alt Hacker NewsIndia's surprise baby bust
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The real reason why nobody is having kids can be summarized by the sentence:
"It takes a village to raise a kid".
Look up how much time a mother actually used to spend holding their own child vs other people holding that same child. It was something like 40%.
When you lived surrounded by your tribe, you had an extremely strong support network that no longer exists in industrialized society.
Add to that all the other factors like:
- both parents working often without the grandparents nearby or even willing to help
- unnafordable housing, even when renting
- effectively delayed adulthood (university) into the 30s
- falling fertility from whatever chemicals we're poisoning ourselves with
- anti-natalist messaging
- etc.
I'm in the Netherlands, and my partner and I don't want kids for a multitude of reasons, but the biggest one for us and many other friends of ours is the obscene costs of having a child. Even the ones that really want kids simply cannot afford to have one, because the price of living is simply absurd.
I'm extremely fortunate to be working at a large tech company and I have good money, but even with my income having a kid would be financially ruinous for us. Daycare costs alone are ludicrous, somewhere in the region of 2000-3000 euros PER MONTH. Now, most people get some form of gov't support for things like these, but we definitely wouldn't due to my income, and while I'm well off, I'm not that well off to be able to afford an expense like that.
Not to mention all the other costs associated with having a child, both material like the ludicrous price of housing but also mental.
I'm always surprised this topic comes up all the time and there's all sorts of navel gazing about economics and housing and other reasons people want to have fewer kids. It seems to me that the simplest and most likely explanation is:
Having kids was never a primary motivation. Having sex was. Kids were just a hard-to-avoid downstream consequence of that. Once you have the pill, which makes it much easier to have sex without creating kids (and in particular, which allows women to avoid having kids even when they are raped), then the natural result is that there are a lot fewer babies popping out.
Because for the majority of sex acts, babies were never the goal in the first place.
What's the strong case against population dwindling other than supporting aging population? Given the AI armageddon, it just makes sense to reduce the population. If there's less population, we need less production and less workers. Of course, countries have to deal with oldest population for a brief period of time.
FT's "Why birth rates are falling everywhere all at once" was published, and discussed, recently:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48168928
https://www.ft.com/content/fba35eca-df3a-4ad6-b42d-eb08eb7c9...
Spoiler: smartphones, social media, housing.
Naive question- why does the human population need to keep growing? Why can’t we let it shrink? If AI and robotics are going to come to fruition in the next 50 years, why do we need so many people?
> But as India and others hurtle through their demographic transition, the consequences will not be pain-free.
Pain for whom? The people profiting from cheap labor probably.
Why is such a massive sin to scale down? To slow down a bit, I don't think the whole world is about to collapse, but even if it was, I rather that than turning it all into the hellscapes we see on some of the most overpopulated places in the world just so a mere 1% of the population can indulge.
What’s the problem? We’re committed to destroying livable human habitat for 100M’s to 1B’s of people via global warming.
That’ll be less painful if there are fewer people. Lower populations should lead to lower emissions growth too.
a true outlier in this, even though other developing countries are mentioned in the article.
most of society is not in productive labour nor have significant female participation in non-agricultural work in the macro level.
almost any theory we apply for population slowdown melts down here. also, there are few regions (also populous) which have still significantly high birth rate.
in urban areas, a lot of asian peers go through a similar situation. crazy high costs to raise a family to stay "competitive": from inception to job market.
handouts will not help as the current social net is not sustainable nor effective. probably for the first time in recorded history would food availability not determine population growth.
The problem with society is that people are commonly selfish, so the majority of people only do things that benefit them. Children benefited ancient societies.
The problem with industrialized societies is that people lost all markers of adulthood. Everything became about worshiping convenience, and once convenience (for short-term pleasure) became "god", people wanted to avoid things they saw as unnecessarily difficult.
To reverse the trend, we need people to understand that the difficulty of life isn't a bad thing, that struggle and suffering aren't bad, they are essential for growth in becoming a better, happier person in the long run.
Would you rather be an ever-weakening wimp? Most people unconsciously say "yes", afraid of the world. Kids are afraid of the chaos in life - suffering that happens when life throws you curve balls, like "what would I do without monetary support?". Even "adults" now are really kids are heart - afraid of losing social security, medicare, etc. "Welfare" programs don't end the dilemma - they only reinforce the childishness and dependency on gov for support.
We need more bold people, people who aren't afraid to suffer because they see the light at the end of the road. Courage separates the men from the boys.
A cash incentive in other places may not work but it’ll definitely work in India. Most of the country is still poor, offering $100 per child will drastically increase the birth rate, at least in the short term.
Of course this doesn’t incentivize the right people to have kids, but population grows none the less.
A state in India is already trying to implement this (https://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/why-andhra-pradesh...), $300 for 3rd child and $400 for 4th child.
If they have the freedom to choose otherwise, they will. The global fertility "crisis" is simply individuals exercising their choices.
Kids are really expensive, and if you want people to willingly have them outside of accidents, you're going to need to pay them a lot of money.
Other Global South countries show the same trend. At roughly 1.6, Brazil is now in a similar range to countries such as the United States (slightly below replacement).
Infinite economic growth depends on women having babies above replacement. Therefore, the economic value of a woman having three babies is virtually unlimited, and the economic destruction of a woman having less is also unlimited (when projecting far enough into the future).
It really makes you wonder if some actors would feel a need to exercise control over this scarce and limited resource...
Maybe economic struggle is not letting people take such a delicate and demanding responsibility. It's getting very difficult everywhere. It's not that just cost of living or housing affordability is a Western problem.
There seems to be a lot of discussion on economic incentives (harder to raise, stronger pensions and less personal involvement) and other modes of entertainment being the reason for this trend, but I wonder if it could be attributed to more understanding on proper upbringing and awareness of such, and self-doubt on people to meet that demands.
Maybe the TV and schooling discussed is indirectly related, such as better understanding of proper upbringing, or more ways to see how things can be messed up, and having larger support group beyond family (and children) for said women in poorer countries.
In general there is more focus put on raising a child better and more involvement beyond hedonistic, time or economic reasons and better parenting expected that some don't think they meet the needs or find it harder to do the same for more than one child.
This is a bit of extrapolating from a small anecdotal group, but I wonder how statistically significant said group is.
I know its not an acceptable view in 2026, but if women had to leave school at 16 and thus couldn't have a professional career I'd think many more women would have multiple children, like 5+ would be normal.
There are a few constraints facing policymakers who try to incentivize people to have babies.
People can only drive or commute a few hours per day without being unable to care for children due to schedule. But the best opportunities cluster in small urban districts.
Throw money at the problem and it just gets used to fund housing, driving up costs and absorbing the money, leaving things back where they started.
This combination chokes population growth.
One interesting factor about India is the minimum age of marriage. For males, it’s 21. For females, it’s 18. There have been attempts since at least 2021 to increase the age for females to 21, and I’ve talked with some that thought it was 21.
Marriages below the legal ages definitely do sometimes occur.
Personally, I think setting it to 21 for males is unwise, and setting it to 21 for females would be sheer madness. There are definitely some men and women that are quite ready for marriage before 21, and not many will marry at that age even if legal. It feels to me (a white Australian who moved to India a couple of years ago to marry an Indian) like they’re reacting too strongly to some of the problems that have historically existed with child marriages. But I definitely don’t grasp the full complexity of the situation.
"In many places birth rates are plunging despite marriage remaining near-universal and even though few women have formal jobs."
This is not just about women entering the workforce, etc. Something is affecting Human society more "horizontally".
Unless they roll-back women's rights and improvements in child mortality, societies will need to radically overhaul their entire relationship to supporting parenthood in order to reverse this trend. The economic costs of having children at a replacement rate are simply too high.
We need universal childcare services, provided by the state and available to all, and other childcare-enabling reforms like automatic right to work from home and other flexible working arrangements for those with children.
These won't be popular with everyone, but you'll won't solve the demographic crisis without them.
> But demographers have long shown that what really counts is girls’ education.
Interesting, they mention JUST education as the deciding factor. Would it not be education AND birth control?
As communication increases the perception of competition also increases. The cost of raising a child that can compete in the world is now known to be higher. Eg cost of tutoring, after school activities, college etc. People who now know they dont have the economic resources to compete at a high level opt out of having children alltogether.
This has a religious angle. Some religions believe in having as many babies as possible. Other religions are seeing the effect and realizing their mistake.
If you invert the question "why aren't people having kids" to "why did people want kids in the first place" then the fertility crisis makes more sense.
Kids were free labor and old age insurance.
Now they are extremely expensive pets. Materially they are a net negative in a modern society.
Anecdotally, every single family member I have in India has 1 or 0 kids.
Totalitarian societies of the future will solve this with technology, with all the unfortunate side effects that will entail.
a non popular theory: the more people become civilized (not using the traditional meaning) the less basic / animal they become. Animal are programmed to follow one goal : replicating one genes. Some (few) human manage to follow more elaborate (and less selfish) goals than replicating their genes.
In a farming culture, children are a profit center:
1) Production of children costs nothing. People married young and children just happen, there are no expensive fertility treatments, etc.
2) children are free labor for decades, helping their dad (family?) expand the acreage. More land = high status for dad. Even today, children can work in the family business without any pay. A child can be free labor, but only for family.
3) After the children become adults, they don't automatically get any share of the land, they have to wait and be loyal to get their share of the inheritance.
4) Children are expected to take care of elders until they die. (free caregiving). Compared to taking care of an infant, which just lasts about an year or so, taking care of old people is extremely resource intensive. People used to do it because thats how social/cultural expectations were set.
5) Religions/culture standardize this by creating the culture/religious texts/etc -- women must produce more children (more followers for the religion) and children (specifically young) must obey their parents.
Now, children are a cost center. They cost a lot to produce, raise, don't confer high status (no free labor to expand production or acreage), and most critical factor no more free caregiving. Adults in these generations are realizing they are on their own when it comes to taking care of them when they are old. Then, why children?
The second thing is divorce is extremely punitive on men. Children happen, a man needs to be punished for the rest of his life and lead a significantly degraded life for decades. Decent men suffer the consequences of the toxic/abusive partners who are enabled by the state to steal as much as they can. When the laws change to be a bit more fair, magically divorce rates plunge. Divorce Plunged in Kentucky. Equal Custody for Fathers Is a Big Reason Why: https://www.wsj.com/us-news/law/the-equal-custody-experiment...
Some people point to poor people have lots of kids --> kids don't cost anything. Yes, poor people do have more kids, because divorce is divorced of disastrous consequences. If you have nothing, the state can't transfer/take much from you. As soon as you surpass the subsistence levels and have a job that pays above min wage, you have to worry about the inevitable consequences of divorce. You lose the primary home, pay a TON in child support, alimony, lose half your assets, pay for childcare, childrens health insurance and activities and still be the bad guy who gets to see his children only for a few hours. Women get most everything. Charlie Munger's on incentives: "Show me the incentive and I will show you the outcome." This site has some examples: http://www.realworlddivorce.com/
If there is one thing Americans need to think about, work with your elected representatives, change the divorce laws. Young men are watching whats happening to their dads and
Note: Some of this is US specific, but largely applicable to most countries. Other countries are copying the worst divorce laws of US.
The desire to procreate above replacement levels is probably heritable, so it will all work itself out naturally.
For anyone interested in really digging deep into this trend, I recommend picking up the book “After the Spike” by Dylan Spears and Michael Geruso.
It opened my eyes to the mathematical inevitability of short-term population contraction. Seriously, there is no way to avoid short term population contraction at this point. None. Zilch. Zero. We made our proverbial bed in the 1980s.
They convinced me that population contraction is almost certainly bad for people alive today, but also probably for our species as a whole.
Finally, they present a dozen or so hypotheses about what might be at the root of declining birth rates and what we might be able to do to stop reverse current trends.
The thing that made the book a true 5/5 for me is that they end with questions, not false certainty. Basically, demographers aren’t completely sure what’s driving the trends nor do they have fully baked conclusions about how it can be solved or if that’s even possible.
"It is not just rich places that are becoming less fertile." Yes, good to know the "rich places" are not alone.
>But when Indian school textbooks are reprinted this summer, they will carry a very different message. They will warn not of the dangers of having too many babies, but of the risks of having too few.
The Chinese have discovered that it is easy to crank down the fertility rate, but impossible to raise it again when you want to do that. And they have brutal totalitarianism on their side.
I have written about this before here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44098431
BTW, the fertility rate is _increasing_ now (granted from an existing base of 1.2TFR) in the richer states of india, due to better availability of IVF and in general healthcare.
The combination of lack of prosperity as well as the effect of nuclearisation that I mentioned above was what made it go weirdly low. It's not that low if you exclude unintentionally non-reproducing couples. I'm not saying its replacement rate, but its also not 1.2.
Many poorer states of india will face the same nuclearisation of the family unit, but crucially when healthcare is more generally available, so you won't see those parts go as low as 1.2. Again, replacement rate is almost impossible in a nuclear family unit, unless you manage to substitute something else that contributes the benefits, i.e reinvent joint families from first principles (and maybe it will be better!)
> One study showed how the arrival of cable television in Indian villages in the 2000s led to a moderate fall in fertility. Soap operas depicting urban, middle-class women with small families may have changed norms (though some wonder whether people were just watching TV rather than having sex).
The latter part seems like the most meaningful cause world wide. Sex is a boredom activity and we just aren't bored in the slightest, ever. I think most married people know that long power outages are the most romantic thing that can happen (though, less now with cell phones).
We're becoming people that care only about money and career, and kids are not exactly helping...
One thing that is often not discussed when talking about declining fertility rates in the world is the change of the role of women.
I've seen multiple numbers showing that women 26+ have as many kids as they had 50 years ago.
It's the teenage or very young pregnancies that are disappearing.
But if you start having kids much later, you're likely to have much less.
So many theories for why people stop having babies. I haven't heard anyone talk about romanticism as its cause. The second millenium began this trend of valuing more "feelings" than "duty". What before was considered madness (falling in love) became a core value. As everyone knows that feeling doesnt last long. We have been conditioned to think that anything "wrong" in the way we feel can be fixed with changing the externalities of our life: a new marriage, a new car, etc. God forbid we tell people they are having less kids or getting divorced more because they avoid their duty and are too self centered. The tragedy is that everyone is so blinded by themselves that it's far easier to tell them it's because the gov't doesn't pay childcare or xyz. Breaks are off and we are close the bottom
Will this result in Indian immigration slowing into western countries?
Not a surprise. It has been below replacement rate since 2019.
> But demographers have long shown that what really counts is girls’ education.
That makes sense. I know that having less people is not a good thing, but I was brought up with the "impending population crisis" thing drilled into my head, so it's difficult for me to be alarmed.
I'm also all for getting women into parity with men. I know that there are a lot of men that will say that this is a bad thing, but I was raised amongst a lot of extremely capable women.
I feel that we need to support parents, if we want more kids. Right now, in the US, having kids is economically devastating, and there's almost no support from the government. I'll bet India is worse (but I could be wrong).
I feel that nature has controls built in. We see it all the time, in other species. I feel that if we drop too far down, the switch will be turned back on again.
[EDITED TO REMOVE TRIGGER WORDS]
A big part of people having lots of kids was infant mortality, the need for physical labour (farming) and lack of old age security (kids take care of parents). All 3 of these issues are mostly gone so now parents try to focus resources into ensuring their children are as successful as possible instead of as numerous as possible.
... as predicted by demographers for the last ?10? Years? Longer?
Is this a surprise to people there though? There was a big boom around independence and people wanted to give their own children a better life. India doesn't have a free national public school system like other countries do, which I believe is a big factor.
This has happened to every single society [*] as it industrializes [0], and offering extensive support and incentives to parents (e.g. as has been tried in Scandinavian countries) does very little to reverse this trend [1, 2].
My hypothesis is that as societies industrialize, they afford their population more and more activities that are simply more fun and rewarding than having children. So many people I know put off having children (or curtailed the number they had) because they were reluctant to give up the activities only available in a childfree/one-and-done life. Ultimately, we are hedonistic creatures, and having kids is antithetical to the myriad hedonic pursuits available in wealthy, industrialized societies.
[*] Israel is the lone exception, due to its Orthodox Jewish population.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/global-decline-fertility-rate
[1] https://pub.nordregio.org/r-2024-13-state-of-the-nordic-regi...
[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10049131/