The same reason it’s ok to eat pigs but not dogs. Humans place animals into fictional categories which dictate the acceptable level of abuse that is allowed to be inflicted upon the animal.
Good point, I thought that this design belongs to the print media world, when the media is split by pages, not to the scrolling continuous world of the web.
It's not a conspiracy. China makes fentanyl, ships some to Mexican cartels, and actually helps the cartels launder their money through Chinese bank accounts. No US jurisdiction there.
What can a country do to get birth rates up? I'm sure there are analyses out there about why Japan's is low, but what can they (or other countries) do to pump birth rates up?
We discuss this issue a lot, be it about Japan, Korea, Germany or even stretches of the US.
I wonder about a more global perspective on this, and whether it's actually truly a problem in the long run. I assume the unspoken assumption of many who worry about population decline in the developed countries is that it will cause the world to regress in some way (either via instability or without) as the rest pick over the bones and important infrastructure and knowledge get lost.
But must this happen? Can't the developed countries perhaps pass their developed traits on to other up-and-coming countries to also stabilize and then slow their growth, and eventually we arrive at a stable and peaked, or perhaps smaller global pop the planet can actually more easily sustain with a sensible energy mix?
Population decline often seems like a hopeful opportunity to me, if we'd stop obsessing about the fortune and minmax of single nations and start putting humanity first.
>But must this happen? Can't the developed countries perhaps pass their developed traits on to other up-and-coming countries to also stabilize and then slow their growth, and eventually we arrive at a stable and peaked, or perhaps smaller global pop the planet can actually more easily sustain with a sensible energy mix?
Not if you promise the productivity of people in future generations to the current generation, but then find out the productivity of people in future generations falls short (perhaps due to insufficient people).
Become poorer, more religious, and get people to work less.
I don't believe there's any examples of modern countries doing it. Providing lots of childcare benefits doesn't seem to help, though it does make the children you do get healthier.
More religious yes, but not necessarily meaningfully “poorer” (at least not if the goal is a sustainable TFR). France and the US had birth rates around 2 as recently as the early aughts.
Two big issues are probably the cost of housing, and educational credential inflation. Young people these days spend four years in college, and concomitantly postpone establishing their real lives by four years, just to get the kind of office jobs prior generations got with a high school diploma.
I would say it’s not just the cost of housing, but cost of (good) childcare in general. Children are massively financially costly… daycare, clothing, food, medical care, education, etc. They’re expensive in terms of time too, and parents are practically always short on time due to needing dual incomes to be able to pay the bills without constantly sitting on the edge.
So realistically, I think that what all this means is that an economy can’t have its cake and eat it too; its workforce can work itself to death or it can have kids at replacement rate, not both.
Polls have shown that young people are no less interested in starting families than they were in decades past. It’s simply not responsible to do so in the case of an increasing number of couples’ situations, and so they don’t. The only way to turn this trend around is to pay actual living wages and mandate a better work-life balance on a national scale.
Huh? Where did you get this idea? Daycare, clothing, food, medicine, and education are not free in Japan. They're mostly not as horrifically expensive as in America, but definitely not free.
If you are not able to assure that you'll have a comfortable retirement years with the appropriate social safety nets to try to assure that someone who worked will be able to maintain at least the basic necessities for life, then having kids who make it into adulthood is that safety net.
The "ok, 60+ years old, unable to do meaningful work, move in with a successful child" is a fairly standard approach. This requires that you have kids and preferably enough that one of them will be able to support you moving in with them and isn't otherwise alienated from you.
Note that this only works on a per family basis and if you outlive your children (war can do that), then a more nationalized social safety net is something that because useful to have. By providing that safety net for retired adults, there is less pressure to have kids to support their parents in retirement and less pressure for single people to marry and have a family to fulfill that role.
Economic hardship (increasing the pressure to not have kids) and that safety net (reducing pressure to have kids at all) in both would then have downward force on the fertility rate and also would suggest putting off having kids until later.
Also of interest - Multigenerational family structure in Japanese society: impacts on stress and health behaviors among women and men - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15087144/
Childcare benefits don't work for the same reason steep prison sentences don't work. Nobody does a cost benefit analysis of "years lost"/"benefit of murdering someone".
I'm sure there is a positive correlation with "home ownership, and low debt" with children however.
Because that would make you feel secure about your future.
That correlation is due to people doing the cost benefit analysis. Do I want to deal with the costs of raising a child in an apartment? Do I want my child to bear the costs of having to change schools? Do I want my child and I to bear the costs of losing income while still paying lots of education/auto/home debt?
Unfortunately, at some point the benefits to not having a child at the individual level become costs at the societal level once enough opt out, and that becomes costs again at the individual level, on a sufficiently long timeline.
Of course, these net costs/benefits can flip from being costs at 10 years to benefits at 30 years and back to costs at 150 years. Maybe excess population leads to excess resource consumption and entropy generation. Maybe some of the excess population figures out how to mitigate excess consumption, and buys a little more time.
Maybe not true for criminals, but many people don't have kids precisely because they did a cost benefit analysis on having them and decided it was too expensive to do so.
>The Jewish fertility rate surpassed the Arab rate for the first time in 2020, with Jews having three children on average compared to 2.99 in the Arab sector.
>At 6.64 children per woman, haredi women had the highest fertility rate among Israel’s Jewish population, compared to 1.96 among secular Jewish women.
Looks close enough to women not belonging to super religious groups in other developed countries.
I've never understood statements to the effect of, "if you take out the group causing the effect, then the effect is no longer present".
I remember discussing a buggy application once with another engineer (I could reliably crash the server with a mis-configuration on the client), and I was taking a fairly apologetic stance that after all the workarounds I had to make it work, it worked OK. His response was, "yeah, if you take out all the parts that suck, then it doesn't suck". And now I can never unhear that.
If you look at the underlying data behind that report you'll indeed also see that a woman living in a top 10 percentile social-economic location is expected to have 1.95 children vs. bottom 10 percentile expecting 5.36 (though good luck separating religion from social-economic status).
If you look the graph and focus only on purely secular women (split as Haredi > Religious > Traditional-Religious > Traditional-Not that religious > Not religious-Secular) you can see that since 1979 it has been hovering around 2, so it is hard to tell if anything real or recent is actually going on. Though if you also understand statistics you'll see that Israel is heading to its own kind of demographic disaster since the least productive population has been consistently increasing at a very high exponent... (That said, it might be better to have the problem of needing to increase the productivity of the least productive than the problem of having no one to work)
Source (in Hebrew) https://www.cbs.gov.il/he/mediarelease/DocLib/2022/062/01_22... (The graph I mention is on page 11, so with the above mentioned divisions + a line for all Jewish women that end right above 3 you should be able to parse it even without knowing Hebrew ;))
My experience suggests that there's a more or less fixed amount of religiosity in any person and it's on a normal distribution in any given population. That's the hardware/firmware so to speak, but what they apply that religiosity to can be quite varied. Just my observation from working in tech companies where C levels are treated like visionary leaders who provide the mission from on high - I could be mistaken, but the dynamics don't really feel terribly different from my religious education.
In the context of this discussion, I think astrange (and I) are using “religious” to mean a culture or tribe that encourages women to have many children and/or restricts women from being able to not have children. In my experience, these groups are typically associated with or offshoots of Christianity/Judaism/Islam, and usually described as “more religious” than the vast majority of people claiming to adhere to those belief systems.
more like kept it from sliding in the last few decades, but yes, still pretty high, and it's an achievement. They were also helped by having a very young population to begin with (just look at that perfect age pyramid), and the whole country currently has population of Nagoya metro area, Japan is much bigger and harder to change.
Probably create a culture that promotes family values, makes housing, food and healtcare affordable, and denounces individualism and consumerism. Something that won't be very popular with modern audiences.
No, we have those and they also have low birth rates. It doesn't appear to work. It's like how the countries with the least sexism have even fewer women in STEM.
I’m sorry but when visiting Japan and landing in Tokyo sort of late in the evening I was shocked that people actually fall asleep on the subway and fall down, and this is from overworking. I wouldn’t have believed it had I not seen it with my own eyes.
Then late at night, scores of young men dressed in suits were playing arcade games.
I’ve also heard about those that just give up and live in a room in their parents house.
Japanese shops also have the weirdest assortment of products ever.
This might come off as ignorant as I’ve obviously not experienced the ‘real japan’ but I’m not sure this would be the case if what I mentioned would be a fundamental part of the culture.
Disclaimer: I really enjoyed my time there, espectially out of the big cities and was particularly impressed by the cleanliness and how nice the people were.
When I first visited Japan I went to Akihabara a lot. You can see a lot of "weird" and "only in Japan" things there, but it's not really a good representation of Japanese society. The vast majority of people in Japan don't frequent Akihabara, and many have never even visited it even once.
Is housing in Japan affordable? From what I have heard, it might be OK outside major cities, but the most desirable jobs seem to be overwhelmingly centralized in those cities.
A 60m^2 apartment just around the periferies of the center of tokyo (I'm talking 10 minute train to Shinjuku) costs about 700k in dollar terms[0] if you want to buy it, and between 1500 to 2000 per month if you want to rent it.
Move further away from the center, and the cost drops dramatically. A house near a station that's 30 minutes from Shinjuku the same size above costs half the price (~350k).
[0] If you think about a 100 Japanese Yen as 1 "Japanese Dollar". It's not equivalent to 1 US dollar, but if you adjust for typical salaries and cost of living it comes out about the same, when you are considering the price of housing, etc.
Tokyo, the most popular city, has decent relatively affordable housing. But you have to make some sacrifices on size, and at the very low end, lifestyle (you might have to go to the bath house for showers).
I think focusing on birth rates puts attention on the wrong thing when it comes to talking about Japan or other post-industrialized countries. Even the replacement birth rate (i.e. keeping the current population) is at best just-barely sustainable from an environmental and quality of life perspective. Having too many retirees is indeed an issue, so I think the solution is to have fewer retirees. Realistically, a good amount of people could work well past the typical pension age without much of a sweat. They may not want to, but the cold fiscal reality is what it is.
It is my perpetual guess that evolutionary pressure alone will be sufficient in the long run. Our society is now strongly selecting for parents who want kids. That choice has only been a choice for a few generations.
Ten generations from now, I think there will be a much larger fraction of the human population who strongly prioritize having kids.
Not sure I agree. I don't think there are selection pressures on humans any more.
I come from an extremely long line of organisms that had offspring. In fact, it goes back to the beginning of life forms that could sexually reproduce. Are you saying that many of my sentient ancestors who understood where babies came from didn't actually want kids? It's possible I suppose. But I think my reasons for not wanting kids are less to do with my DNA and more to do with experiences I had during my life.
Also, if you're taking about modern changes and their effects on human behavior, what traits do paid sperm donation / surrogacy select for?
Maybe the concept of having that choice is new, but lots of people technically have the choice but don't "know it". They follow cultural norms. All of their friends have babies, so they have babies. Has something happened to the DNA of all these Japanese people who don't want kids? Or is it a cultural shift? I'm betting on the latter.
I agree, but I fear that might involve selecting for some undesirable traits.
It seems that many people today who never have kids do so for a good reason, such as unstable personal economy, not owning their home, not knowing as much as possible that their future children will have good lives.
The people that continue to have kids today are often the overly religious, the financially or generally irresponsible who lack self awareness, or just plain stupid people. These are not traits we want to evolutionarily select for. See the movie Idiocracy for an example.
Nothing (that aligns with classically liberal values). Offering child rearing incentives like free childcare, education, outright money, etc does not seem to work, such as in the Nordic countries. People who grow and experience wealth simply don't want to have kids.
If you truly want to raise the birth rate, at any cost, you would reduce education levels, make people poorer, raise religiosity, and ban contraception and abortive services for not just women but everyone. But your country's economy would suffer over and above the slowed birth rate you'd otherwise have.
In the future though, with artificial wombs, I'd imagine we'd go through a Brave New World type scenario where the government grows children themselves (and maybe has the bright idea to stratify the children's gender, race and intellectual capacity as well, but the latter is unlikely if we have AI and robots that do the jobs instead of needing perpetually content Street cleaners).
>you would reduce education levels, make people poorer, and raise religiosity.
The important part of this is making sure women lose their agency over having children by both removing access to effective contraception and their financial independence.
> If you truly want to raise the birth rate, at any cost, you would reduce education levels, make people poorer, raise religiosity, and ban contraception and abortive services for not just women but everyone.
I think it is simpler than that: abolish any state-sponsored retirement plans. People used to have a lot of children so that someone could take care of them in their old age. Now that you have retirement savings you have no need for kids anymore.
>Offering child rearing incentives like free childcare, education, outright money, etc does not seem to work, such as in the Nordic countries. People who grow and experience wealth simply don't want to have kids.
Pay large sums of money to promising young intelligent couple to have kids.
(and no, the govt should not do it)
That still doesn't work unless the sum of money is quite large, over and above the cost of raising the child. And even then, there are many wealthy families, millionaires and billionaires, who still don't have kids. Having children is simply not as elastic of a good as people imagine it to be.
>That still doesn't work unless the sum of money is quite large
Yes it has to be large (several millions), enough so that the couple never have to work again for their entire lives. I would add a whole bunch of other things, ( like delegating the bulk of childcare to somebody else, with a couple only overseen what care is being taken) but it's a good start.
My larger point is that this is not exactly the unsolvable really hard technical problem.
In terms of human assets intelligent people and their offspring are the most important assets that society can have. ( agreed this has negative connotations of eugenics, but the overall concept is sound IMHO)
Is there any developed country that has been able to increase birth rate? Declining birth rate is a feature of developed countries with large middle class, only very rich or very poor people want to have more kids in such countries.
it seems consistent and steady for a few decades (consistently high, not growing), but it's a small country that developed under very special conditions
I don't really understand why is declining population problem in any country and needs some solution. If you have properly set pension system population decline is completely irrelevant and beneficial for everyone.
In human societies younger working people take care of elderly people who can’t work. Financial systems can’t change that fundamental dynamic, it can only shift things around. You can’t eat stocks. They are just an earmark on the productive capacity of the working generation.
You can't have a proper pension system if you don't have enough young and middle-aged workers to pay for it, and to work all the jobs necessary to keep a society running.
you can, you can have your pension in savings investments without anyone's else financial contribution
it's just that most of the world is using archaic thorough/continuous model for pension system which is basically pyramid scheme everyone would avoid if it were used in any other area, but somehow is acceptable for pensions
if you really worry about pensions, you could start with children contributing to their parents pension and nobody contributing to childless people, that should solve declining population very fast, your can combine it with raising retirement age and raising fees everyone pays towards their own retirement
On a national scale, private retirement savings are not that different from pensions. Both are based on tokens that entitle you to some fraction of the economic output of those who do productive work. The value of a token depends on the total number of tokens, the size of the real economy, and the fraction of value the people doing productive work are willing to pay as taxes to the government and the capitalists.
Investing internationally changes some things. Retirees bring in money from abroad, but that does not increase domestic production. Prices will go up, as there is more money competing for the same goods and services. The people doing productive work will want more money for their services. Imports will be relatively cheaper, but the economy suffers, because the exports will be less competitive due to higher wages.
Saving for retirement is rational for any individual if the demographic structure cannot support the pension system. But while anyone can do it successfully, it's not possible for everyone at the same time.
> you can have your pension in savings investments without anyone's else financial contribution
Those investments still need workers to work in the underlying companies, and that doesn't count products that don't usually get covered by pension income e.g. healthcare. Those investments _will_ go into terminal decline if the labour and demand provided by the non-retired starts collapsing.
>If you have properly set pension system population decline is completely irrelevant and beneficial for everyone.
excuse me? pensions need a robust young population to work. otherwise who is going to be providing all those goods and services the pensioners want to pay for?
declining population doesn't mean there will be no young people at all, just slow decline with less and less people including less old people not replaced by anyone
pensions don't need young population at all, you can save your own money for retirement without anyone's contribution towards your pension
>you can save your own money for retirement without anyone's contribution towards your pension
No, that won't work. Money is only worth as much as the goods and services it will pay for, and those goods and services have to be provided by the labour of the working young. If there aren't enough young people to meet that demand for labour, prices will rise, and the purchasing power of those pensions will evaporate.
(This is why the "triple lock" and other such schemes are so evil; by pegging state pensions to inflation, they unfairly lock in the purchasing power of a lucky generation, in defiance of all economic logic.)
I think the terminology you are using might be confusing to some. If I am correct based on your adjacent comments, what you mean by “pension” is the societal agreement to provide for older/disabled people from taxes.
If so, then yes, getting rid of that societal agreement would solve the problem of decreasing productivity.
yes, only you should be contributing towards your own pension without state (financial) assistance, it should be your savings/investment pension account
your kids can help you voluntarily without any system involved
if you didn't work/save and don't have kids them you can get some basic support same as people in productive age get, but it's not really enough even to survive
A significant part of economic growth is the assumption that there will be more consumers tomorrow. If that goes, general growth goes, and with it the investments that usually fuel retirement
I’m not sure; it sure seems like women statistically aren’t too eager to make tons of babies when actually given a choice. Not a cat you’d want back in the bag either. Perhaps we really are screwed on that front.
All 1st world countries have a stagnant fertility rate, some just make up for it with immigration. In fact global population is projected to stagnate in 100 years.
When you can't afford getting a house/apartment big enough to have kids comfortably, and the job eats most of your life getting kids just looks like massive problem.
It couldn't hurt (pun intended).
The problem is that insurance doesn't cover it for some bizarre reason. And some people seem indoctrinated to believe that they shouldn't avoid the pain of childbirth.
They ought to embrace one of a myriad of cultures and belief systems that have historically proven to have proper birth rates. Instead, most modern 'developed' countries are running large-scale social experiments with never-before-tried social policies.
As an Australian I'd say the single largest issue here is the cost of living. It is a massive problem. Housing is expensive (and scarce), public infrastructure is shocking (Roads are bad our public transport is terrible), utilities like electricity and gas are quite expensive, common goods like groceries are expensive.
Don't get me wrong the standard of living in this country is very good, we have a great public health system, our education system is good and crime rate is generally low but it comes at a cost.
Cities like Sydney and Melbourne regularly rank highly as some of the most expensive places in the world to live. It is really not affordable to have children, especially at a young age. As a result most of my friends, work colleagues etc. have waited until their 30's to start a family.
Immigration has not done a lot to bring down the cost of things. Personally I think if they want people to have more children they need to make life in general more affordable.
It doesn't. These societies are permanently changed because of immigrations. This of course works fine for the immigrants (like myself!) but if I was a Canadian in the 70s I would be greatly opposed to this movement.
I'm not Japanese, but in objectively thinking about what's best for Japan, "immigration" is not on the list. In fact it's on the list of things to never ever do. I don't mean it as in "do not accept foreigners". I mean do not adopt the policy of mass immigration to offset the shrinking population.
Japan is completely unequipped to take immigrants at any significant scale. It’s a delicately balanced society that depends heavily on people being socialized into the same rules from birth. Even if Japan could socially and economically integrate those immigrants, which is doubtful, it wouldn’t be Japan anymore. Tokyo would become like London or New York or Toronto, chaotic places where nobody knows the rules because they just got there five minutes ago.
Indeed, it’s doubtful to me that immigration is a fix even for Western Europe. Most European countries have failed to integrate their growing Muslim populations. They’ve imported an underclass, one that’s going to be increasingly furious that they’re stuck in socioeconomic ghettos. For whatever reason, European countries are starkly different from the United States, where immigrant groups have long enjoyed similar economic mobility to the native born (which continues to be true for the contemporary wave of Latin American immigrants).
More generally, it just outsources the problem to immigrants. You’re compensating for a culture that has become broken in a key respect by importing people from a culture that isn’t b
>Most European countries have failed to integrate their growing Muslim populations. They’ve imported an underclass, one that’s going to be increasingly furious that they’re stuck in socioeconomic ghettos
Muslim from London here - my father came here as an immigrant in the 80's, and stayed here. I would say that I'm integrated. Your outlook reeks of no only condescension and disdain for class struggle, but complete misunderstanding of how cultures develop and work. Come to London and tell me immigration is an outlandish idea - your barrista, your off-license shop keeper, your NHS keyworker and your TFL underground marshall will all laugh in your face.
> Muslim from London here - my father came here as an immigrant in the 80's, and stayed here. I would say that I'm integrated. Your outlook reeks of no only condescension and disdain for class struggle, but complete misunderstanding of how cultures develop and work.
I’m not talking about individual experiences, but aggregate statistics. In the UK, poor Muslims get more education than poor whites, but that doesn’t translate into better jobs: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/asian-muslims-and-black-p.... They have lower income mobility than similarly situated whites.
The statistics are much worse in continental Europe, where Muslim immigrants are stuck in inter-generational poverty. Turkish people started immigrating to Europe in significant numbers around 1970, around the same time Vietnamese people started immigrating to the US. Half a century later, Vietnamese Americans have fully caught up with British Americans in terms of income. But the situation for Turks in Europe has been starkly different: https://theconversation.com/many-turkish-people-who-migrated... (“By the third generation, around half (49%) of those living in Europe were still poor, compared with just over a quarter (27%) of those who remained behind… Migrants from three family generations residing in countries renowned for the generosity of their welfare states were among the most impoverished. Some of the highest poverty rates were observed in Belgium, Sweden and Denmark.”).
To an American those statistics are unbelievable. Germans, Italians, and Irish all came over a cheap labor and reached parity with British Americans within three generations. The Latin American immigrants coming to America today are on the same track: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353. Several groups of immigrants who came here as impoverished refugees, such as Koreans, Vietnamese, Lebanese, and Cubans, achieved parity even more quickly.
Your point about “class struggle” and the “barista, off-license shop keeper, [and] NHS keyworker” underscores my point. In Europe immigrants take those jobs, and then their kids take those jobs. That creates a politically and socially volatile situation. In America that doesn’t happen because immigrants have relatively high economic mobility. Irish and Italians did those jobs, and a lot worse, when they came here in the early 20th century. Today there is no meaningful class struggle centered around Irish or Italian identity because those groups fully integrated. In fact it’s a consistent struggle for US Democrats to build durable movements. Irish and Italians got FDR elected, but their kids and grandkids favored Reagan in a landslide.
Coz those countries will get to same slump in decade or three, and meanwhile you're just increasing public unrest because the vastly different cultures very rarely mix well
Legalize polygyny for rich men who can financially support multiple wives.
Japan's population decline appears to be caused not by women giving birth to fewer children, but by an increase in the number of childless women. It appears that 1 in 3 women remain childless into their forties, compared to 1 in 20 in prior decades.
Women remain childless for several reasons, but my guess is they can't find a man who can support them financially and/or who they find themselves attracted to.
The traditional household arrangement is the man is at the office 24/7, the wife gets his paychecks and uses them to raise the children and occasionally go on vacations, and the man gets an allowance (but doesn't go on the vacations because he has to be at the office). Not much room for a harem there.
There are many rich people in Japan who can afford to have multiple wives and support all of them financially. Some of them might do that in secret with a mistress but in the current social and political environment they probably wouldn't have children with their mistresses.
It's traditionally pretty normal for a married couple to drift apart over the years. People marry for appearances, social status, and to raise a family. They then seek gratification elsewhere.
The men who engage in this aren't looking to knock up more women. They already have a mother to their children. They want gratifying sex and emotional connection.
I've seen some posts by Japanese women suggesting they would be open to being the second wives of wealthy men but I'm not sure if they are the kind of women that rich men would be interested in.
It hasn't been two minutes and I already have a downvote.
I understand many people do not "like" this kind of solution because it conflicts with modern people's sensibilities.
But consider what the future would look like if you don't increase the birth rate:
Already one third of the population is over 65. Japan has about 120 million people. When you normally hear this number you imagine a country full with lots of human resources, but the fact that a large portion of these people are retirees. This is already causing a alrge portion of young men to checkout of society because they see no economic prospect for themselves.
Can you imagine what the situation will be like when that portion reaches 50% percent? Perhaps in only a few decades. The trend will accelerate: even more people will checkout of the ecnonomy, making things worse for everyone.
I think you're being downvoted because people consider your original comment poorly constructed and poorly thought out.
That men can participate in polygamy does nothing to encourage birthrates; what is the incentive of the wives to want children? What is the incentive for the man here to want children?
Unless it's implied in your idea that the purpose of marriage is to produce children, polygamy solves nothing here. If that is the presumption that the arrangement requires children, how does this counteract the very common reasons for not having children?
- It's extremely time consuming and life changing; you have to commit substantial time or resources (or both) to ensuring the child is cared for
- A person or persons simply don't want children
- There isn't a strong reason to have children outside of one's own desire to do so (there isn't incentive to maintain a lineage of successors, build out an army of loyal subjects, and so on for the grand majority of people anymore)
- Even within religions, the impetus for having children just isn't emphasized in many sects like it was in the past
- Social mobility, while nowhere near perfect, is far more achievable via other arrangements or even to a degree with personal effort; it won't be the peasant to noble move that existed previously, but it's more possible than it has been in the past (though social mobility is still ridiculously difficult and fraught with discrimination and exploitation, so understand I am not at all saying that it's in a good spot)
Your idea doesn't really address any of the actual reasons a lot of people hold off from having children, it just presents a suggestion to "legalize polygamy for rich men", implying that this somehow addresses the many reasons that people aren't having children.
Your follow-up comment here I think also misses a lot of points as to why people check out and undermines the idea that society can incentivize its way out of these problems. If the problem is a bleak economic future for people, trying to utilize childbirth as a pyramid scheme to overcome this economic uncertainty isn't really a great idea, as that means you need to somehow convince the children of the already checked-out persons that "no, really, it's a great system. Ignore why your parents are so miserable, it will be different for you for reasons."
I don't think you can just economically incentivize your way out of a declining population, not in any meaningful way aside from temporary trends which will fade. If the root cause of the issue is poor economic conditions and unstable comfortable living conditions, you need to first understand why those are happening in the first place. If it turns out that it's because only a select group have the economic stability to support a life that includes children and this select group is not a huge portion of the population, aside from mandating child birth, you haven't actually given incentive to make more children, you just have given special status to the already elite.
> But consider what the future would look like if you don't increase the birth rate:
I have, and I imagine we probably see more adoption of universal income and automation, and far more acceptance of such a system and interest in keeping such a system where you don't need to struggle for basic needs in place by investing time and effort into the system. There's a lot of this which of course is fantastical thoughts right now, but we're already seeing this in many nations, and the quality of life in these places is pretty good while birthrates are just "so-so".
I'd argue that legalizing polygyny would encourage more men to participate in the economy more eagerly: if they succeed they can have multiple wives and have multiple children with each. This is not a small prize.
Contrast to the current situation: if you work your ass off, the best you get is a wife who will treat you with resentment and disrespect in a couple years, expect you to do chores at home and help change children's diapers, etc. If you divorce she can take half your wealth, and has the power to prevent you from seeing your children (until they turn 18 and decide to go look for you themselves, if you manage to stay alive til then).
A large portion of young men around the world (not just in Japan) are opting out of society because they don't see a point. "The juice is not worth the squeeze".
> Your idea doesn't really address any of the actual reasons a lot of people hold off from having children, it just presents a suggestion to "legalize polygamy for rich men", implying that this somehow addresses the many reasons that people aren't having children.
People are not holding off from having children. What's happening is there are more people who are failing to pair bond in order to have children. More men check out of society because they don't find the offer interesting, and as a result more women are unable to find a suitable mate.
Legalizing and normalizing polygyny solves the probem for a lot of women: just because someone is "taken" doesn't mean he's out of reach for her anymore.
Controversial truth: women prefer sharing a high value man than having the full attention of a low vaue man. Of course, they would prefer having the full attention of a high value man, but failing that, they'd rather share him than downgrade to a lesser man.
> If you divorce she can take half your wealth, and has the power to prevent you from seeing your children (until they turn 18 and decide to go look for you themselves, if you manage to stay alive til then).
This isn't mentioned enough in relation to the marriage/birth-rate subject. Men in developed countries (and it is typically developed countries with very pro-woman divorce laws/courts) are completely disincentivized to start families.
Edit to make it a more substantive point: me and my spouse are currently 35 and 36 years old and after much deliberation together (as well as observations of friends who did have children) we don't think our lives would be substantially improved by having children.
The vast majority of women who end up single and childless into their forties don't do it by choice. At least not directly. They _want_ to find a partner and have children; they just didn't succeed at making the right decisions in their life to end up in that desired destination.
Arranged marriages, known as "omiai", are still a thing in Japan, especially if someone is desperate for a marriage. If a man or woman doesn't marry, that is in the vast majority of cases by choice.
Future generations will replace you and your wife with those who think quite differently. If you feel that your values or culture are worth preserving, you have kids.
Observing someone else’s family and deciding that you don’t enjoy their kids is the saddest way to decide not to have a family, and indicates a deep lack of parental empathy. Your kids are nothing like other kids, for all values of “your”.
There are many ways to impart ones values onto society, children being only one of them. It's a very myopic view to think that your children will copy your values and/or culture without developing a mind of their own.
In any case, observing other couples was only one of many reasons we decided on this. We made the decision as well-informed adults and whether you think it "sad" or not is not all that important to us.
No, but if I ask my friends who have been to the restaurant about how it was, then I can glean enough information from their responses to gauge whether I want to go there as well. Even if they feel compelled by social mores to say it was all great, you can observe how they act in addition to the things they say. We decided that while no doubt others love their children very much, it wasn't a lifestyle we were interested in.
Why are parents so predisposed with trying to convince other people to have children as well, especially those who have made a decision not to, either way?
How are those analogous? People can live perfectly fine without a child but can't without a job (unless they live at home with their parents which coincidentally a lot of hikikomori do).
The ability to attract and successfully integrate hundreds of thousands of immigrants per year to support an oversized elderly population is not a luxury that most countries that can afford.
For most communities, normalizing childless will only come back to bite people in some form or another.
Not that I'm against having kids, but this argument is silly. If you feel that your values and culture are worth preserving, it's much more effective to write a book.
> Future generations will replace you and your wife with those who think quite differently.
If that is so, how can people like this exist today, after hundreds of thousands of years of human evolution? Could it be that biological evolution alone does not predetermine one's desire to procreate?
Of course it holds. Desire for sex was what was under evolutionary pressure which was a direct proxy for procreation. Because of contraception this link was severed. Only recently procreation is under evolutionary pressure.
So what? I'm not going to live my life for future generations, we only have a limited amount of time in this universe and personally, I don't want to waste it having and raising children for the next couple of decades. I know what one would rebut with, that it's "your" kids and that there's a lot of fun in raising children, and that may be true, but again it is not something that appeals to me and many other people these days.
That fine as long as you realize somebody else's children will have to take care of you when you wont be able to. And if enough people would think the same way as you do, than there certainly wouldn't be enough children to take care of the elderly generations.
Humean ethics don't seem to work particularly well in day-to-day society. If I have enough retirement savings, I will hire said children to take care of me either way, as there is no guarantee my own children would take care of me anyway.
I would say that deciding not to have a family by observing others' is a lot better than deciding not to have a family after direct experience with it.
People should be allowed to self-select them selves out of reproduction. On the long term this is a eugenic pattern: it means the next generation will be more likely to have more people who value reproduction.
There is no guarantee your children will visit or take care of you in old age, and if you're having children due to the above reason, that is a very poor reason indeed to have children, as it seems to be more of an argument for the parent's well being, rather than the child's. If you don't want to be alone, cultivate lifelong friends.
These are all novel cultural values not common in any traditional society with normal birth rates. In fact, this attitude is one reason why birth rates are so low.
It is totally normal to expect children to care for you in your old age. The guarantee is that other people can and should ostracize people for not caring for their parents. When an acquaintance tells me they don't visit/call/care for their parents with pride, I make a mental note to not be friends with that person. If you can't keep the most basic relationships straight... that's not a great sign, realistically.
That is certainly...one opinion. You don't know what those people have been through, they could have had abusive parents for example and don't talk to them anymore. If the parents don't take care of the child well when raising them, I consider it more than fair to not take care of them in old age (or even simply once the child leaves the nest, so to speak). Taking care of one's parents is not an immutable law of nature (indeed, many if not most organisms simply breed and leave their children), nor should it be. That you implicitly "make a mental note to not be friends with that person" is quite telling indeed.
As a parent myself I can tell you that they are very likely referring to having two to three children close together rather than a single child ... ie. having both a six year old (eldest) and a child in diapers | stroller (youngest) at the same time.
After that period things are great!
. . . until you've faced with a household full of teenagers rebelling against anything and everything in overly dramatic ways.
> we don’t think our lives would be substantially improved by having children.
By that logic you should evade your taxes and park in handicapped spots. Having kids isn’t an individual choice, it’s a social obligation like paying taxes.
And that’s not a moralistic point but a basic economic one. Any sustainable society needs people to have and raise 2.1 children on average. That’s self-evidently true in subsistence agricultural societies. But our society is still closer to those than to some hypothetical post-scarcity one where robots do all the work and replacement humans are created in artificial wombs. We can afford some people to be childless, but it can’t become a widespread thing.
You can paper over that temporarily with immigration, but you’re really just outsourcing a key social function to immigrants. Those immigrants then have to bear the burden of raising kids a toxically individualistic society that’s hostile to children.
>By that logic you should evade your taxes and park in handicapped spots. Having kids isn’t an individual choice, it’s a social obligation like paying taxes.
Doesn't that then beg the question; if a society can't convince it's enough of it's members of the value of that obligation, does that society/culture really deserve to continue to exist as is?
The Christian sect known as "Shakers" illustrate what you describe: They had a rule of celibacy and as a result have essentially died out; their Wikipedia entry says that as of 2021 their total membership was three people.
Unless those 3 people (and those in recent decades who have now died) were hypocrites and broke the rules, then the only way the sect has survived this long is immigration (we'd call it "converts" in this context, since they're not a country). However, while it's kept them alive since the 1800s, 3 people is pathetically small.
> Having kids isn’t an individual choice, it’s a social obligation like paying taxes.
I get what you mean, but fuck that idea into the flaming sun.
All we need now is the state and society to force us to have children, on a planet with 8 billion souls.
Fuck that idea. Do whatever you want with your life, but don't go forcing it on other people and saying it's "social obligation". When has individual choice become a radical, antisocial idea?
It’s not an “idea.” It’s like saying “paying taxes is a social obligation” or “having a job if you’re able bodied is a social obligation.” At bottom those assertions rest on factual observations about society and the economy. If everyone evaded taxes civilization as we know it would quickly collapse. If able bodied people dropped out of the work force en masse, the economy would collapse. If we found out that the last child had been born in America, your retirement funds would quickly tank. These are such fundamental facts that societies have added a moral or religious gloss to them, but the underlying facts don’t go away even if you strip away that gloss.
If you won’t do those things, someone else will have to pick up your slack. Unless your retirement plan consists of hoarding canned food and ammo, or perhaps drifting out to sea when you can no longer work, you’re going to be depending on the children of the people who did the work of raising kids. And until we have robots that can wipe old people’s asses, that’s going to be an inescapable fact of society.
> Do whatever you want with your life, but don't go forcing it on other people and saying it's "social obligation".
Now that’s an “idea.”
> When has individual choice become a radical, antisocial idea?
You’ve got it backward. Until five minutes ago, everyone agreed that everyone has a social obligation to carry out the various work necessary for society to function. “Do whatever you want with your life” is a blip in human cultural history. It’s a blip even in the history of western civilization. And to date every society to adopt that notion has essentially doomed itself to obsolescence.
> Unless your retirement plan consists of hoarding canned food and ammo, or perhaps drifting out to sea when you can no longer work, you’re going to be depending on the children of the people who did the work of raising kids. And until we have robots that can wipe old people’s asses, that’s going to be an inescapable fact of society.
All of these "outlandish" alternatives are seriously entertained by at least some members of the class of people who frequent HN.
caused by... an increase in the number of childless women.
Has there not also been an increase in the number of childless men? Or are men having as many children as they did decades ago, and it's only the women who are having fewer?
I want to respond to this as I think you just have a fundamental misunderstanding on how wealth, relationships, and childbirth can be related.
A child is not made by the equation (One Female Parent + One Male Parent) + Marriage = Child.
This is not the actual requirement. It just requires sperm + ovum + body to carry the organism to birth. I interpret your comments here as attempting to take a purely logical/fact based approach, but you tie yourself to an unnecessary old fashioned notion of one man and one woman in a contractual union.
A woman and two men can absolutely be parents by inseminating the woman's eggs with their sperm and having someone else carry it, or artificial/manual insemination involving other women. I don't think you take your idea of efficiency here anywhere near the much more natural and sensible conclusion of "for-hire birthers", which already happens. A person, regardless of how they identify, should be allowed to do this; for simplicity sake though, I don't see why you don't mention this in your model -- a rich woman, paying for successors, and having multiple male partners who meets her scrutiny/desires raising the children and passing on genes/knowledge/personality traits.
You can suggest that your ideas imply this possibility, but frankly speaking I don't accept this suggestion; if you meant it, you would just say as such and/or use neutral terms for identifying the progenitors in your examples.
If it's legal + acceptable for all men, then it undermines the advantage of the elite in this regard. Plus I don't think "stigma" matters to them at all.
what evidence do you have that population decline has anything to do with T levels? it's a pretty well known and established phenomenon that as societies modernize, people choose to have less children. I have not seen evidence to suggest the same amount of people are trying to have children and just can't (especially as fertility technology becomes more accessible)
From my (albeit limited understanding) the damage from alcohol primarily lies in the 'backup' metabolic pathways getting used when the liver is saturated and cannot keep up with the primary pathway. The backup metabolic pathways produce acutely toxic byproducts - acetaldehyde most significantly - which are significantly more harmful than ethanol itself.
Some people may generate significant amounts of acetaldehyde from a single drink, but I don't think that's the case for the majority of healthy people.
My also limited understanding is that research seems to be converging on any amount isn't good for you and that a lot of the "one glass of wine is healthy" seem to be more finding out that people who are good at self moderation tend to be healthier because they self moderate on other things too.
That's not hard; you can do it with reasonable accuracy and then punt to human employees if there's any doubt.
Matching many photos against many photos is the quadratic assignment from hell. If you use traits to sort people into 50 buckets, and you have 300 people in the database, you'll need to match each photo from the surveillance camera against six people in the database. If your database is the passport photos of the thirty million adult Iranian women, you'll need to match that surveillance photo against 600,000 passport photos of similar-looking women, photographed up to five years ago. Awful.
Japanese culture ceasing to exist isn't about tattoos or racism or whatever bad culture points you want to call out, it's the good that would cease to exist as well. Every culture has problems (including Japanese), but just because Japanese culture dies doesn't mean that it will be purified and become without flaws. Not sure why you suggest it's good if Japanese culture ceases to exist.
I said it might not be bad if "their cultures are going to cease the way they are today." and pointed out issues with racism and sexism.
(The classic example being unwilling to tolerate guest workers, as I mentioned in reply to annother commenter).
I didn't mean the entire culture should cease to exist, hence taking pains to point out positive things too.
(They're more health oriented for example -- can't get a healthy meal in an American 7/11 unless you count the weight loss from a pack of cigs for breakfast)
