> “Do you know how hard you need to abuse a mammal to make them not have children?” If you asked Leahy what the explanation was, “my answer is technology,” he said. “My answer is social media. My answer is AI.”

My answer may include that, especially for richer countries, but also includes, and at a mucher higher placing for all countries:

    * reduced child mortality risk, family planning
    * urbanization; reduction of child-as-farmhand-labor incentives
    * increasing distance to parent support networks, the disaggregation of clan/extended family households
    * economic uncertainty

A world with fewer humans, plus AI/robots doing the heavy work would be amazing, if we shared wealth fairly.

Unless we humans figure out a way to build institutions that share wealth rather than hoard it, then we are toast either way.

Headline should read “The global wealth hoarding crisis is worse than you think”

Basically all aspects of traditional values, systems in place and the whole lifestyle, established mostly after the agricultural revolution; seems to be laser-focused on increasing surviving offspring.

I feel like it should be obvious that if you take a solution that optimizes almost exclusively for x (surviving offspring), and replace it partially, optimizing for a,b,c (industrial output, female participation to workforce, etc.); you necessarily get a lower x in exchange for higher a,b,c.

Now it looks to me like everyone is trying to increase x back again, but without decreasing a,b,c. It seems obvious to me that you cannot do this (unless you have been doing a terrible job at optimizing before). You have to trade some value off from the other side. But in our current society, I don't see how can this happen.

the economics of childrearing aren't workable for most people without a huge cut to standard of living.

I'd rather focus all my time and resources on one or two children and here in Catalunya it's hard to even buy a single family home (most people live in apartments which are very small by American standards) so if I want each kid to be able to have their own room then I'm pretty much limited to one, at most two, unless I win the lottery or something.

Furthermore, it's very difficult for women as the birth and recovery is very hard. There is a lot of pressure on women to breastfeed nowadays too, not just from social media, but even from medical staff. Personally, I was always formula fed as a child so I didn't care if my child was breastfed or not - but nonetheless I could tell the pressure took a big toll on my wife. I ended up in a serious argument with a nurse over it at one point.

I doubt this trend of declining fertility will reverse so we really ought to think about how we will adapt to these changes. I wonder how many people will regret not having kids, or having more kids, though. I waited until 33 to have my kid and I think one of my biggest regrets in life is not having done it sooner.

It was funny reading through the article, as I actually live in Catalunya and I am improving my Catalan precisely to be able to go and live with my kid in one of those small villages in the mountains :)

And the climate crisis. Why does it seem like everyone has forgotten about the climate crisis recently? AI isn't going to fix it.

Not sure if I agree but that's quite a memorable quote

I've worked with mammals from gerbils to dogs fro research. And, yeah, it is really hard to get a mammal to not to want to reproduce (you can go snip-snip, of course). Humans are not like other mammals, of course, we have 'reason' and the like, but still.

I think that little quote is really doing a lot of load bearing in the fertility crisis debates.

Humans, as I am sure we are all aware, really really like reproducing. The other things that come with it are, of course, the issue that stop us from completing the 'job'. But, even things like access to contraception do nothing to the falling birthrate. It's not the prophylactics, it's the participants.

We talk here about the cost of a kid, and rebuttals about Norway abound. The cultural conditions, and then someone mentions Mongolia or Israel. The support afterwards, and then you talk about Sweden. This structure, that structure, this exception, that exception. How we need a recipe not a single policy to fix the birthrate. And still nothing works.

Suffice to say: We are being really badly abused.

Want to fix the birthrate? It's a whole-ass thing where you have to change the whole-ass culture so much that people actually want to just have kids. I know that seems tautological, but like, it's just true. We just have gotta stop hurting each other.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4apGtiz42Qk

What if - given a choice, women just don't want to have 2.1 children on average?

No one wants to touch this topic, because it's super offensive and probably political, but it seems like the most plausible to me.

And clearly we're not going back. No one is going to ban birth control, and they probably shouldn't. But then where do we go from here? Basically all genes of non enthusiastic parents will die out over the next 100-200 years, and we will get more enthusiastic parent genes succeeding, and population grows again? Or we literally just die out...

I’d say there’s an elephant in the room: Childbirth sucks. If you want women to willingly subject themselves to that, you need either a culture that virtually requires it-

And I want to take a moment to emphasise that I don’t like nor want this solution, and would fight anyone who tries for it.

-or you need to pay them well above the actual economic cost of rearing a child, because the process itself is strongly negative. Yes, having a child itself can be great. Eventually, several years in, when they start to become a person.

That’s true, but if you ask any of the women I know, they’ll tell you they’re perfectly happy to keep it at one.

That’s in Norway, by the way, so not one of those countries where you get zero support.

My great-grandparents (and their entire ancestry that I can trace, all the way back to 1807) were punishingly, desperately: poor.

Yet, it seems they averaged a heck of a lot more children than me, or my contemporaries. And their children largely lived to be adults with only a few minor exceptions.

The adults themselves didn't seem to live long though, most records of marriages I have are for 17-18 year olds who were already orphans.

What is different now, is twofold: 1. Bigger financial impact of having a child, both through less government support, and because more women are working. This combined means that to have a child, often, one of the parents needs to stop working, which severely impacts SoL. 2. Less social impact of not having a child. It is far more common to not have children than it used to be, and so it becomes much more of a choice as to whether to make that SoL sacrifice or not.