Wait, now I'm nervous...
funny enough before people used to make estimates of how earth won't have resources to carry a large population. hence some people would need to settle in space or that there needs to a massive drive in birth control, which led to Chinese 1 child policy which has had a devastating effect.
If you measure it in terms of sustainable human life on earth, it was rather effective
And all for supposedly controlling a birth rate that had already fallen to 2.7 by the time it was implemented. And modern scholarship suggests the typical effects of economic development would have kept it running down steadily without all the costs incurred by an unevenly enforced law, given what happened everywhere else that had no birth-control policies.
The whole world seemed to buy into the narrative at the time, but history has shown it to be an example of misguided authoritarian foot-gun akin to the Four Pests campaign.
The movie even starts with news of the dead of the last human born... a 18 years-old argentinian
- Sent from my Lovesense Gush 3
If our current situation was that bad than we would never have made it as a species. We have been cranking out babies through way bleaker times than this.
People have had the baby conversation. The stumbling block is money, not Reels or Tiktok. A 50% drop in fertility if true, is low compared to the percentage increase in the cost of childcare, nutrition and education. Especially in a country like Argentina where the locals do not see a future for themselves there even as the billionaires like Gates and Thiel buy up farmland and luxury real estate like no tomorrow - pun intended.
People are not optimistic about the future, and why should they be?
The previously "looming" climate crisis that we did little to nothing to slow down is here, now, and the real-world negative effects of it are getting worse faster than the predictions that a lot of people used to label as alarmist.
Economic inequality is teetering nearly all of the world's economies on the brink of runaway major crises.
I'm stuck here in this ridiculous society we're running off a cliff, but I don't have to doom anyone else to this fate by having kids.
that is not true - this is ignorant of facts
> Yesterday, I told you Mexico’s total fertility rate is at 1.2. Today, let me remind you that Argentina’s total fertility rate is at 1.05: screenshot from the Argentine statistical agency below. Yes, 1.05. Argentina, in 2014, was at 2.3: a drop of more than 50% in a decade.
> And before you tell me “it’s Milei’s/the Peronists’/Leo Messi’s fault,” remember the following: of the 236 countries and territories on the planet, 219 have a clear negative trend in fertility. Of the remaining 17, I’d say the trend is negative as well in probably 16, although statistical methods have a hard time picking it up for one reason or another. The remaining one? Israel.
> So, if you think fertility is going down in your country because of some country-specific reason X, well, you might want to think twice.
https://ourworldindata.org/population-simulation-tool?demogr...
https://ourworldindata.org/which-countries-have-already-pass...
Peak population forecasted for 2050.
South Korea – A cautionary tale for the rest of humanity - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46230576 - December 2025 (177 comments) ("Childbearing decisions are memetically influenced. They are shaped by the decisions peers make and the examples they see around them in everyday life.")
Birthgap [video] - https://youtube.com/watch?v=m2GeVG0XYTc
I've heard explanations for South Korea's low birth rate but they seemed country specific. What is it about Argentina?
The boomers will continue to choke the young into extinction and young people will die alone because they don’t have sex or form relationships.
On the plus side, with everyone else going extinct, if I can have lots of children who also have lots of children, within a few hundred years my descendants will rule the barren wasteland. The time of the munchkins has come!
Many years later I got into family history, and looked into what happened to mmm's sister, who emigrated to the US. Turns out she had six children, but only four lived up, no one had more than two children, and her last descendant died during covid. It's technically possible there are descendants of course, but then they're "off the books" and would have been unknown to that last guy who died.
mmm's three other siblings too have no descendants - one moved to US, fought in WW1 and died a bachelor at over 100, the two others died shortly after age 18, both in drowning accidents.
So, even back when fertility was much higher, just because you had children and grandchildren didn't mean you'd have descendants a few generations further down.
More seriously, who can start a family when economy is this unstable?
also, by many stats Argentina is more stable of what it was before. what stat you refer indicates less stability?
seems peronista detected here.
It's just a term of art with a longstanding specific meaning, just like any other term of art. No one even passingly familiar with the topic would be confused by it here.
Surely this explanation is circular. People look around and see that their peers are having fewer kids. But why are their peers having fewer kids to begin with? There has to be a backstop somewhere otherwise you get infinite regress.
Terra Incognita: The Economics of a Shrinking World [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49352811 - August 2026
> "As of 2026, humanity is likely below replacement fertility. That has never happened before, not in wars or pandemics. But the real surprise is that the fall has been concentrated in low- and middle-income countries and among poorer and less educated women. We fit a single-factor model to 236 countries since 1950: the common component peaked in 1978, and what drives fertility down today are country-specific trends, 219 of them negative and not one leveling off. None of the commonly cited mechanisms can account for this pattern, so we offer a conjecture: modernity itself, which makes a third child expensive and childlessness cheap. Children come in integers, so it takes very little to move a cohort’s fertility rate from 1.8 to 1.3. And nothing in an economy pushes fertility back to 2.1. We close with the main economic consequences, in particular slow growth."
> There has to be a backstop somewhere otherwise you get infinite regress.
In summary, the global population boom happened because women were not educated and empowered to assert their reproductive choices. They are now. We are currently performing neutral fertility rate discovery via who does and does not choose to have children when it is a choice, versus when it is not a choice or forgone conclusion. A byproduct of this was economic growth, which is coming to an end, and will not repeat in our lifetimes based on demographic trends and trajectories.
Having a child is such a large, substantial commitment which would probably be best made in a really predictable environment.
It is true that in the past, unpredictable environments didn't completely stop people from having children, but there are just so many factors (social media, contraception, job-related stress, social acceptance of not having children) and many more which create the combined net effect.
I wouldn't say that inflation plays the absolute key component, but certainly it's a discussion worth having.
Also, even if some objective measures of living standards are improving, we are constantly bombarded with information about wars, economic crises, political instability, climate change, etc., and it takes a toll psychologically, which perhaps comes into consideration when discussing having a child.
Constantly seeing evidence of this uncertainty could affect the perception of how predictable the future is, which might matter when making a 20+ year commitment like having children.
Historically people hold of kids during bad times - as much as they can