From the article. https://thepenngazette.com/demographic-winter-is-coming/
Is the world's population destined to shrink? Penn economics professor JF-V puts it bluntly: "If you're 55 years or younger, you are likely to witness something no human has observed for around 60,000 years, not even during was or pandemics: a systematic decrease in the world population."
His analysis of trends in more than 180 countries suggests that in many places, UN estimates of fertility rates are probably too high. His calculations suggest that a crucial moment has arrived: the global fertility rate, may have already dipped below the replacement rate. He allows that the global population is still growing, but expects it to peak in roughly 30 years, with a steep decline unfolding in its wake. When the transition comes—when the world's population eventually tips into contraction—he believes the impacts will be disruptive and swift.
Dramatic declines in childbirths are evident in every region of the world, across rich, poor, and middle-income countries alike. Shifting social norms are partly responsible, as young people don't view parenthood fitting into their lives. "Raising children is no longer a priority for many young people," he says, "either in the more traditional societies of eastern Asia or the more progressive countries of northern Europe."
[my aside] Fun fact, his findings parallel those made by my own UPenn research group back in 1981. We used a different technique, and could only "narrow" the event window down to the latter half of this century. What kind of economy will it be where there is one worker for every 3 old farts like me?
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 19, @12:40AM (8 children)
> "If you're 55 years or younger ...
Does anyone here on SN fit that criteria?
(Score: 2, Informative) by aafcac on Tuesday November 19, @12:49AM (1 child)
Yes, I'm in my 40s. And if my recent ancestors are any indication, there's a high likelihood that I'll still be kicking around when the chickens come back to roost on all this stupid stuff that the US Federal government is allowing corporations to get away with.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Tuesday November 19, @04:26PM
Yeah but for everybody else, it's 2024.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 19, @12:56AM (5 children)
Yes. And as far as I'm concerned the only people concerned about population decline are the greedy corporate asshats who are concerned about their bottom line; despite the fact that the vast majority of all the suffering in this world, is our inability to care for the inhabitants we already have.
We've got robot vacuum cleaners and Machines that can duplicate a Picasso or a poem in the style of of a famous author; while at the same time, nearly everyone is running around half crazy from a decade of algorithmic content delivery via youtube, facebook, google, etc..
The technology was a marvel and a wonder that was supposed to increase the free exchange of ideas: yet, it's a small handful of corporations that are hoovering up all the wealth. And the concern of nations is that they're won't be enough chattel to keep things functioning the way we've been accustomed to.
What we've become accustomed to is garbage. Less is more. Always has been. Planned obsolescence, crappy quality products, nobody can repair and fix things anymore: get their hands dirty and learn. Yes of course, certain things require a great deal of complexity, but more often than not, complexity is the enemy.
The only way we can keep up with the complexity, is for machines to do the thinking. And they shouldn't be doing their thinking for us, they should be doing it with us.
We use more water than we need to, more electricity than is required, drive cars that are far bigger and more powerful than is required for 90% of what they get used for. This is the age of absolutely ridiculousness. We can't even remember anymore the breakthroughs in thought, invention, and science from 50+ years ago as we slowly devolve into witch hunting (on either side of the faux political spectrum), social excommunication, and all that ignorance is strength BS.
How many of the religious right could go a day without their iPhone, much less comprehend that the majority of the men responsible from brining that technology to them were liberal atheists or non-theistic buddhists.
It's crazy out there. Out of 10 fools, maybe a couple will figure out a counting machine like an abacus; but 1 properly education person of intelligence, will gift the world with a calculator, if they don't stone him for being a smarty pants.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Tuesday November 19, @01:25AM
The issue with decline is mostly about the proportion of the population that can work. Unless robots can be brought online quickly enough when the population starts to drop, there could be issues caring for the elderly. But, the population would have to drop a lot for issues related to extinction to become an issue.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by driverless on Tuesday November 19, @02:35AM (1 child)
Pretty much all of the world's problems are due to too many people competing for/exploiting too few resources. The problem is always too many babies, no matter what the actual number is.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by mhajicek on Tuesday November 19, @09:44AM
No, there are plenty of resources for everyone to have a reasonable share. The problem is the ultra wealthy, who control thousands to millions of times a fair share and still think they don't have enough.
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 19, @05:29AM
Bah! Kids nowadays
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 19, @03:27PM
The peasants revolt of 1381 is instructive here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peasants'_Revolt#Background_and_causes [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ChrisMaple on Tuesday November 19, @12:56AM (19 children)
One of Scott Adams' better observations is that humanity is good at solving slow-moving disasters. As population begins to fall, problems that too many people cause, like expensive housing, will solve themselves by the lower demand on the supply-demand curve. Culture will shift toward a preference for having children, both automatically and with government encouragement.
As government funding of old-age benefits falls apart, oldsters will work more years in order to maintain an acceptable lifestyle. More automation and robotics will take up whatever slack is not taken up by those who work more years.
Hopefully, governments will become more rational, and large numbers of people won't refuse to have children because they fear the government will make children's lives miserable and hopeless.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 19, @01:24AM (5 children)
The observations of an idiot. Ignoring a problem long enough and something WILL change, be it passively or actively.
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Tuesday November 19, @01:32AM (4 children)
The zen of idiocy perhaps? What's interesting is that ignoring the problem here was a far better approach than aggressively addressing it as the Population Bomb people wanted to do. Aggressively rationing resources would have created more poverty which in turn would create more high fertility humans.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 19, @01:56AM (3 children)
could, not would.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Tuesday November 19, @05:01AM (2 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 19, @05:44AM (1 child)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 19, @01:01PM
Population Bomb people had zero clue on the dynamics of significant parts of reality. They were completely surprised by the combination of declining human fertility and continued cheap access to resources. The Malthusian model is based on the idea that humans grow exponentially until limited by available resources and then die-off.
With such divergence of perception and reality, one will always have a tougher time. That includes wars.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 19, @01:30AM (4 children)
Scott Adams is a psychotic moron.
(Score: 3, Informative) by khallow on Tuesday November 19, @01:33AM (3 children)
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 19, @01:53AM (2 children)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 19, @05:05AM (1 child)
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 19, @05:49AM
(Score: 5, Insightful) by weirsbaski on Tuesday November 19, @05:05AM (2 children)
No we're not, that's a class of problems we're specifically bad at solving. Climate change, massive wealth inequality, borrowing/debt spending, we won't even talk about reigning those in because by the time they come to a head it'll be somebody else's problem.
"As population begins to fall" isn't a solution we made an effort to implement (or even consider), it's the side effect of women not being pushed as hard to stay home and have moar babies, combined with worldwide lower sperm counts.
And I might add, it's an effect which a bunch of people are pissed about:
https://www.vox.com/policy/363543/pronatalism-vance-birth-rates-population-decline-fertility [vox.com]
https://www.npr.org/2024/07/29/nx-s1-5055616/jd-vance-childless-cat-lady-history [npr.org]
https://theconversation.com/what-really-drives-anti-abortion-beliefs-research-suggests-its-a-matter-of-sexual-strategies-186005 [theconversation.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday November 19, @11:03PM (1 child)
Eh...it's more the problem is that slow-moving disasters are only slow-moving until they aren't. That moment of critical, cascading systems failure spreading through the entire metastructure like shattering glass is what the Russians invented the word пиздец ("pizdec") to describe.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 21, @09:52PM
You mean, they piss in decimal?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Deep Blue on Tuesday November 19, @07:39AM
Unfortunately does not seem the be the trend currently, quite the opposite it seems. The few exceptions right now are in huge trouble, because of those irrational current and to be governments.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday November 19, @01:46PM (1 child)
There's also an interesting supply-side interpretation.
The median house will sell for the median mortgage a bank will provide to a median income buyer "in the class of home owners". The supply is what mortgage lenders will lend, the demand is infinite for that check from the lender. When the supply of money dries up the market clearing price will collapse.
Right now, we have boomers selling to other boomers and marking it WAY up each trade while using the retirement fund as collateral, so house prices are like "millions" and nobody can afford them except the other boomers.
However... once the millennials are "in the class of home owners" then the median house will sell at a median mortgage based on median millennial incomes, so expect the days of $75K houses to return.
The thing about fad-based economies like real estate is the people involved never learn from experience. Everything from baseball cards to tulips follows the financial mania curve. Later generations will WTF about how people would, at the margins, pay insane amounts of money for tulip bulbs or baseball cards or acres of dirt. Just like broadcast TV or professional baseball, those fads are over once that generation is gone.
My long term guess is the powers that be, think we can survive moderate hyperinflation longer than we can survive collapsing real estate prices, so in a decade or two you can expect median houses to sell for about $10M while at the same time median hourly wage will be about $2500/hour, a coffee at Starbucks will cost about $2K, a median new car will cost about $3M, etc.
I always LOL when I see fretting about the market clearing price being too high for buyers to pay therefore there will just be no more sales ever again to clear the market. LOL no the price will drop to the market clearing price. Maybe without adjusting for inflation, it'll "increase," but it'll drop in real terms.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 19, @09:06PM
I hope you're right, but the pattern we're seeing so far is just an increasing proportion of people's incoming going to housing, either the in form of longer term/higher interest mortgages combined with ever rising sticker prices or rents going up for people who can't afford to buy. I agree it has to end somewhere since no one can spend more than 100% of their income on housing (although they could sign mortgages saying they will and lose the mortgage once the bank decides they can't get any more money out of them), but I wouldn't bet on that happening any time soon.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by HyperQuantum on Wednesday November 20, @04:16PM
Saying that expensive housing is caused by "too many people" is an oversimplification. Many factors affect the price of housing: supply, demand, and how much money people can afford to spend on housing.
The supply of housing is of course limited by the supply of land. And land is in demand for other things than housing, like industrial activity, agriculture, roads... When economic activity increases, the demand for land increases with it. And usually the economy grows a little bit each year.
Demand is increasing because more people are single or divorced.
Demand is increasing because of immigration. Immigration is favored because it drives down wages, or at least slows down how much they rise each year.
Wages not rising (or barely) makes housing more expensive.
People seeking employment tend to move to densely populated areas because that's where the job opportunities are. Therefore demand for housing in those areas increases, and increasing the supply is difficult because there is very little free space left, so the cost of housing rises.
Housing is used as an investment. People or companies owning lots of properties do not want their value to go down. When prices do decrease, they can simply postpone selling until prices go up again. Those properties that are artificially taken out of the market that way decrease supply and contribute to higher prices.
Whenever something happens that increases the amount of money people can spend, like wages increasing or the government providing subsidies, housing prices are raised to take advantage of that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 24, @03:08AM
Those who don't reproduce won't.
Of course that does mean the future generations might have more people who will have children while not caring/knowing/understanding whether the government will make their children's lives miserable.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Revek on Tuesday November 19, @01:30AM (6 children)
The population is too high. It puts a strain on life itself.
This page was generated by a Swarm of Roaming Elephants
(Score: 4, Informative) by aafcac on Tuesday November 19, @04:02AM (5 children)
It's not that high. Most of the damage being done to the environment is the result of people living in ways that unnecessarily tax the environment. The stuff needed for a base existence would put less of a strain on the planet than a major eruption.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 19, @08:25AM (3 children)
But I don't want a base existence. I want a 200 foot yacht and a private jet to fly me between my yacht, my mountain chalet and my country estate, all of which are maintained by advanced robots.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 19, @11:11AM
Welcome to the Matrix.
(Score: 2) by Dr Spin on Tuesday November 19, @04:10PM
maintained by advanced robots.
I'm afraid the best you are likely to get is retarded robots
Warning: Opening your mouth may invalidate your brain!
(Score: 2) by Revek on Friday November 22, @01:50PM
If the world population was half of what it is now with current processes and tech you could something very like that.
This page was generated by a Swarm of Roaming Elephants
(Score: 1, Troll) by stormreaver on Tuesday November 19, @05:07PM
Which means the population is too high.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday November 19, @03:10AM
A name I've heard for Economics is "the dismal science". No matter what happens, somehow it's bad. This headline is a perfect example of that. Everything I've been hearing is that there are too many people. Fewer babies is good! Maybe it means we're not going to push to the point a catastrophic collapse is inevitable. Maybe we won't have horrible world wide famines and war.
Fears that we will just not want children are absurd. What is behind social conservatives' hate of abortion? Sure, they label it "pro-life" and claim it's about the sanctity of life, but it's pretty clear their motivations go beyond that. Could they seriously fear a population decline, and this policy is one means of fighting that? Lots of other suggestions about what the underlying motives could be. Two of them are controlling and subjugating women, and providing plenty of recruits for the military, to deter potential aggressors.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Tuesday November 19, @04:13AM (14 children)
Having kids is approximately the worst financial decision you can make. An American kid, for example, currently costs somewhere in the ballpark of $800K to raise from pre-natal care through the end of college. Young people to a large degree can't afford that anymore, because wages separated from productivity gains approximately 50 years ago, and so they are doing the responsible thing and avoiding having babies they can't afford (through both abstinence and using birth control).
Add to that a work culture that expects most people to at their employers' beck and call 24 hours a day 365.25 days a year. In that situation, nobody can make any plans for any social anything, including dates.
If the powers that be want to change that, they need to aim for something closer to the Finnish system, where there's a lot of government assistance for everybody for approximately everything from pregnancy all the way through university.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 4, Touché) by looorg on Tuesday November 19, @05:33AM (7 children)
Except it doesn't appear to work for the Nordic welfare states either. They all have the same baby issues like the rest of the world. Not enough babies. They have all been trying to boost their pops with immigration now for decades. Just like the rest. To no or little avail. With more or less similar and horrific results
I strongly suspect it will be more robotics, all that can be made by robots will have to made by robots. (Stupid-) AI will have to fill out all the tasks that it can. Humans will slot everything in between that can't be made by either. Will there even be a retirement? I doubt it. Not as we knew it, not as my parents knew it. I strongly suspect the retirement age when my time comes will be at last 70+. That is if you can retire at all. Retire will be for the people that break down mentally or physically. The bare essentials and nothing more. No more fancy retirement, unless you saved for it all on your own -- won the lottery etc. Which will also become harder and harder to do. You might be allowed to slow down a little. But no full 'feed the birds' retirement. I don't see it happening for me.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Thexalon on Tuesday November 19, @11:59AM (5 children)
You are correct that capitalism sees retirement as a fundamental inefficiency that should be destroyed, because your society is paying to keep people alive who aren't doing any work that makes the capitalist class more money. That makes their idea of a retirement program something along the lines of a bottle of whiskey, a cyanide capsule, and a note saying "you know what to do".
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 20, @04:57AM (4 children)
The obvious rebuttal: what was retirement before capitalism? What's missed here is that capitalism made a wealthy society with long term assets that could support large scale retirement. I'll note also that the developed world ideals of retirement were heavily shaped by capitalist forces. For example, a century ago, retirement was largely unheard of. People were expected to work until they were too unhealthy. The above sarcastic "retirement program" relatively accurately describes back then. For example [seattletimes.com]:
It claims things are changing:
My take is that this isn't the first time capitalism gets blamed for a problem caused by someone else.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday November 20, @11:43AM (1 child)
Depends on when and where you're talking about, of course. But in general, most people did work most of their lives starting around age 8-9 or so, but also had more leisure most of their adult lives than modern workers do, e.g. your typical medieval peasant had more holy days off than someone today with a 9-5 even factoring in weekends. Elders often worked until they couldn't, and after that were typically cared for by their friends or descendants but still contributed where they could. It's also worth noting that work before capitalism was more frequently done whenever you wanted to do it, not when some boss-man told you to do it.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday November 22, @03:32AM
Work more years, work longer (remember these are farmers with all day jobs), and no incentive or opportunity to better themselves because of the feudal system. And while they would have had some genuine leisure holidays, most of those holy days are more work, just for the Church instead of the boss Lord. Against that we have:
Your local lord was your boss man. And of course, no retirement.
The nostalgia effect is strong here. Let's consider the biggest problem with this narrative. Supposedly these people have more leisure than the modern worker, but it neglects a few things. First, as a peasant, they're typically tied to the land and poor as dirt. So not much they can do with that leisure they allegedly have. They also have a lot more unpaid work - maintaining their meager lifestyle (even simple stuff like cleaning clothes or cooking is vastly more work than in the modern age), work for the Church, and not much to do after the sun sets. Second, this narrative ignores that there's considerable value to work in the modern world. Workers get paid substantially and better their lives with that. The peasant has no such incentive. If they work harder, then that excess gets taken from them via taxes, tithes, or pure theft. They'll work hard enough to stay alive. No more.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Joe Desertrat on Sunday November 24, @02:21AM (1 child)
A century ago we had almost completely unfettered capitalism. People didn't retire because they couldn't afford to retire. It wasn't until the crash in 1929 brought about the Great Depression that the New Deal arose. That brought about the idea of social safety nets, among them Social Security, and the ability of people to retire. That capitalism with social safety nets is "what made America great", and is what people like yourself apparently seek to dismantle.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday November 24, @03:01AM
In other words, the so-called social safety net was adopted during a time of weakness as part of a greater program, much of which didn't survive the Second World War (being reversed because they were harming the war effort - like the state-enforced industry cartels). As I've noted before, there is no example of a unrecoverable economic recession - these naturally go away even if we do nothing. The same would have happened with the Great Depression whether or not alleged social safety nets existed and the US would have been a superpower anyway, if only because it was the last major economy standing.
What's particularly shifty about your assertion is that there's no mechanism by which this redistribution is supposed to make America better. After all, the US was in a really good place prior to 1929 and there was allegedly "completely unfettered capitalism" then.
As to seeking to dismantle it, I see some case for needs-based welfare. But not for the extensive systems common to the developed world. I believe these are dragging down the developed world everywhere, particularly through deficit spending.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by VLM on Tuesday November 19, @12:52PM
If that's a net financial gain, that would work. As it seems to be a net financial loss, they're just accelerating the collapse.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Tuesday November 19, @05:59AM (5 children)
Do you have a cost breakdown for that?
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday November 19, @11:55AM (4 children)
Here's the source of my estimates, which I fully admit are estimates:
- Prenatal care and giving birth, which in the good old USA is considered elective procedures: ~$60K
- Birth - age 18: I estimated $25K per year per child. Some expenses that roll into that include any professional child care you employ (easily $15K annually), increased housing costs due to needing another bedroom (~$5K if you're renting), health insurance and co-pays for them, and food. Also, thanks to sexist assumptions employers like to make, odds are quite good that mom's career has either ended or been stunted for the rest of her adult life, so that income loss should be factored in.
- Around $350K for college. At the rate things are going, that might very well increase.
Are there ways to reduce that cost? Yes. They typically involve unpaid labor (e.g. grandma watching the kid while mom goes to work) or government support of some kind (e.g. SCHIP).
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday November 19, @01:18PM (2 children)
Before the ACA, I never heard of it other than "everyone knows that happens to someone else although it never happened to them or anyone they closely know". After the ACA that is simply illegal at a federal level. I'm not sure it was ever legal at the state level where I live.
About $250/week in my moderately high CoL area. I'm sure in CA or downtown NYC its more like $3000/week. (costs go up exponentially, we're like a 90th percentile suburb, so plausible a 99th percentile income community might be $3K/week, maybe?)
Note that it's kind of self limiting; lets say day care costs 100% the median take home pay making the net pay of mom going to work $0/hr. In my state licensing is fairly lax at 4 total kids or fewer. Sort of a "lets be reasonable and realistic about enforcement" if you send your kid to your sister in laws house its not any worse than her having two kids instead of one, so they "adjust" the laws to fit reality. Would be nice if they "adjusted" weed laws in a similar manner. My point being that its very hard to go to work and get 100% of the median income when you could run your own licensed small scale day care in your home with minimal hassle and get 300% of median income or more likely slightly undercut the competing day care providers at maybe 200% of median income. Sure, I'll take a 200% pay raise to "work at home".
You'd think if the state max ratio is 12 kids per adult at ages 4-6 at a corporate facility, that would be 12 * $250 * 4 = $12K/month of income so they "must" be paying day care workers like $144K/yr. Nah due to supply and demand effects its more like $13/hr. But no, we need more graduates from college of the "Early Child Care and Education" program to get those pay rates below $13/hr. So if the parents are paying $144K/yr and the worker gets $24K/yr that's a profitable line of business even if we have not accounted for the other costs of running a building.
Also, you're estimating 18 years of day care, the local commercial places won't allow kids over 6 IIRC but in practice once they hit either K4 or kindergarten they go into various "after school" programs. Quite literally every school district in the country is different but mine offers a free program until 6pm at every school that amounts to open gym/study hall. For free, repeat free. Its literally just supervised indoor recess for three hours after school. They also host a more traditional morning and evening day care operation that's $222/month. Not $250/week for babies and little kids.
Sure you'll end up paying, but not $15K for 18 years LOL.
Approximately 0% of kids are 100% self funded by parents. Welcome to FAFSA and immense student loans or just not going or making alternate plans. Far too many kids go to university right now resulting in a huge percentage of them being wildly underemployed after graduation so dropping attendance by 50% to 80% from current levels is probably a very good idea.
Tuition at the local state U branch for full time 12+ credits last semester for online program would be somewhat under $5200, so IF parents wanted to self fund, eight semesters of tuition would be more like $40K rather than $350K. You can see why there's a wide variation in tuition cost; if you can get into Yale, you should go to Yale and pay your $75000/yr and it'll probably be worth it. For the other 99.9999% of the population, go to the state U, get the meme degree, and go back to working the same old job at Starbucks as a barista now with a cool sounding degree. There's WAY too many degree holders being produced for the available job pool. Just because someone will loan $350K to get a literature degree at an expensive private college with fancy dorms, doesn't mean its a good idea if the only job prospects are working at Panera after graduation LOL.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday November 19, @07:39PM (1 child)
Your $250 / week x 52 weeks / year = $13,000, not far off from my annual estimate. And yes, I was figuring after-school care wasn't free, plus there's summer programs that aren't free, etc.
And just to be clear, I'm not saying those costs aren't worth paying if being a parent is something you want to do in life, just making the argument of how big the incentive is right now not to go that route.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday November 19, @09:04PM
Yeah OK but my numbers are a "90% income community" for diaper-aged kids so most will pay less and generally all will pay less after age 2 or so. I was bored enough to look up some rates and got $210 to $275 for babies.
A lot of parenting seems to be thinking "I'll have it made once they are ... (fill in the blank)" Meanwhile inflation goes up so you never quite get that far ahead but it does generally seem to get much cheaper with time.
I would say having kids is more expensive than having a serious home network/cluster lab or being a serious gamer, but cheaper than golf or hobby traveling. The second kid is a lot cheaper than the first, you already have the high chair / bottles / car seat / toys / etc.
Some of the costs sneak up on you; they really don't eat that much until they're teens then they turn into human vacuum cleaners.
One of the best parts of kids is being able to tell "dad jokes" that part is absolutely hilarious. Also: "God help me $foobar if you tease your little sister again I will post a video of you doing that to my Myspace where tens of people online around the world will see it especially all your friends" See also LiveJournal and Xanga. Teens love having their parents on social media it is absolutely hilarious.
(Score: 2) by stormreaver on Tuesday November 19, @05:53PM
Are are completely insane. Here are my real costs (U.S. citizen):
- Prenatal care and giving birth: $4000 using a midwife. My second son needed a hospital birth because the midwife was insufficient. Added cost of roughly $1K.
- Birth to 18: Looking back, my additional costs varied, but were in the ball park of roughly $6K per year per child after about the age of 6. So let's round up to about 200K to raise my kids well. My wife made less than child care would cost, and hated all the jobs she was qualified for, so she was a stay-at-home wife who became a stay-at-home-mom. Being a stay-at-home-mom is a net benefit to everyone. I had bought my house before getting married, so I already had a 3-bedroom house with a mortgage. Having kids had zero effect on housing costs.
I used to think that, too, given all the time given to the topic by the fake-news media. After I had kids, I talked to a bunch of the young women I worked with, at my wife's suggestion. They uniformly stated that being a stay-at-home mom would be their dream if they could afford it. I was shocked, but found this to be true over and over again. There's reason Trump started calling the media "Fake News" (a notion I laughed at initially). It's as much propaganda as any communist, state-owned outlet.
- College. We haven't gotten there, yet, but they will likely not go. The world is waking up to the scam that is a college education (and a scam it is), and I suspect it will dwindle as a requirement for most jobs in the coming years.
(Score: 5, Funny) by jasassin on Tuesday November 19, @07:03AM
I was getting worried I was the only one who hasn't gotten any since before cell phones were a thing.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday November 19, @10:55PM (4 children)
Every time I hear one of the ruling class hyperventilating about a population crash, my brain filters it to "Oh no, the slave caste isn't breeding enough!" Maybe, just maybe, if the entire world's economy weren't a Ponzi scheme based on ignoring the laws of thermodynamics, this wouldn't be a thing.
Remember: growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. It follows, then, that megacorps and their ilk are...?
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Wednesday November 20, @02:04PM (2 children)
It ought to be obvious to the meanest intellect that continuous population growth, forever, is not possible.
There are two possible scenarios: The population levels off at a steady state where births equal deaths and resource consumption is sustainable; or the population reduces at some point, one option of many being a population crash, which might be brought on by the Malthusian limit of resource consumption.
The steady state can be at differing standards of living/quality of life - the lower the standard of living for the whole population, the more people can be supported for a given level of resource consumption. Again, obviously, the standard of living distribution can be uneven, but the resource consumption of people with a standard of living above the average needs to be balanced by the lesser resource consumption of the people who have a standard of living below average.
We really ought to be planning for a steady-state population. It's a lot easier to assume that growth will continue, as growth solves what would otherwise be a lot of hard problems. So, being human, we choose the intellectually easier option.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Wednesday November 20, @11:23PM (1 child)
I don't believe most humans are capable of thinking in these terms honestly...well, this may explain the Fermi Paradox at least.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Thursday November 21, @01:28PM
Actually, to be fair, it *is* possible to have continuous growth, forever, if the growth asymptotically approaches a fixed value in smaller and smaller steps as time goes on (Treating population as a continuous variable, which it isn't.).
That is, however, effectively, levelling off at a point in the future.
Given that economists regard both growth and a small amount of inflation to be good things, I wonder how a society could be organised around having zero population growth, indefinitely.
(Score: 2) by gnuman on Wednesday November 20, @07:47PM
I imagine a plethora of panic in the 1980s and 1990s about
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Population_Bomb [wikipedia.org]
it's just continuation of same BS. Panic sells. In the end, if population halves, so what? It doubled not so long ago and could double after halving. Anyone that looks at low fertility rates *today* and predicts some sort of "extinction" is frankly out of their minds, even more so than the authors of Population Bomb. If we are worrying about extinction level events, maybe we should worry about things like Nuclear Weapons, biological weapons, and the Great Extinction (of non-humans) that we are actively causing today.
That's also why we have money in economics. With numbers, we can have growth forever, even if in reality it's not really growing in absolute terms!