Not to all of us.
And it’s probably a good thing that some of us are resistant to the idea that we can’t manage well in a decreasing population, otherwise you risk justifying coercive methods of increasing birthrates.
Yeah. I think what’s the really unsustainable part, at least for a large proportion of a shrinking population, is a “Strangelove parents” model, where people work for somewhere between 4 and 5 decades of adulthood and then expect to spend another 2-3 decades not working at all.
It’s reasonable to accommodate the elderly doing different kinds and smaller amounts of productive work as they grow older. But it may not be feasible to expect that a majority of adults will spend whatever decades remain to them past, say, 65 or 70 doing no work at all, at least in terms of economic production.
I’d also like to point out that in simpler and poorer societies children often became economically productive around age 8. They herded the goats, or they were shipped off to factories to knot carpets, or they watched the baby while their parents worked in the fields.
Extending childhood to age 21 is pretty expensive, too.
The children yearn for the mines.
Less snarkily, there is probably some societal slack for less college education. If a somewhat higher fraction of kids stopped at high school, they’d contribute an extra 4 working years and also use less educational resources.
Yeah. They spend, say, $40k/yr on things. Not luxury, but comfortable. Rough ballpark, that’s about half a person in productive value. If they’re retired for 20 years, that’s 10 man-years of resources consumed.
That works out ok if they have two kids that contribute 80 man-years of production between them. It’s like a 12% tax. But as the number of kids decreases, the tax increases. In Seoul, the fertility rate is approaching 0.5–equivalent to a 50% tax (on top of everything else).
Granted, one form of productivity my parents do contribute is taking care of my grandmother. Driving her around, doing basic housework, etc. These things would otherwise have to be done by working age people, so they do genuinely reduce the load on the workforce. But this kind of thing is already being done so it’s not likely to help much in the case of population decline.
As a 66 year old, I sort of am grandpa.
We’re all gonna be on the damn ice floe if we don’t reduce overall population. The only question is whether population reduction is managed in a somewhat peaceful and equitable way or handled by centralized coercive powers that decide who goes onto the ice floes.
With respect to the demographic issues specifically, you’ve only got a few choices:
- The elderly die earlier
- The elderly work longer
- The elderly have a lower standard of living
- We somehow achieve a magical post-scarcity economy with robots handling all of our needs
I’m not counting on the last. So it’ll have to be a combination of the first three. All this talk of “equitable” distribution is just rearranging deck chairs (never mind the absurdity in thinking we’ll somehow transition to a post-money economy).
Unless, of course, we manage to keep the fertility rate at a reasonable level. The US has a good chance of riding things out, with a moderate boost from immigration. SK and a few others, not so much. Especially since there seems to be no natural limit to the decline.
Some scientists have argued that we’re in “overshoot,” meaning that we’re depleting the earth’s resources faster than it can replenish them, which is not a sustainable path. They also argue that climate change is actually a symptom of overshoot. The topic of overpopulation usually gets ignored in these debates, but the more humans that exist, the more resources they will use (at least at current living standards). Others have argued that the earth can only sustainably support around 1.2 billion people. If that’s true, then we have some very large issues to contend with.
I never wanted to have children. And I didn’t. I am trying to imagine what it would take for me to change my mind and throw myself into the gene pool. I really have no idea. $900 or free diapers certainly wouldn’t cut it. The world has become a very uncertain place to live and children typically just increase the uncertainty and burden of making it day to day. I completely understand why people have turned away from it. When you don’t see a certain future for yourself, children don’t even seem like an option. We no longer live in the days when jobs lasted a lifetime and raising a family probably seemed far less risky. For instance, my parents raised two children and paid for both to complete college mostly on a single income. My mother was home for most of my childhood. I wonder if that’s even an attainable idea for many people today. My brother and his wife had one child and both still had to work full time throughout their child’s life. When retirement comes up, they brush it off as “we’ll probably work until we’re 87.” They wouldn’t trade their child for anything, of course, but there was certainly a big tradeoff.
All I can say is that if making children economically unfeasible was a plan (“conspiracy”) to reduce the population, then it has a dimension of brilliance to it. No drama, no backlash, they’re just too expensive. Too bad. If that was the plan, it’s working and someone is a genius.
It’s never ignored. It only took 14 posts to get there in this thread.
Well, they’re wrong. It’s the usual sort of Malthusian slop that was false when it was posited and even more false now.
Ultimately it comes down to energy. The number of humans that Earth can sustain with fossil fuels is zero, since fossil fuels aren’t sustainable. But the number that can be sustained with solar and other renewables is much, much larger than the current population.
Yes, yes - get to work re-ordering society. I will happily cheer you on from message board space. But on the other hand I am dead set on retiring this year under age 60 and then not doing a goddamn thing work-related and you can’t make me 
. I’m just going to sit in my recliner, eat a snack and quietly watch the world burn outside my window. With any luck I should be dead before full societal collapse (well…here’s hoping, anyway).
You left off the idea of children starting to work younger.
I’m now curious about the relative economic burden of children and the elderly in western society. It’s probably hard to get good figures, as a lot more childcare is unpaid then elderly care.
There are a lot of childcare costs that I really don’t understand at all. It’s just crazy to me that daycare can cost $2k/mo here.
I suppose one job that people in early retirement can do is… childcare. Having the grandparents look after the kids is common. But not always easy to arrange up if they live somewhere else. Maybe we need a matching service, rent-a-grandma or the like…
I don’t understand what’s hard to understand about it.
How much do you think it should cost?
In demand services cost money, especially when you want specific services done.
Looking after kids isn’t that difficult a problem. Someone making $25/hr can look after like 10 kids. That’s not the only cost, but even if you triple it to account for other things you’re only up to $7.50/hr per kid. And yet it’s more than double that in many places.
There are obviously things I’m missing, and various forms of “enrichment” undoubtedly increase the costs. But it’s not clear how much value that provides.
Same as college, really. They offer a bunch of luxury services that don’t improve the education at all, but for whatever reason schools have an incentive to provide them.
Sounds like you have excellent opportunity to make some some easy money then, if it’s that obvious on how to provide an extremely wanted service at a significantly cheaper price.
A lot of parents don’t buy childcare for their 9 year olds. There’s no way that one adult can look after 10 toddlers.
I don’t think it’s crazy - I think there’s some combination of people not valuing caregiving and people assuming that in-home caregivers would be caring for their own children anyway and that makes $2000 a month seem expensive,
Daycare is going to be probably at least 50 hours a week so figure 200 hours a month. At $2000/month the parents are paying $10 per hour per kid. At that price, it’s probably a center not a home day care and it’s probably kids under 2. Maybe there are 5 kids per staff member so they are taking in $50 per hour per staff member. The fact that it’s a center means there are going to be expenses that don’t really exist in a home daycare situation- there’s going to be a director, teachers and assistants , administrative staff , a janitor , maybe a cook. They have to be paid and there’s going to be rent for the building. Maybe the staff gets health insurance and other benefits. They are going to feed the kids at least lunch, maybe breakfast and possibly a snack or two.
My kids went to a Catholic school from pre k to 8th grade - current tuition is $5600 for one kid and they can have 30 kids to one teacher and it’s only ten months and you need afterschool care as well. $2000/month for kids under three doesn’t seem so bad compared to that.
Unless you think the daycare providers should work for what McDonald’s pays ( which is about $15/hr here).
Maybe not under the conditions you imagine - my coworkers always thought I was lucky that my mother took care of my kids because theirs wouldn’t . And I was lucky- but the fact that I paid her $300 a month thirty five years ago sure helped. My coworkers were shocked that I paid my mother- I guess they never offered to pay theirs.
Funny how no one expects grandfathers to provide full-time child care for free.
These standards say the recommended staff-to-child ratio for toddlers is 1:7, and max group size of 14. I tripled the figure to account for staff that aren’t actively looking after the kids (instead doing things like preparing snacks, etc.), so I don’t think a 1:10 ratio is so far off in that respect. And it goes down further for older kids.
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the biggest proponents of right wing pronatalism also devalue child care-giving. In fact, that’s a big reason we’re in the situation we are, they don’t particularly care about the quality of life for the next generation, the just want someone to pump money into the system so they comfortably retire and pass power down along their particular demographic line.
Every state is different - here are NY’s ratios. And in a lot of places, 3K is part of public schools so parents don’t usually pay for full time daycare for 3 and up.