Even though I am completely opposed to increasing the birthrate, I find all the discussion about women’s education levels etc. misses the point. The point is, people have neither enough money nor enough time nor enough community support to raise children. In a society where there is a lot of leisure time, or casual work in the home time, for all adults, where people have strong social and kinship ties in their immediate neighborhoods, and where everyone has easy access to medical care, food, shelter, children are a happy addition.
Our entire modern culture is antithetical to raising children. Everyone is stressed, money is tighter and tighter, work is ever more demanding, relatives and friends are usually at a distance, getting sick can mean bankruptcy, and all this against a backdrop of ever more frenetic and meaningless consumption. Children are extraordinarily expensive in this modern life – and the expense is almost entirely borne by the parents, not the society as a whole. I realize that most of you are old men, but if you were a young woman would you want to dive into this?
The assumption across the board in this thread is that we can redesign many aspects of society and the economy. We just lack the will to do so. So far. So it’s worthwhile to consider what might be done once we do develop that will as the shit really hits the fan to the point that everyone’s attention is focused on this problem.
e.g. A deliberate policy decision to produce better-educated high schoolers, to reduce the number of college entrance slots correspondingly, and ensure by enforced regulation that employers are prevented from using “college degree required” as a simple gatekeeper function would all have to be implemented together with appropriate buy-in from enough of everybody. And would, once the new-and-improved high schoolers exit school into the economy 10 years later, begin to bear fruit.
All of which loops back to the OP question. What can we practically do, since implementing deliberately designed and deliberately expensive policies and social changes seems to hard for every country, but especially the USA. And I don’t mean the USA just in the last ~10 years. It’s always been very resistant to anything resembling well-thought through policy.
@Ulfreida has a darn good point nicely laid out a couple posts above. Jumping off from her …
All over the world, but especially in the USA, we have removed our society and replaced it with an economy. Because children are economically useless, very few people want enough of them. The problem is that 20 or 40 or 70 years later too few children leads to uncontrolled collapse of that economy we tried so hard to build our lives into and around.
The capitalists found yet another way to sell themselves the rope to hang themselves with. And the rest of us too.
The thread is not about trumps Amerika. It’s about the world, and a world that is not in the throes of an RW takeover.
Call it a call for progressivism in the service of having enough humans in the right place at the right age with the right training to deliver a soft landing to the economy as we work towards a stable and eventually slowly declining worldwide headcount.
I had seen some data showing a larger correlation, but when I went and looked for a cite, I see that it is smaller than I had remembered seeing before. Though Musk is a counter-example. But there is a correlation, even if it is weak.
While I think a lot of your other points are persuasive, I’m rather dubious about this goal. It’s not like we don’t already have a lot of people working their asses off to figure out how to produce better-educated high schoolers. And the results, as they always have been, are decidedly mixed.
I am skeptical that we can really make the existing twelve-year primary/secondary schooling schedule in the US provide everything that most students need as preparation for competent civic life and fulfilling employment. I think we’d be better off setting our sights on expanding the options for shorter and cheaper post-high school degree or training programs: not only vocational apprenticeships, but associate’s degrees and various certifications.
If you don’t have lots of reasonably stable unskilled jobs (and even “unskilled” jobs nowadays make demands on, e.g., literacy, vehicle operation, and other forms of technology use undreamed of by the journeyman carpenters and such-like of a century or more ago who left school at 12 or 14 to start apprenticeships), and a social structure that tolerates a lot of poverty and precarity in the lives of average unskilled workers, then I don’t think a basic high-school education is going to be sufficient for most young people. Not even if we make “a deliberate policy decision” to somehow make high school graduates significantly better educated.
Heck, look at Finland, that darling of educational policy enthusiasts. Even they have recently mandated that all students, after completing their primary and comprehensive education that takes them up to age 16 or so, have to put in another three to four years of so-called “upper secondary” education or vocational education. The former combines the equivalent of the last couple years of American high school with more or less a year or so of community college, while the latter is, as the name suggests, a combo of the tail-end of high school with vocational training.
Nope, I don’t think you’re ever again going to get the majority of Americans prepped for flexibly functioning adulthood with a hard cutoff of formal schooling at age 17 or 18. Not in a world where unskilled manual labor no longer provides adequate careers.
I completely agree that we need to expand more opportunities for young people that require less investment of money and time than a full-blown four-year bachelor’s degree following high school. But I think that extra year or two, post high school, for career-focused education and training is going to be pretty crucial to people’s competencies and ability to make the most of their opportunities.
I agree with you that authoritarianism is on the rise.
But it is pointless to have any conversation about improving anything, when the response is “that’s impossible in our dis-improving world”.
So just pretend the world is not disimproving, that it’s still e.g. 2010 or so, and talk as if we’re in that timeline, not this one. That is the only way any conversation about improving our society makes any sense at all.
if you (any you) don’t want to talk about hypothetical improvements that could be made in a better-run world, then don’t. But coming in to announce that “any improvement is impossible in the current environment” amounts to mere threadshit IMO.
My understanding of Japan’s problems is more that the salaryman expectation is still toxic as hell, that to the degree women work too many companies are still expecting that most women are still only in it for a husband at which point they will leave (heck, that was still a driving plot of the first season of Aggretsuko), and that rural areas are hollowing out (obviously not just a Japanese problem) as the youth move to the cities. Combine that with a culture that’s anti-immigration and a written language that takes years to learn and there you go.
The weird stories are just the stuff that gets picked up easily, like police reports from Florida.
The most useful thing people in Western countries can do is work on inventing technological solutions. The UK is responsible for <1% of global greenhouse emissions; even if we magically achieved a carbon-free economy tomorrow, it would make no difference. The US produces 11%, so it’s more directly influential, but people in developing countries just aren’t going to accept a lower standard of living to save the environment, so we need to find ways to solve the problem without doing that.
I don’t think that’s it exactly. I think it’s about status: having kids used to be a way to gain status, and there weren’t many other options for women. Nowadays career is the way to get higher status so that’s what nearly everyone focuses on.
People are perfectly willing to do hard things if it gets them admiration or respect - look at athletes training, or PhD students - but having kids is still hard, and doesn’t really do that anymore. Worse, it interferes with things that do give you status, ie education and career.
But this is the issue where it’s least obvious how to change things.
This I agree on.
Hmm, maybe. Certainly a totally uneducated workforce is not going to be doing advanced jobs, but there must come a point of diminishing returns. The question is whether we’ve reached that point, or maybe whether education needs to be better targeted to teach useful skills.
I’m probably the youngest woman here, and no I didn’t want to for most of my life. But now that I have a child, I realise I was missing out, and I’d like to make society more supportive so other women (and men) can also enjoy having kids.
Yup. And because kids are not just economically useless, but costly in medical care and education, governments have an incentive to discourage people from having them. I think that’s why I felt the NHS pushing contraception after I had a baby was paternalistic - was it really for my benefit, or to save the government money?
US schools do pretty well, AFAIK. You could fit more in if you individualised education, which possibly AI might allow for?
Reasonable. And some people aren’t going to be able to do highly skilled jobs no matter how much education you put them through, so you’re going to need some number of stable unskilled jobs anyway.
@DSeid, you’re insistent that nothing works, but for Japan and South Korea, they know there are things that help, since European countries have higher birth rates. It’s just a challenge to implement the necessary changes. There’s no reason to think European countries and the US can’t do better too.
It is a question. Unfortunately anyone who thinks they know the answer doesn’t know enough to know they don’t know. There are only best guesses to what the useful skills will be in the future. Probably should be its own thread.
You horribly misrepresent my position.
Yes the worst case is the plunge off the cliff that South Korea is the poster child for. If they want to emulate to EU levels they need to rapidly change the expected roles of fathers and mothers in their society.
European nations and the United States need to avoid going backwards in that regard lest they also fall off the cliff. They can do some things and should. I’ve listed them in multiple posts. But it won’t be enough to get to replacement levels or above. Fortunately that need not be catastrophic.
Everybody seems to think the population in South Korea and Japan is crashing, and that does not look like the case. Going by South Korea Population 1950-2025 | MacroTrends South Korea’s population has been shrinking since 2020, in which time it has fallen all of 0.27%, to the level that it was in the far-off days of 2018. This does not seem like a crisis to me.
Japan’s population hit a peak in 2010, so it has had a shrinking population for 15 years, or about 1/2 a generation. Can anyone point me toward the metrics that measure the magnitude of this catastrophe? I would expect young-adult unemployment to be at 0% with wages rising quickly, while return on capital would languish or fall, but what is happening? What are the appropriate metrics to measure a society undergoing population collapse? Reduced life expectancy? Reduced access to medical care? Basically, what are the symptoms? If you are concerned about this, you should be able to show it in metrics from Japan.
I don’t see how you can know that, either. Sure we don’t know the future, but we can definitely look at how good a job we are doing educating people for the current job market.
Sorry. South Korea also need to ditch the long hours work culture, and the extreme levels of competition in education. These changes plus better gender balance would improve life for everyone. But there’s no reason to think European countries can’t do better too - we haven’t achieved a perfect society by any means. And there’s nothing magic about replacement rate that makes it impossible to reach. (Not to mention countries like Britain and Japan are overpopulated, and would benefit from a slowly falling population.)
Israel is way above replacement, and a lot of that is due to religious subgroups in the population. But Google suggests even secular women there have a tfr close to 2, so we know it is possible to do better.
South Korea’s population isn’t crashing yet, but it’s going to if nothing changes.
Here’s the population pyramid for South Korea. The bottom 2/3rds is completely inverted, with many old people and very few young ones. Once that bulge reaches old age and people start dying off, the population will crash. Even if young women started having 2.1 kids each tomorrow, the population would still fall drastically, because there are now very few young people to have children compared to the number of middle age and older ones.
Here’s Japan. It’s not as steep, but it also has an inverted pyramid shape. Japan’s population is projected to fall by over a million people a year over the next 5 years, and by 26 million by 2050 (22% lower than today). And it’s very difficult for society, because there are so few young, productive people compared to old, retired ones needing support. Japan’s GDP per capita has hardly grown since the 1990s.
There’s a vast difference between a group of people that is 25% old people/75% young people and one that’s 75% old people/25% young. Or, to look at it another way, there’s a vast difference between 5,000 people who are under 50 and working and 5,000 people who are 80.
It’s not just sheer numbers, it’s who makes up those numbers.
I firmly disagree. Firstly, the US has a higher fertility rate than many other developed countries. Secondly, the economic aspects of having children has been part of family-repdroductive decisions for centuries, at least (indeed, in my every time and place I’ve studied history, it’s been a consideration, at least of those of who had any choices in the matter). I think your post is your per-exisiting ideology about capitalism (that it is the great evil, responsible for most bad things) being taken as a given and then looking for a way to blame it. Add in a particular disdain for the US (even though it’s nowhere near the worst in this regard, but it’s your “especially”).
I find it really bizarre that you perceive LSLGuy as having a “disdain” for America or a dislike of capitalism. I think that’s you projecting something onto someone who disagrees with you.
Yes, the US has a higher fertility rate than other “developed countries”. That still does not make it replacement level.
Classifications of economic systems aside, our current situation does in fact discourage people from having children due to multiple factors.
