A very interesting video! While the title may sound pretty doomer (and is more doomer on YouTube as its all caps there) it does do a pretty good job of explaining the trajectory that South Korea...
A very interesting video! While the title may sound pretty doomer (and is more doomer on YouTube as its all caps there) it does do a pretty good job of explaining the trajectory that South Korea is currently on and the trajectory other countries may soon find themselves on. The most depressing part of the video wasn't the video itself, but the comments section. It's just filled with people from South Korea talking about how the government hasn't tried addressing the root causes and simply keeps offering bandaid fixes, which doesn't really help.
This has been the sentiment of the South Koreans I know in real life. For example, my partner's cousin visited South Korea and ended up falling in love with a woman there. They got married and...
This has been the sentiment of the South Koreans I know in real life.
For example, my partner's cousin visited South Korea and ended up falling in love with a woman there. They got married and lived there for several years. But when they decided to have children, they left South Korea for his home country.
She explained to me that, as much as she wanted to keep living near her family, there was no way she was going to raise children in South Korea. South Korean society is simply not conducive to starting a family, and Koreans who want to have kids immigrate elsewhere to do it.
Yep, that's pretty much what the commenters in the video also mentioned. The workaholic culture has people often spending 70+ hours a week at work, which is like ~12hr days for 6 days a week. You...
Yep, that's pretty much what the commenters in the video also mentioned. The workaholic culture has people often spending 70+ hours a week at work, which is like ~12hr days for 6 days a week. You get one day off and then you're back at work. Assuming you sleep 8 hours a day, there's very little time after that to even look after yourself, much less look after kids as well. Combining that with a rising cost of living and stagnant wages, most people are getting squeezed.
She didn't give me specifics, but she told me that basically Korean society (work, childcare, public spaces, social expectations, etc.) broadly cater only to adults without children. She mentioned...
She didn't give me specifics, but she told me that basically Korean society (work, childcare, public spaces, social expectations, etc.) broadly cater only to adults without children.
She mentioned that she was particularly reluctant to raise a son in South Korea due to conscription.
To be fair, whenever this comes up I feel like people think there's this magic "make babies" lever that XYZ government doesn't want to pull. The SK government has many, many issues, and I don't...
To be fair, whenever this comes up I feel like people think there's this magic "make babies" lever that XYZ government doesn't want to pull. The SK government has many, many issues, and I don't think they've done anything to particularly make the problem better in any way shape or fashion.
But, this birthrate "issue" is really something that is observable in every developed country - and generally correlated with development.
Take Switzerland - it has one of the highest development indexes anywhere, and its birthrate is 1.39. Is that as bad as Korea? No, but it's also not that far off of Japan's (1.27), and far below replacement (2).
Social democracy, communist dictatorship, military junta, buddhist theocracy - the trend is observable in countries with a very diverse set of economic and governance models.
It just seems to be part of life that as a people get richer, their appetite to have children falls, and vice versa. Particular conditions can accelerate or decelerate that trend, but as no country is particularly interested in becoming poorer, it seems like it's a trend that will affect us all.
But even in rich nations, income inequality can mean that people who are fundamentally pretty well off on a global sense are just scraping by. I'm in one of the most expensive areas of the...
But even in rich nations, income inequality can mean that people who are fundamentally pretty well off on a global sense are just scraping by. I'm in one of the most expensive areas of the country, and there's a strong correlation between profession and having children. If one or both of the parents are a programmer for one of the big companies, a doctor, or a lawyer, there's one kid, maybe two. Otherwise, people dont have kids because they don't have faith that the kid wouldn't drop them into penury. Kurzgesagt calls it out: with income and housing insecurity paired with long working hours, evensome people who would want to have kids just can't.
That doesn't really generalize, though. The countries with the highest birthrates are some of the countries with the worst income inequality, with the worst housing insecurity, with the worst...
That doesn't really generalize, though. The countries with the highest birthrates are some of the countries with the worst income inequality, with the worst housing insecurity, with the worst everything really. Gaza has one of the highest birthrates in the world - it's hard to imagine a more hellish place to raise a kid. The 4th highest birthrate belongs to Somalia, which is currently in an unimaginable humanitarian crisis due to civil war.
On the other hand, rich countries with strong social safety nets... still see their birth rates plummet year over year.
edit:
As a more clear, and less extreme, example, take the US. The income bracket with the highest birthrate was also the lowest income - 0-$10,000 with 62.75 per 1,000 women. The income bracket with the lowest birthrate was the second highest: $150,000-$200,000 at 46.46 births per 1,000 women.
My completely unsubstantiated theory is that the level of income required for birth rates to start going in the other direction is so high that there’s not a large enough sample size to measure...
My completely unsubstantiated theory is that the level of income required for birth rates to start going in the other direction is so high that there’s not a large enough sample size to measure the effect. It essentially needs to be enough that having children is not going to materially change the couple’s financial situation (where it’s basically the same as if they hadn’t), which in developed countries would be ridiculously high. Like US$400-500k+ combined income high, if we’re talking a major metro.
The last time any developed nation saw anywhere near that kind of compensation adopted broadly was in the US following WWII, which I think was a big factor in the sheer size of the baby boomer generation. A lot of people weren’t just getting by or comfortable but felt like they were thriving, and I believe that state of mind is difficult to find anywhere these days.
I think at some point it just stops scaling. The presumption is that having a child is something everyone definitely wants, but I just don't that's something that can be presumed at all. No matter...
I think at some point it just stops scaling. The presumption is that having a child is something everyone definitely wants, but I just don't that's something that can be presumed at all. No matter your income, having a child is a big commitment, and involves sacrifices no matter what. For both parents, it's committing a large portion of your life to raising said child, and committing to be with your partner for the long term. For mothers, childbirth is still an excruciating and demanding process, physically, emotionally, hormonally.
The richer and more at leisure you are, the more you have the prescience to examine these tradeoffs. The more that your life is good, the more that you sacrifice dedicating your life for the next few years to changing dirty diapers.
In the end, if people decide that they'd rather not bear the costs, I think that's a valid decision. Nor does it need to be as radical as the childfree movement. I think for many people it's just that they examine the sacrifices every year, and every year decide it's not worth it yet. Which is what it is.
All true, but it’s easy to imagine that for many, the sacrifice to financial stability is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Nobody wants to endure financial hardship in the first place, and...
All true, but it’s easy to imagine that for many, the sacrifice to financial stability is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Nobody wants to endure financial hardship in the first place, and staring down the possibility of having to do that with a family in tow is terrifying. There’s also the cuts to various quality of life things that the resulting budget restrictions involves, as well as potentially eliminating the possibility of home ownership depending on the couple’s situation.
That’s probably the biggest and most visible roadblock for most couples. Removing it is bound to have a positive impact.
I may be biased, though. Within my circle of 30-something millenials, attaining the highest level of monetary padding possible and starting a family before it’s too late is a very common goal. Just about all of them would be having kids if they had a button to push that would eliminate finances as a problem.
those places also, ironically(?) enough, have stronget senses of community. When it's not just this feeling of you and maybe a spouse providing care for a kid and instead a village caring for...
it's hard to imagine a more hellish place to raise a kid
those places also, ironically(?) enough, have stronget senses of community. When it's not just this feeling of you and maybe a spouse providing care for a kid and instead a village caring for everyone (because by those points, you realize that no one can even survive solo, let alone with a kid), the burdens can severely lighten.
But that's nt really a concept in much of western society, outside of the most rural areas.
And yes, there are other factors of non-planned births that cause this too. DOGE mocked the incorrect 7-figures of sending condoms to Africa, but helping 3rd world countries with birth control does have a profound effect.
I think assessing the effects of income inequality would make more sense comparing among rich countries with robust social safety nets, rather than comparing with countries where there is almost...
I think assessing the effects of income inequality would make more sense comparing among rich countries with robust social safety nets, rather than comparing with countries where there is almost certainly extremely little access to birth control and other means of family planning (this is also undoubtedly a factor in the US differences between rich and poor women). It's already pretty well-known that richer countries have lower birthrates and that a country's birthrate gets lower as it gets richer, so comparing rich countries to extremely impoverished ones doesn't seem super enlightening when it comes to assessing the impact of other factors.
Another factor is that professions that require high levels of education —medicine, law, engineering— select for people who prioritize education enough that they are able to ignore or suppress...
Another factor is that professions that require high levels of education —medicine, law, engineering— select for people who prioritize education enough that they are able to ignore or suppress other avenues of identity or meaning, like having a big family, that could detract from that goal. In my observation, when they're in their 30s and 40s, they're still in the professional grind mindset and it's who they are and have become: they are their work. It doesn't switch off.
I think it's more than just income and working hours, but it's how an advanced economy that requires increasingly higher levels of education selects for people who willingly embrace careers and education as their primary source of identity and meaning.
For the most part, he two levers are "child subsidies" (and big ones, either directly or indirectly) or "stop overworking your populace". They aren't without consequence, but are well within...
I feel like people think there's this magic "make babies" lever that XYZ government doesn't want to pull.
For the most part, he two levers are "child subsidies" (and big ones, either directly or indirectly) or "stop overworking your populace". They aren't without consequence, but are well within access for a government to pull and budget for.
But yes, there are simply some societal facts that mean it will be hard or impossible to approach back to 2.1 children. less societal pressure to raise families (let alone large ones), declining social strucures (remember "it takes a villiage to raise a chid?"), being better off reduces the desires to burden that convinience with a kid, better education and knowldge of birth control, etc. Those are problems you solve in generations, not decades. Very few governments are that forward thinking these days.
But today, I believe the #1 or #2 reason 1st world country citizens state for not having children is the financial and time burden. These simple levers will still raise it up from the pitiful 0.7 rate if you need short term wins.
Financial security is probably the number one issue preventing people from having children right now. Of one of my friend groups, I'm the first (and so far only) one to have a child. Some of them...
Financial security is probably the number one issue preventing people from having children right now. Of one of my friend groups, I'm the first (and so far only) one to have a child. Some of them want kids in theory, but don't think they can afford it, or want to buy a house first, or have been prioritizing their career, or are worried about the current political environment (we live in Canada), or all of the above. If they can't afford to live how they want to now, it's only going to get worse after adding a child to the mix.
Most of this can be fixed with enough money for at least one parent to take a year or more off of work without worrying about finances. For dual income families, losing half that income for one parent (usually the mother) to stay at home for at least a year is simply infeasible. If governments want people to have children, they're certainly not making it easy.
Even better would be a UBI. If people aren't worried about their financial security now, and also aren't worried about the financial security of their children when they become adults, then they're much more likely to have a child. I'll admit, I'm worried about what the world will look like 15-20 years from now, and what that means for my child.
I am the parent of an adult child, so obviously I wanted kids back in day, but if I were a young adult now, even if I were very financially secure there is no way I would consider having children...
I am the parent of an adult child, so obviously I wanted kids back in day, but if I were a young adult now, even if I were very financially secure there is no way I would consider having children without a lot more commitment on the part of the major governments to address climate change. I just wouldn't want to bring a child into a world with the crappy future we're looking at right now.
Someone sent me this video a few weeks ago. Despite the apparent subject, they spend quite a while on the history of Japan and its own demographic and cultural crisis, so if you're interested in...
Someone sent me this video a few weeks ago. Despite the apparent subject, they spend quite a while on the history of Japan and its own demographic and cultural crisis, so if you're interested in the one you might be interested in the other (I've also watched the South Korea one last week).
It feels to me like this is a major flaw in modern democracies. It's a default failure state that results from a serious imbalance in incentives tied to a combination of fixed term lengths in political posts and increasing lifespans. As the elderly become a more powerful voting bloc, politicians have greater incentives to make shortsighted policies that keep them happy rather than policies to support the (increasingly) fewer young starting their own families. So the young don't start those families (at least not in their birth country). Which means even fewer young people, and proportionally more elderly people. It's happening everywhere. It's actually pretty bad right here in Portugal too.
Now here's the controversial bit: It's hopefully not the only solution, but I believe this would be solved with a maximum voting age. Political systems should be designed such that the young always retain a (high) minimum amount of power. And if necessary I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is and give up my vote if I live to a sufficiently old age.
I think the legal voting age should be 25 to 50. Many thinking abilities, including memory, planning, and decision-making, peak around the early 30s and plateau until the late 50s or 60s. People...
I think the legal voting age should be 25 to 50. Many thinking abilities, including memory, planning, and decision-making, peak around the early 30s and plateau until the late 50s or 60s.
People in younger and older age groups can create unions and other groups to influence the voting block.
Interesting take for sure. What do you and @Protected think about a “family weighted” vote? The basic premise is that, while also extremely difficult to implement, it might allow us to avoid the...
Interesting take for sure.
What do you and @Protected think about a “family weighted” vote? The basic premise is that, while also extremely difficult to implement, it might allow us to avoid the you are now too old to have a say-debate.
I already know this would be incredibly hard, if not impossible, to perform fully fairly in practice… but working with the assumption that in the aggregate, parents will vote at least somewhat with their kids in mind if they actually had to represent them until, I don’t know, 16 years old, the idea is:
Suppose we found a hopefully fair and effective way to grant the parent(s) additional vote(s) proportional to the number of their kids, and parents will use these up by default (do not ask me about the logistics of that…)
Younger people are not underrepresented as drastically anymore, positively affecting policy made on their behalf – families would vote for family-friendly politics, education, future of the planet/environment, etc., leading to a more family-friendly environment for future potential parents to want to be in.
Assuming most kids <14 do not majorly split/part ways with their parents ideologically yet (if ever), the time a child spends potentially being misrepresented due to actually wanting to vote in a different direction is only a couple of years. One could also imagine a “vote reclaiming system” for those who do disagree with their parents at some younger age already.
On the flip side, the ones who agree with their parents get more years of representation, and earlier in the course of things. If it is found empirically that this assumption of “the majority agree with parents” is wrong, this argument doesn’t hold up anymore, I think.
Children are maybe asked by some parents on their wishes for a voting decision, or at the very least, grow up to be more politically engaged/educated, which is important for the continued existence of a democratic system and society. And then by virtue of aging alone, they reduce their parents’ influence, as the vote is taken away from them, not added into the pool anew, since it was already added 16 or 18 years prior. (Admittedly, they don’t even have to vote themselves from 16 or 18 onwards for this effect to occur.)
Another side of this: it may or may not be desired to gradually or in steps reduce the voting percentage, such that a young child grants +1 vote, and an older one only +0.5, until eventually +0. This would mean that parents of younger children are weighed more, which however is counteracted by the total number of children being lower in the start of almost all parents' careers.
In time, eventually, hopefully, a lot more people can afford to have kids, rebalancing the system such that not only rich people get to have increased voting power, avoiding that “having kids” becomes the new “owning land”. This part may be more unrealistic than the rest.
I’ll admit this is not a well-considered idea as in, I haven’t actively searched for downsides/arguments against it yet, but it is a thought I’ve had several times over the years now. Also, uh, disclaimer? that my maybe idealistic thinking is shaped by being from a country where there are very regularly more than two parties being elected, allowing for more nuance even if people disagree on some things. I don’t know/haven’t thought about if this could work at all in a first-past-the-post system.
It's an interesting idea, but I think that while it might have something akin to the desired effects in theory, it's doomed to fail simply because it's too complicated for a lot of people to wrap...
It's an interesting idea, but I think that while it might have something akin to the desired effects in theory, it's doomed to fail simply because it's too complicated for a lot of people to wrap their heads around it. Even in something as simple and straightforward as regular voting (I'd argue it's nearly as simple as we could make it) we see a spate of issues around the world with people mistaking the names of political parties, not understanding what they're voting for, challenges to voting counts, challenges to polling processes, etc. I think something like this may be too brittle/vulnerable to pressure from bad actors and malcontents.
I'd also want to increase the political power of young people without kids regardless of the scenario. Young people are working and paying income tax. Retirees pay some taxes, but they are not working anymore (generally speaking). Therefore, younger people deserve significant representation, a minimum proportion of the political power. I wouldn't take away the vote from all elderly, just restrict it based on a simple and straightforward proportion. In the event of a situation of demographic imbalance, voting rights could be distributed to some elderly on a per-election basis using a true randomizer.
I'm a big believer in how modern technology and technological developments can make certain things much simpler and straightforward and solve some political problems, streamlining political participation and enabling things like more direct democracy with fewer resources. People themselves on the other hand are still the same!
To be a bit macabre: the oldest boomers are pushing 80 now. The problem will solve itself for the most part in 1-2 decades at best, since the generations following will shrink immensely post...
I believe this would be solved with a maximum voting age.
To be a bit macabre: the youngest oldest boomers are pushing 80 now. The problem will solve itself for the most part in 1-2 decades at best, since the generations following will shrink immensely post boomers.
the idea is interesting, though. Even if the very systems in-place mean it will never pass. But if we were ever to propose it, it's always better to give incentives instead of penalties when introducing something controverial. So perhaps instead of some proposals below, we give some 18-36 demographic 1.5 votes, and 37-65 1.1 or something (I'm sure some poly sci's/game theorists could calculate something more precise). It's also less legally thorny perhaps, given we have multiple amendments in-place to specifically not remove such abilities from various groups.
Once you can leave the workfoce and retire, it seems fair to lose any bonus participation to policies you may not live to see. Likewise, some young voter who may have to suffer consequences from presidents before they were even born seems fair to influence the future the most.
I generally agree with your thoughts. I wouldn't restrict voting as narrowly as @xk3 . Official retirement age seems like a good, easy to understand boundary for changing people's political power....
I generally agree with your thoughts. I wouldn't restrict voting as narrowly as @xk3 . Official retirement age seems like a good, easy to understand boundary for changing people's political power.
The problem will solve itself
Permanently, though? My fear is that I see several countries having this problem. If this is a self-reinforcing cycle, a problem of slipping proportions, it could keep happening regardless of population contractions, if the system isn't changed.
the very systems in-place mean it will never pass.
I fear it's not a matter of whether something will "pass" or not. The breaking point for social democracies such as those in Europe reaching this failure state has the young effectively enslaved to the elderly; comparatively few of them work multiple jobs and long hours for the privilege of living in a shared room while paying a ridiculously burdensome amount of tax and having no meaningful political say (all of this is already happening). They will no longer be able to emigrate, because in this future every country has naturally reached this state. Meanwhile, the elderly are homeowners. They live longer. There are more of them. Their prejudices are 50 years out of date. And just like all top politicians, they won't be around in a short amount of years, so they don't strictly speaking need to care about the future.
Then the entire system could suddently collapse, and it would be ugly. Not let's pass new laws ugly, but let's riot and set things on fire ugly. Let's hang people from the lamp posts ugly.
To prevent this, countries like mine are now importing ridiculous amounts of foreign workers. A political party just proposed giving the vote to temporary residents (non-citizens). Sure, this works as a short-term band-aid. But I can't help but wonder if when a whole new generation of young people has no more blood ties to the previous generation, how long they will put up with this nonsense. I wouldn't begrudge them hanging the elderly portuguese - who they would owe very little to - out to dry. Maybe this is the only way this cultural shift can happen peacefully.
If we went back in time hundreds of years and talked about our political system with various tribal societies throughout the world, they would laugh at our foolishness. We think ourselves more civilized, but humans have "always" known that the young can't live for the elderly. If the tribe cares about the future, then it's the elderly who should prioritize the young. All over the world, children were raised by communities as a whole. Young parents were helped by everyone. Educators were respected and rewarded. When prosperity is flagging, the priority should always be the children. My taxes and yours should, first and foremost, be used to support young families. Incentives. Healthcare. Nurseries. Long parental leaves. Then quality education. Then, when the system is stable again, we can bring back the lavish pensions.
Hard to say. I think it will devolve down to a crisis or near-crisis and steps are taken to have babies again. I imagine it cycles. That crisis mode would be the best time to introduce such a bill...
Permanently, though?
Hard to say. I think it will devolve down to a crisis or near-crisis and steps are taken to have babies again. I imagine it cycles. That crisis mode would be the best time to introduce such a bill as well.
There are more of them. Their prejudices are 50 years out of date. And just like all top politicians, they won't be around in a short amount of years, so they don't strictly speaking need to care about the future.
Yes, I won't disagree that things will get ugly. I don't have much faith in the powers that be relinquishing that power without such ugly matters, though. You see how many people died on their principles over a global pandemic and realize that these people's minds cannot be changed in such ways.
The peaceful way to resolve this only comes in that window where the population craters as the old dies out. Will we get there? Who knows at this point?
We think ourselves more civilized, but humans have "always" known that the young can't live for the elderly.
The times were definitely different. They'd also never imagine a time where there's such a skewed ratio of the elderly. It definitely was a bad move to isolate out of our tribes and try to do the child and elderly caring all as singular units, though. Indeed, very dumb.
That breaking down of community may be partway instigated by the (statistically) psychopathic billionarires, though. Definitely other micro factors like racism, NIMBYism, and outright greed, but the rich's influence carries a lot of sway.
This is, frankly, just you making stuff up about how you think the world ought to be (and thus to have been). It is not a remotely accurate reflection of human history or even prehistory. Caring...
If we went back in time hundreds of years and talked about our political system with various tribal societies throughout the world, they would laugh at our foolishness. We think ourselves more civilized, but humans have "always" known that the young can't live for the elderly. If the tribe cares about the future, then it's the elderly who should prioritize the young. All over the world, children were raised by communities as a whole. Young parents were helped by everyone. Educators were respected and rewarded. When prosperity is flagging, the priority should always be the children. My taxes and yours should, first and foremost, be used to support young families. Incentives. Healthcare. Nurseries. Long parental leaves. Then quality education. Then, when the system is stable again, we can bring back the lavish pensions.
This is, frankly, just you making stuff up about how you think the world ought to be (and thus to have been). It is not a remotely accurate reflection of human history or even prehistory.
Caring for (and, more broadly) the elderly has absolutely been a cornerstone of a huge variety of civilized societies worldwide, both now and in the past. One of the most obvious examples is Confucianism, which is over a thousand years old and features filial piety (which can be simplistically summarized as taking care of one's parents) as one of its four core virtues. And while this is just one very well-documented example of a very explicit cultural emphasis on respecting and caring for the elderly, it is not remotely as much of an outlier as you seem to think. Ancient Greece has a number of examples of privileging elders over younger people -- Plato said "it is for the elder man to rule and for the younger to submit" and Sparta was ruled by a council made up of members who were at least 60. If we go back even further, there is evidence that even pre-Neanderthals cared for their elderly and infirm.
Caring for the weak beyond one's own offspring and mate is something that largely sets us and our early human ancestors apart from other animals, even other great apes. Some argue that it was actually a rise in elder populations that enabled a "cultural explosion" among Homo sapiens that contributed to our species' success over other early human species. This involved development and use of more complex tools as well as increased food production and creation of art, likely due to the ability of elders to pass on useful information to the next generation. It's funny that you insist that a culture should devalue its elderly while simultaneously respecting and rewarding educators -- for the vast majority of human history, elders were the educators. Arguably they still are in many contexts, depending on your definitions. You say "the young were raised by communities as a whole" but seem deliberately blind to the idea that the elderly were and have always been vital parts of those communities.
But, also, the idea that the elderly almost anywhere in the world are getting "lavish pensions" is completely disconnected from reality. Even in EU countries, pensions do not result in high income for the elderly people on them without other retirement savings or familial support, and pensioners are very often at high risk of poverty. Cutting pensions and other social safety nets only serves to exacerbate wealth inequality and punish the poor, weak, and vulnerable. Imo this is inhumane regardless of a person's age -- I think one of the most important functions of a state is to ensure that no one lives in poverty -- but it's especially brutal when you apply it to populations that cannot work for a living, like the elderly.
Moreover, when you start deciding that a human's right to have the basic means to live comfortably is dependent on how useful you consider them to be to society, the inevitable result is eugenics. If the elderly who don't have family to support them deserve no support, why bother supporting disabled people under the same circumstances? They're functionally even less valuable to society by your assessment. Why should we ever care for anyone who can't care for themselves unless we have hope for extracting future value from them?
Normally I wouldn't even bother to reply, but that's a whole bunch of you putting words in my mouth and misunderstanding the point of the entire conversation. I won't pose it as a question, but...
Normally I wouldn't even bother to reply, but that's a whole bunch of you putting words in my mouth and misunderstanding the point of the entire conversation. I won't pose it as a question, but all I can say is that I hope you at least watched the video.
I'm going to say something controversial that's going to come across as quite callous, but I think population decrease at a global scale is a good thing long term. Bad for humanity? Sure, maybe....
I'm going to say something controversial that's going to come across as quite callous, but I think population decrease at a global scale is a good thing long term. Bad for humanity? Sure, maybe. Better for the majority of the planet's other inhabitants? Definitely. I am out in nature on a regular basis, I work in the environmental field. I see and live the destruction and loss year on year.
Instead of trying to fight this we should be working towards adjusting and easing into it, but I don't hear anyone talking about this as even being an option. What is the point of continuously growing the human population when resources are finite? As the quote goes, growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of cancer.
I also don't necessarily think that population growth is inherently good, but one factor is that many social systems are structured under the assumption that the population will continue to rise,...
What is the point of continuously growing the human population when resources are finite? As the quote goes, growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of cancer.
I also don't necessarily think that population growth is inherently good, but one factor is that many social systems are structured under the assumption that the population will continue to rise, and are thus funded by the next generation in a way that isn't sustainable if they consist of fewer people. If you have a social security-style system and the next generation is half as large as the previous, you either need to raise taxes or lower benefits to keep the system sustainable. One at least temporary/partial solution to this is immigration, where you get new adults contributing into these funds without the state spending resources on them as children -- and it's not a surprise, thus, that the countries where population decline is considered the biggest catastrophe (Japan and Korea) are countries with very low rates of immigration.
I agree with what you are saying, but a lot of conversations I hear are around trying to reverse the trend by encouraging people to have more children. What we should be focusing on is mitigation...
I agree with what you are saying, but a lot of conversations I hear are around trying to reverse the trend by encouraging people to have more children. What we should be focusing on is mitigation measures and an overhaul of a system that is poised for collapse if nothing changes. It might be an immediate problem for countries like Japan and South Korea, but this is going to become a global issue, and immigration will only take us so far. Developing countries are also thankfully rising out of poverty, but that means they too will face the same issue eventually.
The human population is and always has been a giant pyramid scheme (I mean the ideal demographic chart is a literal pyramid). The thing about pyramid schemes is they eventually fail. We can't keep functioning like this and expect it not to fall apart eventually. Yet no one wants to have that conversation, or think about how we build a society and system that is sustainable beyond the pyramid model.
I by and large agree with you in principle, but just wanted to point out a motivation that isn't totally awful that people have for worrying about this, since you seemed kind of in askance in your...
I by and large agree with you in principle, but just wanted to point out a motivation that isn't totally awful that people have for worrying about this, since you seemed kind of in askance in your previous comment.
Frankly, I think a substantial portion of people who worry about this outside of Japan and Korea do not have goals remotely as noble as upholding existing social safety nets for the elderly, even when they're nominally discussing Japan and Korea. A lot of discussion of low fertility rates in Western countries is thinly veiled Great Replacement theory. But I figured it was worth considering the parts of population decline fears that are more legitimate instead of focusing on those aspects.
On a more ecological scale, human overpopulation is a red herring anyway. Human consumption and destruction of the environment is perfectly capable of increasing even with a decreasing population, unfortunately. The issues we need to solve to fix both the social systems that rely on constant growth and our rampant destruction of the environment are more complex than just the sheer number of human beings on this earth.
The US really should be making a nation wide trust. Instead, we’ve been borrowing from SS for years without paying it back and now they want to defund it entirely.
The US really should be making a nation wide trust.
Instead, we’ve been borrowing from SS for years without paying it back and now they want to defund it entirely.
One angle I’ve seen argued for continuing population growth (or at minimum maintaining current levels) is that fewer people means fewer new ideas and fewer problems solved, which makes a lot of...
One angle I’ve seen argued for continuing population growth (or at minimum maintaining current levels) is that fewer people means fewer new ideas and fewer problems solved, which makes a lot of sense. The more a population shrinks, the more hamstrung it becomes in sciences and the arts. Everything slows down. For a while the difference can be made up by countries newly developing, but much like immigration this is not a bottomless well and eventually global cultural and technological stagnation sets in.
Of course this comes with the caveat of good living conditions for the population in question, because people whose energy is consumed just surviving are going to have severely curbed ability to contribute that way.
If this idea has any merit, then the only way forward is to figure out ways to have a high standard of life for everybody while also reducing consumption, which is no doubt tricky at best.
If we suddenly had 10% the number of humans on the planet (with rural and city areas receiving the same percent-cull) it is still very possible that the environmental impact is largely unchanged....
Better for the majority of the planet's other inhabitants? Definitely
If we suddenly had 10% the number of humans on the planet (with rural and city areas receiving the same percent-cull) it is still very possible that the environmental impact is largely unchanged. It only takes a small number of humans to deforest the amazon or create a chernobyl, etc.
Would we have less of a need to run the resources dry? Physically yes. But psychologically there will always be people and corporations that want to capture the market via false scarcity or drain the mangroves to build a casino that can only be accessed by aero-shuttle because it was marginally cheaper than the ecological alternative.
A decline in population probably would be a good thing at a global scale, but that has little relevance to whether it’s a good or bad thing for one country or region. This mostly depends on local...
A decline in population probably would be a good thing at a global scale, but that has little relevance to whether it’s a good or bad thing for one country or region. This mostly depends on local considerations.
I think that the solution is automation, so that we don’t need an ever-increasing work force to pay for the pensions and maintain the infrastructure for an ever-increasing population of...
I think that the solution is automation, so that we don’t need an ever-increasing work force to pay for the pensions and maintain the infrastructure for an ever-increasing population of increasingly longer-lived old people. If humans had all their needs provided for and didn’t have to work, then our way of life wouldn’t risk reverting back to the 1800s by a shrinking population. We would just get used with having a smaller world population, which wouldn’t be a bad thing if you ask me.
Thought experiment: What if a country’s government chose to make it a law that every man and woman was required to enter an arranged union at age 20 and “produce” at least two children by their 30th year of age, with more children earning them greater benefits? I’m not so much interested in how a government would pay for the insane amount of money they would have to invest in order to create benefits that are enticing enough for people to sign up to such an experiment, and the systems necessary to support it. Rather, I am interested in knowing if a pro-natal culture could arise out of a developed nation, where everyone agrees that getting into an arranged union and having children is as normal and expected of a milestone in life as finishing up one’s education. I can imagine that this could work under military rule.
Of course it would be hell, and isn’t something that should happen. What I want to know is if a society of a developed nation like that, where the overwhelming majority of the population...
Of course it would be hell, and isn’t something that should happen. What I want to know is if a society of a developed nation like that, where the overwhelming majority of the population subscribes to the agenda and there are no queer people (which I know exist in all societies, obviously), could function and grow their population. I wonder if any society in history has ever attempted to impose natalist policies on its population and what the outcome was.
Many religions have built in memes (in the old sense) encouraging procreation, banning birth control, etc. What are those if not pro-natalist policies?
Many religions have built in memes (in the old sense) encouraging procreation, banning birth control, etc. What are those if not pro-natalist policies?
I mean even if queer people didn't exist, this is a horrifying violation of human rights and more or less amounts to state-enforced rape. Not to mention that, due to the increased risks and...
What if a country’s government chose to make it a law that every man and woman was required to enter an arranged union at age 20 and “produce” at least two children by their 30th year of age, with more children earning them greater benefits?
I mean even if queer people didn't exist, this is a horrifying violation of human rights and more or less amounts to state-enforced rape.
Not to mention that, due to the increased risks and negative effects of pregnancy, both physically and financially, on the one actually carrying the child, this would only exacerbate inequality between men and women societally.
Of course. I’m not saying otherwise. It’s a thought experiment. That being said, when inequality between men and women was the norm, families were also larger. But again, that was the way of life...
...this is a horrifying violation of human rights and more or less amounts to state-enforced rape.
Of course. I’m not saying otherwise. It’s a thought experiment.
That being said, when inequality between men and women was the norm, families were also larger. But again, that was the way of life before the industrial revolution, and I clearly wouldn’t want us to return to a feudal system just so that people were forced to have children in order to survive.
What I want to know is, could we retain modernity, and also produce a society in which the culture has internalized that having children in this manner is the norm? I’m assuming that no queer people would exist in such a society (which they do everywhere and I’m obviously not calling for).
As much as it is the norm today, for example, to have either no children, or have them in one’s 30s, what cultural shift would it take for almost all people to want to seek to have children, have more, and have them earlier?
Unless your definition of modernity excludes important developments like liberal democracy and recognition of fundamental human rights, I don't think it's possible to maintain a system like this...
Unless your definition of modernity excludes important developments like liberal democracy and recognition of fundamental human rights, I don't think it's possible to maintain a system like this in a modern context even if your thought experiment is so wildly unrealistic that queer people don't exist in it. A system like this would require a nigh-complete destruction of women's rights and an authoritarian society akin to that in A Handmaid's Tale. I understand that this is a thought experiment and that you don't actually advocate for this, but I think it's important to recognize that the only way this becomes the norm is if you force it on people through state violence.
No decline in your standard of living. Basically, pay them, and not just “free childcare and oh maybe a $500 check.” I mean, entry-level doctor pay to stay home and have kids. (Note this answer...
what cultural shift would it take for almost all people to want to seek to have children, have more, and have them earlier?
No decline in your standard of living. Basically, pay them, and not just “free childcare and oh maybe a $500 check.” I mean, entry-level doctor pay to stay home and have kids.
(Note this answer assumes no changes to religiosity.)
That’s the difficult part. I think that culturally speaking, we see having children as a decline in standard of living these days, regardless of the actual decline in our standard of living. We...
No decline in your standard of living.
That’s the difficult part. I think that culturally speaking, we see having children as a decline in standard of living these days, regardless of the actual decline in our standard of living. We don’t want to be inconvenienced by having to give attention to a child (especially if it turns out to be rowdy one). The “perceived” decline in the standard of living will happen regardless, unless the child is immediately raised by a third part and the parents can go about living as they did.
So, yeah, no amount of money from the government would make anyone who isn’t enthused about having children actually want them, especially if it required to stay at home and forego a career that they enjoy.
All you can do is make sure the conditions are optimal, the support is there, and people who want to have children can have them without suffering overrmuch, financially and socially, for it. I...
All you can do is make sure the conditions are optimal, the support is there, and people who want to have children can have them without suffering overrmuch, financially and socially, for it. I don't think you could or should force anyone, but all other things being equal, good conditions means more children. Many of us are biologically and culturally wired to want/like kids for a variety of reasons, even when expecting to have to suffer for it. We are willing to suffer for all other kinds of goals, aren't we?
Using your reply as a springboard, I think most people have a surprising level of tolerance for temporary dispruptions in their lives, and as disruptive as children are, it’s quite front-loaded...
Using your reply as a springboard, I think most people have a surprising level of tolerance for temporary dispruptions in their lives, and as disruptive as children are, it’s quite front-loaded with the first 5 years by far being the most demanding (especially the first half of that) and steeply declining as they become more self-sufficient and start going to school.
In comparison the 18+ years of hard financial dependency children have on parents is a lot less temporary and thus, much more daunting.
That’s the thing. I see more and more that people are willing to suffer for their careers, but not in order to have children. This is an anecdotal observation, of course, and I’m not pooh-poohing...
That’s the thing. I see more and more that people are willing to suffer for their careers, but not in order to have children. This is an anecdotal observation, of course, and I’m not pooh-poohing on the career chasers, as I wish I had been one myself, but I also wish that the conversation around the birth rate wouldn’t avoid the aspect of culture, as if it’s “offensive” to point out the simple reality that society became a lot more individualistic and less interested in children in in my lifetime. A good example of this is how unwelcome small children are in a lot of public spaces in America, for example. Thankfully, I don’t see that being the case in much of Europe yet. People tolerate children, even when they cry on airplanes.
Personally, I don't see the appeal of children. They're usually loud, have tantrums, are largely unappreciative until after-death-wherein-they-regret-not-calling-more-often, and they are expensive...
what cultural shift would it take for almost all people to want to seek to have children, have more?
Personally, I don't see the appeal of children. They're usually loud, have tantrums, are largely unappreciative until after-death-wherein-they-regret-not-calling-more-often, and they are expensive to take care of. Bring back the kibbutz. If I can impregnate the adult female human mammal specimen and not have that effect my life much then it might make sense to do so. But it seems like a financially and emotionally reckless thing to do at this time. My wife and I value our ability to sleep long periods without interruption.
If we had a solarium we would value the time we spend in there over the time that child-rearing takes but since we do not have a solarium we value our time thinking about building a solarium and other possible futures in place of child-rearing.
But children who grow up in communal environments like daycare or the children's social centre are perhaps not well-adapted for modern living. I'm not sure
and have them earlier
Raise the standard of living for new workers. No unpaid internships. Minimum wage must be able to support 5 people if you want to target that 2.1 children per nuclear family with one parent working and one child-rearing (with a trip to Disneyland every 5 or 10 years (this is the cost of the 0.9 child))
Have no idea what that is. Duckduckwent it and got this: uh What? lol Finally someone who gives me the honest reason why they don’t want children. tips hat only looked at the link later Oh. So it...
...kibbutz
Have no idea what that is. Duckduckwent it and got this:
At their heart, kibbutzim are small towns — typically with somewhere between 100 and 1,000 residents — historically centered around collective farms. In recent decades, some have come to thrive on modern industry and tourism. Central to the kibbutz are roots in socialist and Marxist ideas about collective living.
uh What? lol
Personally, I don't see the appeal of children. They're usually loud, have tantrums, are largely unappreciative until-after-you-die-wherein-they-regret-not-calling-more-often, and they are expensive to take care of. (...) If I can impregnate the adult female human mammal specimen and not have that effect my life much then it might make sense to do so. But it seems like a financially and emotionally reckless thing to do at this time. My wife and I value our ability to sleep long periods without interruption.
Finally someone who gives me the honest reason why they don’t want children. tips hat
only looked at the link later
Oh. So it was something about Israel. This is interesting.
No unpaid internships. Minimum wage must be able to support 5 people if you want to target that 2.1 children per nuclear family...
A very interesting video! While the title may sound pretty doomer (and is more doomer on YouTube as its all caps there) it does do a pretty good job of explaining the trajectory that South Korea is currently on and the trajectory other countries may soon find themselves on. The most depressing part of the video wasn't the video itself, but the comments section. It's just filled with people from South Korea talking about how the government hasn't tried addressing the root causes and simply keeps offering bandaid fixes, which doesn't really help.
This has been the sentiment of the South Koreans I know in real life.
For example, my partner's cousin visited South Korea and ended up falling in love with a woman there. They got married and lived there for several years. But when they decided to have children, they left South Korea for his home country.
She explained to me that, as much as she wanted to keep living near her family, there was no way she was going to raise children in South Korea. South Korean society is simply not conducive to starting a family, and Koreans who want to have kids immigrate elsewhere to do it.
Yep, that's pretty much what the commenters in the video also mentioned. The workaholic culture has people often spending 70+ hours a week at work, which is like ~12hr days for 6 days a week. You get one day off and then you're back at work. Assuming you sleep 8 hours a day, there's very little time after that to even look after yourself, much less look after kids as well. Combining that with a rising cost of living and stagnant wages, most people are getting squeezed.
I’m wondering if there are any companies [edit: in South Korea] that compete for workers by offering a better work-life balance?
Currently? I'm not sure, but that was silicon valley through the 00's when demand for worker skill was very high.
Yeah, I’m wondering about whether a similar thing might happen in South Korea.
Work/life balance is still good in Silicon Valley, although more places are pushing employees to "grind" than before.
Just out of curiosity, why is that so? What reasons did she give?
She didn't give me specifics, but she told me that basically Korean society (work, childcare, public spaces, social expectations, etc.) broadly cater only to adults without children.
She mentioned that she was particularly reluctant to raise a son in South Korea due to conscription.
Doesn’t SK also have a Japan-like work culture, of insane hours and mandatory “fun with your boss and coworkers” kinda thing?
To be fair, whenever this comes up I feel like people think there's this magic "make babies" lever that XYZ government doesn't want to pull. The SK government has many, many issues, and I don't think they've done anything to particularly make the problem better in any way shape or fashion.
But, this birthrate "issue" is really something that is observable in every developed country - and generally correlated with development.
Take Switzerland - it has one of the highest development indexes anywhere, and its birthrate is 1.39. Is that as bad as Korea? No, but it's also not that far off of Japan's (1.27), and far below replacement (2).
Social democracy, communist dictatorship, military junta, buddhist theocracy - the trend is observable in countries with a very diverse set of economic and governance models.
It just seems to be part of life that as a people get richer, their appetite to have children falls, and vice versa. Particular conditions can accelerate or decelerate that trend, but as no country is particularly interested in becoming poorer, it seems like it's a trend that will affect us all.
But even in rich nations, income inequality can mean that people who are fundamentally pretty well off on a global sense are just scraping by. I'm in one of the most expensive areas of the country, and there's a strong correlation between profession and having children. If one or both of the parents are a programmer for one of the big companies, a doctor, or a lawyer, there's one kid, maybe two. Otherwise, people dont have kids because they don't have faith that the kid wouldn't drop them into penury. Kurzgesagt calls it out: with income and housing insecurity paired with long working hours, evensome people who would want to have kids just can't.
That doesn't really generalize, though. The countries with the highest birthrates are some of the countries with the worst income inequality, with the worst housing insecurity, with the worst everything really. Gaza has one of the highest birthrates in the world - it's hard to imagine a more hellish place to raise a kid. The 4th highest birthrate belongs to Somalia, which is currently in an unimaginable humanitarian crisis due to civil war.
On the other hand, rich countries with strong social safety nets... still see their birth rates plummet year over year.
edit:
As a more clear, and less extreme, example, take the US. The income bracket with the highest birthrate was also the lowest income - 0-$10,000 with 62.75 per 1,000 women. The income bracket with the lowest birthrate was the second highest: $150,000-$200,000 at 46.46 births per 1,000 women.
link
My completely unsubstantiated theory is that the level of income required for birth rates to start going in the other direction is so high that there’s not a large enough sample size to measure the effect. It essentially needs to be enough that having children is not going to materially change the couple’s financial situation (where it’s basically the same as if they hadn’t), which in developed countries would be ridiculously high. Like US$400-500k+ combined income high, if we’re talking a major metro.
The last time any developed nation saw anywhere near that kind of compensation adopted broadly was in the US following WWII, which I think was a big factor in the sheer size of the baby boomer generation. A lot of people weren’t just getting by or comfortable but felt like they were thriving, and I believe that state of mind is difficult to find anywhere these days.
I think at some point it just stops scaling. The presumption is that having a child is something everyone definitely wants, but I just don't that's something that can be presumed at all. No matter your income, having a child is a big commitment, and involves sacrifices no matter what. For both parents, it's committing a large portion of your life to raising said child, and committing to be with your partner for the long term. For mothers, childbirth is still an excruciating and demanding process, physically, emotionally, hormonally.
The richer and more at leisure you are, the more you have the prescience to examine these tradeoffs. The more that your life is good, the more that you sacrifice dedicating your life for the next few years to changing dirty diapers.
In the end, if people decide that they'd rather not bear the costs, I think that's a valid decision. Nor does it need to be as radical as the childfree movement. I think for many people it's just that they examine the sacrifices every year, and every year decide it's not worth it yet. Which is what it is.
All true, but it’s easy to imagine that for many, the sacrifice to financial stability is the straw that breaks the camel’s back. Nobody wants to endure financial hardship in the first place, and staring down the possibility of having to do that with a family in tow is terrifying. There’s also the cuts to various quality of life things that the resulting budget restrictions involves, as well as potentially eliminating the possibility of home ownership depending on the couple’s situation.
That’s probably the biggest and most visible roadblock for most couples. Removing it is bound to have a positive impact.
I may be biased, though. Within my circle of 30-something millenials, attaining the highest level of monetary padding possible and starting a family before it’s too late is a very common goal. Just about all of them would be having kids if they had a button to push that would eliminate finances as a problem.
those places also, ironically(?) enough, have stronget senses of community. When it's not just this feeling of you and maybe a spouse providing care for a kid and instead a village caring for everyone (because by those points, you realize that no one can even survive solo, let alone with a kid), the burdens can severely lighten.
But that's nt really a concept in much of western society, outside of the most rural areas.
And yes, there are other factors of non-planned births that cause this too. DOGE mocked the incorrect 7-figures of sending condoms to Africa, but helping 3rd world countries with birth control does have a profound effect.
I think assessing the effects of income inequality would make more sense comparing among rich countries with robust social safety nets, rather than comparing with countries where there is almost certainly extremely little access to birth control and other means of family planning (this is also undoubtedly a factor in the US differences between rich and poor women). It's already pretty well-known that richer countries have lower birthrates and that a country's birthrate gets lower as it gets richer, so comparing rich countries to extremely impoverished ones doesn't seem super enlightening when it comes to assessing the impact of other factors.
Another factor is that professions that require high levels of education —medicine, law, engineering— select for people who prioritize education enough that they are able to ignore or suppress other avenues of identity or meaning, like having a big family, that could detract from that goal. In my observation, when they're in their 30s and 40s, they're still in the professional grind mindset and it's who they are and have become: they are their work. It doesn't switch off.
I think it's more than just income and working hours, but it's how an advanced economy that requires increasingly higher levels of education selects for people who willingly embrace careers and education as their primary source of identity and meaning.
For the most part, he two levers are "child subsidies" (and big ones, either directly or indirectly) or "stop overworking your populace". They aren't without consequence, but are well within access for a government to pull and budget for.
But yes, there are simply some societal facts that mean it will be hard or impossible to approach back to 2.1 children. less societal pressure to raise families (let alone large ones), declining social strucures (remember "it takes a villiage to raise a chid?"), being better off reduces the desires to burden that convinience with a kid, better education and knowldge of birth control, etc. Those are problems you solve in generations, not decades. Very few governments are that forward thinking these days.
But today, I believe the #1 or #2 reason 1st world country citizens state for not having children is the financial and time burden. These simple levers will still raise it up from the pitiful 0.7 rate if you need short term wins.
Financial security is probably the number one issue preventing people from having children right now. Of one of my friend groups, I'm the first (and so far only) one to have a child. Some of them want kids in theory, but don't think they can afford it, or want to buy a house first, or have been prioritizing their career, or are worried about the current political environment (we live in Canada), or all of the above. If they can't afford to live how they want to now, it's only going to get worse after adding a child to the mix.
Most of this can be fixed with enough money for at least one parent to take a year or more off of work without worrying about finances. For dual income families, losing half that income for one parent (usually the mother) to stay at home for at least a year is simply infeasible. If governments want people to have children, they're certainly not making it easy.
Even better would be a UBI. If people aren't worried about their financial security now, and also aren't worried about the financial security of their children when they become adults, then they're much more likely to have a child. I'll admit, I'm worried about what the world will look like 15-20 years from now, and what that means for my child.
I am the parent of an adult child, so obviously I wanted kids back in day, but if I were a young adult now, even if I were very financially secure there is no way I would consider having children without a lot more commitment on the part of the major governments to address climate change. I just wouldn't want to bring a child into a world with the crappy future we're looking at right now.
Tongue in cheek, but lately it seems like the United States is interested in becoming poorer
Someone sent me this video a few weeks ago. Despite the apparent subject, they spend quite a while on the history of Japan and its own demographic and cultural crisis, so if you're interested in the one you might be interested in the other (I've also watched the South Korea one last week).
It feels to me like this is a major flaw in modern democracies. It's a default failure state that results from a serious imbalance in incentives tied to a combination of fixed term lengths in political posts and increasing lifespans. As the elderly become a more powerful voting bloc, politicians have greater incentives to make shortsighted policies that keep them happy rather than policies to support the (increasingly) fewer young starting their own families. So the young don't start those families (at least not in their birth country). Which means even fewer young people, and proportionally more elderly people. It's happening everywhere. It's actually pretty bad right here in Portugal too.
Now here's the controversial bit: It's hopefully not the only solution, but I believe this would be solved with a maximum voting age. Political systems should be designed such that the young always retain a (high) minimum amount of power. And if necessary I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is and give up my vote if I live to a sufficiently old age.
I think the legal voting age should be 25 to 50. Many thinking abilities, including memory, planning, and decision-making, peak around the early 30s and plateau until the late 50s or 60s.
People in younger and older age groups can create unions and other groups to influence the voting block.
Interesting take for sure.
What do you and @Protected think about a “family weighted” vote? The basic premise is that, while also extremely difficult to implement, it might allow us to avoid the you are now too old to have a say-debate.
I already know this would be incredibly hard, if not impossible, to perform fully fairly in practice… but working with the assumption that in the aggregate, parents will vote at least somewhat with their kids in mind if they actually had to represent them until, I don’t know, 16 years old, the idea is:
I’ll admit this is not a well-considered idea as in, I haven’t actively searched for downsides/arguments against it yet, but it is a thought I’ve had several times over the years now. Also, uh, disclaimer? that my maybe idealistic thinking is shaped by being from a country where there are very regularly more than two parties being elected, allowing for more nuance even if people disagree on some things. I don’t know/haven’t thought about if this could work at all in a first-past-the-post system.
It's an interesting idea, but I think that while it might have something akin to the desired effects in theory, it's doomed to fail simply because it's too complicated for a lot of people to wrap their heads around it. Even in something as simple and straightforward as regular voting (I'd argue it's nearly as simple as we could make it) we see a spate of issues around the world with people mistaking the names of political parties, not understanding what they're voting for, challenges to voting counts, challenges to polling processes, etc. I think something like this may be too brittle/vulnerable to pressure from bad actors and malcontents.
I'd also want to increase the political power of young people without kids regardless of the scenario. Young people are working and paying income tax. Retirees pay some taxes, but they are not working anymore (generally speaking). Therefore, younger people deserve significant representation, a minimum proportion of the political power. I wouldn't take away the vote from all elderly, just restrict it based on a simple and straightforward proportion. In the event of a situation of demographic imbalance, voting rights could be distributed to some elderly on a per-election basis using a true randomizer.
I'm a big believer in how modern technology and technological developments can make certain things much simpler and straightforward and solve some political problems, streamlining political participation and enabling things like more direct democracy with fewer resources. People themselves on the other hand are still the same!
To be a bit macabre: the
youngestoldest boomers are pushing 80 now. The problem will solve itself for the most part in 1-2 decades at best, since the generations following will shrink immensely post boomers.the idea is interesting, though. Even if the very systems in-place mean it will never pass. But if we were ever to propose it, it's always better to give incentives instead of penalties when introducing something controverial. So perhaps instead of some proposals below, we give some 18-36 demographic 1.5 votes, and 37-65 1.1 or something (I'm sure some poly sci's/game theorists could calculate something more precise). It's also less legally thorny perhaps, given we have multiple amendments in-place to specifically not remove such abilities from various groups.
Once you can leave the workfoce and retire, it seems fair to lose any bonus participation to policies you may not live to see. Likewise, some young voter who may have to suffer consequences from presidents before they were even born seems fair to influence the future the most.
Just a small note on what you had said:
These would be the oldest baby boomers, the youngest are now past 60.
Darn, I did mean "oldest". Oldest are starting to die out and in 20 years many statistically will die.
I generally agree with your thoughts. I wouldn't restrict voting as narrowly as @xk3 . Official retirement age seems like a good, easy to understand boundary for changing people's political power.
Permanently, though? My fear is that I see several countries having this problem. If this is a self-reinforcing cycle, a problem of slipping proportions, it could keep happening regardless of population contractions, if the system isn't changed.
I fear it's not a matter of whether something will "pass" or not. The breaking point for social democracies such as those in Europe reaching this failure state has the young effectively enslaved to the elderly; comparatively few of them work multiple jobs and long hours for the privilege of living in a shared room while paying a ridiculously burdensome amount of tax and having no meaningful political say (all of this is already happening). They will no longer be able to emigrate, because in this future every country has naturally reached this state. Meanwhile, the elderly are homeowners. They live longer. There are more of them. Their prejudices are 50 years out of date. And just like all top politicians, they won't be around in a short amount of years, so they don't strictly speaking need to care about the future.
Then the entire system could suddently collapse, and it would be ugly. Not let's pass new laws ugly, but let's riot and set things on fire ugly. Let's hang people from the lamp posts ugly.
To prevent this, countries like mine are now importing ridiculous amounts of foreign workers. A political party just proposed giving the vote to temporary residents (non-citizens). Sure, this works as a short-term band-aid. But I can't help but wonder if when a whole new generation of young people has no more blood ties to the previous generation, how long they will put up with this nonsense. I wouldn't begrudge them hanging the elderly portuguese - who they would owe very little to - out to dry. Maybe this is the only way this cultural shift can happen peacefully.
If we went back in time hundreds of years and talked about our political system with various tribal societies throughout the world, they would laugh at our foolishness. We think ourselves more civilized, but humans have "always" known that the young can't live for the elderly. If the tribe cares about the future, then it's the elderly who should prioritize the young. All over the world, children were raised by communities as a whole. Young parents were helped by everyone. Educators were respected and rewarded. When prosperity is flagging, the priority should always be the children. My taxes and yours should, first and foremost, be used to support young families. Incentives. Healthcare. Nurseries. Long parental leaves. Then quality education. Then, when the system is stable again, we can bring back the lavish pensions.
Edit: Spotted a few typos.
Hard to say. I think it will devolve down to a crisis or near-crisis and steps are taken to have babies again. I imagine it cycles. That crisis mode would be the best time to introduce such a bill as well.
Yes, I won't disagree that things will get ugly. I don't have much faith in the powers that be relinquishing that power without such ugly matters, though. You see how many people died on their principles over a global pandemic and realize that these people's minds cannot be changed in such ways.
The peaceful way to resolve this only comes in that window where the population craters as the old dies out. Will we get there? Who knows at this point?
The times were definitely different. They'd also never imagine a time where there's such a skewed ratio of the elderly. It definitely was a bad move to isolate out of our tribes and try to do the child and elderly caring all as singular units, though. Indeed, very dumb.
That breaking down of community may be partway instigated by the (statistically) psychopathic billionarires, though. Definitely other micro factors like racism, NIMBYism, and outright greed, but the rich's influence carries a lot of sway.
This is, frankly, just you making stuff up about how you think the world ought to be (and thus to have been). It is not a remotely accurate reflection of human history or even prehistory.
Caring for (and, more broadly) the elderly has absolutely been a cornerstone of a huge variety of civilized societies worldwide, both now and in the past. One of the most obvious examples is Confucianism, which is over a thousand years old and features filial piety (which can be simplistically summarized as taking care of one's parents) as one of its four core virtues. And while this is just one very well-documented example of a very explicit cultural emphasis on respecting and caring for the elderly, it is not remotely as much of an outlier as you seem to think. Ancient Greece has a number of examples of privileging elders over younger people -- Plato said "it is for the elder man to rule and for the younger to submit" and Sparta was ruled by a council made up of members who were at least 60. If we go back even further, there is evidence that even pre-Neanderthals cared for their elderly and infirm.
Caring for the weak beyond one's own offspring and mate is something that largely sets us and our early human ancestors apart from other animals, even other great apes. Some argue that it was actually a rise in elder populations that enabled a "cultural explosion" among Homo sapiens that contributed to our species' success over other early human species. This involved development and use of more complex tools as well as increased food production and creation of art, likely due to the ability of elders to pass on useful information to the next generation. It's funny that you insist that a culture should devalue its elderly while simultaneously respecting and rewarding educators -- for the vast majority of human history, elders were the educators. Arguably they still are in many contexts, depending on your definitions. You say "the young were raised by communities as a whole" but seem deliberately blind to the idea that the elderly were and have always been vital parts of those communities.
But, also, the idea that the elderly almost anywhere in the world are getting "lavish pensions" is completely disconnected from reality. Even in EU countries, pensions do not result in high income for the elderly people on them without other retirement savings or familial support, and pensioners are very often at high risk of poverty. Cutting pensions and other social safety nets only serves to exacerbate wealth inequality and punish the poor, weak, and vulnerable. Imo this is inhumane regardless of a person's age -- I think one of the most important functions of a state is to ensure that no one lives in poverty -- but it's especially brutal when you apply it to populations that cannot work for a living, like the elderly.
Moreover, when you start deciding that a human's right to have the basic means to live comfortably is dependent on how useful you consider them to be to society, the inevitable result is eugenics. If the elderly who don't have family to support them deserve no support, why bother supporting disabled people under the same circumstances? They're functionally even less valuable to society by your assessment. Why should we ever care for anyone who can't care for themselves unless we have hope for extracting future value from them?
Normally I wouldn't even bother to reply, but that's a whole bunch of you putting words in my mouth and misunderstanding the point of the entire conversation. I won't pose it as a question, but all I can say is that I hope you at least watched the video.
I'm going to say something controversial that's going to come across as quite callous, but I think population decrease at a global scale is a good thing long term. Bad for humanity? Sure, maybe. Better for the majority of the planet's other inhabitants? Definitely. I am out in nature on a regular basis, I work in the environmental field. I see and live the destruction and loss year on year.
Instead of trying to fight this we should be working towards adjusting and easing into it, but I don't hear anyone talking about this as even being an option. What is the point of continuously growing the human population when resources are finite? As the quote goes, growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of cancer.
I also don't necessarily think that population growth is inherently good, but one factor is that many social systems are structured under the assumption that the population will continue to rise, and are thus funded by the next generation in a way that isn't sustainable if they consist of fewer people. If you have a social security-style system and the next generation is half as large as the previous, you either need to raise taxes or lower benefits to keep the system sustainable. One at least temporary/partial solution to this is immigration, where you get new adults contributing into these funds without the state spending resources on them as children -- and it's not a surprise, thus, that the countries where population decline is considered the biggest catastrophe (Japan and Korea) are countries with very low rates of immigration.
I agree with what you are saying, but a lot of conversations I hear are around trying to reverse the trend by encouraging people to have more children. What we should be focusing on is mitigation measures and an overhaul of a system that is poised for collapse if nothing changes. It might be an immediate problem for countries like Japan and South Korea, but this is going to become a global issue, and immigration will only take us so far. Developing countries are also thankfully rising out of poverty, but that means they too will face the same issue eventually.
The human population is and always has been a giant pyramid scheme (I mean the ideal demographic chart is a literal pyramid). The thing about pyramid schemes is they eventually fail. We can't keep functioning like this and expect it not to fall apart eventually. Yet no one wants to have that conversation, or think about how we build a society and system that is sustainable beyond the pyramid model.
I by and large agree with you in principle, but just wanted to point out a motivation that isn't totally awful that people have for worrying about this, since you seemed kind of in askance in your previous comment.
Frankly, I think a substantial portion of people who worry about this outside of Japan and Korea do not have goals remotely as noble as upholding existing social safety nets for the elderly, even when they're nominally discussing Japan and Korea. A lot of discussion of low fertility rates in Western countries is thinly veiled Great Replacement theory. But I figured it was worth considering the parts of population decline fears that are more legitimate instead of focusing on those aspects.
On a more ecological scale, human overpopulation is a red herring anyway. Human consumption and destruction of the environment is perfectly capable of increasing even with a decreasing population, unfortunately. The issues we need to solve to fix both the social systems that rely on constant growth and our rampant destruction of the environment are more complex than just the sheer number of human beings on this earth.
The US really should be making a nation wide trust.
Instead, we’ve been borrowing from SS for years without paying it back and now they want to defund it entirely.
One angle I’ve seen argued for continuing population growth (or at minimum maintaining current levels) is that fewer people means fewer new ideas and fewer problems solved, which makes a lot of sense. The more a population shrinks, the more hamstrung it becomes in sciences and the arts. Everything slows down. For a while the difference can be made up by countries newly developing, but much like immigration this is not a bottomless well and eventually global cultural and technological stagnation sets in.
Of course this comes with the caveat of good living conditions for the population in question, because people whose energy is consumed just surviving are going to have severely curbed ability to contribute that way.
If this idea has any merit, then the only way forward is to figure out ways to have a high standard of life for everybody while also reducing consumption, which is no doubt tricky at best.
If we suddenly had 10% the number of humans on the planet (with rural and city areas receiving the same percent-cull) it is still very possible that the environmental impact is largely unchanged. It only takes a small number of humans to deforest the amazon or create a chernobyl, etc.
Would we have less of a need to run the resources dry? Physically yes. But psychologically there will always be people and corporations that want to capture the market via false scarcity or drain the mangroves to build a casino that can only be accessed by aero-shuttle because it was marginally cheaper than the ecological alternative.
A decline in population probably would be a good thing at a global scale, but that has little relevance to whether it’s a good or bad thing for one country or region. This mostly depends on local considerations.
A Kurzgesagt video on the projected impacts of population decline on the country of South Korea - and possibly other countries in the future.
I think that the solution is automation, so that we don’t need an ever-increasing work force to pay for the pensions and maintain the infrastructure for an ever-increasing population of increasingly longer-lived old people. If humans had all their needs provided for and didn’t have to work, then our way of life wouldn’t risk reverting back to the 1800s by a shrinking population. We would just get used with having a smaller world population, which wouldn’t be a bad thing if you ask me.
But even if full automation was possible (I highly doubt it), then that might have other negative consequences.
Thought experiment: What if a country’s government chose to make it a law that every man and woman was required to enter an arranged union at age 20 and “produce” at least two children by their 30th year of age, with more children earning them greater benefits? I’m not so much interested in how a government would pay for the insane amount of money they would have to invest in order to create benefits that are enticing enough for people to sign up to such an experiment, and the systems necessary to support it. Rather, I am interested in knowing if a pro-natal culture could arise out of a developed nation, where everyone agrees that getting into an arranged union and having children is as normal and expected of a milestone in life as finishing up one’s education. I can imagine that this could work under military rule.
Sounds like absolute hell to me (queer people in particular would suffer), rife with sexual assault and full of child abuse.
Of course it would be hell, and isn’t something that should happen. What I want to know is if a society of a developed nation like that, where the overwhelming majority of the population subscribes to the agenda and there are no queer people (which I know exist in all societies, obviously), could function and grow their population. I wonder if any society in history has ever attempted to impose natalist policies on its population and what the outcome was.
That’s fair. I’ll be more careful next time.
Many religions have built in memes (in the old sense) encouraging procreation, banning birth control, etc. What are those if not pro-natalist policies?
I mean even if queer people didn't exist, this is a horrifying violation of human rights and more or less amounts to state-enforced rape.
Not to mention that, due to the increased risks and negative effects of pregnancy, both physically and financially, on the one actually carrying the child, this would only exacerbate inequality between men and women societally.
Of course. I’m not saying otherwise. It’s a thought experiment.
That being said, when inequality between men and women was the norm, families were also larger. But again, that was the way of life before the industrial revolution, and I clearly wouldn’t want us to return to a feudal system just so that people were forced to have children in order to survive.
What I want to know is, could we retain modernity, and also produce a society in which the culture has internalized that having children in this manner is the norm? I’m assuming that no queer people would exist in such a society (which they do everywhere and I’m obviously not calling for).
As much as it is the norm today, for example, to have either no children, or have them in one’s 30s, what cultural shift would it take for almost all people to want to seek to have children, have more, and have them earlier?
Unless your definition of modernity excludes important developments like liberal democracy and recognition of fundamental human rights, I don't think it's possible to maintain a system like this in a modern context even if your thought experiment is so wildly unrealistic that queer people don't exist in it. A system like this would require a nigh-complete destruction of women's rights and an authoritarian society akin to that in A Handmaid's Tale. I understand that this is a thought experiment and that you don't actually advocate for this, but I think it's important to recognize that the only way this becomes the norm is if you force it on people through state violence.
No decline in your standard of living. Basically, pay them, and not just “free childcare and oh maybe a $500 check.” I mean, entry-level doctor pay to stay home and have kids.
(Note this answer assumes no changes to religiosity.)
That’s the difficult part. I think that culturally speaking, we see having children as a decline in standard of living these days, regardless of the actual decline in our standard of living. We don’t want to be inconvenienced by having to give attention to a child (especially if it turns out to be rowdy one). The “perceived” decline in the standard of living will happen regardless, unless the child is immediately raised by a third part and the parents can go about living as they did.
So, yeah, no amount of money from the government would make anyone who isn’t enthused about having children actually want them, especially if it required to stay at home and forego a career that they enjoy.
All you can do is make sure the conditions are optimal, the support is there, and people who want to have children can have them without suffering overrmuch, financially and socially, for it. I don't think you could or should force anyone, but all other things being equal, good conditions means more children. Many of us are biologically and culturally wired to want/like kids for a variety of reasons, even when expecting to have to suffer for it. We are willing to suffer for all other kinds of goals, aren't we?
Using your reply as a springboard, I think most people have a surprising level of tolerance for temporary dispruptions in their lives, and as disruptive as children are, it’s quite front-loaded with the first 5 years by far being the most demanding (especially the first half of that) and steeply declining as they become more self-sufficient and start going to school.
In comparison the 18+ years of hard financial dependency children have on parents is a lot less temporary and thus, much more daunting.
That’s the thing. I see more and more that people are willing to suffer for their careers, but not in order to have children. This is an anecdotal observation, of course, and I’m not pooh-poohing on the career chasers, as I wish I had been one myself, but I also wish that the conversation around the birth rate wouldn’t avoid the aspect of culture, as if it’s “offensive” to point out the simple reality that society became a lot more individualistic and less interested in children in in my lifetime. A good example of this is how unwelcome small children are in a lot of public spaces in America, for example. Thankfully, I don’t see that being the case in much of Europe yet. People tolerate children, even when they cry on airplanes.
Personally, I don't see the appeal of children. They're usually loud, have tantrums, are largely unappreciative until after-death-wherein-they-regret-not-calling-more-often, and they are expensive to take care of. Bring back the kibbutz. If I can impregnate the adult female human mammal specimen and not have that effect my life much then it might make sense to do so. But it seems like a financially and emotionally reckless thing to do at this time. My wife and I value our ability to sleep long periods without interruption.
If we had a solarium we would value the time we spend in there over the time that child-rearing takes but since we do not have a solarium we value our time thinking about building a solarium and other possible futures in place of child-rearing.
But children who grow up in communal environments like daycare or the children's social centre are perhaps not well-adapted for modern living. I'm not sure
Raise the standard of living for new workers. No unpaid internships. Minimum wage must be able to support 5 people if you want to target that 2.1 children per nuclear family with one parent working and one child-rearing (with a trip to Disneyland every 5 or 10 years (this is the cost of the 0.9 child))
Have no idea what that is. Duckduckwent it and got this:
uh What? lol
Finally someone who gives me the honest reason why they don’t want children. tips hat
only looked at the link later
Oh. So it was something about Israel. This is interesting.
Yes!