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I suspect that as cost of living goes up and fertility rates continue to drop and planned parenthood becomes more available, it will become fashionable for rich people to have more kids as sign of wealth. Now days and especially in the past there’s a stigma that people with large families are poor and uneducated, but I think in the upcoming future it will be a way to flaunt your wealth similar to how Elon Musk has 10 kids. Although I don’t think this will be healthy for these families with such attitudes, but I suspect it will slightly bump up the rates.
I personally don't care what the hoi-polloi consider fashionable. I'm able to do math, and I can see I would be less well off financially if I had kids to support. I do have some wealth, not a huge amount but net worth is well into 7 figures. To me, wealth is for generating more wealth, and certainly not for "flaunting". Of course at Musk's level he has wealth to flaunt, although I personally would do something practical even with that level of money - why waste money when you could help out (for example) St. Jude hospital, where they do both research and practical treatment of childhood cancer?
Of course to me the Rubicon is "even just one?" - with a single kid, you are a parent, and all the costs and time sucks that come with parenthood are "on".
But I guess there are not enough guys like me out there to have a statistically significant effect.
"Because of a cultural preference for boys during the government’s one-child policy, which ended in 2016, China has around 35 million more men than women, fueling a sense of economic competition for marriage." [What happened to about 35M female babies during those years?]
....
Several excerpts from among the hundreds of reader comments to that article:
The answer to your question was obscured by that sanitized phrase "cultural preference for boys". The answer is abortion (when fetus was determined to be female) and infanticide of female babies.
The world needs to stop hating on women if it wants us to keep bearing the burden of reproduction and child-rearing.
But as Nigeria develops, it's quite possible and likely that they will slow down on the babymaking, as per other developing countries. But this institute projects massive upward growth. Ditto for Pakistan.
One country that is adding population at a rapid clip is Nigeria. Project to pass the U.S. in population by 2045...............
For a country not too much larger than the state of Texas, this is amazing.
Quote:
Originally Posted by blisterpeanuts
But as Nigeria develops, it's quite possible and likely that they will slow down on the babymaking, as per other developing countries. But this institute projects massive upward growth. Ditto for Pakistan............
Amazing. And frightening, too. The GDP per capita of Nigeria is $2,066. In 2010 it was $2,080.
But they have plenty of natural resources. I'm sure they will do fine.
On the TFR front, Nigeria is at 4.7. It will be a while before they reach the 2.1 point of replacement, but they'll get there. In 2000 the TFR was 6.0. It has gone down every single year.
As always with the NY Times, check the comments, especially the "Reader's Pick" comments. Like our site, the comments on the Times are moderated to assure quality and remove the ash and trash comments.
Here's an excerpt at the start of the article: "The world’s demographics have already been transformed. Europe is shrinking. China is shrinking, with India, a much younger country, overtaking it this year as the world’s most populous nation. But what we’ve seen so far is just the beginning. The projections are reliable, and stark: By 2050, people age 65 and older will make up nearly 40 percent of the population in some parts of East Asia and Europe. That’s almost twice the share of older adults in Florida, America’s retirement capital. ... This is a sea change for Europe, the United States, China and other top economies, which ... are already aging off the list."
I hope readers will use the link and read it for themselves.
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An outstanding article in today's NY Times on our topic. The graphics are amazing. ...
The gist of the article is that lower fertility combined with longer lifespans, eventually leads to lower ratio of workers to retirees. This strains economies and generational relations.
While that observation is certainly true, I wonder - admittedly counterfactually! - what would have happened if lifespans did NOT increase, while fertility fell. In other words, suppose that we had made the same strides in infant and child mortality, and the various diseases and discomforts of childhood, youth, young-adulthood and motherhood... but did nothing to increase life-expectancy on the back end. In this counterfactual fantasy, it would be normal for 60-year-olds to fade away, putting it euphemistically, as they might have done in pre-industrial times. What then? Would we still have a retirement crisis? A crisis of mis-proportions between working-age people and the elderly?
It seems fraught, to put it mildly, to enjoin our young-adults to be having more babies, just so that the elderly would have more support. Is that really our best argument for keeping fertility rates at replacement level? As a middle-aged person now no longer imponderably far from Social Security eligibility, I have a selfish interest in seeing more young people push baby strollers... or, more of my peer-group proudly announcing that now they're grandparents. But again - isn't this just selfish? If I dropped dead a month before reaching Social Security eligibility age, have I not, strictly speaking, solved the problem?
As always with the NY Times, check the comments, especially the "Reader's Pick" comments. Like our site, the comments on the Times are moderated to assure quality and remove the ash and trash comments.
Here's an excerpt at the start of the article: "The world’s demographics have already been transformed. Europe is shrinking. China is shrinking, with India, a much younger country, overtaking it this year as the world’s most populous nation. But what we’ve seen so far is just the beginning. The projections are reliable, and stark: By 2050, people age 65 and older will make up nearly 40 percent of the population in some parts of East Asia and Europe. That’s almost twice the share of older adults in Florida, America’s retirement capital. ... This is a sea change for Europe, the United States, China and other top economies, which ... are already aging off the list."
I hope readers will use the link and read it for themselves.
Thanks for posting this excellent article. The graphics are fantastic. A few of the comments are incisive, but people tend to neglect the impact of automation and artificial intelligence.
I suspect that 50 years from now, the West and Japan will continue to be fabulously wealthy, thanks to artificial intelligence which will compensate for the shrinking workforce. What will an AI driven economy look like in the future? No one really knows, but it’s coming.
That said, the energy and new ideas, mainly come out of the heads of young people, and if a civilization has no young people, it is bound to ossify and decay.
The gist of the article is that lower fertility combined with longer lifespans, eventually leads to lower ratio of workers to retirees. This strains economies and generational relations.
While that observation is certainly true, I wonder - admittedly counterfactually! - what would have happened if lifespans did NOT increase, while fertility fell. In other words, suppose that we had made the same strides in infant and child mortality, and the various diseases and discomforts of childhood, youth, young-adulthood and motherhood... but did nothing to increase life-expectancy on the back end. In this counterfactual fantasy, it would be normal for 60-year-olds to fade away, putting it euphemistically, as they might have done in pre-industrial times. What then? Would we still have a retirement crisis? A crisis of mis-proportions between working-age people and the elderly?
It seems fraught, to put it mildly, to enjoin our young-adults to be having more babies, just so that the elderly would have more support. Is that really our best argument for keeping fertility rates at replacement level? As a middle-aged person now no longer imponderably far from Social Security eligibility, I have a selfish interest in seeing more young people push baby strollers... or, more of my peer-group proudly announcing that now they're grandparents. But again - isn't this just selfish? If I dropped dead a month before reaching Social Security eligibility age, have I not, strictly speaking, solved the problem?
I remember a lecture by a local cardiologist a few years ago, where he said that the lower life expectancy of say 100 or so years ago was driven mostly by infant deaths, and that people 100 years ago who made it to adulthood generally lived about as long as people do today. Of course I don't have a proper reference for this and it may not be correct.
I remember a lecture by a local cardiologist a few years ago, where he said that the lower life expectancy of say 100 or so years ago was driven mostly by infant deaths, and that people 100 years ago who made it to adulthood generally lived about as long as people do today. Of course I don't have a proper reference for this and it may not be correct.
The Social Security Administration offers a fun applet for American data: https://www.ssa.gov/policy/tools/lon...zer/index.html . It goes back to the year 1850. I entered birth-years, in 20 year increments, for males, and stipulated age 50 as vantage point. How long would a male who had already reached age 50, who was born in year XXXX, likely have to live? The results:
Year born ..... Expected remaining #years at age 50 ..... Probability of reaching 65, %
Let's consider the year 1900. Men turning 50 in 1900 were born in 1850, our earliest year for which there's data in the applet. About two thirds of these guys reached age 65. Had Social Security existed back then, a third of them would have died before reaching full eligibility age, despite by then having paid into it, for some 30 years! In aggregate, their cohort would have been collecting for only 5 years on average.. because the expected age at death was 70.
For the most-recent years, presumably these are projections rather than actual data. But let's imagine... a person born in 1970 would have turned 50 in 2020. This guy has nearly 90% chance of reaching 65... and his cohort has an expected remaining longevity of 32 more years... so, 17 years of collecting Social Security, or 15 years with the raised full retirement age of 67.
Looking at these data, we don't have a fertility problem... we have a longevity problem! Today, our retirees are spending some 3X longer as old-age benefits recipients, than they would have been at the turn of the 20th century, had such benefits existed. So maybe instead of longer parental leave, more generous childcare, tax-breaks for parents and so on, we should instead consider:
* Promotion of smoking as a lifestyle choice.
* De-emphasize preventative healthcare.
* Ban blood pressure medicines.
* Limit chemotherapy to the young.
* Encourage high-fat, high-cholesterol diets.
* Promote alcoholism.
* Encourage dangerous hobbies, such as ice-fishing, hunting, off-roading,...
In other words, make the America of the 2020s resemble Russia of the 1990s.
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