| marriage, unless you have prenup that says otherwise for
| some reason.
|
| That has zero to do with whether it is safe to move into
| in-laws house when you are entering vulnerable period of
| pregnancy and being primary caregiver for small kids.
| Because both severely limit your economic options even in
| best conditions.
| antiverse wrote:
| Why is this comment downvoted? It's literally what goes
| through the minds of parents of newly weds and weds-to-be.
| Let's not beat around the bush and be upfront about it.
| helen___keller wrote:
| Off topic. GP and the response from female POV are
| regarding living in the elders' house, not the husbands
| house.
| antiverse wrote:
| That distinction is not worth burying the comment. It was
| an earnest response, and a valid one at that.
| watwut wrote:
| How did all those whole generations of parents and grandparents
| lost their houses and who took those houses?
| bombcar wrote:
| Back then they didn't lose houses, they sold them because
| they didn't need them anymore, and moved in with kids for
| eldercare, basically.
|
| Houses weren't limited in availability, other things were the
| limiting factors - and sometimes "move in with" would mean
| moving in next door or into what were called "mother-in-law"
| houses.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-06-27 23:00 UTC)